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Video Description
Politics may seem noble noble in theory — but this Academy of Ideas video follows Niccolò Machiavelli in refusing to confuse the fairy tale with the machine. Machiavelli’s real subject isn’t how government should work; it is how power actually operates behind the speeches and slogans. He saw that every society splits into a small ruling class and the many it controls, held together not by trust but by force, deception, and a justifying myth — what we now call democracy. Naming that machinery, the video argues, is the first real act of liberation, because you cannot resist a game you do not know is being played.
Full Video Transcript
Daring as it is to investigate the unknown, even more so it is to question the known.
It is often said that to understand the present we must understand the past.
For history is our greatest teacher and one thing it teaches us is that mankind is a fallible species.
Our past is as much defined by the truths we have discovered as by the errors we have lived by.
But while it can be easy to recognize the mistakes of generations past,
it is much more difficult to see the errors in our own ways and for this reason
we must be willing to continually question the known. In this video
we are going to apply this skeptical approach to the field of politics by exploring the ideas of the contrarian Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli.
Machiavelli was born in 1469 and he served as a diplomat, politician, and a commander of the Florentine militia.
But his political life was cut short by a conspiracy charge against him in 1513. After being tortured,
but never confessing, Machiavelli was released and he retired from politics and spent the remainder
of his life focused on his writings. As an astute observer of the political side of man,
Machiavelli believed that most people are utterly mistaken about the true nature of politics,
and these confusions remain entrenched to this day. These Machiavellian ideas we are about to
discuss may seem like heresy to some, but they are ideas worthy of our consideration because
if there is truth to them, then it could radically change the way we approach the political world
and the way we pursue freedom, or as James Burnham writes in his book, The Machiavellians,
if the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men,
the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much
less likely. A deeper freedom would be possible in society than Machiavelli himself believed
attainable. The first step to a more accurate view of the nature of politics is to recognize
how often we fail to separate the real from the ideal in our formulations of all things political.
Instead of looking to the abstract theories of philosophers,
or to the idealistic notions that spill from the mouths of politicians,
we need to look at how people act in the political realm.
We need to, in other words, separate the wishes we may have about how politics should work
from the reality of how it does work.
This was one of Machiavelli’s foremost goals in the writing of his most famous work, The Prince,
or as he explains,
pursuit of the good society, the realization of the general welfare, nor is it fundamentally
a mechanism for the maximization of social welfare or social cooperation.
Some forms of political organization may be conducive to these ends, while others are
completely antithetical to them, but what defines politics in all ages and in all its
manifestations is that it is the realm where men and women compete in open and concealed
ways for power and control over others.
The primary object of the politician, or any member of a ruling elite, is always the same
– to cement, to augment, and to increase their power.
The struggle for social power is not a game in which all of us participate, and this leads
to another of the Machiavellian principles about the nature of politics and its impact
on a society.
A society, according to Machiavelli, is always divided into two classes – the rulers and
the ruled, or as Burnham writes,
The ruling class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes
power and enjoys the advantages that power brings.
Whereas the ruled, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in
a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies
the first with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential
to the vitality of the political organism.
If the primary motivation of those in the class of the rulers is not to improve society,
although this may be a byproduct of some of their actions, but to increase their own power,
why do those in the class of the ruled, always far greater in number, accept this state of
affairs?
Machiavelli identifies a number of tools used by ruling classes to grow their power, and
these include force, fraud, deception, and the tactical redistribution of the wealth
they expropriate.
None of these things, however, would be effective at cementing their rule and allowing them to spread their tentacles into ever more areas of a society without the existence of a justifying myth, ideology, religion, or political formula.
Rulers, in other words, always rely for their legitimization on the spread of ideas that are favorable to their aims and which somehow convince the masses of the necessity of their rule.
Or as David Hume wrote,
idea of the will of the people. Democracy is the formula that legitimizes the political structure
of our day by teaching us that we are the true rulers and our politicians merely our loyal
servants and representatives. Some may wonder if our ability to vote has made Machiavelli’s insights
into the nature of politics antiquated. The answer to this question by those who have followed in
the tradition of Machiavelli is an emphatic no. The ability to check a box next to a name every
few years does not rid the world of power-hungry individuals, nor does it rid the world of
the power games that Machiavelli identified as the essence of politics.
For even in democracies, many positions of social power are not open to the voting process
being attained through means such as the accumulation of great wealth, nepotism, or political appointment.
And in terms of the politicians we do vote for, to believe that we are their rulers,
and not vice versa, is wishful thinking.
As Mikhail Bakunin explains,
the results are largely the same. Power over other people begets the desire for more power, and even in a democracy a stark division exists between a class of rulers and the class of the ruled.
But what are we to do with these Machiavellian revelations? Should we just accept our status as mere pawns in a game played by men and women whose fundamental motive is to accumulate more power and to use this power to control us?
us? Or can we make use of this knowledge in a constructive manner? One of the purposes of
Machiavelli’s writings was to open people’s eyes to the way politics works so that more effective
strategies could be devised to counter the machinations of a ruling elite. Or as he wrote
in a letter to a friend,
them. Machiavelli believed that a better knowledge of our rulers would help us avoid one of the traps
that have led many a nation into the hands of a tyrant. These are the calls we hear so often for
political unity. For unity, when preached by a member of a ruling class or one of its apologists,
is not a path that will lead to increased freedom, but instead is the path to a despotic hell.
Or as Burnham explains, since Machiavelli is neither a propagandist nor an apologist,
Since he is not the demagogue of any party or sect or group, he knows and says how hypocritical are the calls for a unity that is a mask for the suppression of all opposition.
How fatally lying or wrong are all the beliefs that liberty is the peculiar attribute of any single individual or group, prince or democrat, nobles or people or multitude.
Freedom is not born through political unity, rather freedom, as history lays witness, is born in the cracks that emerge when a ruling class is divided against itself.
Even more ideal for freedom is the existence of independent institutions of social power
which counterbalance each other by dividing those who wish to rule into separate and competing factions.
A prime example of this occurred in the early history of the West, or as Gerard Cayce writes in Freedom’s Progress,
As the Western world began to settle down after the fall of Rome, there would be not one but two loci of authority,
neither of which would have a complete claim to the total allegiance of the individual.
In the tension between the church and the state, a space was created that permitted freedom to flourish.
This freedom took concrete form in the high Middle Ages and the emergence of commerce,
technology, the cities and universities, all of these institutions and practices forming the social spine of a world that is
recognizably modern and is still with us today.
Machiavelli’s view of the political world suggests that far from lamenting the divisions that seem to be emerging in the ruling elites of our day,
We should instead see this as a positive development for this infighting will weaken them and expose their true colors to ever more people
But we should not rest content on the hope that a ruling class will divide against itself and that we can merely sit back and
Watch the show such a passive approach will only leave us at the mercy of whichever ruling faction gains the upper hand
Rather as a ruling elite weakens the thirst for liberty among the class of the ruled must intensify
For liberty will only be gained by men and women who actually desire it and who are willing to take actions in the furtherance of this end.
Or as Frederick Douglass, a 19th century American who escaped slavery wrote,
just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong
which will be imposed upon them. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress.
Source: Academy of Ideas