this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Oh interesting, that's not what it sounded like. Is that your personal view, or a tenet of the Golden Mean? Is there a particular thinker that you cleave to more than the others?
The Wikipedia page is pretty nebulous on this, other than allowing for a limited aristocracy (and monarchy?? Lol no thanks on that).
I'm not sure how you'd decide exactly how limited this aristocracy is without importing from other philosophies and value systems.
Golden Mean is a philosophy of Aristotel who said that all things have a golden mean (or balance) where existence is optimal.
Basically avoiding any sort of extremism will always be the most efficient path because of uncertainty and imperfection of our existence.
He mostly applied it to virtues of living like justice or wisdom. Sure you can close yourself off and study non-stop or fight all of the injustice in the world without sleep but this is not sustainble and diminishing returns reaches a point where the energy input is no longer returning positive results or even decreasing the overall output.
Imo this applies to basically everything including politics. Because political systems are so complex (and people are so complex) it's imposible to control the systwm without leaving space for imperfection. So you can be a socialist but you still need to respect some individual freedoms, you can be a libertarian but you still have to admit that some things need to be forbidden for smooth sailing basically.