Mach the Knife
24th February 2010
Get your swing ding-a-ling on . . .
. . . Machiavelli adheres forever with persuasion as both description and prescription. To persuade is to be like Mach and to persuade well is to make Machiavelli proud. Machs exhibit no ideological commitments, possess a cynical take on human nature, follow a heartless calculation toward other people, and display a marked disregard for conventional morality. “Git ‘er done, baby” could be the popular homespun saying, properly twisted.
Academic studies of Machiavellianism paint a dark and dangerous portrait. Those infected with Mach qualities find themselves classified as pathological and can read detailed descriptions of themselves in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of deviance for clinicians and insurance companies. And, those who elude capture, but range free in the world like Hannibal Lector between incarcerations, can find themselves quantified in journal reports with Normal Machs who reveal their dark side in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, the Ten Dollar Game, and blasts of white noise.
Of course, it also helps when you invent a Machiavelli that does not exist. If you read the original Mach IV scale that measures the contemporary meaning of Machiavellianism then compare it to to what Machiavelli wrote, you wonder whether the scale authors were academics or poets. The Prince is much more subtle than hammers on the thumb like,
“One should take action only when sure it is morally right,”
“Most people are basically good and kind,”
“Honesty is the best policy in all cases,”
“There is no excuse for lying to someone else.”
Certainly anyone who scores High Bad on statements like this is someone to examine carefully for either poison or a bad sense of humor. They might even be crazy. But, persuasive? Manipulative, even?
And while it is good to despise pathology – but, isn’t that a tautology – it is free riding to savage those who save the city from predators. Machiavelli should not be acknowledged as a bastard, but our bastard, but as a deep thinker on the means of survival, success, and succor for all, including those who would carp, criticize, and cavil all the way to a death camp.
Consider from the Dark Source itself, The Prince, with Machiavelli describing the case of the notorious tyrant, Agathocles:
Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory. . . Nevertheless, his barbarous cruelty and inhumanity with infinite wickednesses do not permit him to be celebrated among the most excellent men. What he achieved cannot be attributed either to fortune or to genius.
And, now, a different source, but still Machiavelli’s thought:
“All cities that ever, at any time, have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats, or by the people, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things, or when they are produced, does not maintain them. Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world.”
from “Words to be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money”, in Chief Works and Others [of Machiavelli], trans. Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), v. III, 1439.
Prudence operationalizes itself through power and persuasion. This is pathology? This is dangerous? Even Jesus admonished the Disciples to spread the Gospel, but wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove . . .
. . . or blues out with Mr. Armstrong . . .