Platonic Irony - Plato and Socrates could not dwell in the Just City

Gotta love the Republic - arguably the world's and certainly my top 5 pick of all time greats.
Every time I re-read it I get something new.. and that is over 12 times now.
I was just thinking: Neither Plato nor Socrates would be allowed to dwell in the Just City! That is without sacrificing a key element of their psychic makeup.
Even more telling the Republic could not be published in the Just City.
Socrates could not conduct his philo investigations with the Guardians in the hope of moving them to critical thinking.
I really don' see this book as satire. The problem is in the actual reading of the text (the famous: 'RFTB') Socrates loves his creation and his revolutionary proposals. He suggests the city is possible!
As my good friend Mr. Nietzsche would say (my paraphrase): I am a child of my time - like Wagner - a decadent - except that I have realized it and I have resisted it.

Maybe we can see the Republic as Plato's struggle vs. his own time's decadence.

The Paradox of Inquiry per Meno Part Deux - Gotta Love my Perserverence!

Socrates is often the character in Plato’s dialogues who asks thought provoking questions that do not seem to have answers. However, in Meno, the situation is reversed, and Meno ponders about the process of inquiry during a discussion about virtue,
“But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you’ve found is the thing you didn’t know?” (Meno 80d-e).
These questions eventually became known as Meno’s Paradox. Socrates responds to Meno, but his explanation for the paradox, his Theory of Recollection, can barely satisfactorily explain inquiry as a process for acquiring non-empirical information; when one applies his theory to empirical knowledge the theory seems to collapse completely.
“Meno’s Paradox,” also known as “The Paradox of Inquiry,” questions how anyone could ever truly know when he has succeeded in finding a correct answer, whether that be an answer to an empirical or a non-empirical question. In layman’s terms, I will now try to describe Meno’s objection to the entire process of inquiry. One begins in one of two states: either the person knows what he is looking for, or he does not know what he is looking for. If the individual knew what he was looking for, inquiry itself would be altogether unnecessary, due to the fact that the information would already be known. However, if the individual did not know what he was looking for, inquiry itself would be altogether impossible. One cannot look for something without knowing what it is he is looking for. Therefore, inquiry seems to be either completely unnecessary or utterly impossible. Thus, one cannot learn what he already knows or what he does not know. At the very most one could only know the questions he does not have answers to, but, even then, there would never be any way to know when one has stumbled upon a correct answer.

Meno's Paradox - Mysteries That I Love! ;-)

Meno's puzzle has generally, and, as I believe,
erroneously been taken to represent merely a
bit of typical sophistic logic-chopping. Shorey,
for example, refers to it as 'this eristic and lazy
argument. '3 Taylor's comment on the passage
is that, 'At this point Meno again tries to run
off on an irrelevant issue. He brings up the
sophistic puzzle. . . . etc. '4 And Ritter asserts
in similar vein that Meno 'encumbers the inves-
tigation with the proposition advanced by the
eristies, that there is no sense in looking for
something which one does not already know.

As over against all such interpretations of
Meno's paradox as irrelevant eristic, I wish to
submit the thesis that the objection is perfectly
germane in the context of the problem being
discussed-namely the nature of ethical knowl-
edge-and that, moreover, the entire passage is
one of real philosophical import and is basic for
understanding the Theory of Ideas and the re-
lated notion of Reminiscence. Far from being
solely an instance of sophistic eristic, it contains
in embryo one of the essential contentions of
sophistic nominalism as a philosophical position,
and it raises a problem which the Theory of
Ideas is designed to meet, and which it must
meet if it is to have any plausibility whatso-
ever.

The seriousness with which Plato re-
garded the puzzle is shown by his invoking of
the Myth of Reminiscence in order to reply to it.
It is inconceivable that he should have gone to
this length to meet an argument which he viewed
as a mere sophism.