Drone

God has made the flying drones, Adeimantus, all without stings, whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings but others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class

Plato establishes the drone as the foundational political-psychological typology for parasitic, appetitively ungoverned individuals who destabilize the social order, bifurcated into the passively indigent and the actively criminal.

Plato, Republic, -380thesis

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his tempters come in on the other side. And when the wicked wizards who want to make him a tyrant despair of keeping their hold on the Jung man … they contrive to implant a master passion in him to control the idle desires that divide his time between them

Alexander recruits Plato’s drone-tyrant typology — idle desires managed by an implanted master passion — directly as a psychological model for the genesis of addictive character structure.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis

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κηφήν, -ῆνος [m.] ‘drone’, often metaph. ‘lazy vagabond’ (Hes.), also used for Asiatic peoples by the Anatolian Greeks, e.g. for the Persians (Hdt. 7, 61)

Beekes’s etymology confirms that the Greek drone-word carried from its earliest attestations a metaphorical valence of social parasitism and ethnic stigmatization, giving the psychological type its deep linguistic roots.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010thesis

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Frazer attempts to explain the belief in such a miracle by analogy with the natural appearance of ‘drone-flies’ in the corpses of animals. In this case a natural phenomenon provided the basis for a myth of zoe.

Kerenyi, via Frazer, locates the drone-fly within mythological thinking about zoe — life emerging from death — embedding the drone in archaic regeneration symbolism rather than merely appetitive pathology.

Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting

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liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery. True, he said. Very well; and may we not rightly say that we have sufficiently discussed the nature of tyranny, and the manner of the transition from democracy to tyranny?

Plato traces the political arc through which drone-proliferation under democratic excess produces the conditions for tyranny, providing the structural background against which the drone’s psychological significance is measured.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

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he is the son of the miserly and oligarchical father who has trained him in his own habits … he keeps under by force the pleasures which are of the spending and not of the getting sort, being those which are called unnecessary

Plato situates the drone-character’s emergence within intergenerational transmission of psychic imbalance, where suppressed unnecessary pleasures await release into the democratic and then tyrannical personality.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

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Probably related to ῥύζειν ‘drone’ vel sim., as a sound-imitation. Other such names of cicadas and locusts in Stromberg 1944: 18. According to Gil Emerita 25 (1957): 322f., the word is Pre-Greek

Beekes traces a secondary drone-related term to Pre-Greek sound-imitative origins, suggesting that the drone’s linguistic identity is rooted in its characteristic auditory signature — a hum associated with mindless, repetitive existence.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting

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the Capricorn Ascendant will shudder and drone, ‘Must I do it? I know I really should. Am I good enough? Oh, what a big responsibility!’

Sasportas deploys ‘drone’ in its verbal sense to characterize the ruminative, self-doubting inner voice of the Capricorn Ascendant — a marginal but suggestive use of the term within astrological psychology.

Sasportas, Howard, The Twelve Houses: An Introduction to the Houses in Astrological Interpretation, 1985aside

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