Getting Out of Plato's Cave: Three Cases

Australian publishing, United States nuclear command and control, and Liberation oriented pedagogy.

A. Australia’s publishing industry is trapped in human capital and quality assurance challenges due to the rush-to-market for new books. This is not new. I first experienced it working as a freelance journalist in the mid-late 1990s. Most of Melbourne’s major physical bookstores closed in 2008-11 including the United States owned Borders chain. Acquisitions and developmental editors are often hired on a contract basis. Non-fiction books are often poorly scoped and researched; their production quality is poor; and they are not often in physical bookstores (where they may be accepted from smaller publishers on consignment) for very long. Programs like the ABC’s former Q&A and writing festivals tend to have the same established people - and maybe a few newer authors as breakthrough talent - but panels are often stage-managed behind the scenes (even to a kayfabe level of deliberately faked shock controversy). The average Australian author also maybe makes $AUD15,000-20,000 in annual gross income. The cost-benefit outcome for such a small domestic market is not really there anymore - unless it is supplemented from other income like university teaching.

B. WOPR in John Badham’s film WarGames (1983) - and the military sourced police surveillance helicopter in Blue Thunder (1983) have returned with a vengeance. Daniel Boguslaw considers the AI-nuclear command and control systems debate for The New Republic. That this is missing from Australia’s domestic debate on AUKUS in its public national security elites highlights how disconnected in reality they are from the reality that the United States and China are two legs of nuclear tripolarity (Russia is the third and has a renewed geopolitical alliance with China). This shift from a Cold War bipolar era to a tripolar or complex deterrence era has long been debated in the United States (for example in 2025 at the Center for a New American Security think tank. Australia does not have the comparative think tank networks that the United States has - and so there is still not yet the contestability (although it is wished for) in either domestic debates or the socialisation pathways of national security elites.

C. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama discusses with Damon Linker the intellectual history of Leo Strauss and the pathway of some adherents into the MAGA movement. There are some great insights here about academic publishing; how to teach about Plato’s Cave Allegory; and how Liberation oriented pedagogical teaching practices actually work in the context of moral and political philosophy. Aspects of this debate can be applied to other contexts and problems - such as concerns in Australia about the rise of populism.