deep in the cell of my heart I will feel glad to go

I know I promised a super dorky post on political philosophy. I would go so far as to say that even thinking about doing so counts as super dorky. This isn't exactly what I was originally going to write about, (in my head it was a lot more brilliant) but it is indeed a post on political philosophy. Brace yourself.

Socrates is famously known for saying "All that I know is that I know nothing" The opening line to K'Naan's "Take a Minute" is "Any man who knows a thing, knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all."

At the beginning of Watchmen we see "who will watch the watchmen" spray painted on a wall. Plato, in the Republic, asks "who will guard the guardians?"

The band name "Alice is chains" can be seen as a vague reference to Rousseau's well known line "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

Just three examples of how political philosophy has permeated culture today (though that last one might be a stretch...) My question is HOW? It's like these old boring men haunt our day to day to measure our choices and actions to see how we compare to their theories. Does pop culture even recognize that they've sucked these lines in and made them so generic that to find their true meaning you have to read these unbelievably dense "discourses"? Do they even have meaning any more?

I guess since these political philosophers are still around today, in some form or another, they must have done something right. Maybe even said something worth thinking about.

Maybe.