There once lived a shepherd who served the king of Lydia (an ancient
country of Asia Minor, in present-day Western Turkey). One day in the midst
of a severe thunderstorm, the shepherd watched in dismay as a violent
earthquake ripped open the ground and created an enormous chasm where he
was tending sheep.
Overcome by awe as well as sheer curiosity, he immediately went down into
the chasm. Among many other marvelous objects, he saw a hollow bronze horse
of disproportionately large size. Climbing through one of the horse's
several window-like openings, the shepherd caught sight of a large human
corpse, which was wearing nothing but a ring of gold on one of its fingers.
He pulled the ring from the corpse's hand, put it on his own, and climbed
out of the chasm.
Several days later, during a regular monthly meeting in which the royal
shepherds reported to the king on the state of his flocks, the shepherd
inadvertently turned the ring upside-down on his finger. Immediately upon
doing so, he became invisible, and his fellow shepherds sitting around him
continued talking as if he had stepped out of the meeting.
Dumbfounded by what had just happened, the shepherd turned the ring back
over and immediately became visible again.
After testing it several more times, the shepherd came to realize fully the
ring's power of invisibility. In the days following this discovery, the
shepherd took full advantage of the ring's power and, in very calculated
and self-serving fashion, committed numerous acts of evil. He schemed to
become one of the king's personal liaisons, he committed adultery with the
king's wife and, with her help, murdered the king and took over the Lydian
kingdom.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato describes this myth in his best-known
work, "The Republic," a treatise exploring the nature of justice. In the
course of using the story to raise basic questions about human nature and
our motivations for doing the right thing, Plato poses the following
provocative question: If human beings were in possession of an invisibility
ring as described in the myth, what would human beings be inclined to do
with it?
In other words, if we had the power to do whatever we wanted, without any
consequence of being seen by others, what would we be like and what would
we do?
Importantly, by taking this question to heart and responding with honest
answers -- whether for ourselves, our children or even our president -- we
can really begin to penetrate one's true personal character.
For we're asking about those times when one can do things in secret, those
times that would ultimately reveal who one really is as a person, whether
good or not so good. And that's why it's so important for us to teach our
children, as the old sayings go, that character is indeed "what you are
when no one's looking" or "what you are in the dark."
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