Why Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes—and an old sixty-cent paperback—still explain the world I am trying to understand
By Joe Cozart
I suppose there is a reason I can pick up an old, battered copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and feel almost immediately that I am not reading about something ancient. I am reading about something unfinished.
I have always been drawn to Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and increasingly I understand why. They were not simply writing plays. They were examining people inside systems. They were interested in what happens when authority becomes convinced of itself, when institutions become more interested in preserving their legitimacy than questioning their assumptions, when individuals discover that doing what appears reasonable can still produce disastrous consequences, and when an entire society becomes so accustomed to its own absurdities that perhaps only comedy can expose them.
That does not sound particularly ancient to me.
Sophocles fascinates me because his tragedies so often turn on the limitations of what a person can see. Oedipus is intelligent. Creon is not a fool. Their destruction does not come because they are incapable of reasoning. It comes because they reason from inside realities they believe they understand completely.
That distinction resonates enormously with me today.
I spend much of my life looking at organizations, technologies, communities and institutions in precisely that way. I am less interested in whether intelligent people are present than in whether the structure surrounding those intelligent people permits them to see what they are missing. Intelligence does not automatically produce clarity. Sometimes intelligence simply makes us more sophisticated at defending the assumptions we began with.
Sophocles understood that more than two thousand years ago.
The tragedy is rarely that nobody knows anything. The tragedy is that everybody knows something, and each person mistakes the portion he can see for the whole.
That may be one of the most contemporary ideas I know.
Euripides takes me somewhere slightly different. His people are messier. The clean categories begin disappearing. Reason, passion, resentment, loyalty, fear, status and power become entangled. He seems unwilling to give me the comfort of believing that human beings behave according to the elegant explanations we later construct for them.
I recognize that world too.
Organizations create strategic plans. Governments create policies. Companies create mission statements. People create explanations for their decisions. But underneath all of that formal language remain human beings—with ambitions, fears, loyalties, insecurities, histories and competing interpretations of reality.
The spreadsheet may be rational.
The person reading it remains human.
Euripides understood the difference.
And then there is Aristophanes.
Perhaps that is where I feel most at home.
There are moments when the only intellectually responsible response to an absurd system is to make the absurdity visible by exaggerating it slightly less than reality already has.
That is what great satire does.
It does not merely make people laugh. It creates enough distance between people and their assumptions that, for a moment, they can actually see themselves.
Aristophanes could take politics, war, intellectual fashion, bureaucracy, social pretension and public seriousness and expose the ridiculous machinery underneath them. The joke was funny because somewhere beneath the laughter was recognition.
We still do this. Or at least we should.
Sometimes an institution becomes so fluent in its own language that nobody inside it notices that the language has stopped describing reality. Meetings produce meetings. Studies recommend additional studies. Demonstrations lead to more demonstrations. Committees establish subcommittees to determine why the original committee has not produced an outcome.
Everyone remains busy.
Everyone remains professional.
Everyone can point to activity.
And nothing has actually moved.
Aristophanes would have had a magnificent time with us.
That is probably what I find so compelling about The Greek Way today. Hamilton was ostensibly writing about the Greeks, but what she was really examining was the emergence of habits of mind. The Greeks she admired were willing to look directly at human beings—not as we claim to be, but as we actually behave. They were willing to interrogate authority, question inherited assumptions, laugh at institutions, examine contradictions and accept the unsettling possibility that the person asking the question might himself be part of the problem.
That last part matters.
Clarity becomes meaningless if it is something I only apply to other people.
If I can recognize contradictions inside a corporation but cannot recognize them inside myself, I am not practicing clarity. I am practicing criticism.
Sophocles will not allow me that escape.
Neither will Euripides.
And Aristophanes would probably make fun of me for attempting it.
Perhaps that is why these writers have never felt remote to me. Their costumes are ancient. Their circumstances are ancient. Their gods and political structures belong to another civilization.
Their people do not.
Creon still walks into conference rooms.
Oedipus still searches furiously for the source of a problem without realizing how close he stands to it.
Euripides’ characters still discover that human emotion refuses to obey institutional logic.
And Aristophanes’ pompous officials still explain, at extraordinary length, why the obviously ridiculous thing happening directly in front of everyone is actually evidence that the system is functioning properly.
Change the robes to suits.
Replace the agora with a conference room.
Give everybody an iPhone.
The play continues.
And perhaps that is what I see now in this battered little book.
The sixty-cent price on the cover almost makes the object itself part of the argument. Someone once believed these ideas should be inexpensive enough to travel in a pocket. Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes were not supposed to belong exclusively to scholars. They belonged to anyone curious enough to ask why human beings keep constructing systems they eventually become trapped inside.
I have spent much of my own work asking a version of that question.
Why do intelligent organizations fail to recognize what is directly in front of them?
Why does activity become confused with progress?
Why can a technology work without becoming deployable?
Why can everyone inside a system perform his assigned role competently while the larger system continues producing the wrong outcome?
Why do we become attached to explanations long after reality has stopped cooperating with them?
The Greeks would recognize every one of those questions.
They might phrase them differently. They might place the argument before an oracle, a king, a chorus or the citizens of Athens. But the underlying inquiry would be familiar.
What do you think you know?
What are you unable to see?
What happens when your certainty encounters reality?
And who are you when the answer finally arrives?
That is not ancient history.
That is Monday morning.
Maybe that is the real Greek way—not a collection of conclusions handed down from antiquity, but a willingness to remain suspicious of conclusions that have become too comfortable.
Sophocles gives me tragedy when certainty becomes blindness.
Euripides gives me humanity when our explanations become too clean.
Aristophanes gives me laughter when institutions become too impressed with themselves.
And somewhere among the three is something I have spent years trying to articulate in my own language.
Clarity is not knowing everything.
Clarity is recognizing that what I can see may not yet be everything there is to see.
That is why a battered sixty-cent paperback can still feel contemporary.
The civilization surrounding it has changed enormously.
The human being holding it has not nearly as much.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.
Books by Joe Cozart are available at: amazon.com/author/joecozart
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Joe Cozart is a writer and consultant based in North Dakota. His work explores the intersection of political performance, cultural clarity, and the architecture of power. He is the creator of the GMJoe™ consulting voice and author of several longform essay series exploring sovereignty, institutional systems, industrial civilization, and the recursive tensions shaping the modern age.