Suggested Reading

• Plato’s Gorgias

I may surprise you that a course on political communication in the contemporary age of surveillance introduces the concept of “politics” with an author who lived about 2,500 years ago.

And yet, Plat is an indispensable reference in any course that has anything to do with politics. He was the first thinker who systematically studied the nature of political power – and als how communication can become a tool to achieve it.Building on Plato’s work, we study in depth what the foundation of political power is, which the columns are that support it.

Plato

Myth of the Cave

Any time the name of Plato comes up, it is inevitable to introduce the famous allegory of the cave.

First, its timeliness makes it a necessary reference to understand the limitations and different levels knowledge – and also the obstacles to reach it – regardless of time and space.

Then, particularly communication students should be familiar with the allegory, since is anticipates for centuries the actual nature of contemporary mediated communication.

The allegory of the cave is also a lesson in political communication. The puppeteers in the cave could be replaced in contemporary society by the political actors and media professionals. They are the ones who create the shadows that the prisoners in the cave, the vast and anonymous majority of the population takes for the real world.

An important part of political communication consists of manufacturing shadows to be disseminated by the media. 2,500 later, Daniel Boorstin named those synthetic shadows “pseudo-events”. We will discuss this important term in the learning unit dedicated to Mass Media Effects.

The Nature of Political Power

Plato developed his theory on the nature and origin of political power in his controversy with the sophists, in particular with Gorgias.

Gorgias was the most successful teacher of Rhetoric in Athens in the 5^th Century B.C.

In the “Encomium of Helen”, a brief essay on persuasive communication, the author explores the relationship between language and power.

Gorgias came to the conclusion that language was a very powerful weapon.

In this work, Gorgias compares the effects of words in the mind of the people with the effects of drugs “over the nature of bodies”.

As drugs can influence your body functions and how your body feels, the skillful use of language might have an impact on the way people perceive issues and feel about them.

Thus, the most effective way to achieve political power is to become a master of rhetoric, a virtuoso in the use of language.

Gorgias even had the arrogance to state that, with the skillful use of words, he could make men slaves.

Plato never had respect either for the discipline of rhetoric or for the teachers of this art, the sophists.

In his opinion, the main objective of rhetoric was to achieve political power, not to serve the polis or improve its citizens.

In democracy, in any kind of democracy, to achieve power means to gain power over the Will of the People.

And how did the sophists believe that they could get power?

They achieve power through MANIPULATION of DOXA (Opinion – or also Public Opinion)

And they are able to manipulate this opinion (DOXA) using basically EMOTIONS.

Rhetoric is for Plato a form of prostitution of knowledge because this discipline teaches how to use knowledge not for approaching the truth, to understand and explain things, or to reach virtue, but to flatter the public opinion.

In the Greek democracy, public opinion was the only source of power.

Still this power was for Plato just an illusion. When you use rhetoric to flatter public opinion, you don’t have real power over it. You are rather subordinating yourself, your discourse and your ideas, to what the public opinion demands.

In this way, Plato reversed Gorgias’ theory.

Not only will words never help you enslave people.

Quite the opposite, those who aspire to get the power that flows from public opinion will end up becoming themselves slaves of the public.