Thus Spoke Plato

2,400 years ago, give or take, an extremely smart man lived among the Greeks. We know of him to this day because nearly everything he said was written down in one form or another and preserved for future generations.

Future generations being us, the collective whole that currently inhabits this blue and green rock.

When everything you say is recorded and passed along for twenty-four hundred years, it's generally due to your insights either being enlightened like no others, or just the opposite.

Rarely is mediocrity worth recording.

Now here's the rub. What can it mean when everything you say is written down in some form or other at the time you say it, and regarded so highly that it's preserved for millennia...and I'm talking about material such as:

"Let nobody speak mischief of anybody."

"Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety."

"These then, will be some of the features of democracy...it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not."

"When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them." 

"The greatest wealth is to live content with little."

"Excess generally causes reactions, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments."

And so on, for at least another five or six pages. All universally accepted words of wisdom, all regarded as words to live by.

And all, of course, ignored in large part by the million billions.

Does any even study Plato anymore?