Whatever Netflix touches will almost certainly turn into trash. It’s the only way they know how to make money. In its latest example, it takes the fictional story of a ‘lost city’ called Atlantis and turns it into a ‘documentary’, a crock of evidence-free eyewash about a world-saving intellectual master-race.

It was Plato (d. 348 bc) who made up the story, and put it into in the mouth of an old man, who heard it aged ten from his grandfather, who heard it from his great grandfather’s contemporary Solon (c. 590 bc), who heard it from Egyptian priests who were talking of a period 9,000 years earlier. Might that not drop a hint of sorts?

The priests said Atlantis was an idealised super-state, built on an island in front of the mouth of the strait of Gibraltar. It became corrupted, and enslaved Africa up to Egypt and Europe up to Italy. Noble, modest Athens defeated it, and later divine wrath ensured the whole area was engulfed and disappeared.

It hardly needs to be said that, as history, this is transparent nonsense. Athens did not exist in 9000 bc (nor did Greeks). Plato’s picture of it looks like an idealised contemporary version. So what was his purpose? The Atlantis story was an allegory about the good society and its degeneration. Such allegories were the stock-in-trade of ancient philosophers, as Aristotle well knew, commenting that Plato created Atlantis only to destroy it.

Inevitably, the authority of the great Plato led future generations to use Atlantis for their own purposes, e.g. might it anticipate the Brave New World of America? The Bible too was regularly put to such prophetic ends. But the idea that Atlantis is a record of a historical event, let alone one teaching the world architecture and maths, takes fantasy to new levels.

Plato’s whole philosophy was based on the idea that there was a real world and an unreal world, and that our world was the unreal one. Netflix and its fake news codswallop continue to make one feel he was on to something. Reality clearly has no future.

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