The Labour Party has this uncanny idea that if it dishes out favours and cheques before an election, then people will vote for them and everything will be alright. There is this tendency to buy everyone off and ultimately cling to power, as if power was the only and ultimate aim in politics.

The Labour Party (PL) seems to run away with the idea that there is a Gyges in all of us; that all men, if given a chance, will revert to selfish nature. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues against the sophists Thrasymachus and Glaucon. Sophists were Greeks who believed that there was no such thing as an objective truth, an eternal truth and that everyone’s beliefs were relative to the time, culture and place we live in. In presenting the myth of Gyges who finds a ring which, when worn, makes him invisible and then proceeds to commit unjust acts, very much as Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Glaucon wishes to underline the fact that it is human nature to be selfish, that each human individual would be unjust in behaviour, if he could get away with it. This selfish trait in humans is seen to be the right conduct and rulers might quickly come to the assumption that it is a convenient way to maintain order in society. Does this ring a bell?

The PL’s conversion here from a society in democratic political theory based on the collective Marxist state command economy which they embraced in the Mintoff years, to the individual self-interest theory of Glaucon in modern politics encompassed in the philosophy of selfishness of Ayn Rand fame, is a veritable summersault which misses the main point in politics completely. Socrates’ answer to both those two gentlemen is to compare the State to the work of a physician. Just as a physician takes an oath to Do No Harm, and in practising his profession he does not only look at his own interest but his primary concern is the interest of the patient, so politics should be a moral state where the rulers can achieve the same kind of professionalism as in medicine and based on knowledge of the forms, of what is ideal, turn politics into a noble profession. The moral state then, when ruled properly through wisdom, courage and temperance which creates justice in the city, will cause individuals to learn and follow the right order of harmony in themselves when each follows the dictates of rationality, morality and emotions in that order.

Because political leaders have to have the ability to teach people to be virtuous, it is incumbent on them to have the highest virtue of wisdom and for Plato that meant being able to recognise the form of Justice and ultimately the form of the Good. This implies that there is such a state of being as just and such a state of being as good, independent of the relativity of our own interests and practical pursuits. There is a form of the good, a transcendental form independent of us. Failing to grasp this form of the good loses sight of what in politics is called the theory of the common good. There is an ultimate good for the whole people, for the whole nation, that produces action which is just and good for everyone and which should be the ideal position to follow. In following Thrasymachus’ premise, the PL conveys the message that might is right, that there is no transcendental aspect of being that recognises a standard of justice and of the good, that the main behaviour is based on a standard of power and it is the rulers themselves who define what is just and good for they are the most powerful. The message in the end is that the person who is unjust is the happier person. It is implied that the unjust are not only happier but more successful. There is in this image an unnerving similarity to the philosophy of Nietzche and his Ubermensch or superman, in the present philosophy of the Labour Party.

Observe an alliance with all that is powerful. With property and building developers in a disordered fashion, a contrivance against nature in a disordered fashion, an unsustainable development in their global approach, a justice which is slow and out of reach to the man in the street. The man in the street is bullied by unscrupulous developers and builders, sometimes in collusion with professional architects, other professionals such as lawyers and engineers including some doctors and the forces of law and order who should know better. The forces of law and order themselves are inadequate, with ordinary folk being forced out of their homes with no one to protect them, people are buried under the rubble of the developers’ progress, physically and metaphorically. Immoral and corrupt property owners push people out of their private properties by making their lives hell, or damaging their buildings to the point that the owners simply have no choice but to sell their property often for a monetary pittance and move away. Public green spaces are sacrificed to development and there is very little respect with wholesale encroachment of the few green spaces left. Nature is treated with unfortunate propensity as one would use an object for personal use and then discarded with the loss of the common good. Any enforcement by the forces of law and order is inadequate or absent, and the regulatory institutions asleep, simply reactive or at worse in collusion with the powerful instead of protecting the weak!

The Labour Party has moved along an existential trajectory of that of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoire. An existentialism, a freedom to choose and to do what one likes at the cost of losing its connection with transcendence and being. There is no objective good, there is no objective justice, there is only freedom to do as one wishes.

There is however another way, a freedom to find one’s fulfilment while respecting the freedom and fulfilment of others. A freedom that does not lose its connection with being, with the objective form of the good and the just, with its proper relation to community, nature and the fulfilment of others in that community. This is the personalism of Emanuel Mounier and Gabriel Marcel which although recognising that man is born free and has existential issues to cope with, does not jettison the connection to the transcendental absolute. Whether one conceives of this absolute as God and his precepts or as Plato’s ideal forms of the good and just.

I am an avowed Aristotelian. The forms that should be practiced are within and part of the material world and existents. I believe that there exists a politics which affords human beings a freedom to find fulfilment in life but is also attached to the forms of the good and justice all rolled up in the same act. There need not be any detachment between the politics of the common good and practical realities. This act of the good and this act of justice are sorely missing in the realities of material political life today. Otherwise, it would not have been incumbent for the Labour Party to vote against the Jean Paul Sophia public inquiry or for some Labour Members of Parliament to afterwards state that they were sorry to have voted against it. This is the unfortunately the state of the matter today! I also believe that the return of Joseph Muscat to the political scene, which by the very admission of his own resignation from the premiership, after the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, is by its very act, an admission of failure, nor the recycled return of other disgraced politicians for that matter, will help to pull the Labour Party out of its present ivory tower.

The tower of ivory may be creating a false sense of security in the Labour Party. The tower already has visible cracks but once the forms of good and justice have their way, or God’s justice and goodness for that matter, the collapse will be dramatic and monumental, as it was in 1987. God gives one time to realise the extent of one’s mistakes, God’s time is not man’s time, but ultimately, the ideals of good and justice will have their redeeming day!