Catherine Rowett, British academic and former Member of the European Parliament, argues democracy survives on lies. Drawing parallels between Plato's Republic, where a noble lie binds society together, Rowett traces this same fiction through modern democratic myths: equal votes and equal capability. Against Popper's warning that such lies pave the road to totalitarianism, Rowett reimagines the necessary fabrications of society as not only promoting order but equality. 

Plato’s philosopher kings and queens, the only ones fit to rule in the ideal state sketched in the Republic, are lovers of truth. They alone of all the citizens know and love, and don’t just pretend to know and love, what is good and fine and just. How, then, could philosopher rulers resort to lies? Why would they even need to do so? This is one of the great questions that arises among readers of Plato’s most famous work.

In the wake of the twentieth century’s uncomfortable encounters with totalitarianism, Plato’s “ideal state” earned a reputation as a blueprint for the worst kind of political oppression. Not least among the worries was the strange inclusion of the so-called “Noble Lie” as a crucial tool for governing the state. The Noble Lie is a state-promulgated myth about each citizen’s birth and origins. It is to be universally believed by the citizens. It forms (according to the Socrates character, who has the job of describing this mythical community) a crucial tool for establishing the citizens’ absolute loyalty to the state and to each other.

If loyalty and cohesion are what the rulers want to achieve, why would they not just tell the truth? If something is expedient, why not just explain it, and inspire the people to choose it for what it is? It’s a puzzle, especially as Socrates insists that the philosopher rulers are “lovers of truth”.

It did not seem much of a puzzle to Karl Popper, writing in The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945. For Popper, Plato was the thinker whose malevolent spell inspired the worst examples of twentieth-century dictatorships. The Republic, he suggests, recommends handing totalitarian control to a privileged group, and keeping the proletariat oppressed by means of lies and class structures. Generations of students have doubtless been asked to vilify Plato’s Republic along these lines, and to find there a right-wing totalitarian class-based society, in which workers and public servants are manipulated into ceding absolute power to an oligarchy of philosophers, by means of a blatant lie designed to deceive them into accepting that their position in society is fixed by birth.

Certainly there are puzzles about Plato’s broader claims about lying for political expediency. However, one thing in his “Noble Lie” passage immediately gives us space for doubting the story told thus far. Socrates is emphatic that the rulers themselves must be the first to believe their myth: first them and the soldiers, and later the rest of the city. This is not manipulation. It’s more like a foundational ideology. It guides the rulers’ decisions because it forms part of their own beliefs about what matters and why.

Does our democratic liberal society depend on any founding myths like that? Is it something to be afraid of? Let’s look more closely at what Plato’s myth is doing and then turn to our own.