Modern Noble Lies
I was reading a novel about Plato's Republic, which famously introduces The Noble Lie: "a myth knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony." It's notable to me that the wikipedia page for Noble Lie doesn't contain any examples beyond Plato, which got me thinking: what are the plausible candidates for noble lies in our society today? I started looking out for people claiming something is a noble lie, if perhaps not in those exact words.
Courts of Law
This podcast episode involves lawyer Ken White saying (I think) that the idea that juries are able to implement clear and objective legal standards is a noble lie: the juries are given complicated instructions orally that it's implausible a non-lawyer could understand, and are asked to implement standards such as "what would a reasonable person do in this situation?" with no clarification of who this reasonable person is or how anyone is meant to decide that.
Democratic Elections
Another thing that's been called (something like a) noble lie is the process of elections: I heard this in college and I wish I still remembered who made the argument, but the internet tells me it may have been Schumpeter.
The argument (as I remember it) is that the point of elections is not to correctly aggregate the Will of the People, which is maybe impossible, but just to maintain peace and stability and consent among the governed. But in order to do that, it's important that people feel that the Will of the People was correctly and unambiguously aggregated, whether or not that's coherent. So we share the myth that elections are all about making sure that The People's Choice governs, rather than just making sure that there's one coherent government that people generally agree is legitimate, or whatever.
Meritocracy
Of course I asked my friendly neighborhood LLM for possible examples of modern noble lies. The most plausible, I thought, was "Meritocracy", which of course ties back in to the original noble lie that we are all born with different natures (based on the metals that compose our souls!) and only those whose souls are dominated by Gold are suited to rule.
Plato says that most people's souls will be dominated by the same metal as their parents, but "it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire." Therefore, the guardians of the city are commanded to intently observe the mixture of metals in all the children of the city, such that if their our own offspring come out brass or iron they must "thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers," and equally if somehow the child of a laborer is born "with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian."
But this is all based on a lie, that people's souls are composed of metals in the first place, whereas actually they're not. Any similarities or differences with modern university admissions is left for the reader to consider.
Bureaucracyspeak
The LLM's other suggestions for plausible Noble Lies all struck me as not really noble lies, but for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, for charming and maybe instructive reasons. "This policy is for your safety," for example, really is a myth and really is intended to maintain social harmony, I suppose, but it somehow feels disqualified – perhaps because it's too trivial, or perhaps because the people saying it don't actually expect us to believe it, but only to be hard to argue back to. Which holds even more so for my favorite LLM nominee for the modern noble lie: "Your Call is Important to Us."
what's YOUR favorite noble lie? Let us know in the comments....