Naked Archimedes and the king’s new clothes

Two people were taking a stroll through the city naked. The first one was running and shouting 'I've found it' and the second one was parading slowly and with great pomp, wanting to show her people the never-before-seen new clothes. The first one was real. It happened in the vicinity of where the great Bronze Age collapse occurred, on the largest island in the Mediterranean, Sicily. Skipping and jumping, Archimedes went through Syracuse, the largest city in Sicily.

On that island, some one hundred and sixty-nine years earlier, the Athenians and the Spartans clashed in battle. There Alcibiades fled from the Athenian ranks. Instead of sailing to Athens to face a corruption charge, he fled to Sparta. The Athenians under his command were winning the war, but from then on they lost the island and the war. That Alcibiades was immortalized in Plato's dialogue 'The Symposium' as a close friend of Socrates. In that dialogue, Socrates repeats what Diotima of Mantinea, a woman 'wise in that and in many other things' (ἣ ταῦτά τε σοφὴ ἦν καὶ ἄλλα πολλά) told him about love. The Symposium consisted of an event following the banquet where the guests drank at their pleasure.  The activities during the Symposium consisted of drinking and chatting about a proposed discussion topic. While some were discussing a topic, others’ were mixing water and wine in the bowls’, as mentioned in the Odyssey (οἱ μὲν οἶνον ἔμισγον ἐνὶ κρητῆρσι καὶ ὕδωρ).

Another younger disciple of Socrates made three trips to the the largest city of that island, Syracuse. Plato made three attempts to convince Dionysius I, and his successor Dionysius II, to establish an ideal model of a Republic in their city. Although on his first voyage, according to ancient sources, he ended up being sold into slavery.

But then, some one hundred and fifteen years after Plato's last voyage, there was Archimedes running, happy to have discovered his principle, forgetting his clothes, totally delighted with his discovery.

But that naked man was well covered in knowledge. He was part of the group of those who, using measurement systems to measure events, investigating the behavior of nature, establishing cause-and-effect chains, built a scientific system. When the Romans besieged Syracuse, the city's rulers turned to Archimedes with a request. They wanted him to devise devices for the defense of the city. In critical moments you have to turn to science, there is no time for jokes. Taking advantage of the fact that the city was in the middle of a celebration, a group of Roman soldiers entered the outer part of the city and, without knowing who he was, killed Archimedes. But thanks to Archimedes' devices, the Romans needed eight more months to take the inner side of the city.

To know which group of people Archimedes belonged to, we must mention another figure who lived five centuries later. The Greek philosopher and physician Sextus Empiricus defined a person as: ‘an animal that loves truth by nature’ (τὸ φύσει φιλάληθες ζῶον εἶναι).

The second person, the king, was other way. Hans Christian Andersen's tale reflects a different reality. Lies are the driving force behind this story. A pair of swindlers made the king a proposition.They promised to make her a suit made of the most subtle and delicate fabric. Only fools and those incapable of performing their duties would be unable to see the clothes. That story was woven from that false situation. No one dared to tell him that they saw nothing but her naked body, without the slightest hint of clothing. If they told the truth, they would be considered fools or incompetent.. The two imposters gestured incessantly, and the king, during the tests, did not dare to say that in the mirror he saw only his miserable body. Meanwhile, the two forgers were showering the king with all the praise they could think of. In the end, the king, who considered himself the cleverest of the clever, paraded before his people showing all 'the family jewels' he should have kept hidden. Collective lying was the disease of that society.

The forces of life and death (Eros and Thanatos) that Freud pointed out during Nazism can be turned into an opposition between truth and lies. The truth, embodied in Archimedes, is made for the preservation of the species. The behavior of nature is measured and investigated, cause-and-effect chains are built, until a scientific paradigm is constructed for the maintenance of society. A society based on lies and praise leads to the opposite path, that of disappearance.

A person who shouts ‘they eat the dogs, they eat the cats’ and turns that lie into a slogan of their election campaign seems to be part of the group of the emperor with no clothes. Then a long chain of lies and a powerful group whitewashing those lies are characteristics of a form of government, in the way that the court of the naked emperor was full of flatterers. And what's worse, the only country that supports him has a falsehood embedded in its thinking: that God gave them ownership of their land, and thus, apparently, to obtain that land any barbarity is justified. This is how they devalue the Bible; from being a sacred book it becomes a simple notarized deed of ownership.

Before casting their vote in an election, everyone should ask themselves: What am I voting for, the survival of the species or its extinction? Am I voting for science or for the downfall of society, under a foolish king?

And it seems that this disappearance does not only refer to a change in society, but also to the possibility of total disappearance.