It was right to attack Machiavelli’s The Prince for its underlying amorality. The author itself may have agreed. The book is amoral, though it’s not entirely a sure thing whether its amorality was critical or not. Questions on satire aside, there was one basic rule to the book, ‘If you’re going to be a power-hungry bastard, you should at least be an intelligent power-hungry bastard”.
Power, even ruthless Machiavellian power requires rules and laws to function.
The society that Machiavelli lived in was a dysfunctional one. Lord of Minor city-states were unable to secure the lands for their sons so power often fell into the hands of a conniving advisor or a treacherous uncle. Armies were all for hire, and hired Generals frequently backstabbed their employers. Rulers, since they had no heirs, often had no notion of an enduring legacy, and so plundered their population for all they were worth. The problem wasn’t merely that people were amoral, but that they were amoral in the most dysfunctional, petty, and stupid ways possible.
The situation is familiar if you look at modern politics.
The current modern-day Covid Regime doesn’t obey the laws of rational power like you find in The Prince. Instead, it acts a lot more like the politics of Renaissance Italy. Politicians and Wealthy Businessmen continue to seize more power, without real regard to the long-term consequences. Even to themselves. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every corruption that a set of Elite allows to overtake them, gives an opportunity for political backslash.
I’m of such a divided mind. On one hand, I hate our political elite. As I see them rack up mistake after mistake, I can’t help but laugh a bit and say ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you’. On the other hand, the forces that they’re going to unleash are not likely to be stable either. A lot of people could die.
So a part of me wants to entreat them. ‘Please you insufferable fools, stop this madness. But they won’t. It’s all ridiculous though. 2008 was minor compared to the devastation of Covid, and 2008 gave us a Trump, Bernie, and a resurgence in twentieth-century illiberal ideologies. There will be a backlash to Covid as well. And it will be terrible.
With Omicron they’ve stopped even pretending that there’s an end date to this.
All of this is senseless. It’s not based on real calculation. It’s based on emotion. Somehow, the powers that be think they can use Covid as a tool to put all of the genies that 2008 unleashed back in the bottle, they fail to realize that they’re setting the stage for something far worse than 2008.
Do I care at this point? I don’t know if there’s much use caring. 2008 was the end of the long 90s. The so-called end of history. The Covid Era will be a much bigger punch. It will be the end of the long 60s. The end of the era of equality and justice for all. The end of the Post World War II order as the supremacy of Liberal Democracy as an idea will come under an attack it will not recover from. The time to change those trends was yesterday.
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