Socrates problem

 Claude finished the response

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"[There is] only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance; wealth and good birth bring their possessor no dignity, but on the contrary evil." - Socrates, quoted by Xenophon in the Symposium. 

That takes a good deal of metaphorical and figurative work to succeed.
Examined Socratic intellectualism's philosophical tensions and interpretive demands

That line is doing a lot of work, isn't it. Taken flat-footedly, "wealth and good birth bring evil" and "only ignorance is evil" both look false on their face — plenty of well-born, wealthy people are perfectly virtuous, and plenty of well-informed people do terrible things knowingly. So the sentence only holds if you've already smuggled in a very particular, technical sense of "knowledge" and "ignorance."

The move Socrates needs — and this is the notorious "Socratic intellectualism" — is to redefine knowledge as something like true, examined understanding of the good, such that if you really possessed it, you couldn't act against it. Wrongdoing then gets reinterpreted as a symptom of not truly knowing, however articulate or well-informed the wrongdoer appears. That's a substantive, almost stipulative claim, not a description of ordinary "knowing." It also has to explain away akrasia — the garden-variety experience of doing the worse thing while recognizing the better — by insisting it's not really weakness of will but a failure of knowledge in disguise. Aristotle didn't buy it; he thought the phenomenon of acting against one's better judgment was real and needed its own account rather than being defined out of existence.

Same trick has to run on "wealth and good birth." For those to count as evils, you need something like: they tend to breed complacency, flattery, and false confidence that substitutes for the examined life — so it's not wealth itself but the ignorance wealth tends to produce or shield. Xenophon's Socrates is fond of these paradoxical-sounding compressions that turn out, on unpacking, to be much narrower and more conditional claims wearing the clothing of universal ones.

There's a rhetorical payoff to that compression, though — it's aphoristic, quotable, and forces the listener to do the interpretive labor themselves, which is rather the point of the elenchus generally. Whether that's philosophy or persuasion dressed as philosophy is its own old argument.

On its face it is not just wrong but discouraging and maybe harmful.  Reminds me of my mom's faith that the world's problems could be solved with better education.
Opted to engage authentically without referencing absent contextual details

There's a real kinship there. The Socratic version and your mother's version share the same structural optimism: that vice is basically a cognitive error, and errors are correctable by the right input. It's a flattering picture for anyone who values the intellectual life — it makes learning not just pleasant but morally necessary, and it makes evil something other people do because they haven't had your advantages yet, rather than something woven into wanting and choosing as such.

And you're right that read literally it's discouraging, maybe worse. If ignorance is the only evil, then the appropriate response to genuine cruelty is remedial instruction, not moral judgment — which quietly lets people off the hook while also being useless in practice, since plenty of cruelty is perfectly well-informed. It also inverts something people learn by observation fairly early: that articulate, educated people can be the most dangerous kind of unscrupulous, precisely because knowledge sharpens the tools without touching the will that wields them. The 20th century supplied no shortage of highly educated men running efficient atrocities. If knowledge is the sole good and ignorance the sole evil, that history becomes almost unintelligible.

The kinder reading is that Socrates isn't talking about information at all but about self-knowledge — knowing what's actually good for you, in a sense that already includes caring about it, wanting it, being oriented toward it. That's less a factual claim than a definition of virtue by fiat: he's built "really knowing" to already contain the caring, so of course the equation comes out clean. Your mother's version, if it's the more common one — that better schooling, more facts, more literacy will fix greed, cruelty, tribalism — doesn't get that escape hatch. It's making an empirical bet about human motivation, and the bet keeps losing, which I'd guess is part of what makes it feel painful to you now rather than merely wrong.
Recognized humorous diet quip, opted for warm reciprocal tone

Then don't let me stop you. There's a particular kind of dignity in eating the bacon anyway, eyes open, no illusions about virtue — that's a different thing entirely from not knowing better.

Enjoy it while it's hot. The soft-fried spiced kind doesn't reheat with any grace, so this is a now-or-never proposition anyway.

Oh it's gone.

Good. That's the correct order of operations — plate first, philosophy after.
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