SOCRATES AT THE LAST CHANCE SALOON

Allegory on the Disenchantment of the World

Socrates is condemned by the gods of Olympus to perpetual incarnations to atone for his suicide and to complete a mission he left unfulfilled in Ancient Greece. We meet him at the cusp of the 21st Century in the LAST CHANCE SALOON where he holds court in a final effort to redeem himself and to correct the ill-fated impressions of THE REPUBLIC. This utopian novel about the ideal society was inspired by Socrates and written by his pupil Plato. More than any other philosophical treatise, THE REPUBLIC, and its notion of the philosopher king was twisted and misapplied by the tyrants of history.

Socrates practices his famous dialectical methods of question and argument in the LAST CHANCE SALOON where he occupies the Chair of Resident Gadfly and midwife to the sleeping souls of customers. In a retelling and modern reinterpretation of the Greek myths, Socrates entertains, educates, and agitates the saloon’s customers. Covering a broad expanse of human history and human nature, he addresses the deep anxieties of youth and the modern age with questions that, in conventional life, go unasked, unanswered, and unchallenged.

Socrates tries, with uncertain results, to demolish the illusions and pretenses of life. He tries to demonstrate that the success or failure of noble social experiments resides in the nobility of the soul which depends upon the ethics of character. During a discourse, a young man named Joshua leaves the saloon and commits suicide – abandoning the teacher just as Socrates had abandoned his students with a similar action more than two millennia earlier. Joshua becomes the conscience of Socrates as well as his imaginary contestant in a dialectical debate on the purpose of existence, the past performance, and the future fate of humanity.