The doctrine of the golden mean elaborated by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics specified that the virtue always corresponds to the intermediate state, the only one that was understood as virtuous. Virtue was a condition for happiness. Taking into account the fact that human happiness, as it was defined by Aristotle, - unlike the happiness of gods, that consisted in their alleged eternal state of contemplation, theoria, - was given by the opportunity and the equilibrium of an emotion, attitude or action, the happiest individuals were those able to live in accordance with the ethical laws and also in accordance with the laws of society, and not the most powerful ones or those which lived the fullest lives.
But what will happen when a human would have the possibility to select the golden mean for the entire species, becoming thus endowed with the power of a deity, since only the hypothetical beings called gods may have this power at their disposal? More precisely, such a human would have the liberty to choose for the entire humankind, and his subsequent choices regarding the key fields of survival, as the manner of government, the economic policy or the social system will determine the continuity of his species. In other words, a temperate policy regarding the new economical undertakings combined with the preservation of the monopoly of most valued resources and implemented by a universal hereditary absolutist monarchy may prove to be the only way to save the totality of subjects which composes the human species from an otherwise certain extinction, as was the case with the alternate history of humanity that was created for the readers of Dune's cycle.
'Again, we feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice.' (Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics, II).
Assuming that such a historical scenario will be possible, then we must admit that this human, if he would make a good choice, should receive the right to be called god and his behaviour would be completely virtuous. Moreover, in spite of the confinement of the gods to the immaterial realm of contemplation - as it results also from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics - a human endowed with the ability of changing the fate of the entire humanity should have effectively the dignity of a god, just that his righteousness will be exhibited through his contingent choices. Therefore, his 'godhood' will be seen in actu, and will not be a theoretical righteousness, as in the case of the entities which populated the mythologies of ancient Greece - the gods of Homer.
Actually, Aristotle's theory or doctrine of the golden mean, that was formulated and exemplified in Nicomachean Ethics, impressed the whole political and ethical thinking of Aristotle, since he used the concept of an ideal intermediate political system both in Nicomachean Ethics and in Politika. Personally, I think that the ideal political system of government from Aristotle's political and moral philosophy was a political consequence of his theory of golden mean.
More precisely, as it follows from the fifth book of Nicomachean Ethics as well as from Politics III.7, we have three types of good, desirable or virtuous systems of government with their corresponding unjust or decayed forms: monarchy (kinship) and tyranny; aristocracy and oligarchy; polity and democracy.
Aristotle is an advocate of the aristocracy - and the spirit of the concept is shared by both main thinkers of European classical antiquity, Plato and Aristotle : for both of them aristocracy is defined as being the rule of the most virtuous citizens, and is recommended as the finest mundane hypostatis of a state (polis). Still, while for Aristotle oligarchy is the deviant form of aristocracy, for Plato oligarchy represents the byproduct of timocracy, hence it is an indirect decayed form of the ideal democracy.
The next pair of systems from the political philosophy of Aristotle is monarchy - tyranny, that speaks about the cases - not so common in the increasingly liberal Greece from the age of the thinker from Stagira - in which the political power was concentrated in the hands of a single individual or of a dynasty that exerted the control over the country - monarchy - and which may decay and become a tyranny, as in the cases in which the king didn't respect at all the wishes and the needs of his subjects.
Finally, we have the pair polity - democracy, where the first term denoted a system of government in which the politics were realized and implemented by the middle class, while the latter described a state where the leadership belonged to the poor, that represented the biggest majority of the population. Considering these depictions of the systems of government from the point of view of an ancient Greek - which lived in a time when, as in the whole world in fact, the huge majority of the people was poor - I can say that Aristotle's notion of polity - that was alien to Plato, which classified the political systems only in five types - equals approximately with Plato's democracy, where all the free citizens were able to express their vote, - while Aristotle's political concept of democracy equals rather with the more modern concept of anarchy.
As we may see, the method used by Aristotle to classify the political systems was determined by the criterion of the number of the citizens involved in the act of government. In consequence, we have states ruled by a single man - monarchies and tyrannies -, by a few individuals or families - aristocracies and oligarchies -, or by virtually everybody (that mattered) as in the case of polities, or by everybody in the absolute sense, as in democracies. Again, the golden mean or the ideal government seems to be realized by the political structure located in the middle in accordance with the quantitative criterion, that meaning that the society preferred by Aristotle is aristocracy. Is not insignificant the fact that aristocracy - the government of the best, aristoi - corresponds to Plato's virtuous aristocracy, whose utopic state from Politeia was ruled by the most noble by nature inhabitants, the philosophers-kings, but which technically was an aristocracy, since the virtuousity of a citizen was appraised from his or her early childhood.
It is almost unnecessary to say that 'the government of the few' or 'the leadership of a socio-political class' - that corresponds to the golden mean - is nearer to kingship and tyranny than to the more 'populist' pair polity - democracy. Aristocracy represents the intermediate political system, and hence it will appear to be the best type of state in a literal interpretation of the theory of golden mean. Aristotle conceives three types of virtuous systems, and aristocracy is placed, quantitatively speaking, in the middle. Therefore, aristocracy will correspond to the virtue because will be more likely that the most ethical citizens of a polis - the best - to be significantly fewer than the entire middle class, which represents polity. Also, the aristoi will be more than one, which is the number of the monarch. This seems to be a clear case where the point of equilibrium is located near to the negative limit (or near to the defect’s edge) than to the excess’ edge, as was also the case with some of the examples provided by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics.
According to Aristotle, this fact occurs because the humans have the tendency to listen some propensities that:
[either are] drawn from the thing itself; either [are] drawn from ourselves; for the things to which we ourselves more naturally tend seem more contrary to the intermediate.' (Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics, II).
As an effect, the golden mean may be established by the common sense as being located either to the right or to the left to the 'geometrical center' of a given ethical situation. Actually, the mathematically ideal 'geometrical center' of a concrete state with moral implications will remain in most of the cases just an abstract measure, since our contingent choices will establish the golden mean, in its quality of a moral paradigm, almost always in a different place than the geometrical center.
Therefore, if our emotions, traits of character, will, and so forth incline us to consider self indulgence as being nearer to temperance, that meaning that the limit of excess should be closer to the golden mean, while insensibility would represent rather an unnatural state, this should not exclude the existence of some situations in which the nature of our behaviour - as is the case of serenity - should make us to place the golden mean nearer to the defect’s edge - that means next to the limit that corresponds to indifference - than to the excess’ edge, represented by irascibility.
We have situations in which the so-called golden mean is placed either to the left or to the right of the geometrical center not only because of our nature, but mainly due to the nature of the thing itself, as in the case of courage, whose qualification as golden mean depends both by the moral beauty of the attitude and by our own moral and physiological constitution, which already determine us to label courage as being a special disposition, an effect of the virtuous nature of our character - although representing normality - reason for why is though considered as an intermediate state. In the case of courage its upper limit, bravery, seems to be nearer to it than its lower limit, cowardice.
Of course, applying the doctrine of golden mean to the three possible good or natural systems of government of Aristotle we will see that aristocracy will be located in the middle, having a preeminent place, fact that may be explained both philosophically - in accordance with Aristotle's political theory - and empirically - since the most political systems of antiquity were constituted by a limited number of individuals, only sometimes by just one king, and rarer by a relatively extended middle class, as in the case of polity.
The Aristotelian literary sources suggest us an emergency preference of the Stagirit for polity - the rule of the moderately rich middle class - and he even presents a justification for the eligibility of a system led by this category:
'because those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation find it easiest to obey the rule of reason' (Aristotle - Politika, IV, 11, 1295 b4-6).
Polity will be desired when the ideal virtuousity of aristocracy will not be tangible. In its quality of 'the second-best state', polity stands, as its turn, as a golden mean between oligarchy and democracy. It is interesting that polity is placed in the middle using two different criteria, wealth, which is primarily a qualitative criterion, and the demographics, which is obviously a quantitative criterion, but with clear axiological implication. The richest citizens will be always less numerous than the moderately rich, which, at their turn, will be less numerous than the poor.
