Do we really want justice?

In The Republic, Socrates goes very far in depth into how to form a just society. The thing is we really can't just skip to forming the just society that Socrates proposes because to start the society he proposes, he states that you really have to start from scratch. The question we have to ask ourselves is we want to start over and erase everything the human race has done in order to form a just society. I just want to examine some of the statements Socrates makes in regards to making the just society. Socrates says we have to make entirely different stories in regards to heroes and people in order to somewhat trick the guardians to become the ultimate protectors. First of all I want to state how strange and possibly unjust this is because you are tricking people into believing what you need them to be. Another thing that Socrates states must happen is that everyone must be specialized in something. In our society today, we know that people want to be good at lots of things and not just one. Another thing that I want to point out is that people would be too opposed to the idea of starting over fresh since the human race worked so long to reach everything we have reached so far. There is no way that anyone would just want to start over to make our society be just.

Is wisdom justice?

The two main questions that need to be asked when it comes to this question are: What is wisdom? and What is justice? Both are very difficult to answer. People have many different definitions of what they think wisdom is or what they think justice is. Wisdom I think is sort of a maturity to thought and understanding. It is a sort of knowledge where you understand what to think and what is good to think and what his bad to think. You understand how the world works and how the world should work. Justice is very difficult to define. The Republic tries its best in using the Socratic method to define a perfectly just society. Justice is basically the act of doing something in consequence of someone doing something else. In justice you need to understand what is good for society and you need to understand why things are good. In a way justice and wisdom are related because you need to understand what makes the world good to have a clear background in both.

Dear Parents

Personally, I think life is about finding truth. Notice how I use the word finding. This does not mean you should indoctrinate your children with your beliefs. In truth, this indoctrination Is a bigger statemen about you than it is about your children. It shows you are insecure about your beliefs and you want to become more secure about them by forcing your children to believe it's true. Notice how I use the word forcing. None of these children want this to be forced on them. They aren't giving you permission to tell them what to believe. People may think their child was born a Christian or an Islam or whatever but this is simply not true. These children were born without beliefs of what this world is about. This also shows a lot about your belief system if you do this. If your beliefs were true, why wouldn't you lead your children on an endless quest for truth instead of telling them what to believe.

Civics

Civics are the rights and duties of citizenship. The main problem that I find with civics is that people feel entitled to do lots of things they think they are allowed to do. For example, when we find someone's child acting in the wrong and we try to teach them how to be better people for the rest of their life, the parents feel entitled to be the only ones that are allowed to teach their children things. This also causes a problem with indoctrination. Since the parents think they are the only ones allowed to teach their children, they can teach their children only the views they think are correct causing their children to not be open-minded. You can see this very often in religious groups and cults. To spread the doctrine of the religion, the adults who believe in the doctrine convince their children that the doctrine is the absolute truth. This causes the religion to be passed on but causes the children to be close-minded. This has a somewhat implication that religion is false because if it were true the parents would lead their children on a never ending quest for truth.
Back to the topic of civics, it is a societies duty to try to make our world a better place and improve the living circumstances of our offspring. We should be nice to others like we would want them to be nice to us. The sooner we understand that, the sooner our world will reach utopia.

Integration

Having finished the autobiography of Malcolm X, my views on integration has changed a little bit. I believe if none of us were racist or brought up as racist, integration would work perfectly because everyone would treat each other by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. This sadly is not true. Racism still exists to this day even though many people gave their lives to end racism. Malcolm X made very good points when defending segregation. He understands that since this racism exists, there is no other way to let everyone get what they want then to little every black return to Africa and keep all the whites in America because black people will never really be considered as Americans. I think the problem is this is that the best outcome for our problem would be to integrate and for everyone to be family but this problem will not be fixed for any time in the near future. So although this is the best solution, Malcolm X understood that the only solution would be to segregate.

Poverty

As a child, what decisions can you really make for yourself? You can't decide where you're born, what culture you're born in, how rich you are, what religion you are born into, what you're going to look like, or if you have any talents. As far as your early years go, I don't think you have a decision of  wether or not you want to live in poverty. When you grow up however I would like to argue the other side. Say you were born in the worst of all conditions. You were born in a very bad neighborhood with lots of violence and your family is extremely poor. There is nothing stopping you from working your butt off during school so much so as to be able to move out of that neighborhood and get a good paying job and boom you're not in poverty anymore. So as it seems to me poverty is decision you get to make. As closing I would like to leave this quote from the late Christopher Hitchens. "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it’s called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some, say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine—condemns them, and then if you’ll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn’t matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time."

Malcolm X

"And because I had been a hustler, I knew better than all whites knew, and better than nearly all of the black 'leaders' knew, that actually the most dangerous black man in America was the ghetto hustler. Why do I say this? The hustler, out there in the ghetto jungles, has less respect for the white power structure than any other Negro in North America. The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing. He has no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear--nothing. To survive, he is out there constantly preying upon others, probing for any human weakness like a ferret. The ghetto hustler is forever frustrated, restless, and anxious for some 'action'. Whatever he undertakes, he commits himself to it fully, absolutely." I never really thought about morality that much. I think that it doesn't really matter that much where you come from as a character but that you should follow the golden rule. Don't do onto others what you wouldn't want done to yourself. Clearly I have been to all parts of society because these hustlers don't follow the same moral code as the rest of us. That makes me wonder if other people do the same. If hustlers or the worst of us, where's the cutoff where people don't have morals. We might all be immoral people. People don't care about humanity and so humanity will never move on. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "We stopped dreaming."