6 ms·

The Machiavellian Maze

69 points by jger15 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
drpgq 3y ago
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.” Reminds me a little of work.
- thih9 3y ago
  From experience, avoiding environments with these traits and finding better workplaces sometimes requires extra effort but in general is possible.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago
  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.
  - thimkerbell 3y ago
    What is a different, good, brief representation?
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      The Prince is very short. Read all of it.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Not by accident. 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.
- allofgovforsho 3y ago
  [flagged]
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> 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?
- scottedwards 3y ago
  yeah agree, plus not sure I believe that poverty reduces ambition
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    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.
  - the_sleaze9 3y ago
    It isn't poverty that reduces ambition, it's that poverty has crushingly enormous cognitive overhead.
- jonahx 3y ago
  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.
- hammock 3y ago
  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
gentoo 3y ago
> 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.
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  His society didn't have fossil fuels, or renewable energy. See: the malthusian trap.
- banannaise 3y ago
  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.
- howmayiannoyyou 3y ago
  > 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.
- jahewson 3y ago
  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.
chilmers 3y ago
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. https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-5/episode-94-how-machiavellian-was-machiavelli-part-i/ https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-5/episode-94-how...
thimkerbell 3y ago
This is worth reading. 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?
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  Basic question: how does civilization prevail over barbarianesque warfare, at macro and micro scales.
  - thimkerbell 3y ago
    Is joining the army still a fulfilling outlet for young male energies, or do video games do better?
  - thimkerbell 3y ago
    What field of scholarship is this.
banannaise 3y ago
Repost from the same user 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591164
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  The person has good taste. And nobody responded before.
zoogeny 3y ago
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.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > 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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Reading The Prince as a child permanently shifted my worldview, for better or worse.
MichaelRo 3y ago
>> 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 Totally Stalin's strategy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
davidhyde 3y ago
> “Success inspires more devotion than friendliness and affability” Seems to ring true with a lot of leaders.
Joker_vD 3y ago
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.

69 points by jger15 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

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.” Reminds me a little of work.

thih9 3y ago
From experience, avoiding environments with these traits and finding better workplaces sometimes requires extra effort but in general is possible.
Phiwise_ 3y ago
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.
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  What is a different, good, brief representation?
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    The Prince is very short. Read all of it.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Not by accident. 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.
allofgovforsho 3y ago
[flagged]

pavel_lishin 3y ago

> 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?

scottedwards 3y ago
yeah agree, plus not sure I believe that poverty reduces ambition
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  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.
- the_sleaze9 3y ago
  It isn't poverty that reduces ambition, it's that poverty has crushingly enormous cognitive overhead.
jonahx 3y ago
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.
hammock 3y ago
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

gentoo 3y ago

> 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.

thimkerbell 3y ago
His society didn't have fossil fuels, or renewable energy. See: the malthusian trap.
banannaise 3y ago
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.
howmayiannoyyou 3y ago
> 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.
jahewson 3y ago
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.

chilmers 3y ago

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. https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-5/episode-94-how-machiavellian-was-machiavelli-part-i/ https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-5/episode-94-how...

thimkerbell 3y ago

This is worth reading. 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?

thimkerbell 3y ago
Basic question: how does civilization prevail over barbarianesque warfare, at macro and micro scales.
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  Is joining the army still a fulfilling outlet for young male energies, or do video games do better?
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  What field of scholarship is this.

banannaise 3y ago

Repost from the same user 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591164

thimkerbell 3y ago
The person has good taste. And nobody responded before.

zoogeny 3y ago

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.

jstarfish 3y ago
> 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.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Reading The Prince as a child permanently shifted my worldview, for better or worse.

MichaelRo 3y ago

>> 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 Totally Stalin's strategy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov

davidhyde 3y ago

> “Success inspires more devotion than friendliness and affability” Seems to ring true with a lot of leaders.

Joker_vD 3y ago

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.