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William Hooper,
Trader, Quant, Platonist Philosopher
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Full Name: William Morris Hooper. Born: April 1969
Father: Tony (Criminal Barrister in UK, QC, Now Court Of Appeal Judge).
Mother: Grethe (Teacher, Linguistics). Sister: Sophie.
Schools & Education
Lived in Canada till age 4,
then Bungay School in Suffolk England,
later
Ipswich Private School, Physics then Pure Mathematics at the University of
Lancaster, finally Postgrad Economics at the London School of Economics.
Financial Markets
I started my career as a junior proprietary trader on
the Bond Arbitrage Desk at Union Discount Bank on Cornhill in the City Of London. I
loved the work and eventually became a senior trader in a small quantitative
hedge fund owned by Investec Bank, I mostly traded exchange traded derivatives. Although I have always been fascinated by current affairs, spending hours
a day reading the news, I actually worked as a quantitative analyst trader, not
a directional punter. At that
time I wrote models to find anomalies in the volatility squew and backed my
views with long term delta neutral positions, and I am proud of having made an
average annualized return of 35% during these several years. Then I became
involved in technology and a Dot Com start-up, later I returned to finance
with a job at Credit Suisse First Boston doing emerging market fixed income
analytics in New York. I subsequently moved back to
London and took a job at Bank Of America doing Foreign Exchange High Frequency Proprietary
Program Trading. Later I moved to Société Générale doing the same thing - still successfully.
I gave a
nice radio interview which was recycled (without my knowledge) into a silly
BBC article about me,
which didn't go down well, and shortly thereafter I left SG. For the record,
I am an ascetic, not a playboy these days.
People often wonder what we bankers get up to, and high frequency trading in
particular seems to have an aura of black magic, but I think leaving aside the money it's
actually pretty mundane. I had one c++ IT developer working for me and I also wrote
my own code, it was a completely stand alone operation, in fact the two of us
would have been far better off without the bank around us. Our high performance code connected to EBS and Reuters, which are the big conduits of
spot foreign exchange all the worlds major banks are connected to. My favourite
currency was EURJPY and on my biggest day, which was around the Lehman's
bankruptcy, my computer program traded thousands of times racking
up fifteen billion of turnover and three quarters of a million in profit. I was
on holiday at the time, the guy in the office just pressed a button to start it
in the morning, and another button to stop it in the evening, the computer did
the rest itself like a real magical black box. According to EBS, I was the
worlds second largest EURJPY trader for a while, and all my little program did
was hit the market aggressively in clips of 1 or 2 million with a maximum
position size of up to 4 million. My EURJPY position would therefore swing
around between +4m and -4m, and at night you just waited for it to get back to
zero and then switched off and went home. I had no more than a dozen or so
negative days a year, it was basically free money that exploited
small anomalies in the market place (statistical, not real, arbitrage). For
example, if a human being puts a manual BID onto the exchange to buy EURJPY, he
doesn't watch what is going on in EURUSD and think to himself I need to drop my
BID in EURJPY now because these markets are correlated and if I get filled at
this price it will be a rip off, instead he just leaves it there. My computer
could take advantage of this inertia, picking off prices a fraction of a tick
away from fair value, and if one does this thousands of times the pot of
positive expected value is guaranteed to be positive. It
sounds very brilliant, but it's not like academia where the world advances
collectively, instead it's a tiny group of people out for themselves and keeping
their secrets to themselves, and that makes it stone age stuff compared to
proper science. It's an enriching but not a fulfilling game, and regulators
could put a stop to it if they redesigned exchanges (eg concentrating liquidity
into fewer instruments and less time periods). But in the big bad world of
finance this kind of "scalping" is nothing compared to the big funds who bet
vast sums and break Central Banks and make hundreds of millions plus a year. And
even the big funds are nothing compared to the madness of crowds investing in
real estate bubbles, and it all coming crashing back to earth destroying
everyone. So god forbid I don't claim to have lived a good life before Plato,
but I wasn't a monster, nor did I destroy the world.
Philosophy
These days I devote myself to Plato. Plato was, of course, an Ancient Greek philosopher, and the student of the most famous of all Ancient Greek philosophers, namely the wonderful Socrates. The Oracle at Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man in Greece, but he didn't live the life of a celebrity guru or philosopher, he was very much an outsider whose criticism of society upset a lot of people and eventually cost him his life. He lived in Ancient Athens, the richest, most liberal and most atheistic state in Ancient Greece. Elite Ancient Athenian society was dominated by urbane liberal intellectuals such as Protagoras who claimed there is no truth, pleasure seeking hedonists such as Philebus, and anarcho-capitalists such as Thrasymachus who lusted after power. Socrates was, on the other hand, an extremely idealistic and spiritual man; he talked about things like justice, virtue, wisdom, reincarnation, heaven and hell; he even claimed a divine voice occasionally came to him telling him what not to do. Nevertheless, he was nether a Priest nor a New Age Hippy, he didn't talk about faith or inspiration, he was a intellectual genius with a razor sharp mind who ran circles around everyone else in debate. He wasn't a populist, he spoke in riddles and made fun of the speeches politicians use to reach ordinary men. He taught well educated up and coming members of the elite such as Alcibiades the art of statesmanship, but he avoided public office and contemporary political debates, which was an exceptionally unusual thing for an intellectual Athenian citizen to do. Aristotle described Socrates as the inventor of idealistic objective human virtue philosophy and credited him with single-handedly defeating the nihilist philosophers of the day, the so called "sophists", and reintroducing the belief of god and self development back into Ancient Greek society, setting the stage for Alexander The Great's idealistic crusade to build a world utopia. Socrates lived in what Chinese call interesting times, over the course of his life Athens experienced terrible wars and plagues and a geopolitical shift in hegemony from Athens to Sparta. In fact, within a hundred and fifty years of his death Ancient Greece had imploded and the remnants of their civilization became Roman slaves.
Plato wrote conversational style dialogues many of which feature the character Socrates teaching philosophy by cross examining and ripping apart various elite intellectuals. All one really needs to study Plato is a copy of Plato's Complete Works, published by Hackett, which is a 1,700 page long English translation of his two and half thousand year old Ancient Greek texts. By in large little or nothing of what earlier Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Pythagoras, said or wrote has survived. The only other really significant surviving work of Ancient Greek philosophy was written by Aristotle. Aristotle was Plato's student for a while, but he was more of a natural scientist and polymath rather than a true philosopher in the Socratic tradition who devoted himself to the study of human nature, virtue ethics, self development, enlightenment. Therefore Ancient Greek philosophy today is, by in large, simply the study of Plato's dialogues.
Those of us who study Plato call ourselves interchangeably Platonists, students of Plato, Socratics, students of Socrates, Ancient Greek Philosophers, or just Philosophers. Studying Plato is like the Ancient Chinese game of GO, it's very psychological, very abstract and complex, and it swallows and consumes the life of those who take it seriously. Like Chinese Philosophy it's very much about dividing the world up into philosophical / psychological concepts such as the famous yin and yang duality, but whereas Taoist dialogues are written in a sort of short poetic way which is very difficult to decipher without a living master, Plato left a vast intricate body of work to be explored, some say a complete self study guide for the Western world.
Although Christians sometimes claim many of Plato's ideas were incorporated into Christianity, the concept of duality is essentially unknown in the West. For example, is love one thing or two? If two what are the two types? How can you describe them? If the Christians could really answer questions like that they wouldn't argue over the which is the better religion, Catholicism or Puritanism, or which is the better political system Socialism or Capitalism. Ancient Greek philosophers, like Ancient Chinese philosophers, say there are different perspectives, and different communities or individuals should pursue different paths. For example, the French and Germans have different personalities, and under the Ancient Greek system they would probably worship different gods with different personalities and different viewpoints on the meaning of love. In Germany one might emphasise the strength of the Puritan who hurls himself against short term challenge; but in France one might emphasise the courage of the Catholic who surrenders to short term circumstance for the sake of long term goals.
In a sense religions are paths up the mountain, so the man who worships Hera and the man who worships Aphrodite might disagree about the techniques of self development, but they both converge at the same "just" summit. For example, just as women and men have different mindsets, so a Catholic and a Puritan King will run their respective countries very differently, but if they throw themselves into their religion they will both evolve and become better Kings and live in peaceful harmony. Why? Because I hope, by Zeus, that you will agree that good but different people find it easier to live with each other because they are better at minding their own business, which allows them to reach a consensus on external relations. Both climb the mountain by worshiping and abiding by the laws and conventions of their god. For example, someone who worships Aphrodite is well aware of the difference between heavenly Aphrodite and earthly Aphrodite, one is his vision of good and the other his vision of evil. Speaking technically, the relationship between the human mind and truth is like multiple dimensions of duality compared to one transcendental reality, so in a sense Aphrodite is a one dimensional projection of truth that entails a loss of information, but it is perfectly useful for those who operate purely in the Aphrodite plane aware only of the heavenly and earthy directions. The multi path 12 god model of self development is the traditional way common in Ancient Times, not just in Ancient Greece but in China and India and other places too. By forgetting all this the Christians became ideologists who once killed each other arguing about different perspectives, and then became pacifists and liberals who talked about the problem of evil and began trying to amalgamate everything so everyone is happy, but what they really did was mix the gods by deleting all the idealism, creating a moral vacuum which destroys humanity.
Just as the Buddhists had a simple god worshiping religion for ordinary people and Zen Buddhist philosophy for the elite, so the Ancient Greeks believed that the more advanced thinker should follow a different path from the ordinary thinker. Instead of choosing a god and having faith and worshipping and abiding by this one dimensional vision, the philosopher leans to go on an intellectual journey, attacking his ego with a series of reasoned questions, exposing his ego to the light of reason, purifying and dehumanizing himself. The philosopher also learns to think multidimensionally, he learns to transcend the world of duality and look directly into the truth. It's this path, of course, that Plato teaches. Philosophy can be dangerous for ordinary people, because it can strip away their belief systems leaving a vacuum, as occurred during the French Revolution. Consequently this web site is not for ordinary people, philosophy is for elite intellectuals and shouldn't be handed out indiscriminately. Nevertheless, the truth is that the belief system of modern society has broken down to such extent that there almost nothing left anyway.
One of the central themes in Ancient Greek philosophy and mythology is paradigm change, the idea that human history is the evolution of new ways of thinking, and I believe we are beginning to cross the intellectual duality between one dimensional and multi dimensional thinking. It seems to me that the Ancient Greeks underwent this transition long ago, and after the implosion of Ancient Greece, like Plato's story of Atlantis, society begun a new cycle starting at a lower rung. In other words we are now living though a seminal moment in history with profound philosophical and economic ramifications, a sort of Age Of Enlightenment Part II. Except it's not really Part II, because Part I doesn't really count, it was just a faint echo of the proper paradigm shift. During the Age of Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes imagined rationality as a simple sort of Cartesian Turing Machine, whereas rationality actually begins with the multi dimensional comprehension of paradoxical duality. As it happens modern science is beginning to realise this too- Roger Penrose talks about the loss of determinacy in quantum physics invalidating the Turing Machine concept.
I don't speak Ancient Greek, I haven't had a chance to learn their very difficult language, but I spend my life immersed in Plato. Friends joke Plato's collected works are my bible, I no longer read other books, I treat Plato like a god, over the years I have gotten to understand him far better than any other philosopher I have come across.
If someone seriously claims to be the world expert on Plato, how can you tell whether or not he is actually just mad? Actually the best way to find out whether or not a person is mad is to give him a drink and ask him about politics and the meaning of life, but what I mean is how could an ordinary person tell whether or not he is talking to a real expert or an impostor who has just learnt a few tricks?
Alfred North Whitehead famously said all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato; but more importantly, he said that whilst one can see genius sprinkled across Plato's work, the basic schema which joins the dots is a total mystery. Whitehead said Plato was either playing Sphinx like tricks, or he was an incompetent systematic thinker. Very famous philosophers such as Whitehead call Plato's arguments incomprehensible, regular philosophers call his arguments bad. So if someone claims to be the first person to have understood Plato in 2,500 years, the first way you might test them is to ask them to explain how some of the simpler dots are connected.
For example, Plato's work is filled up with jokes, if someone claims to understands Plato, then he should be able to give all sorts of insights into little things things like jokes. On this web site I have done that, for example, I have talked about how in Plato's Symposium Aritophanes has the hiccups because he is represents the "Air" principle and the the speeches were called for in the wrong order because explaining why the ordering is (water, earth, fire, air) not (water, earth, air, fire) requires some insight (because the active passive reverses on the down compared to the up). I have searched through the commentary of modern scholars and even and famous Platonists in the past, yet as far as I am aware no-one since perhaps Isaac Newton has even realised that first four speeches in the Symposium reflect the four elemental psychological types. Yet this is one of the simplest observations one can make about Plato, and something that comes to one a very long time before properly understanding what the elements actually mean.
A big picture insight into what joins the dots is the question why do Plato's dialogues go round and round in circles? Take a look at Jay Kennedy's realization that in some dialogues Plato was line counting and the arguments are not drifting around aimlessly but rather seem to have been built in a very mysterious but structured way with repeating patterns like a piece of music in 12 movements. What's actually going on, of course, is that the 12 Olympian gods each have their own perspective. Think about a French Catholic and a Japanese Samurai for example. They come at life in completely different ways, a character trait that in one is a strength in another can be a weakness, so they have totally different ideas about how to live a good life, in other words about "justice", "virtue" etc. Plato writes in circles and patters so you can understand the evolution of ideas and the perspectives correctly. The Ancient Greeks weren't the only ones to use this idea, the Ancient Chinese wrote philosophy according to patterns as well. For example, the famous Confucian Eight Legged Essay also had a rigid format. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, candidates who wished to join the Confucian Elite had to demonstrate their mastery of philosophy by sitting the Imperial Examination. In the examination a topic was handed to scholars who then had to write about it by decomposing the topic into philosophical concepts according to the Eight Legged schema. The essays were originally 500 characters long, and written as balanced pairs of complimentary concepts, moving progressively through the concept from case and effect at individual and groups levels and other complex concepts. In marked-up examination essays that have survived, scholars always find numerous small circles marking exactly the balanced and antithetical clauses in each of the legs of the essay.
Now Kennedy talks, for example, about discord at occurring at position 7 across multiple examples. Zeus is at position seven, of course, after the three water and three earth you have the first fire, and he is powerful and destructive. Kennedy says the Euthyphro dialogue has 12 parts, take a look and see how parts 3, 6, 9 & 12 have circular self contradictory arguments - this comes out of the four elements multiplied by the three construction, they are the mix types. Look at part seven in the Euthyphro, the Zeus part - here Socrates talks about what all the gods hate. Zeus is called the King of the gods because he represents consensus, in fact he condemns the people everyone hates to the fires of hell. Hera sits in position one, the opposite of Zeus, and Hera is famous for protecting weak little birds from injustices (like Saint Francis). Indeed the whole Euthyphro is a dialogue dedicated to Hera, the main character represents the perfectly corrupted version of Hera, neurotic, jealous, patricidal etc. So if you wanted to teach a Hera type person philosophy you would look at that dialogue for the thought patters that are most likely to reach them. Many of the dialogues are like this, and as you lean more about Plato you begin to pick up on more and more of the hints. For example in the Charmindes dialogue Socrates said I caught fire when I got a glimpse of what was beneath his cloak. This is one of the many hints that tells you which god this dialogue is dedicated to. Alas I am not sure how many in the world pick up on these things, poor Hestia, most modest and gentle of the gods, keeper of the eternal flame, it seems I alone still treasure it under my cloak.
Plato is like a subtle and incredibly beautiful tapestry in which everything connects. Great festivals to the goddess Aphrodite, little wrestling schools dedicated to Hermes, even crossing a bridge or walking around the city walls, it's all part of the mind-bogglingly complex and beautiful tapestry. Kennedy claims it's all about music, but it's about philosophy of course. Philosophy is the study of the human mind, the personality types derive from the mechanics of human thinking. Anyone who studies Plato and contemplates what I have said here will be totally blown away, alas the terrible shallowness and madness of this pitiful world is testified to by the fact that so few have been. But what should non experts ask?
The second way to test the self proclaimed Plato genius is to listen to what he has to say and think about whether or not what he is saying is both new and useful. For example, suppose a mathematician went back in time to the Middle Adages, if you listened to him carefully you would see his strange new thing called mathematics was both new and internally consistent and capable of explaining real word things. In the same why I hope that if you read this web site carefully you will find the rudimentary beginnings of a whole new science of human nature. Plato said we philosophers should seek purity not quantity, and I have spent way too much time rambling in a effort to reach people, yet as you read articles on this site I hope you can see me dividing things and building models that explain a lot of deep and important concepts at the heart of life and really make sense of the world in the most remarkable ways. For example, if you compare this web site to Whitehead's adventures in philosophy I hope you will see that whist he was just waffling I am sailing all over the ocean and giving you some lessons in map making. Whitehead's writing is a struggle to read not just because he likes a fancy turn of phrase, but because he has no depth. I used to enjoy Carl Jung, but for me these days even a lot of his writing is flat and dull and I find myself turning page and after page without finding any gold. So I hope on this web site you will sense something in a different league, something really powerful and extraordinary that grabs you and shakes your whole mind.
Long ago I read a lot of books, and yet before I discovered Plato I had no idea what (water, earth, fire, air) or (one, many, mix) or (knowing something, knowing nothing) etc etc means. Alfred North Whitehead was wrong, Western philosophy is not a series of footnotes to Plato, Western philosophy is a just children's picture of the cave wall, and Plato is the only philosopher known to Western civilization. I like to jest that comparing Kant or Nietzsche or Jesus or Buddha with Plato is like comparing a flashlight with a laser beam so powerful it can rip apart the very fabric of the universe. I say this to people but they don't wake up, sometime you can only reach people by punching them on the nose. Bertrand Russell was a Nobel prize winner who specialised in Ancient Greek Philosophy, but I find it incomprehensible how someone could seriously read Plato's Republic and still believe in democracy. I wonder what goes through their mind when they read the Wild Beast Trainer or the Sea Captain story. Bertrand Russell once said he didn't understand why Plato was so anti the sophists, that's like watching the film "Star Wars" and not realising that Darth Vader is a bad guy.
I think the point is that these people don't go on a journey, they don't try to connect with what Plato is saying, they don't see it from his eyes, they don't feel it, they are like someone with Asperger's syndrome watching the Sound Of Music, it's just a total waste of time. I have written friendly emails to dozens of academics and journalists, even Jay Kennedy, they don't even bother replying, you cannot imagine how tragic the world is. You have to understand that Bertrand Russell at least had passion and an attention span and enjoyed a good debate, I think I could have taught him philosophy, but when you see inside the minds of most people today it makes you want to throw yourself into the abyss. Steve Jobs said "I would swap all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates", but people don't realise what a challenge philosophy is to their ego, I have never yet met a person who loves the truth more than their own opinion. When the Nexus-6 Replicant is dying at the end of the film Blade Runner he gives an inspiring speech saying "I have seen attack ships burning over Orion etc...", my speech would be about how I tried and tried and could never reach a soul! But to be fair to all the fluffy people who I have talked to, I am still working on that technique for interweaving and twisting the woof and the wharf described by the Visitor in the Statesman. So one of the reasons philosophy must be keep secret is that one needs enormous strength to survive the appalling pain of being a sort of Omega Man in a mindless dead world who can't figure out how to cure anyone.
I feel as if my whole life was orchestrated to prepare me for Plato. I had many advantages, I was brought up as an intellectual atheist but I became fascinated by the yin and yang and Eastern philosophy at a young age, we had no TV and my father outlawed all 20th Century music and encouraged me to read only classical literature thus protecting me against modern culture, he was also an accomplished criminal lawyer who instructed me in art of verbal debate and cross examination at a young age, I studied pure mathematics and physics and economics at university, then I worked in proprietary trading which is really great philosophical training. In Plato's Parmenides there is a line that says "you need to spend some time occupying yourself with idle chatter before you figure this out". My study of geopolitics has allowed me to unlock some of the secrets of human decision making which have made it possible for me to begin to understand Plato. Sitting down with a copy of various newspapers and trying to figure out whether or not the journalists are talking sense and how they are presenting their argument was one of the magic keys that unlocked Plato for me. I think the Ancient Greeks were great debaters, and they got so good at debating that they sat around and figured out the meaning of life. I retraced their steps by sitting down with a copy of all the newspapers and thinking about what the journalists are saying and why they are saying it. I realised that journalism has nothing to do with the truth, it's just a bunch of people who have a lot of opinions that reflect their personality. The skill journalists have, if you can call it a skill, is to trick you into thinking their opinion is reasonable. The goodness and badness of their journalism depends on their goodness and badness, they are like a herd of sheep that reflect the zeitgeist. You find the truth by throwing away not only everything they are saying, but also everything that they are, and examining only how they are changing. So the good ones are evolving, and the evil ones are resisting change and becoming more and more insane. The religious person learns to change his personality by following some external inspiration, the philosopher learns to look inside and understand himself and delete everything human about himself.
Although I have learnt some amazing things and really want to communicate them to the world, I only claim to know the basics and there are many many things in Plato that still baffle me. I would say that I have seen a lot of things in the distance, and can write poetically about them, and can therefore make it look to you as if I understand a lot more than I do, and I can also work with some of the basic concepts in real detail. It's not that I am really a super hero, I was just the first guy to dig up the gold, and I hope one day I can teach other people to be better philosophers than me. Believe me, being the first to find the snow covered path is vastly harder than following, I am so threadbare I am half dead, but with what I know some young whiz kid could climb far higher. This web site is a sort of diary, it reflects my philosophical journey, it's full of mistakes and self contradictions, one day I will delete the lot of it. I don't like writing about Plato's dialogues directly, I think it would be blasphemous and dangerous to put commentaries on the internet, nevertheless I think this web site will help serious students of Plato because it will help them to find the bigger picture. People get bogged down in Plato, they can't see beyond his subtle presentation, what he is saying is not just some kind of arcane irrelevant theory about the meaning of words, it's absolutely huge and mind blowing and life transforming and terrifying to talk about. Besides I don't want to write too much about Plato because the whole point of this web site is to get people to contact me, and we live in the sort of mad world where people take ideas without reciprocating. I want some university, NGO, think tank, government, oligarch etc to call me up and give me a job teaching philosophy or consulting in some way. I am happy to teach Plato, or to teach new socioeconomic models. I don't want to be a politician or have the sort of profile that famous academics such as Niall Ferguson have, I want to remain behind the scenes, to teach the elite not get involved with the general public on television or with best selling books. I think the Chinese are getting pretty good at philosophy, so maybe my life is a waste of time, but frankly I still think even they could do with lessons, frankly I still think I could teach even them rather a lot. Yet I think my real job is to help the West, I think people in the West and East think differently, and I specialise in Western minds because I have a Western brain and I think so did Socrates. China has a bright future following its own path, but without Plato the West will die, so it's the West who need me not the Chinese. Most of all I feel it's my duty to help either the UK or the USA get their act together.
Studying Plato completely transforms one's entire life, you do become a bit like Socrates. If you read the lives of very religious people they usually describe a kind of born again moment when they cry their eyes out and despise their old life and dedicate themselves to God etc. Reading Plato does the same thing to you. Perhaps the best way I can explain what learning Plato is like is by way of an analogy. Imagine Plato's works as the writings of the Krell in the film Forbidden Planet (If you don't know the film you're really missing out, it's arguably the greatest Sci-Fi film ever made!). Long ago, at the peak of their wondrous civilization, the Krell suddenly became extinct, and all they left behind is a museum full of cryptic writing. What did they find out? Why did they die? For two and half thousand years people have been walking through that museum, but instead you have to sit there and read it over and over again until it sinks deep inside you and bells start ringing. People used to do that back in the 4th Century and the 18th Century, but the time wasn't right, they were steeped in Christianity and they never figured it out. Today people walk through that museum in seconds, their attention span is literally blasphemous. Personally I was immediately impressed by Plato, nothing he said upset me, even as a child democracy and modern society revolted me, but Plato made sense of why. As I gradually became more and more engrossed in his writing I felt like I was on a spiritual journey, and after a year or so I began really hearing the music and seeing the lights. Then you realise his writing is like a hallow statue filled with gold that opens up when you see behind its surface. Think about the psychodynamic energy of the concepts and the patterns by which they are constructed. Behind all those funny looking meandering arguments are the secrets to living a good life and building a good society. They shake you out of your slumber, tear apart your personality and open your mind. Like the Krell brain booster, as you study Plato your brain expands and for the first time in life you can think clearly because for the first time in your life you can see the fundamentals from which the world is constructed. You are the tiny child who walked into the sacred Krell museum and dedicated himself to it, and as you loved them so they loved you, and you became a Krell child. In a nutshell that's what Plato's really all about. He and Socrates left behind the holy grail that can turn a man into a King fit for public office, that can make a man capable of solving the ethical problems of state, capable of saving a collapsing society, capable of building a heavenly utopia.
PS: Why is this site called theoligarch.com? Long ago my sister suggested it as a fun memorable name and now I am stuck with my flippant choice (I was going to call it ppereader.com but she said no-one will ever go to that web site!). I am not Russian, I don't even have a sailing boat let alone a cruise ship, and real oligarchs would probably regard me as poverty stricken. Of course I am anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-individualist etc, so the name is a joke.