Par Mohamed Salah Ben Ammar*
It is wrongly believed that democracy is the triumph of freedom. However, it carries the seeds of its own burial. The trial of Socrates, in 399 BC, is the symbol of this. Accused of corrupting the youth and denying the gods of the city, Socrates is legally condemned to death. Meanwhile, Gorgias, the sophist, rallies the crowds and imposes himself by the charm of his words, not by the truth.
When democracy sacrifices truth to emotion
Democracy favors those who use words rather than ideas. The crowd ignores doubt and submits to the magic of words, with charismatic effects, as Freud already emphasized. This is where the fragility of the system lies: truth is sacrificed on the altar of emotion and opinion. Socrates is the victim. Nothing has really changed since then.
Philosophy is born to resist this tyranny of opinion and is despised and mocked.
Speech is not innocent. It is an act. Slander, hatred, insult and slander spread, take root, divide. Today, amplified by social networks, they are becoming viral. Speech becomes empty, instantaneous and compulsive, individual and collective at the same time. Homo unlimitedus gets drunk on words, while Homo limitus abandons himself to the shedding of his critical thinking. The time of universal resentment, “all against all”, has arrived.
Viral speech, fertile ground for murderous ideologies
Murderous ideologies always begin with words. They construct enemies, legitimize atrocity and fragment society. Social networks, with their bubbles and algorithms, accentuate these excesses: the truth is no longer what is based on reality but what is shared. Conspiracy theorists present themselves as skeptics, but their absolute certainties show that they are the polar opposite of doubt.
Plato had already analyzed this drift. In The Republic, he shows that democracy, if it gives in to ideology or collective emotion, prepares itself for totalitarianism. Speech becomes vertical, hierarchical, formatted. Lies and deceptions take root there. Lenin, by taking up Marx, illustrates how this Platonic logic can generate modern dictatorships: anonymization, individualism, shedding of responsibility.
Philosophy and vigilance: the bulwark against barbarism
Faced with this threat, philosophy remains our best defense: reestablishing the possibility of disagreement without hatred, spreading wisdom, defending doubt and individual responsibility. To promote democracy without this vigilance is to condemn it.
The trial of Socrates teaches us a universal lesson: barbarity always begins with words. Where the other is no longer a human being but an enemy, a vermin where speech gets drunk on its own, where opinion replaces reason, democracy dies. Resisting empty words, cultivating doubt and spreading wisdom become not only a civic duty, but an act of moral survival.
* Pr Mohamed Salah Ben Ammar MD – MBA
