Tastes great, more filling
After all this, I still yearned for something with some substance to it. Something chewier than the easy, crunchy truths of Mr. Wadsworth. Something with questions instead of answers. But there's just not a lot of time in a person's holiday schedule. How can you seriously improve yourself in half an hour or less?

One document that caught my eye surfing through the riches of MemoWare was Plato's Crito (see http://www.memoware.com/cgi/mwsearch.cgi?string=crito#TOP.) For one thing, it was short, so I figured I'd read it.

Crito is Plato's story about his teacher, Socrates. It's got two speakers, Socrates and his friend Crito, doing a little Socratic dialectic song-and-dance. Crito thinks Socrates should escape Athens and the Athenian death penalty. Socrates thinks it's just and right that he should submit to the laws of the state.

This is pretty radical stuff. I mean, we modern Westerners tend to think our own welfare pretty much trumps any other concern. Even in situations where heroic people put themselves in danger -- like, say, in that movie "Die Hard" -- we hope and expect that they will survive themselves. It's hard for us to imagine people dying for the cause of others, just like poor Doyle did in the November 30 episode of "Angel."

[He had to die; the trades had been reported for weeks that that actor was doomed. Some even said he'd only been given a short contract from the start. -- DG (who watches Buffy for the articles)]

It's even harder to imagine that a person might be willing to die because it's just to submit to the will of the state, that the survival of the state is more important than the survival of the individual.

You can certainly see some serious totalitarian potential here. The state, above all, is not MY primary concern. But Socrates has some good arguments about how the state provided for him, and how he therefore ought to obey its laws, since that was the social agreement they had entered into, he and the state. I guess if my country gave me healthcare, I might be able to see the point.

You can skip the introduction to this one; I'm not sure if it helps the dialogue make more sense or not. But it's an interesting little read. It even gave me something to think about, deep in a funk about Doyle dying on "Angel" and all. Doyle did die for others, but not to ensure the survival of the state. Oh, well. I guess I don't have time to get into a funk. I've still got a lot of presents to buy. Maybe I shouldn't have gotten too deep into this self-improvement kick in the first place.

Judith Tabron thinks the ultimate goal of human evolution should be that enlightened state where we all get dozens of cable channels and Bill Gates gets what's coming to him. She is the puppet dictator of academic technology at Brandeis University.