Tumblrrr....

anyways about this, I noted down something related to this a long time ago cause I thought it was a good story and never thought id be able to use it but turns out I can 

so going back to "23 hundred years of philosophy" and Platos ring

Plato tells this story about his former mentor socrates and a student of his (of socrates not plato) and they discuss morality and the human soul and the student brings up a story that goes like this:

"A shepherd tended to his flock when a earthquake struck and swallowed him whole. He sees a figure and gets this ring and gets out. 

Later in the night he gathers around with his other shepherd friends to eat and talk and so on. The shepherd twists the ring he found, and now wore on his finger, to the right. And to the the rest of the groups surprise he's gone. The shepherd now twists the ring the other way around and he's now visible again.

He now uses his new found powers for evil when he's appointed as the kings messenger. He uses the ring to become invisible to go around the castle undisturbed. With this, he seduces the queen, kills the king and becomes the king of Athens himself."

The student uses this story to illustrate the fact with the power anyone can do bad. The student says that there are three types of people with the power. The first who uses it to only experience simple pleasure and contentment, the second who uses it to become powerful, and then the third who uses it to become both by using their knowledge. He says that only the second deserves to have that power. Socrates disagrees with this and says that it is the third who deserves that power.

So socrates reasoning for this is that he says that there are three elements for the human soul. there in the image from some website I found. he says that the second would let their spirit take over their reason and pursue senseless desire but that the third would use their reason to keep their spirit in the right place and avoid the fatality of desire. So in retrospect the shepherd from the story would later become beguiled with guilt over misusing his power and doing what he did.

there was also Confucius, who was way longer than socrates, who also came up with something similar and said that " we do good not only because it benefits us (of course since doing bad can also benefit you) but also because it makes us feel good". Which seems pretty common sense to us all now but then there were later western philosophers who argued against this with other philosophies that went like: "goodness is only performative while badness is the pure truth of humanity" or "we only do good to fit in with regular society and therfore earn our natural human rights" etc etc

Also fun fact the ring story was based of a real one back then that involved no ring which goes:

"A messenger was good friends with the king and one day the king showed off the queen to the messenger and boasts of her beauty. Later, even though the messenger doesn't want to, the king bades him to go secretly watch the queen from her chambers. He was soon caught and the queen gave him two options 

-The messenger becomes king while the current king gets killed

-the guards outside the queens room will kill him instead

The messenger reluctantly chooses the first option so his good friend gets killed for the cost of him becoming king of Athens."

Which is way different from how the first one goes.