There is a story that Plato tells in The Republic, his dialogue on political justice. Here’s how it goes.

It starts with a man named Gyges. Everyone considered him to be a normal fellow. There was nothing odd about him. One day, as it happened, Gyges found a ring that, when he wore it, rendered him invisible. Gyges wasted none of the time opened up by this opportunity. By day he was our good old unassuming Gyges. By night however, or whenever he put on the ring, he could and would steal, rape and murder at will!

The story of Gyges enables Socrates (standing in for Plato) to pose the question: 

Is the just man happier?

And would he be happier even if there were no social advantages to be gained by acting justly? Would he be happier even if only social disadvantages followed from acting justly?

It’s a psychological, political and philosophical question. It goes to the truth about us. What are we? Are we like Gyges, only good when people are looking? Or is there some more uplifting truth about you and me?

Well, let me share some of my own recent experiences as a relatively helpless patient with a hip fracture. My experiences might furnish relevant evidence.

As my previous column, “Fracture,” made clear, not everything turned out sweetness and light. Take for example the day I was scheduled to be discharged from Rehab and released to go home. The people who normally attended me were not supervised on that day, nor were they going to be evaluated. So far as that institution was concerned, my assigned helpers were on their own.

The supervising nurse looked in once pro forma but did nothing supervisory. The nurse (or nurse’s assistant) who was left alone with me told me that – since I was now sufficiently recovered to go home – I should stand at the bathroom sink and get myself just as cleaned as I wished. 

Now I could no more stand at the sink and do that safely than I could walk on the ceiling. If I’d had the stupidity to try, I’d most likely have tumbled to the tiled floor and got another fracture. But clearly the nurse did not think I would try. She was just hoping to discourage me from taking any more of her valuable time.

When, nevertheless, I insisted on her taking me to the bathroom sink, she did provide a wheelchair. But unprecedentedly, zero supervision or presence. Nor, when I had got myself washed, rinsed and dried, did she return within a reasonable time to wheel me back to my room. The call button was back in my room, so I had no effective way to summon her. Finally I started shouting, at which point she did return.

Likewise, the previously courteous people who attended me to Jerry’s car were, on that last day, barely civil.

Nobody was watching. So the question, posed by the Ring of Gyges legend, is still, what is the truth about human nature? Are we really like Gyges, when we believe that nobody can see us?

Possibly, but on the other hand, there may be another way of posing that question. The other day, Jerry was telling me about a book by Sandra D. Mitchell titled, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism. She’s a philosopher of biology whose own specialty is social insects. Ants, it seems, have extremely complex role assignments within their nest. Their intricate social structure enables the colony as a whole simultaneously to meet quite distinct functional obligations.

Higher up the evolutionary ladder, primates and human infants show empathy and demands for fairness that don’t have to be taught. This is so at least among human babies confined together and aware of each other.

So it might be that people who behave selfishly or unkindly when they think nobody can see them are not so much showing humanity’s true colors as showing something else:

We are essentially social animals –

most truly ourselves

when we know that we are seen.

Related Content: Fracture | How to Live One’s Story | Must Our Stories Come Out Right? | Witness