So you have an elite class whose members insist that they’re wise and just and good, but whose actions are constantly shaped by self-interest even when this harms the rest of society; you have a managerial class—that’s what the guardians work out to be, of course—whose loyalty to the regime is at least tempered, and quite possibly undercut, by the fact that they have their own desires for physical pleasures and comforts, and their own ideas about how society should be run; and you have a working class that is supposed to be wholly interested in physical comforts, but actually has a well-developed sense of collective pride and a robust capacity for violence, and is perfectly capable of recognizing when a set of policies imposed by the elite class, supposedly for the public good, is actually just another opportunity for the elites to line their own pockets or bolster their own egos at the expense of everyone else.

If this doesn’t sound familiar, dear reader, you need to get out more.