It is obvious that those picked to be the guardians must be the best. And so if we want to pick the best Guardians we must pick those who have the greatest skill in watching over the community.  True.   But we care most for what we love. Inevitably.  And the deepest affection is based on identity of interest, when we feel that our own good and ill-fortune is completely bound up with that of  something else.

I understand what you mean by a voluntary loss but not an involuntary loss.

Surely you agree that men are always unwilling to lose a good thing, but willing enough to be rid of a bad one. And isn't it a bad one to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to possess the truth? For I assume that by possessing the truth you mean believing that things are as they really are.

Yes, you are quite right, and I agree that men are unwilling to lose a belief that is true.

So when it happens it must be due to theft or witchcraft or force. By theft I simply mean the insensible process by which people are persuaded to relinquish their beliefs by argument, or else simply forget them in the course of time.

By force I mean what happens when men change their opinions under the influence of pain and suffering.

And I think you to would call it witchcraft when people  change their opinions under the spell of pleasure or impulse of panic.

Yes, such delusions always seem to act like witchcraft.

So we must look for the Guardians who will stick most firmly to the principle that they must always do what they think best for the community.  We must watch them closely from their earliest years, and set them tasks in doing which they are most likely to forget or be led astray from this principle, and we must chose only those who don't forget or are not easily misled. Do you agree?

Yes, and with the same end in view we must see how they stand up to hard work and pain and competitive trials.

We must also watch their reactions to the third kind of test, witchcraft. If we want to find out if a colt is nervous we expose him to alarming noises: so we must introduce our Guardians when they are young to fear and by contrast, give them opportunities for pleasure proving them far more rigorously then we prove gold in a furnace. If they bear themselves well and are not easily bewitched, if they show themselves able to maintain in all circumstances their integrity and the principles of balance and harmony they learned in their education, then they may be expected to be of the greatest service to the community as well as themselves.

And any Guardian who survives these continuous trials in childhood, youth, and manhood unscathed , shall be given authority in our state. He shall be honored during his lifetime and when he is dead shall have the tribute of a public funeral and appropriate memorial. Anyone who fails to survive them we must reject.

Strictly speaking then, it is for them that we should reserve the term Guardian in its fullest sense. Their function being to see that friends at home shall not wish, nor foes abroad be able, to harm our state.
We must take every possible precaution to prevent our Guardians from treating our citizens poorly because of their superior strength and behaving more like savage tyrants than partners and friends.

We must certainly prevent that.  And the greatest possible precaution will have been taken, will it not, if they have been properly educated?

What we can be positive about is that they must be given the right education, whatever that might be, as the surest way to make them behave humanely to each other and the subjects in their charge.

The community suffers nothing very terrible if the cobblers or the potters are bad  and become degenerate and pretentious; but if our Guardians of our laws and state, who alone have the opportunity to bring it good government and prosperity, become a mere sham, then clearly the community is ruined.  Guardians must be compelled to act accordingly and persuaded, as indeed must everyone else, that it is their business to perfect themselves in their own particular job. Then our state will be built on the right basis, and as it grows, can leave each class to enjoy its share of happiness its nature permits.