I found the comparison here between Machiavelli and Nietzsche interesting, and in some respects there is a blurring here between the ideas of the two men. What I think is interesting is that Nietzsche was also responding to Dostoevsky. I think Dostoevsky makes a stronger psychological claim to the benefits of Christianity than existed in Machiavelli's time.
It also reminds me of a recent discussion I had here on HN related to cynicism, something I think Machiavelli could be accused of supporting. His moral prescription is for the absolute rulers of states, not for the subjects of the state. He is claiming to be objectively analytical in his description of effective state stewardship. In that sense, it is obvious to him that the ruler of a state ought to be held to a different moral standard than the subjects. This is red meat for the cynic who wants to see any pronouncement from any authority as being duplicitous or hypocritical. Of course the ruling class are telling me to "love and forgive my enemy" since that will make me easy to govern, yet those same rulers will surely annihilate their enemies just as Machiavelli taught them to do.
It makes the general push of humanism towards universal moral values a bit more clear to me than it was previously. And why we should be extremely wary of any kind of moral relativism, even when it is couched in progressive liberalism. If we allow moral relativism then the most pernicious place it can take place is in the ruling class. That is guaranteed to breed cynicism in the populace.
I think, for that reason, we must demand that our rulers are held to the same moral standards as the populace. That might mean we will not have states as glorious as the Roman Empire, but perhaps that is a price worth paying. I admit that I don't have an answer to Machiavelli's question as to how a state where the rulers are held to the same moral standards as the populace can hope to compete against states where the rulers are free to set their own more brutal morality.
One of the nice things about Christianity is how it works when the ruling class actually believes it. If they truly think they will be held eternally responsible for their actions they’re more likely to treat their subjects charitably and justly.
Nothing unique in Christian views on eternal damnation. Not after they classify a group of humans as inherently evil, then every atrocity is fair game.
Okay, let's settle on "unequal" if evil is too on the nose.
Michael Wood asserts that during the 16th century, it was almost impossible for the indigenous peoples to be considered human beings in their own right, and that the conquistadors brought with them the baggage of "centuries of Ethnocentrism, and Christian monotheism, which espoused one truth, one time and version of reality."
Faith (belief without adequate supporting evidence) comes in a wide variety of forms, no one is immune to it (I believe for evolutionary (including cultural) reasons).
> Of course the ruling class are telling me to "love and forgive my enemy" since that will make me easy to govern, yet those same rulers will surely annihilate their enemies just as Machiavelli taught them to do.
You raise a very interesting point. Look at the state of social media--the People's Platform--right now. It's nothing but grievances, hostilities, and fragmentation. "Tolerance" has itself been fashioned into a cudgel. Everybody is miserable and has a million mental health issues.
The one word you don't find anyone advocating on broadcast or social media is "forgiveness." (Where's Jesus when you need him?)
Love and forgiveness are requisites for neighbors to unite against common enemies, whether they be the King's enemies or the King himself. People that are angry at everyone around them are as close to feral as humans can be, and cannot be governed effectively. Petty warlords only speak the language of conflict and it's impossible to get them to agree on anything.
To those ends, the military is predictably struggling to retain recruits; they're blaming TikTok to pave over our collective failure to foster any sort of love for country for so long that the kids are realizing military pay sucks, this country offers no real opportunities for growth to underclasses anymore and it's not worth dying for assholes who would leave you for dead if it saved them a dollar. We've also desensitized everyone to Communism and terrorism so much that they're starting to look favorable as means to revolution. Lack of love for each other is the biggest national security threat nobody talks about.
It's what stops people from turning traitor, but what do I know. People are struggling to afford food and housing, while King Cuck and Queen Delulu insist pronoun enforcement in schools and Gravy Seals LARPing in Kansas should be our most pressing concerns. God forbid a flash mob storms the Capital again and writes a slur on the wall without killing anybody.
> God forbid a flash mob storms the Capital again and writes a slur on the wall without killing anybody
They took a calculated and premeditated swipe at the seat of power. Even a liberal democracy built on loftier principles than Machiavelli's cannot afford to let this slide.
The mob's purpose in the the plan devised by Eastman and enacted by Trump [1] was to serve as a distraction / excuse for Mike Pence to launch a contingent election with fake electors who would certify Trump as the victor, thereby terminating our democracy and ending the American experiment. Pence refused to do this and that's why the peaceful mob started chanting "Hang Mike Pence, Hang Mike Pence."
I have to admit, before that point in time I saw Pence as the diametric opposite of every political belief I ever held -- because I did not realize that a basic belief in American democracy was up for question. I thought it went without saying that we all shared that value. We did not. But Pence did, and he set an example of "Love Thy Neighbor" that I will not soon forget.
>The mob's purpose in the the plan devised by Eastman and enacted by Trump [1] was to serve as a distraction / excuse for Mike Pence to launch a contingent election with fake electors who would certify Trump as the victor, thereby terminating our democracy and ending the American experiment.
The 'source' in this is the "House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack". It's hard to get more authoritative..
What isn't backed up by the source? The purpose of the mob?
Accepting the government investigation reports, the fake elector plot was real. They didn't _need_ a mob to attack to push Pence into enacting it. It would have just told their story better afterwards.
Optically, if you're going to steal an election by changing which electors count, after putting your own electors in as replacements, then having a mob attack the capital demanding that you respond to some made-up conspiracy is a _lot_ better optics than just enacting the plan without any kind of justification.
>What isn't backed up by the source? The purpose of the mob?
Yes.
>Optically, if you're going to steal an election by changing which electors count, after putting your own electors in as replacements, then having a mob attack the capital demanding that you respond to some made-up conspiracy is a _lot_ better optics than just enacting the plan without any kind of justification.
You're justifying your speculation by saying it is plausible. That doesn't change that it's speculation.
It's fine for you to speculate. I was confused because you were mixing speculation with fact in the same sentence and providing a source.
Speculation? Not really. It is beyond reasonable conjecture as a motivation for the mob orchestration at this point.
And the much more important findings around the fake elector plot are very concrete. Arguing the burden of proof on motivation for the mob orchestration is a distraction.
The mob was showy and got a lot of attention, sure. But everything happening in the background has been proven beyond any doubt by now. And it was _much_ more important.
This proof is not dependent on the mob attack having occurred.
The facts would be the same if the mob attack had never happened.
Ignore the mob attack entirely, regardless of motivation or spontaneity, and it doesn't change anything.
Look, I guess it's going to be another one of those years.
Our brains put these bias filters in place for their own protection. But they're horribly exploited. They're going to keep getting exploited, and we'll keep seeing attempts to build on gains from past exploitation. It's really hard, but try to work past it.
> The mob's purpose in the the plan devised by Eastman and enacted by Trump [1] was to serve as a distraction / excuse for Mike Pence to launch a contingent election with fake electors who would certify Trump as the victor, thereby terminating our democracy and ending the American experiment. Pence refused to do this and that's why the peaceful mob started chanting "Hang Mike Pence, Hang Mike Pence."
How was this purpose transported from the minds of the planners into the minds of each individual member of the mob? Was there some sort of training program that hasn't been covered in the news yet (assuming I haven't missed anything)?
What details do you think they needed to know, lol? Pence was going to take all of the official actions. The rioters just had to storm the capitol and delay the response long enough for team Trump to consolidate power, and maybe serve as a prop if Pence was asked to rationalize his decision. Trump's speech to rile up the mob and send them to the capitol building at the correct time was quite sufficient. That's how stay-in-power coups work. That's how they've always worked. The mobs never needed telepathic training before, why would they now?
Those that are materially relevant to the discovery of comprehensive truth.
> lol?
What is the intended message of this? Do you believe this is a laughing matter?
> Pence was going to take all of the official actions.
You have no way of knowing with guaranteed correctness what Pence was going to do. If you disagree, please explain a methodology of how you could.
> The rioters just had to storm the capitol and delay the response long enough for team Trump to consolidate power, and maybe serve as a prop if Pence was asked to rationalize his decision.
Leaving aside a variety of things, such as:
a) The US Military's opinion on the matter.
b) The truth of the matter.
> Trump's speech to rile up the mob and send them to the capitol building at the correct time was quite sufficient.
Sufficient to accomplish what it did, which is unknowable. Due to the unknowability of reality, our culture has adopted a convention: telling stories, and believing them to be true with little to no concern whether they actually are. This cultural norm is driven into our heads constantly, bypassing all filters, because it is a cultural norm.
> That's how stay-in-power coups work. That's how they've always worked. The mobs never needed telepathic training before, why would they now?
Well, you could explain how the gameplan ended up within the mind of each participant. Or, you could explain why you refuse to do that. Or, you could tell us some more popular, fun to believe memes, and continue to act as if I have not asked you point blank about the truth value of them.
Humans fear epistemology, and I can see it clear as day through your evasive cultural conventions, "lol".
> God forbid a flash mob storms the Capital again and writes a slur on the wall without killing anybody.
Except for the capitol police officer whose skull was busted open after being brutally hit in the head with a fire extinguisher over and over again. Slur on the wall? I suppose you mean the literal feces smeared all over the walls.
Is this Poe's law in action? Brian Sicknick was not was killed by a fire extinguisher, that was a completely made up media claim that was retracted once people saw it was based on absolutely nothing.
I recently listened the podcast Our Fake History's two parter on Machiavelli and can recommend it as a nuanced look at his life and work. Most particularly, the host points out the context that Machiavelli wasn't writing The Prince in a vacuum, it was likely intended to win him a job in the restored Medici government in Florence. And that the most brutal advice is specifically given as applying to rulers who have recently seized power through force of arms, not as applying to all rulers in all situations.
In The Prince, Machiavelli wrote that men are “ungrateful, wanton, false,” and “cowardly, greedy, arrogant and mean, and their natural impulse is to be insolent when their affairs are prospering and abjectly servile when adversity hits them.”
Have you ever actually read Machiavelli? Have you read The Discources, instead of the trendy practice of misreading Art of War and The Prince and ending the day early? This is a borderline slanderous misrepresentation of one of the first great Humanist philosophers.
IMPORTANT EDIT: I just realized that I misread this as saying
>Reminds me a little of his work.
instead of
>Reminds me a little of work.
How embarrassing, right? Just ignore me while I curl up and die in the corner over there.
Avarice is the driving force of capitalism; so should be expected to be an integral part of any organization that optimizes for capital return to investors.
> It's a good idea to keep your people in a state of poverty and always prepared for war. This helps to reduce both ambition and boredom—two qualities that can undermine obedience.
> Fierce competition in a society is desirable, for it generates energy and ambition
Don't these two statements exactly oppose each other?
Not necessarily. Think of life in poor neighborhoods today. People can be competitive over limited resources or status within their world of poverty. And the constant threat of violence ("prepared for war") can even exacerbate this dynamic.
Yet at the same time all larger ambitions -- those which could threaten the people with real power -- are thwarted.
One sector of the population is dull and complacent, the other are fiercely competing for limited spots at higher eds and tech companies with 2% acceptance rates
It may. You don't dream of becoming president; you dream of having enough money to have both an apartment and food. You have just as much ambition, but the ambition is for smaller things. You therefore are not threatening the political power of those who have it.
Interesting how everyone always focuses (almost) entirely on The Prince and (almost) completely ignores his Discourses on Livy. Here's the thing: if you read the Discourses first, Machiavelli comes off as a staunch republican — and then when you read The Prince you just have to conclude that it could only be a brilliant satire, subtly aimed at Lorenzo Medici, because there is really no way he was not writing it tongue-in-cheek. And yet people take it completely at the face value and think that Machiavelli was keen on giving advice to the tyrant on how to tyrannize people more efficiently because he thought it was just the greatest way to run the world.
> His great transgression, according to Berlin, was to say aloud what everyone knows but no one will admit: multiple ideals cannot be simultaneously attained. We can’t have everything good all at once.
Everyone will admit this. No one honestly believes all virtues are equally and simultaneously attainable. At any given time, certain things must be prioritized.
But some of us believe that it's not a zero-sum game; that "human nature" is not set in stone, and that it is a worthy project to try and engineer conditions which allow more of humanity's virtues to flourish. Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding. He also seems to believe that it's correct to trade individual prosperity for state power and glory.
I… don’t think so? Machiavelli was challenging the zero-sum 14-1500s Catholic Christian thinking that the world was set in stone by God and that providence was beyond humanity’s control. This is what he means by encouraging “ambition” among elites - a conscious act to produce the betterment of the state and those within it. Indeed he hoped virtues would flourish in such an environment - but was not optimistic about the odds.
> Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding.
He’d dismiss a state founded on ideals, yes, but he’s in favor of human progress, even if he’s pessimistic about what that yields. Remember in his era to be ambitious and want to change things was to go against God.
It’s easy to dislike Machiavelli as he’s cynical and amoral but he’s a modern thinker in many ways.
> Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding.
Pretty much accurate. Machiavelli viewed the 'average person' as capricious and most rulers as corrupt. He viewed the mix of the two as a recipe for societal decay that could only be controlled by rulers of benevolent intent but willing to act without virtue to prevent decay and disorder. In Discourses, Machiavelli reveals his hope that virtue might be pervasive in a republic, but he did not view human nature as necessarily aligned with that goal.
The author is just going for a roundabout version of "[unspecified group] are a bunch of virtue-signaling hypocrites", and giving the reader some latitude to fill in the unspecified group.
But how can it be anything other than a zero-sum game? We are biomechanical units with a limited lifespan. We rent out this lifespan to the highest bidder we can access. And then we die.
And if one of the bio robots happens to be in a different position in the hierarchy (a founder maybe) - their task is to arrange the other biorobots just so and extract maximum output from them before they expire.
Sure, one can work to maximize the extraction and perhaps that's progress in someone's view. But it seems more geared towards ignoring the basic biology of the units involved and pushing them as hard as possible. They are a renewable resource after all, so churning through them faster means more efficiency.
In other words, anyone claiming that life is not a zero-sum game better be ready to demonstrate how immortality is possible. Otherwise it's bovine excrement.
> But how can it be anything other than a zero-sum game? We are biomechanical units with a limited lifespan. We rent out this lifespan to the highest bidder we can access. And then we die.
Do you recall the spontaneous (yet short lived) concern everyone (well, right thinking people at least) had for the well-being of their fellow human (well, fellow countrymen at least) during the COVID phenomenon?
It seems to me that people can be nice to each other, provided you tell them an adequately persuasive story.
No, I don't recall that. I recall a lot of flame wars and virtue signaling about mask wearing. I recall a lot of denial of science because of ideology and fear. And a lot of name calling.
We read M on human nature as descriptive not proscriptive, except that in M's time it was proscriptive too(oops, wrong here, it was prescriptive.).
How do women fit in, or alter the reasoning?
Progress got made by people who were protected from at least some forms of competition, who didn't have to expend cognitive energy on survival, right? What were the early polytechnic universities, was that where inventions happened and were built upon?
We are happier with the societies we have now, no? (Unless we are young men?) How did they outcompete the nasty British (note, I did type "brutish". How do I turn autocorrect off? Answer: in keyboard Settings.) and short ones?
>> When you confer benefits to the people, make sure to do so yourself. But let minions do the dirty work of inflicting punishments because then they, not you, will be blamed, and you can then gain the people’s favor by cutting off your minions’ heads
It also reminds me of a recent discussion I had here on HN related to cynicism, something I think Machiavelli could be accused of supporting. His moral prescription is for the absolute rulers of states, not for the subjects of the state. He is claiming to be objectively analytical in his description of effective state stewardship. In that sense, it is obvious to him that the ruler of a state ought to be held to a different moral standard than the subjects. This is red meat for the cynic who wants to see any pronouncement from any authority as being duplicitous or hypocritical. Of course the ruling class are telling me to "love and forgive my enemy" since that will make me easy to govern, yet those same rulers will surely annihilate their enemies just as Machiavelli taught them to do.
It makes the general push of humanism towards universal moral values a bit more clear to me than it was previously. And why we should be extremely wary of any kind of moral relativism, even when it is couched in progressive liberalism. If we allow moral relativism then the most pernicious place it can take place is in the ruling class. That is guaranteed to breed cynicism in the populace.
I think, for that reason, we must demand that our rulers are held to the same moral standards as the populace. That might mean we will not have states as glorious as the Roman Empire, but perhaps that is a price worth paying. I admit that I don't have an answer to Machiavelli's question as to how a state where the rulers are held to the same moral standards as the populace can hope to compete against states where the rulers are free to set their own more brutal morality.