Plato diagnosed tyranny as the worst constitution in both cities and psyches.

Ideology is what reason produces once enslaved to the appetite for control.

People under oppression develop real mastery that can be reoriented.

In Book IX of the Politeia (commonly mistranslated as "The Republic"), Plato describes the tyrannical constitution as the most disordered form of governance in both cities and psyches. The tyrant rules by "lawless desires" that have seized what Plato calls the Arkhōn (ruling principle): the governing seat of the psyche. Under tyranny, "the best elements in his nature will be enslaved and wholly controlled by the most evil" (589d-e).

This is not a metaphor. It is a clinical description. The reasoning and spirited faculties do not disappear under tyranny. They become corrupted servants of appetite and fear. Every capacity of the psyche gets bent to the service of whatever lawless desire has taken the throne. Plato is specific about this at 553c-d: When appetite rules, reason does not stop reasoning. It reasons in service of the appetite, calculating "nothing but the ways of making more money." A tyranny organized around ideology works the same way: The ideology is not the appetite. It is what reason produces once it has been conscripted. The appetite is control. In my clinical experience, clients raised under rigidly authoritarian systems often confuse the content of the rules with the appetite that enforced them. Distinguishing between the two is frequently the first real step in recovery.

Plato's five-regime model in Books VIII and IX describes how constitutions deteriorate: from aristokratia (governance by reason) through timokratia (governance by spirited honor-seeking), oligarkhia (governance by wealth-appetite), demokratia (governance by undiscriminating........

© Psychology Today