The second worst thing you can do is go against the state...

...and the worst thing you can do is go against the people.

I was listening to a podcast about Socrates' trial (Politics on Trial: Socrates vs Democracy), and this thought came to my mind.

Socrates was charged with, among other things, corrupting the youth of the city/state of Athens. In his trial, he was found guilty as a result of which, he was put to death.

The host goes through many things about the trial, but for this post, I'll only talk about one of them:

As mentioned earlier, the main charge that was put against Socrates was - 'corrupting the youth of the city/state of Athens'. The reason I say 'city/state of Athens' here, is because in case of Athens of 399BC these two could be hyphenated to mean the same entity and there are ways in which these could be seen as different entities as well. 

Athens was a democratic republic, but unlike modern representative democracies where apart from voting their representatives to run the government the people of the state have very little power or involvement in the governmental affairs, Athens had much more public participation. People were chosen randomly and took turns (over fixed tenures) to serve in public offices. Contributing to the state was an integral part of every person's life. Even in Socrates' trial, like in most trials of those times, the jury was the (a selected 500) people of city. So the city-state and the city-people can be seen as the same entity.

Yet, the distinction between the people of the city and the city state can be seen too. It was the state that went to wars. It was the people who suffered them. It was the state that faced existential crisis in a decade or so leading up to the trial. It were the people that got anxious. Regardless of their rotating system of assigning public officers, or the brief rule of a "select few members"(like the Thirty Tyrants) the ones in power and the ones that power is exercised on shall always remain distinct. It was in this way that the city-state and the city-people can be seen as two different entities.

My main these is two-fold. 
1. Socrates did a grave mistake of going against the state. I think I read this in David Dennett's book - that a state can be seen as an organism, which like most organisms is primarily driven by self-preservation. The Athenian city-state too was driven by self-preservation. It took the threats against it seriously, and in doing so, naturally found Socrates' actions threatening the existence of the state in the form that it was back then.
The kind of questions that he asked, doing is philosophy in the public squares, drove people to question the very foundations upon which the state was built on and based its everyday functioning. When the state held every person responsible for keeping itself afloat, Socrates "corrupted the minds of the youth" by driving them away from the duties laid onto them by the state, thus undermining its power and threatening its existence. This is an extremely serious crime for anyone to commit.

2. Much more grave than the mistake of going against the state was Socrates's actual mistake - going against the people. Towards the end of Socrates's 71 year life, the people of Athens had gotten anxious about the future of their beautiful democratic experiment that the city of Athens was. It was just reeling itself from the Peloponnesian War, and then a series of coups like the Thirty Tyrants. Since 508BC, Athens had been an oasis of democracy in a land which wasn't really accepting of those ideas. It managed to survive till the turn of the 5th Century BC by holding its ground against some very serious forces. By the time of the trial of Socrates (399BC), it would be naturally for the people to be tired of protecting their faiths in the idea of Athens against their own realities. Then comes Socrates' with his grand philosophies of undermining the very thing that they cared about and staked their lives on. "But why do you find Athens worth protecting? What is it about democracy that makes it better than everything else? Why you seek to have an equal say in the flow of power?" Socrates would ask questions like these justifying them by his pursuit for truth and higher knowledge. But while doing so, Socrates was, inadvertently or not, perceived as being contemptuous. His questions were perceived as personal attacks against people who were so devoted to the cause of Athens, which was naturally offensive to those whose devotion had previously demanded them to risk even personal life. This made the people wary and tired of Socrates.

Out of these two, I think the first got Socrates to the trial, but the second one gave him the verdict. People would rather let 71 year old Socrates die, that to have him survive amongst them planting seeds of doubt if their entire lives (as faithful servants of Athens) had been a lie. People rather chose to live in a happy delusion than possibly bitter truth.