Led Astray by Small Steps
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Socrates — ἔστιν οὖν ὅπως τεχνικὸς ἔσται μεταβιβάζειν κατὰ σμικρὸν διὰ τῶν ὁμοιοτήτων ἀπὸ τοῦ ὄντος ἐπὶ τοὐναντίον, ἢ αὐτὸς τοῦτο διαφεύγειν, ὁ μὴ ἐγνωρικὼς ὃ ἔστιν ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων;
Is there any way, then, that a man could be skilled at leading others little by little, through likenesses, from the truth over to its opposite — or at escaping this himself — if he has never come to know what each of the things that are really is?
Socrates presses the point that persuasion without knowledge is dangerous. Deception, he shows, is not a bold leap but a gradual walk — and the only protection is to know what things truly are.
Here Socrates lays bare the mechanism of all deception, and it is not what one expects. Manipulation does not work by the bold lie; it works by <em>metabibázein katà smikrón</em> — 'leading across, little by little.' You move someone from a truth to its exact opposite not in one leap (which would trigger alarm) but by a chain of tiny steps, each 'through likenesses' (<em>di' homoiotḗtōn</em>), each so close to the one before that no suspicion fires — until, imperceptibly, they are standing where they would never knowingly have gone. It is how a jury is walked from justice to injustice, a friend to a betrayal, a city from freedom to tyranny: not by argument but by increments, riding on resemblances. Plato's diagnosis is precise and unsettling, and it applies to every propaganda and every seduction since.<br><br>But the sentence has a double edge, and the second edge is the point. Socrates asks whether the ignorant man could be skilled <em>either</em> at doing this to others <em>or</em> at 'escaping it himself' (<em>diapheúgein</em>) — and the answer to both is the same: no, not without knowing 'what each of the things that are really is.' Knowledge is not only the deceiver's tool but the <em>victim's only defense</em>. If you truly know what justice is, you feel the step where a likeness of it has quietly become injustice; the small increments cannot slip past a mind that holds the real thing fixed. This is why Plato will not let rhetoric be neutral. The person without knowledge is defenseless in <em>both</em> directions — he cannot lead others rightly, and he can be led anywhere. And it is the final vindication of the whole dialogue's demand: the true speaker must know the truth (277b), not merely to persuade honestly, but because <em>only the truth is stable enough to stand on</em> while the likenesses shift underfoot. The lover of appearances — Phaedrus dazzled by Lysias's diction, the crowd swayed by the plausible — is exactly the soul that can be walked, step by small step, to its own ruin. The examined life is, among other things, the only life that cannot be quietly turned into its opposite.
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