The Beastliness of Things

When the world feels like it’s descending into madness, I find myself looking to Virginia Woolf’s sensitivity and Plato’s ancient warnings. We are living through the return of pleonexia—the tyranny of unchecked desire.

I cannot help but feel shocked by what we have become. At times, this unease reaches such an intensity that humanity itself begins to frighten me. In these moments, Virginia Woolf inevitably comes to mind.

She was "undoubtedly much more sensitive than most people to the general beastliness of things happening in the world to-day," as described in a letter to The Sunday Times by Mrs Kathleen Hicks. Woolf had just taken her own life, unable to bear the "dreadful time" and the looming threat of a Nazi invasion any longer. Even the iconic slogan of the era, "Keep Calm and Carry On" (the image from the web is the 1939 original poster), offered no comfort to a soul so much sinking into the world's darkness. 

My mind then shifts to Plato’s Republic, which feels disturbingly prophetic in its description of societal degeneration. Plato—channeling the values of his teacher, Socrates—contends that four virtues lead to true happiness: courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice.

Plato defines justice as proportion and balance. However, when an insatiable desire for greed and disproportionate gain prevails—what he describes as becoming a "tyrant of erotic love"—people are driven to outdo others and accumulate relentlessly. This disrupts the harmony of the soul, the city, and the cosmos. Plato calls this pleonexia, a condition that inevitably breeds tyranny—a form of madness that rejects all objective value.

In Book IX of The Republic, Socrates states: "Someone in whom the tyrant of erotic love dwells and in whom it directs everything next goes in for feasts, revelries, luxuries, women, and all that sort of thing..." He explains how these unchecked desires proliferate, requiring vast resources to satisfy them. This eventually leads to the robbery of others' wealth, whether by deceit or force. It is the ultimate victory of dull arrogance.

What scares me so deeply is the realisation that "everyday people" increasingly feel entitled to obtain whatever their "erotic love" commands. 

We are becoming surrounded by a growing social madness—a world where the pursuit of more has completely erased the pursuit of balance, of values and virtues, to such an extent that they sound even ridiculous to their ears!