this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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The Prince is basically the same. It's basically just "please just fuck with other nobles, and when you lock them up and steal their shit go and give it to the public or something, and don't fuck with the common people" and "it's ok that you're a huge dumbass, just please hire someone who's not and then let them do all the real work while you go camping and play soldier in the woods, also pack a lunch."
Machiavelli gets such a bad rap as an evil man, and I really think it's just people who don't understand politics balking at how cruel and nasty politics is.
My own theory is that it's because Machiavelli himself was a radical republican who was necessarily opposed to what the ruling class thought was polite, and The Prince is basically a blunt treatise on ruling class politicking and strategy without all the pretty lies about nobility or w/e that none of them ever really followed but liked to pretend they did. Not to mention it encourages things that are outright dangerous to an aristocratic system, like emphasizing that noble-on-noble conflict should be brutal and taken all the way to completion instead of treated with decorum and mercy.
Then liberals followed suit after liberalism subsumed the old aristocratic order into itself, so Machiavelli is the bad evil scheme man instead of the for-his-time-radical liberal who disrespected the old aristocratic system's norms.
Like I feel that the modern equivalent of The Prince would be if a communist agreed to write a guidebook for the Waltons in exchange for being allowed to return home to the Walmart corpo-fief, and it said they should be resolving their conflict with the Kingdom of the Mouse with PMCs and assassinations instead of the Corporate Court, and they shouldn't stop till all the Mouse's shareholders are dead, then they should give all of Disney's capital to the citizenry to buy their loyalty. Liberals would fucking hate that because it's so uncivil and gives the lie to their idea of a peaceful rules-based order.
love your fanfic, id totally read it
I did write a thematically similar short story framed as a news bot interviewing two brothers on opposite sides of a permanent trench war between the remnants of Florida and the Disney corpo-state.
you really put the rad in comrade
He would’ve loved WWI
Lenin's reaction to WWI was basically "I can't believe they are giving us this gift".
Checks out
Yeah I always heard that The Prince was really just descriptive, not an endorsement of evil shit
Let's be fair, Machiavelli was a total edgelord about in some aspects of the text.
Machiavelli explicitly said "use the least amount of tyranny possible" while for some reasons popculture pass this as "use the most tyranny as possible" if not straighforward "MUAHAHAHA bring the horses and rope"
Right? Given how politics worked at the time - Gangs of partisans killing each other with swords in the streets, mercenary captains changing teams mid battle, brutal warfare with North Africa and, well, everyone else. It's got to be placed within the context of the brutality of it's time, and the development of political theory.
I've always really stuck to the always seek to be feared, be loved if you can, but take care not to be hated because people who fear you will obey, people who love you will endure hardships, but people who hate you will destroy themselves to destroy you. Always made a lot of sense to me.
Also, "if you build your army mostly from hired mercenaries, don't be surprised when your enemy hires them out from under you".
“Do not ride inside a helicopter” -Machiavelli
Brace Belden truly is the modern Machiavelli
The Transylvanian Cocksucker
From the 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.