The rise and fall of the House of Solon.

Democracy: the system of government that has outlasted every other system of government devised by man,  to date over 2,500 years of continuous success and adaptation to revolution, conflicts and the ambitions of the powerful, is I believe to have been due to the vision of one man, Solon. 

Before Solon, Democracy wasn’t possible because he established a rule of law and central ethics of fairness and equal status for citizens. These two ideals powered Athens from a wealthy city state but of no more importance than any other city state to the most powerful and respected form of government in the Ancient world within a few short generations; defeating the Persian Empire at Salamis and defeating the Spartans soon after to emerge as Ancient Greece’s dominant power. The path to democracy was far from smooth and it required a two generation tyranny to provoke it into being but, without Solon’s laws and ethics of fairness over patronage and equity over privilege, the people wouldn’t have risen up to take the power back from the tyrants in the first place.

“By the early 6th century B.C. social tensions in Athens had become acute, pitting the poorer citizens against rich and powerful landowners. Many citizens were reduced to the status of share croppers, and others had actually sold themselves into slavery to meet their debts. To resolve the crisis the Athenians appointed Solon as archon (magistrate) to serve as mediator and lawgiver. Plutarch and Aristotle describe in some detail the constitution devised by Solon, who then went into voluntary exile to avoid being pressured into amending this legislation. Solon cancelled most debts and freed those Athenians who had been enslaved, but he refused to redistribute property or to deprive the aristocracy of most of the political power. As he tells us in his own words as recorded by Plutarch:

For to the common people I gave as much power as is sufficient, Neither robbing them of dignity, nor giving them too much; and those who had power, and were marvelously rich, even for those I contrived that they suffered no harm. I stood with a mighty shield in front of both classes, and allowed neither of them to prevail unjustly. (Plutarch, Life of Solon 18.4)”

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Now there’s a little context required for us to fully understand what Solon did and why he deserves his mention in the annals of Democratic history. Solon understood the danger represented by a vengeful rabble more acutely than the aristocratic clans whom he protected. His equanimity towards the rich and wasteful wasn’t an indicator of his being easy to bribe but, it was a sign of just how disciplined he was ensuring a balanced foundation to Greek society as opposed to a popular one. When he came under intense political and social pressure to repeal or rescind his laws in favour of the powerful and the paid-for popular swell, Solon chose the option of exile to ensure that his constitution, ratified by the people, could not be overthrown or rescinded by individual magistrates or politicians. To overthrow the constitution, the entire elite had to be in agreement, this principle was established fifty years before the people of Athens ever heard the word ‘Democracy’.

 

Thus the nursery of democracy was justice and equity.  Instead of imposing an unrealistic and unmanageable equality in which every person was given the same amount of wealth irrespective of their position or ability, Solon eased the burdens of the weakest, freeing them from servitude but he did not destroy the structure of his civilisation as many modern radicals dream of doing.  Because he provided and wisely defended its rock-solid foundation, Democracy itself can be called the House of Solon. The most effective part of his constitution for the Athenian State was demanding the active participation of Athen’s citizens themselves.

An important concept clearly laid out for the first time in Solon’s political poetry is the notion that political participation was the duty of the citizen, not just a privilege to be exercised or not as one chose:

He saw that the state was often in a condition of factional strife, while some of the citizens were content to let things slide; he laid down a special law to deal with them, enacting that whoever when civil strife prevailed did not join forces with either party was to be disenfranchised and not to be a member of the state. (Athenian Constitution 8.5).

While Solonian reforms did not establish democracy, they were a crucial step on the Athenian road to democracy. Solon's constitution, consisting of moderate redistribution rather than a revolutionary transfer of political power, nonetheless granted important rights to the lowest class of citizens.

This middle course pleased no one, as he himself tells us:

Wherefore I stood at guard on every side, A wolf at bay among a pack of hounds. (Athenian Constitution 12.4).”

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Use it or lose it, basically.  Solon understood that tyrannies form more quickly from the apathy of the privileged than the anarchy of the poor, or as Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 94:

“Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds”

This duty to participate in the politics of the state ensured that Athens had no shortage of eager men who would police their own patch jealously and were expected to do so. This imposition upon an elite more used to drinking parties and the entertainments of poetry and drama due to their wealth largely inherited from their clan estates and worked by indentured debtors perfectly reflects the France of Louis XVI and of today; the neo-liberal/globalised world of Foxconn suicides and empty financial scam towers. We are due a Solon-style shake up of what the wealthy and influential can put upon the impoverished.

I say, impoverished and not poor because nobody freely chooses poverty; that part of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ theory is largely correct but when the conditions of gaining even modest wealth is taken out of the hands of many and reserved exclusively for the connected few then revolution is never far away. The problem with revolution in the 21^st Century is that our weapons are devastating of the entire civilisation and revolt inevitably falls into civil war and violent anarchy.

As stated above, the path to democracy was blocked by two tyrannies that lasted nearly sixty years. By tyranny, I mean a system of governance not directly calibrated to benefit the people. It wasn’t necessary to rule with terror or wander about in a black mask and cloak urging people to ‘feel the power of the dark side of the force’. A tyrant was simply someone who seized power by political coup or violence and not by popular election. The first tyrant, Peisistratos, was popular and enjoyed a great groundswell of support but, after many failed election attempts he simply forced his way in through bribery and empty populist promises, breaking all the traditions and rules to gain absolute power despite the popular vote and the wishes of most of his peers; sound like anyone we know?

Peisistratos’ period of rule wasn’t particularly harsh and he tolerated useful rivals such as Milatedes (who later defeated the Persian navy at Salamis) and Cleisthenes. His period of power (546-527 BC) saw a lot of grandiose building and glitzy events (still not getting it?) which provided his supporters with all of the ‘Whataboutery’ they could possibly need to defend their idol.

The real rot set in when Peisistratos died and his tyrannical position was inherited by his two sons Hippias and Hipparchos. Hippias played the statesman and Hipparchos played the lover and showman. Naturally the lover and showman got stabbed by a love rival (possibly a critic?) and then all hell broke loose in 514BC. Hippias, obviously with one eye on his back, set about eliminating all possible rivals including Cleisthenes and even his own nephew also called Peisistratos (á la Game of Thrones). Lots of public executions ensued.

Luckily, Ancient Greek clans have a lot more gumption than Irish insiders and they waged a four year war on Hippias’ tyranny until they finally managed to entice the Spartans to intervene in 510 BC.  The Spartans were the US peacekeeping expedition of the era with all that that entails both good and bad. King Cleomenes of Sparta quickly put whatever resistance he encountered to the spear and asked questions later. Hippias and his armies of supporters were driven out or slaughtered. This set about a free for all among the elite Athenian families and factions eventually setting Cleisthenes up against Isagorus, an elite faction leader of not terribly strong will and his backers, the Spartans.  Obviously Cleisthenes couldn’t defeat then entire Spartan army with his one faction and defeat would have left Isagorus in power as a Spartan satrap, doing the bidding of his benefactor to the detriment of the Athenian people. 

Cleisthenes, in such a tight spot, looked to Athenian history and found the example of Solon.  He proposed a new constitution in which Solon-style rule would be the new order. This got the attention of the people who had memories of a gilded past in which everyone had their own freedom.  Although Cleisthenes’ forces were routed by the Spartans and he faced exile with his followers. However when King Cleomenes of Sparta attempted to invoke de-facto Spartan rule via his puppets the people banded together and laid siege to the Spartans in the Acropolis, determined not to lose their freedom again. Cleisthenes was ushered back as the nominal head of the interim government but he had no doubts that his promised constitution had better be delivered or else….

Why the history lesson?  

Never doubt that the people are the power, despite all the propaganda and shows of central power that they are exposed to, the people are not sheep. Individuals can be broken and terrorised and a mass movement can be misled in the short term. A people with the ambition of a better future for their children are unbeatable. Even when King Cleomenes returned with the entire Spartan army and two other city states in support; they could not take Athens because they recognised that a people fighting for their own freedom would fight to the last man.

Cleisthenes’ name comes down through the ages to us today not because he enjoyed the infamy of Adolph Hitler or an Ivan the Terrible but because he was that rarest of rare creatures: a politician who delivered what he promised (not that he had much of a choice given that even the Spartans wouldn’t intervene to save him if he reneged on delivering his promised new constitution).

Thus democracy was born as a means to reward the people who had won their own freedom. This is where Cleisthenes revealed his astonishing realism and thoroughness. Having seen that Solon’s equity rule had been easily swept away by the tribal interests of whichever popular tyrant was rising among the rich and privileged clans, he broke up the clans not by force but by election.  Cleisthenes offered his range of new rights and public responsibilities not to the established aristocrats but to all free Greek men of even modest means via their enrolment in one of ten new tribes. Enrolling in a tribe wasn’t just joining a club but receiving a new home in the area of Attica that belonged to that tribe. Basically, people who probably shared homes with several generations now got a brand spanking new house and land to farm into the bargain. Who was going to pass that one up? 

By creating a completely new system of distributing power, he cut across the tribal loyalties of all the aristocratic families and they could not protest lest they felt the wrath of their former loyalists.

It didn’t matter whether that man knew the great classical poems or just made clay pots, that man’s rights flowed to him through his membership of a new democratic tribe which may have also had members of previously rival Athenian factions but now their lives depended on their new loyalties. In Bronze Age warfare, the most effective formation was the phalanx, a group of spearmen in a line behind shields where it was the shield of your neighbour that protected you and you protected the next man along the line. Knowing this; very few Athenians opted out of their allotted tribe. 

Each tribe was named after an Eponymous Hero selected by the Delphic Oracle to represent that tribe. Public messages pertaining and relevant to that tribe were posted below a bronze statue of that tribe’s hero upon a plinth of all ten tribes so that much governmental information could be distributed efficiently in a matter of days. In this way Cleisthenes invented news broadcasting with separate channels. Members of a tribe were allotted their duties completely at random via the world’s first randomizing computer (yes, they were extremely clever) so that all members of that tribe’s names were placed in numbered slots and a series of black and white pebbles were dropped down a chute so that the selected person was assigned by his name culminating with a white pebble dropping at the same time (much fairer than a tombola) which was impossible to cheat.

Why I am going to this degree of detail is to illustrate that one doesn’t simply change an entire political system with a piece of paper but one needs to think each step through and be consistent with the ethic even to the point of inventing a completely new technology in the process. If Solon provided the foundation, it was certainly Cleisthenes who provided the walls and the ten pillars of the house that democracy still resides in.

The House of Solon is your typical Greek Temple design so beloved of banks and government offices. Once you are able to interpret the symbolism of Neo Classical and Rococo friezes and pediments, the values of those societies become abundantly clear. Contrast this frankness and earnestness with the intellectual and stylistic poverty of ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ building styles and it should be no surprise that we currently live in a period of time dubbed ‘Post Truth’.  Nothing we see around us on our screens, in our architecture, even on our own bodies is what it seems; our entire aesthetic is an ugly mishmash of cheap knock-offs, preset templates, second-hand soundbites and Photoshopped lies. 

So it is with our politics.

The house of Solon still lacked a roof by the end of Cleisthenes’ reforms and, as any builder can attest, without a cap or brace, walls and columns can easily fall over. The roof and downward pressure needed to stabilise our House of Solon was provided by that most divisive of characters, Pericles. Pericles’ democratic record is no less impressive than that his two predecessors on the face of it but his steadfastness in the face of massive populist revolt and the threat of all of Athens being destroyed by the more powerful Sparta was counterbalanced by his determination to expand.

Pericles’ period of power was from roughly 461-427BC but this included a period of war, ostracism, and political controversy. To the commentators of the day, Pericles was Marmite: you either loved him or you hated him. In this he was no less a populist than Peisistratos the tyrant but he had far greater ambitions. Pericles had the vision that historical glory was a two horse race between Athens and the increasingly envious Spartan kingdom. By banding together a generation earlier, the two Greek city states had defeated the vast Persian Empire much like the US and USSR had defeated the seemingly unstoppable Third Reich of Hitler but, once their common enemy was defeated, they began a cold war to win over as much territory not under their flag but under their ideology. So it was with democratic Athens and martial law Sparta.

If Pericles could be said to have a modern equivalent it is John F Kennedy; showing hawkish aggression when his territory was infringed upon and untrammelled ambition when he was secure. The Space race, such an inspiration to me as a child, was war in all but name between the US and the USSR despite the fact that the scientists behind the race to the moon ended up working together long before Glasnost.  What Pericles did was to open the door to constant reform and querying the orthodoxy of set laws and traditions in order to ensure that the Athenian democracy better reflected the needs and day to day challenges faced by Athenians as long as they could argue for it fairly.

Much of that could be called populism but he was noted to avoid the tricks of rabble rousers, constantly forcing the people who listened to his speeches to think for themselves as individuals. He rarely raised his voice or whipped himself up into frenzy but held his line of calculating logic even as Athens and Sparta were at full war with one another. When the question of Athenian citizenship came up, Pericles went against the populist tide to ensure that only the children of two Athenian parents could be citizens. This was indeed unfair and inequitable to those disenfranchised children of the ten tribes but it did reflect the pressure Athens was under through an influx of peoples voting with their feet to live within the superior quality of life that Athens provided to the region of Attica.

 

This may have fatally divided Athenians into a two-tier society which would fracture on his death but Pericles maintained his logic to the end; perversely being just as unbending as the conservatives in order to ensure that democracy was robust and stood against even the greatest of challenges and only changed when the people voted for it in response to a logical argument as opposed to a popular groundswell. 

The challenges he faced 2,500 years ago are perfectly mirrored today on our streets.

Pericles’ gift to democracy was the duty to reject of orthodoxy for its own sake and to constantly examine the flaws in society using logic and far sightedness as opposed to knee-jerk responses to sudden events. Less inventive than Cleisthenes and less intractable than Solon, Pericles nevertheless spread the word of democracy across the Ancient world and it was his orations and logical points that influenced the Roman Republic when it was being formed which is why we know about democracy today.

I will leave you Pericles own words which laid out the definition of democracy that we still believe in and recognise:

“Our polity does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves.  It is called a democracy, because not the few but the many govern. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences;  if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity,  class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state,  he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.”  Theucidides – Pericles’ Funeral Oration

However, this essay is about how we have allowed this definition to be betrayed in Ireland and across the entire west. Democracy: The House of Solon is falling and crumbling and its sorely needs sensitive renovating to bring it back to its classical glory. Maybe other champions of democracy in other countries are aware of this and are writing about it too but this is how I see it.

Today the house of Solon (Ireland Branch) is a bawdy house run by a tacky pimp who is not afraid to use his fists upon the workers trapped within it. The house of Solon is now on shifting sands as opposed to firm foundations with every u-turn and populist gesture made solely to win votes in the next election. The political parties who dominate my Ireland have no core values or obvious mission. 

What does Fianna Fáil mean if not just a party of fantasised mythology, past glories, and its own reputation?  What has Fianna Fáil built in the last 30 years?  What has Fianna Fáil sabotaged in the last 30 years?  The latter list is far longer than the former and yet they maintain their popularity because of how awful the other parties are.

What does Fine Gael mean?  What language is ‘Fine’ even? Where are the core values? Where do these centre right parties differ when it comes to how your life is shaped? They don’t.  Both voted for the bailout, both continue with the repossession courts and both have pushed through even MORE legislation to ensure offshore vulture funds (who do not pay tax anywhere) can re-enact the mass evictions of the late 1890s. 

Let me remind you that each and every home on this island has received State subsidy of one sort or another and thus rightly remains public responsibility; responsibility that FF and FG have both venally denied in order to sell off more State assets.

When did Labour last propose or vote for progressive measures to alleviate the suffering of the impoverished? Ireland indeed has no natural poor – Ireland’s losers have been cheated of their just inheritance by the very people who spout daily on their needs. It is a sick, vicious circle of imposed mutual dependency: Labour needs there to be an impoverished to maintain the illusion of caring about them, which they don’t. Irish Labour has moved further to the right than even Tony Blair and his crew of media spinners and war cheerleaders dared to move. Look at their voting record.

Sinn Féin – another meaningless name – what do they espouse? When it matters, what do they do?  They certainly have plenty of homework done and they certainly enjoy showing up the two larger parties’ dodgy accounting but…when it matters, they shy away from the responsibility and accountability of government. They are afraid of the power they resent the other parties enjoying. Leaving us with various independent (former/quasi party affiliated) TDs and radical leftist TDs – radical meaning they want to see change but they never define what change they mean outside of attacking a status quo that an infant could see is inherently corrupt.

Not a pretty picture, is it?  And whose fault is that? Is it the pimp or the whores we should blame?

Woe betide anyone unfortunate enough to reside within these walls that have no new tribal pillars available but they wobble with Civil war tribal loyalties, long since redundant and betrayed, and the nonsensical hatreds of past conflicts obliterating the common threats we face today. As for a roof that presses down upon those walls with constant inquiry and self-reflection as well as vaunting with ambition; nope!  It’s not even a corrugated iron sheet. There is no roof on this ruin. There is no wish for glory and achievement; progress is for other nations; solidarity is for countries safely too far away for them to ever call on us for help; our neutrality is no longer honourable but cowardly. I don’t recommend NATO but I do recommend international engagement supporting Human Rights.

Yes, this is a bawdy house; it’s the best little bawdy house in Europe because here the rich can have their wicked way with its people and not even have pay for the pleasure. All payment and charge for the service is refused by this pimp just in case an offended patron chose to get his jollies elsewhere. How is this sustainable even in the short term?  And yet, in a democracy, the only people to blame are the voters themselves. In a democracy you get what you vote for. In a PR democracy, you can’t even complain that the selection of candidates isn’t representative of you. This is the country that spawned the Healy-Raes and Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan. The fault lies with the tribal voters who vote AGAINST their own rational self-interest again again; there is no way they will have the courage to do otherwise because everything around them is a reflection of their Civil war tribal culture. Anything that doesn’t have their tribal brand is not to be trusted.  

So, yes, I blame the whores.

At the moment there is an argument raging among the US Democrats that ‘third party’ voters cost Hillary Clinton her presidency in favour of a candidate with the worst publicity ever in an election – it was wall to wall, lickspittle, lascivious publicity but ostensibly negative. No debate on any subject could be concluded over the last 18 months without the mandatory shock story on what Trump tweeted that day.  And the electorate lapped it up. What publicity did the Green or Libertarian party get?  What TV station covers their agenda? Nope. It wasn’t that tiny minority of third party voters who cost Hillary her presidency it was the assumption is was HER presidency in the first place.  Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched – everyone knows this, right?

 

Likewise, it is not the fault of people who vote for their rational self interest but the people who continuously vote for Civil war parties who have refused even to apologise for the meltdown in the economy and the bailout and the pain that was poured upon a blameless people; because it wasn’t the Irish people who ‘lost the run of themselves’ in the Tiger years but the Civil War parties. 

Proof? 

http://www.thejournal.ie/register-of-members-interests-tds-property-investments-2002567-Mar2015

Have a good look at what NAMA is doing and with whose property portfolios. Yep, they are shoring up their OWN speculative losses at the cost of everyone’s futures. So this final part of my essay is about how to rebuild the House of Solon first in Ireland and then spread the message across the rest of Europe and, hopefully, the western world. Not everyone will agree with the need for a robust democracy, favouring the certainty of their own Authoritarian regimes or favouring losing their voice in politics entirely in return for the trappings of wealth promised by an increasingly corporatist culture. But for those of us who still want a say in our lives... 

FOUNDATION:

Equality under the law is nice but equity is far more important. Equity is the fairest possible way to distribute the bounty of a nation. For equity to work then there has to be a transparent system of testing for the distribution of tax wealth into the society. Quangos and special interest groups are merely an exercise of centralising power ‘at arm’s length’. Clearly if the government has placed their cronies on the board then the quango is controlled by the government, without the responsibility of it being a government department and thus accountable to the people. This is an obfuscation; an attempt to disguise the flow of money from the public purse into private hands. It is reasonable to presume a certain level of corruption in the absence of comprehensive reporting back to the people and direct accountability to a minister charged with that portfolio.

Equity demands that what people get out from their society is in proportion to what they put in. Obviously, someone who cannot make ends meet even without the burden of general taxation cannot afford to pay extra stealth or utility taxation. Calling a flat-tax rate ‘equitable’ is a nonsense when someone on the lower level of that tax rate might be pushed into penury while someone else at the top level mightn’t even notice it in their daily spend. Equity is ensuring that every single citizen enjoys a minimum level of comfort and security to ensure that they can improve their lot without losing hope. That some people at the more prosperous end of society feel no different for these safeguards being in place is not them ‘losing out’ but simply being in the lucky position of not needing those supports in the first place. All it takes is a stock market crash with a sudden pricey and catastrophic illness and those supports may have to be called upon after all.

So all that is required for our foundation is that we decide now what the minimum standard of living in Ireland is. Obviously, someone living to minimum standard is not having a whale of a time or keeping up with the fads and fashions of clothing, technology and furnishings; our minimum living standard is there to ensure that nobody goes hungry, desperate, or homeless. Let us begin with Dr. Ernst Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What is recognised across the board from business, to child development, to database management, to health and wellness courses is seemingly considered irrelevant by successive governments: That the basic needs, the minimum standard, satisfy both physiological and safety needs.  Anything less than satisfying the basic needs of our people qualifies Ireland to be called a ‘failed state’ by its neighbours with great justification.

  

Physiological needs are what human beings require or they will die, simple as that. These needs are: Food, Water, Shelter, Sleep, Warmth, Air, etc. Just try doing without any one of these for a couple of days…it is insane that we, as one of the top 20 richest states in the world, can refuse to provide even this meagre existence to all of our people. The next level on Maslow’s chart, also the basic requirements for someone to have a life, are the safety needs: Protection, Stability, Order, Law, Limits and Security.  For many within our society these simply do not exist for them.  

Satisfying these two base levels, base levels the animal kingdom have provided for themselves through instinct, is all I am talking about and yet…..we are currently denying our people access to shelter, heat, food, water, stability, security, and even protection. 

Some civilisation!

The Foundation needs to provide these two base levels, for human beings just to reach parity with wild animals, Physiological and Safety needs must be the business of the state as part of its base level rights.  Even Athenians living 2,500 years ago enjoyed these as a matter of course.

WALLS AND PILLARS

The walls of the House of Solon provided Athenians with their own context. They were more than just people living together but they were of a particular group or family the ancient Greek words for family and house are the same.  The walls offer people the privacy to congregate and to express love, kinship, friendship, and belonging.  It may seem like an intangible thing for a government to be dealing with when there are such important questions such as BREXIT or a diminishing US taking on a resurgent China but, really, those exterior things are of no consequence if your people are committing suicide in despair, from loneliness, over angst, because they do not see a point to life. 

We are gregarious animals, we have banded together in family and tribal groups for at least the last 40,000 years so by now it is innate in our species to enjoy company. Individualism is the ideal in our modern world and there is a lot to be said about that but, first and foremost, community matters to the individual. If you want to break a person, even a hardened criminal, solitary confinement is a very effective torture. The mind will inevitably begin to fail him or her for want of human contact. Look at how we fail to deal with dreadful loneliness in our elderly yet look at how homeless people are so quick to greet and support one another despite what they are individually going through.  

If we are to rebuild our democracy we need to do so with robust and supportive communities.  These communities can take many shapes and forms but not one of our modern new towns with flash corporate apartments featuring pointless tiny balconies have designed in an awareness of community.  Shockingly, even our most expensive apartment and condominium developments fail to plan in communal space and shared facilities, leaving it to individuals of initiative to develop and provide those. This is happening all the while as we rip the heart out of our rural communities because we cannot see an economic advantage to them in our rush to urban sprawl.

Just as with the ten new tribes of Athens; our communities need a sense of status and reputation. It is not enough for our renewed democracy to accord status just to the rich and well connected; that’s simply programming in division, envy, and hatred in our communities. Here we are in Ireland of the 21^st Century and the age old tactic of divide and rule still holds sway. Our traditional political tribes reflect this division: Fianna Fáil for the urban middle class, Fine Gael for the rural middle class, Labour for the urban working class and Sinn Féin for the rural working class and the urban poor.  As I said above, not one of these Civil War parties actually have any vision or motivation to change this sorry state of affairs one jot. It suits them just fine.

We need new tribes, just as Cleisthenes wisely provided. These pillars could take the form of geographic location just as in ancient Attica, where Cleisthenes was careful to evenly distribute people of the mountains, plains and coast among these new tribes. The new tribes of Ireland need to provide personal esteem, status, achievement, responsibilities and reputation to their cohort.  There needs to be a social gel much like Bronze Age phalanxes within these tribes to ensure that people across a wide traditional social divide feel comfortable being with one another. 

What I propose is that the five traditional provinces of Ireland (Ulster, Munster, Connaught, Leinster and Meath) be reactivated by provincial councils that handle provincial budgets and our Dáil assembly get back to just legislating. The five economic functions of our society can be evenly divided among our five provinces: Civil, Finance, Energy, Data, and Culture. The annual tax budget would be allocated with equity and each province could then provide for their own, without having to beg the Taoiseach.

ENTABLATURE AND PEDIMENT

Now for the flashy stuff that grabs everyone’s attention, if the entablature of the house is that weight that holds the pillars and walls in place then the entablature of the house of Solon must surely be the ambition in individuals and groups encouraged by their earlier needs being satisfied. Remember, the richest people in the world are actually not at the top of this hierarchy but lower down because their family or community needs remain unsatisfied.  This is why so many of the mega rich either burn up their wealth in a garish display of hyper-consumerism to compensate for what is missing from their lives or they invest their wealth into altruistic causes to win the respect and admiration they still crave despite their mega success.

By ambition, I mean that dream we all have to be what we want to be. There are a select few people in the world who enjoy a comfortable living, even great wealth by doing exactly what they are gifted to do and wish to do. None of these people got to their position easily but one can see they enjoy decades of success and personal fulfilment doing what they deem they were supposed to do. Other people crash about, failing at this and failing at that but they become fulfilled when they finally make a real difference to others in ways they never imagined they could. Then life makes sense. 

This satisfaction is the self-actualisation area of Maslow’s hierarchy; it is the apex of his pyramid. This is where our society needs to provide that outlet to the individual, not just in industry, but also in culture, in enterprise, in society, in leisure, in science, in education, no matter where, we have a big enough population to be able to provide outlets for people of all talents and ambitions.  If we haven’t thought to provide that outlet we should at least provide for the individual to forge their own outlet with our support because ultimately this entablature of successful, fulfilled, ambitious and adventurous people supports our National Pediment. 

Our triangular Parthenon style frieze showing the world our ambition and our self-actualisation represents the ultimate goal of this redevelopment of the house of Solon. Our people adorn our democracy, full of promise and ambition and they enjoy long careers and raise new generations born into a society that does not know fear, despair, poverty and helplessness. If that sounds pie-in-the- sky to you, kindly explain to me how smaller and poorer countries than ours have astronauts and opera houses and world class science labs and immense libraries and even film industries.  They choose to have those where we choose to remain the poor, raggedy man of Europe.

The Pediment with our carved marble, brightly painted and guilded figurines is not made up of our people’s ambitions and adventure but the ambitions and sense of adventure of our own democracy; unafraid to deal with thorny questions, entrusting the people with their own say and their own tax monies, providing for future generations and making sure that our older generations receive the dignity and companionship they both crave and deserve, all as part of the national design.

Why? 

Because the House of Solon is not a bordello but a temple and our national treasury. That is what the Acropolis is, the treasury of the people in plain view each day, every day. Never once being obscured from view but shining brightly and adorned with the brightest colours as a constant reminder to the people of Athens just how special and valued they were.

What is the point of greatness if you never show it, especially to the people who make you great?   

Post Partum comment: 

What else can we take from the Golden Age of Democracy?

 - The philosophy of cross party participation in our governance

 - Critical Thinking courtesy of Socrates and Plato.
 - Proportion and Balance in our architecture and planning
 - Exposing logical fallacies in our debates and discourses
 - Promoting our intellectual and creative achievements abroad

 - Giving our people a more active role in our public life 

 - Keeping a beady eye on factionalism and rising tyrants

These would be a good start.