Obviously there are two interpretations of Machiavellianism, one light-oriented and one dark-oriented. The Machiavellian personality within the context of psychology, as we mentioned in the last round, is a darker reading, and is one of the ways in which Machiavellianism is usually perceived. In other words, this type of person is selfish and cold, and uses his friends as tools.
But in the text On Livy, Machiavelli gives the impression of being a patriot, and that he is in favor of **** and doctrine. Whatever the nature of *** andism really is, *** andism is surely a political philosophical proposition that prioritizes the interests of the ****same people. As for the ironicized reading of Machiavellianism that we mentioned earlier, it highlights the tension between virtue and destiny. That is to say, according to this reading, Machiavelli's Monarchism is, in effect, an implicit warning against the arbitrariness of monarchs.
Obviously from a philosophical point of view, the reading of Machiavelli's Lightward is still more interesting. According to this reading, Machiavellianism shouldn't have much to do with narcissistic and sociopathic personalities, a doctrine that implies precisely that *** same interests should take precedence.
Of course, as Machiavellianism, this doctrine still encourages deception and power play in certain situations. But this is not done for one's own benefit, it is done for the benefit of one's fellow man. What is victimized by such practices is other ****-siblings than the present ****-siblings. That means that to exercise the kind of doctrine of Machiavelli, you already have to presuppose a very intense international competitive environment, or some kind of domestic environment where different small groups are in intense competition with each other.
Now let's presuppose that we're right about this light-oriented reading of Machiavelli, but is there nothing wrong with Machiavellian power politics, even if it's based on the interests of ****-siblings? I'm afraid it may not be.
Let's look at a case in history that is quite relevant to Machiavelli's own writings. This is known as the St. Bartholomew's Buy Day Massacre. This massacre is also known as the night of St. Bartholomew's. In 1572, there was a serious religious civil unrest in France, and there were two main schools of thought, one of which was Roman Catholicism. The other was Protestantism. And at that time in France that faction of Protestantism there is a special name called Huguenots.
So why did this massacre happen? Catherine de Medici, the mother of King Charles IX of France is said to have devised a power plot to massacre the Huguenots. She first lied to that group of Huguenots that Catholicism and Huguenotism should now join hands and stop slaughtering each other. So she was about to fling such a marriage. One of the parties to this marriage was Marguerite de Valois, the sister of the king, who belonged to the Catholic sect. The other party was Henry Bourbon, the future Henry IV, who was a Huguenot.
The Huguenots were so happy to hear this that they entered Paris in large numbers, ready to feast and **** celebrate the wedding. Little did they realize that the Catholic faction had been sharpening their knives for a long time. The massacre took place on the evening of August 23, 1572, just before the anniversary of St. Bartholomew's purchase. It was also around this time that the King of France himself gave a bull, at the urging of the Dowager Empress of course, ordering the murder of all the Huguenot religious who entered Paris. The massacres then expanded beyond Paris, lasting for weeks, with varying accounts of between 10,000 and 70,000 deaths. This ignited the religious wars that were to follow in France, resulting in countless deaths.
Why is this massacre the embodiment of Machiavellian ideology, or why Machiavelli, to take the blame for this massacre? Everyone knows that Machiavelli's Monarchia, was dedicated to the Medici family. Catherine de Medici, the Dowager Empress of this King of France, was a Medici. Did she read Machiavelli's Treatise on Monarchies dedicated to their family? Wasn't it inspired by his ideas on monarchism to set up a trap to cleanse dissent?
Many people tend to think that it was indeed so. For example, a Huguenot lawyer named Innocente Jantrit wrote a book called Against Machiavelli. It makes the connection between this atrocity and Machiavelli's ideas, the poisoning of the human heart. At the same time even if the Dowager Empress Catherine de Medici had not read Monarchia, the act itself seems to fit the description of Machiavellianism.
First, this act it was not done for an individual, it was done for the benefit of the Catholic group. It was based on Catholic interests against Protestant interests, it was not individualistic. Second, she used power and fraud to trick the Huguenots into coming to Paris to set a murderous trap using the wedding as bait. Thirdly, to do this one must also be as ruthless as a lion and as cunning as a fox. If using the wedding as bait to trick people into coming to the wedding is a reflection of the fox's intelligence side, then killing and decapitating people is a reflection of the lion's cruelty side. Isn't this pretty standard Machiavellianism?
But does reading this give anyone the creeps? To go on a killing spree at a wedding is just too low of an act. Such an act also gave Machiavellianism a bad name in Europe, and Machiavellian ideas came under pressure to escalate.
From today's standpoint, what is the greatest fault of Machiavellianism's political philosophy? That fault is not his emphasis on power politics. The emphasis on power and strategy is really found in many books, and we have The Art of War, which also emphasizes power and strategy. But the problem is that Machiavellianism does not have a very clear, opposing attitude to violence.
This is not as good as The Art of War. Even Sun Tzu believed that war, is a means that has to be used, and he still believed that the highest state of war is to give up without fighting. Personally, I think in some cases Machiavelli's doctrine may encourage horrific acts like the Rwandan massacre.
So how do you upgrade the idea of Machiavellianism? I may not go into detail on all of these upgrade options in this program, but I will mention them at least slightly. The first one I'll mention is the upgrade program of the British philosopher Hobbes, who wrote a masterpiece of political philosophy called Leviathan.
He wrote this book during the English Civil War, and I personally speculate that it was written to kiss the ass of the Lord Protector, Cromwell. In fact, the historical background of writing this book is also a bit interesting, the Lord Protector of England, Cromwell. He actually read Machiavelli's books. Machiavelli wrote a book called The Art of War in addition to On Monarchs, On Livy, and The History of Florence. After this book was translated into English, it became widely popular in the English-speaking world. Cromwell's instrument of force was his so-called New Model Army. And all the officers of the New Model Army, at all levels, read the English translation of the book called The Art of War, written by Machiavelli.
Cromwell himself was an exemplary practitioner of Machiavellian morality, and he was certainly on the side of Protestantism. But the royal party that fought against him, the king's forces, were small followers of the Catholic forces. His acts of war overpowered the small followers of the Catholic power in England, thus locking England into the orbit of the Protestant state, and thus completing the unification of the country. Hobbes himself was a little fan of Cromwell's, but as a philosopher he had to wrap Cromwell's program in philosophical language so that it didn't seem like ass-kissing was so low.
In doing all this philosophical wrapping, Hobbes has some points that flow from Machiavelli's Monarchism for him, such as Hobbes describing the natural state of the human psyche at For example, in describing the natural state of the human psyche, Hobbes makes no mention at all of the fact that there is an element of goodness in the human soul. But the traditional ethical descriptions of the past would say that there is a goodness in the human soul. Not only is the description of the good redundant, but also, in view of the multiplicity of human desires, he thinks that there cannot be such a thing.
In contrast to his avoidance of the concept of the good, Hobbes was more interested in the concept of the supreme evil. He saw the so-called supreme evil as the existence of the greatest evil, which is the fear of violent death. That is to say, a political ****-symbiosis is formed not on the basis of goodness, but on the basis of the fear of death. Isn't this exactly what Machiavellianism is all about? Machiavelli also argued that man is essentially an animal that seeks to avoid harm and needs to be terrorized and disciplined, and that it is not possible to do so without taking the whip.
Not coincidentally, Hobbes also argued that since there is no supreme good, it is unlikely that people in the state of nature would automatically form a political group that seeks the greatest public ****ing good, and then fall into an anarchy of fighting each other. In his words, man and man are similar to wolves and wolves. But such a state of fighting with each other, will inevitably lead to the end of the same, and human nature is to avoid harm, so what to do? Hobbes thus argues that it is precisely because everyone is afraid of dying together that a government needs to be invented to govern everyone. This gave rise to the so-called social contract.
Note that this social contract theory is not quite the same idea as what we will hear later, for example, in Rousseau. It's not about citizens contracting with each other, it's about citizens surrendering their individual rights, especially the right to arms, to a super-authority over all citizens. This super-authority is left to maintain internal peace, and external defense, and retains only the right of each citizen to be spared from death. Nine times out of ten, this super-authority is a monarch, or an aristocrat.
Of course Hobbes, logically, did not rule out the possibility that a democratic government could also play such an authoritative role, but he had in mind presumably a Lord Protector like Cromwell. This aspect of his thinking is where Hobbes develops Machiavelli's ideas. Machiavelli's Treatise on Monarchy assumes that the monarch already exists, and then teaches that the monarch should do this or that. But he lacks a description of the path of the non-government state, evolving into a governmental state.
And Hobbes's theory contains a desire for peace, pointing out that private fights between people like wolves and wolves are so terrible that a government is needed to keep everyone in line. This means that Hobbes himself would have hated tragedies such as the San Badoro buy massacre. Yet Machiavelli maintains an optimistic view of the internal strife within a ****some that he believes can energize the whole ****some. Even I do not find in Machiavelli's doctrine enough moral resources that would enable him to condemn such a tragedy as the St. Bartholomew's buy massacre.
Having finished with Hobbesianism, let us turn to another philosophical path that developed Machiavelli's thought, and that is called utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is where he wants to emphasize that we need to maximize the good of ****siblings and that we need to emphasize the flexibility of means. There is a touch of Machiavellianism in this idea. But the typical representatives of utilitarianism, such as Bentham in England, or Mill, the path of development of their ideas, let us appreciate the question, that is, how to calculate the maximum interests of the ****-siblings?
Let's take a very simple example to illustrate where the problem lies. Suppose there is a public **** fund inside my neighborhood or inside my community that can come to promote our culture. Then at the discussion of the democratic committee within the community, there are two programs that are at odds with each other.
One option was to use the money to hire a symphony orchestra to bring high quality music into the community, and then make it accessible to all, but it would cost a fortune. The other option is to say that this is unnecessary and a waste of money, so we will use the money to buy some simple audio equipment and then enable the older men and women to dance in the community squares. People are not interested in listening to those elegant symphonies either, they just want to sing "Little Apple". In the democratic voting session, the proposal to sing "Little Apple" overwhelmingly eliminated the proposal to listen to symphonic music. In a sense, then, singing "Little Apple" instead of listening to the symphony reflects the maximization of the interests of the ****same people.
You might say that if you're a Bianchinist. But Mill, on the other hand, suggests some corrections to traditional utilitarianism. Mill's view is that you have to think about pleasure not just in terms of quantity, but in terms of the relationship between quantity and quality. Listening to a high class symphony is a high class pleasure, and singing "Little Apple" is a low class pleasure, so a little bit of someone's pleasure is worth 20 of yours.
And in terms of the long-term interests of the society, you're still going to listen to a high class symphony. Of course this raises the question, what makes you say that something elegant is good is good? What makes you say that the pleasure I get from listening to a symphony alone is better than the pleasure I get from 20 people singing "Little Apple"? What is the relationship between quantitative calculations? Here it becomes a matter of public opinion and public opinion.
This case illustrates that there is a great deal of disagreement among different social classes and different cultural groups about the long-term interests of society. We can imagine that in a multicultural society like the United States, this culture can be quite alarming.
For example, in Chinese American families, as long as the mom and dad have money, they try to use that money to pay for their children's college education, and try to get their children to carry as little student loan money as possible, which a lot of people in the United States have to carry in order to go to college. In white families, even if the parents have some money, they are not willing to give it directly to their children, and let their children go to college on their own with student loans. This is because in the Chinese family's view, the long-term interest of the whole ****ing community is our collective interest. Whereas in the view of white families, the overall interest of the entire ****some, such as a family, is embodied as the sum of the parents' immediate interests and the children's immediate interests. Their timeline is relatively short and they think more about the sum of the present interests. So in the Chinese family's mindset, we are much more enthusiastic about this long-term investment in education, which is not the case with the white mindset.
So which is right and which is wrong? Can utilitarianism shed a kind of light on these questions? That's a big question too, and note that this question still draws from within Machiavellianism, because Machiavellianism's **** and doctrinaire orientation is precisely to highlight the best interests of the entire ****-sibling as the final pointer.
Well, all this trouble above triggers an even more radical revisionary program of Machiavellian thought, and what is this program? It's that such a program would presuppose that all men are equal, and would settle each man's quest for freedom within such a normative framework. You can do this if you want to, and he can do that if he wants to, as long as they are not in anyone's way. So what is such a frame of mind? It is the frame of mind of Kant's philosophy, and that is what we are going to talk about in the following section.
Machiavellianism, embodied in our real life, the negative side is utilitarianism, the positive side is to look at the goal, everything to achieve the goal as a criterion. Therefore, if the use and interpretation of Machiavellianism, I think we should introduce Aristotle's idea of the middle way, specific problems and specific analysis, specific qualities and specific applications. On the contrary, I am afraid that people with poor qualities will use Machiavellianism or have such a personality, because there will be no bottom line for people to marvel at. Personally, I still think some Machiavellianism is needed, so that it is easier to achieve the goal, but also differentiate between different people with different ways, because some people may not really be suitable to waste time on them.
So, Machiavellian ideas may have a lot of benefits if they fall on people with guaranteed character. Because in life but people with good character are instead prone to become meat on the case, too unprincipled and too concerned with the persona of the good guy ......