thing-credit
Therefore in their search for a world whose stability translates into their realization of personal happiness, modern Americans, like their mythical alter-ego, have set loose a power whose developments ultimately betray their best interests and their deep intention to have a positive impact on the world. Gyges believes that the world should be a total inscription of his desires; he has turned his dominion into a regimented world designed to gratify all his longings for power, for turning the ring removes normal social-ethical sanctions against impunity. But as Plato retorted, Gyges’ apparent freedom to pursue his excessive aims also reflects an utterly immoral and empty mode of Being. In our case, the willingness in the last few generations to actualize in our lives the claim of our corporate leaders (in mass commodity production, mass media, mass advertising, and the credit card industry) that an adequate way of life should be one founded upon high financial borrowing and consumption has resulted in a situation in which we have lost control of our lifestyles: the profundity of symbols turns out to be the symptom of a process of substituting its natural capacity for creative and positive action with personality features that breed stress, anxiety, fear but also a process of social de-skilling recently introducing into American society a widespread unfamiliarity with the critical thoughtfulness, rigorous patience, and tenacious activism any types of successful social reform require.
III.
Not surprisingly the whole import of the Republic is Plato’s commitment to find a cure for Gyges’s disordered soul by compelling it to substitute its obsession for the pleasure principle