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  • 2016-04-12 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Socrates Say Slander Is 'The Tool of the Losers? (en)
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  • On 25 June 2019, Eric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump, was reportedly spat upon at a Chicago restaurant. The following day, he took to social media to post an ostensible quote from the Greek philosopher Socrates that proclaimed slander to be the tool of the losers in debates: The classical Greek philosopher Socrates is a fixture of literature and culture, but his legacy is complicated by the fact that what we know of him hasn't come to us directly from him, but from a variety of secondary and indirect sources. However much truth that statement may or may not hold, the historical attribution of it to Socrates has no solid basis in factual evidence. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, the renowned Greek philosopher was an enigma and an inscrutable individual who wrote nothing, and all our information about him is second-hand [with] most of it vigorously disputed: The Cambridge Companion to Socrates similarly informs us that: A few secondary sources offer Socrates' commenting on the subject of slander in their paraphrasing of Plato's Apology of Socrates (which recorded Socrates' defense of himself at his trial for impiety and corruption), but not in a way that bears any close resemblance to the quote in question. For example, Professor Josiah Ober, an American historian of ancient Greece, characterized Socrates as proclaiming that If there are nasty rumors about me floating around, these are the product of my opponent's slanders. It appears that the widespread attribution to Socrates of the 'When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the losers' bit of wisdom only began after 2008, with the rise of quote-sharing via social media memes: Online searches for the existence of this quote prior to 2010 either produced very sparse results or pointed to posts and pages that had been updated since that year. The absolute earliest Socratic attribution of this phrase we were able to locate came from the social literature site GoodReads, where it appeared in 2008. So as far as we can tell, the phrase when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser emerged roughly around 2008 and appears to have no traceable history prior to that. Despite its popularity on social media, no one has ever found a single direct link to any material attributed to Socrates matching the quote. Its abrupt appearance and lack of historical support suggests that Socrates' signature was tacked to the commentary to give it an air of ancient wisdom. (en)
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