Lying as a Leader

Abstract

This essay will use Plato’s Republic as a model of leadership that is fundamentally situated on lying to subordinates. Socrates founds a hypothetical city that would be the epitome of virtuosity, but at its core would be a system of oppression of the masses based on a lie that would segregate the citizens into a hierarchical caste system with no possibility of changing their circumstances. I will use the work done by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science, and Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity to develop a critical analysis of the ethics of using a lie as a foundation of any leadership capacity.