The point at which the upper class transitioned from overt …

The point at which the upper class transitioned from overt to covert narcissism I locate at the work of Plato. To provide some background, Plato was not the first philosopher, but is the earliest one from whom complete works survive. An early event in Plato's intellectual development was the execution of his teacher Socrates by the Athenian democracy, and Socrates was not the first philosopher to be politically persecuted. According to Plato, philosophers were persecuted for questioning the existence of the gods and in particular the divine sanction of their society's institutions. Thus, philosophers were seen as anti-nomos, which was an ancient greek word which could be translated as tradition or convention, which was seen as essential to the freedom enjoyed by the Athenian upper class. Philosophers we seen as promoting tyranny, which meant rule by one man unconstrained by convention or tradition. Nowadays, in large part because of Plato, tyranny is a very bad word but at the time it was not universally abhorred because tyrants had also sometimes been seen as pursuing the interests of some formerly oppressed class. The short Platonic dialog Euthyphro dramatizes the conflict of philosophy and tradition as one man who asks simple questions and another who cannot answer them. Thus, according to this view, a philosopher was not simply a "friend of wisdom" but a forerunner of the modern atheist. Knowing how closely Euthyphro resembles a real episode of The Atheist Experience, one of my favorite shows, I do not think that this version of events is altogether implausible. However, an interesting book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy by Costin Alamariu, proposes that the early philosophers actually did advocate for tyranny and in particular said that they should be the tyrant, being smarter than everyone else. Plato's political philosophy is the earliest political philosophy known, but Alamariu's theory that there was an earlier doctrine makes a lot of sense because of the way that Plato can be read as a warning to philosophers not to set themselves up as tyrants.