What the country needs even more than campaign finance reform, or a few good men, is a few more fool catchers

The first and greatest of all the fool catchers was a Greek army veteran. He had fought in  three major engagements as a heavily armed infantryman, in one of them saving the life of his general during a perilous retreat. He was devoted to his city and, except for his military service, he seldom strayed from it. It was in its great central market, its gymnasiums and other public spaces that he hunted and caught fools.

He did not set out to be a fool catcher. Fool catching was a job of work he more or less fell into as a result of his reflections on the nature of the good and the conditions for realizing it  in his own life and the life of the state.

When a friend asked a noted authority who in town was best informed on these issues the authority replied that no man was wiser than the fool catcher.

This puzzled the fool catcher, who was well aware of his own ignorance, so he set out to find people who knew more than he did. An odd thing happened. He found lots of  people who claimed to know something…about the good, about the management of the state, about the nature of virtue…and were willing to explain it.

They were happy to share what they thought they knew with the fool catcher because they were puffed up with themselves and prouder of their knowledge than the emperor was of his new suit.  It also gave them a chance to lord it over the fool catcher.

“What,” they would say, “possesses  a man of your age to worry about these matters like some schoolboy when you should be out making money. This behavior is childish and unmanly.”

Sadly, when the fool catcher began to question these experts their knowledge vanished in a cloud of doubt and confusion. They knew no more about the matters in hand than he did. He decided that if he were wise at all it must be because he recognized his own ignorance.

Over an entire lifetime the fool catcher pursued this quest, looking for those who must surely be wiser than he, talking to statesmen, artists, and working craftsmen. While doing so he attracted a following of young men who gathered round him to hear him question the successful and established because, as the fool catcher himself said, there was something amusing about it.

Of course the younger generation, even in those days, liked to see pomposity or self-deception brought down a peg, but the establishment was not amused. As a matter of fact the establishment was really really annoyed and decided to silence him by charging him with capital offences against the best interests of the state.

He was accused of teaching false gods and of being an atheist, a  contradiction he quickly disposed of. He was accused of corrupting the youth and making the worse cause appear to be the better cause. In his gently ironic way he sank those accusations as well, not that it did him any good…he was convicted anyway.

It was the tradition in his city’s judicial system that the convicted person could suggest an alternate punishment. The fool catcher  suggested that his services to the state, as critic and gadfly, had been so valuable to the city that he ought to be given a pension. That suggestion pretty much put the icing on the cake as we would say today.

Socrates was executed in the year 399 BC, after a day discussing the possibility of the immortality of the soul.

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