Title: From Cicero to Slob: How We Went from Philosopher-Statesmen to Careerist Clowns

 

Once upon a time, the statesman was a scholar. In the golden age of Greece and Rome, political power came with intellectual responsibility. To govern others, a man had to first govern himself. He had to think, read, debate, write. He had to know why he believed what he believed, not just that he believed it. The Senate was filled with orators who quoted Homer and philosophers who quoted each other. Today, our parliaments and congresses are filled with apparatchiks who quote polls, stammer through focus-grouped platitudes, and have the intellectual depth of a pothole.

The modern career politician is a tragic degeneration. He is not a leader but a lifer, a bureaucrat with a press team. He hasn't read a serious book since university, if then. He speaks in slogans, thinks in clichés, and only moves when the donor class says jump. He “believes” in whatever keeps him employed. In the Greco-Roman world, such a man would be laughed out of public life. Today, he’s made Prime Minister.

Take Cicero: a philosopher, a lawyer, a statesman, and a writer of enduring brilliance. He debated not only political rivals but the very foundations of justice, law, and virtue. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, spent his mornings in military camps writing Meditations, a Stoic masterwork still in print two millennia later. Even Caesar, the ultimate man of action, found time to write histories and polish his Latin. These were men who led armies and wrote books, not men who spend 40 years clambering up greasy party poles, dodging responsibility, and mouthing third-hand ideological fluff.

Compare them to the modern political class. Look at the West’s leaders: soulless party drones with media consultants instead of minds. How many of them could write an essay, let alone a book? How many of them could win a public debate without a teleprompter and a pre-chewed narrative? How many of them know history beyond their speechwriter’s footnotes? These are not serious men. These are mannequins animated by ambition and cowardice.

What happened?

We stopped valuing wisdom. We stopped believing that leadership required virtue and intelligence. We professionalized politics, turning it into a career path for mediocrities. Greco-Roman culture believed in paideia—the lifelong formation of the citizen through philosophy, rhetoric, and moral training. Modern liberal democracies believe in branding, polling, and identity politics. We don’t ask what a politician knows; we ask which box they tick.

The result? A society adrift. Leaders without depth produce policies without spine. When crises come, they blink. When mobs scream, they kneel. When foreign powers rise, they tweet hashtags. They’ve spent decades learning how to climb the ladder, not how to carry the weight of power.

It’s time to revive the ancient model. We need fewer politicians and more philosopher-kings. We need leaders who read Aristotle and Machiavelli, not just talking points and Twitter. We need statesmen who’ve grappled with the tragic and eternal questions of human life, virtue, mortality, freedom, justice. We need men who see public office not as a career, but as a burden of duty. As the Romans would say, non nobis solum nati sumus, not for ourselves alone are we born.

The ancients gave us the blueprint. But we’ve chosen clowns over consuls, slogans over substance, handlers over heroes. And we’re paying the price.

Let the West wake up. Let the age of the intellectual warrior return.

Let us once again expect our rulers to think.