Scrolling online one night, you see pictures of someone’s weekend trip or even their lunch meal, all arranged for an audience. Essentially, these images drag someone else’s hidden thing into the light. And the life we choose in the light and in the dark depends on the audience – our good deeds want a witness, while our own faults we try to bury.

At the heart of this issue is the ancient question raised by Glaucon to Socrates in “The Republic”: “What is justice?” Socrates appears to have accepted the argument that justice is only the advantage of the stronger. But Glaucon restacks the challenge with the ring of Gyges: Wear the ring, and you disappear. With the ring, the audience is removed, meaning we will choose either justice or its opposite for its own sake, not for how we will be seen or perceived. A perfectly just man could wear the ring and will continue being just without receiving recognition for it. Meanwhile, the unjust man will wear it and be perfectly unjust all while seeming to be the opposite.

Reputation cannot replace character. If you would not choose the just life without any reputation, then you never truly wanted justice. You wanted the look of it. As Glaucon’s brother says,

Strange, how all you self-proclaimed champions of justice, from the earliest heroes whose words have survived down to the men of the present day, have declined to praise justice and denounce injustice except for the reputations and honors and gifts they may bring.

Socrates continues the discussion by trying to define justice, considering what justice would look like in a city versus in an individual. In order to be just, every part of the soul must be like the city, doing its own work, reason ruling, spirit helping, appetite not running the house. The just life is the only life not at war with itself, regardless of reputation.

Yet Glaucon reminds us that “no one is willingly just, since whenever a man thinks he can get away with injustice he does it.” The issue with this kind of freedom is that Glaucon’s unjust man still must look just externally. That is how the ring works. It allows us to do an unjust action in the dark but wear the name of justice in the light. Yet as Socrates explains, the man who actually lives that way – the tyrant in the city, the tyrant in the soul – gets the promise but loses the only freedom that counts. He is the least free man in the story, not because he got caught, but because he is controlled by appetite.

The first option is the dream of getting away with everything, and the second is the dream of never being missed when we perform the good. But the third option is practicing justice when no one notices and when someone may be looking for faults.

Justice cannot be part of our reputation or brand, forcing us to question not only the troll online but also the decent person who is only good when someone is watching. If that person would not be just without someone watching, they only ever loved the look it provided.

This is why “The Republic” remains timeless and worth reading today. We have more technology today than in the past, broadcasting everything we do to a crowd of witnesses, but although the ring that curates our image has changed, the test remains the same. The question is just harder for us to ask. If you took the ring off, took away the audience of your actions, how would you live your life?

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Unsplash