Politics of People – Not Subjects, Composing, 23/05/2017

There's a politics of the state and a politics of the people. Ironically, politics of the state is a lot more personal than politics of the people, even though the latter is where the people live.

The politics of authority.

This post will be a more literal Composing than usual. I’m literally playing with the ideas and even some of the phrases that will make up the Utopias manuscript. In conceptual writing – you could call it pure philosophy – you often have to take a lot of passes at your argument to find the precise words. So here’s an early pass.

I got started thinking about this in reaction to that essay I came across. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction method applied to the concept of power that’s fundamental to every analysis of of International Relations theory. Pretty straightforward.

A good challenge to the dogma, but there’s no sense of where to go from there. There’s nowhere to go that doesn’t look suspiciously vulnerable to the same kind of attack. Because there isn’t.

Instead, keep your eye on the real differences. Thomas Mercier asked how Machiavelli could be considered an ontologist, even though he never used the word. It’s because Machiavelli described the human world as the power of the people.

He spoke of ancient and modern politics, but in terms of individuals’ desires living in communities. He analyzed them in terms of how their public moral beliefs, expectations of their leaders, expectations about what share they should have in leadership. The feedback loops among these communities and the institutions through which they govern themselves.

The politics of the people. Symbols, of course.

That’s a politics of force – the material power of a society is in the jostling action of free people all conditioning each other’s activity, as they each slam into walls around them more durable than almost anything they’ve known. Or at least it feels like it when you hit them.

The politics of the people.

So what is the politics of the state? Well, IR seems to provide a great expression. It’s the politics of power, and power as the capacity and ability to command. The politics of law, enforcement, and obedience.

Politics as sovereignty – space where your command is absolute, or at least so unquestioned as to be taken for granted. The state has this space over its borders, enforced with legitimate violence. Authority is violence that has been authorized. The uniform and the badge.

The lawgiver as comprehensive, total command. But not just the state. The individual is a sovereign too – a person’s rights are their absolute powers within the borders of their world. Powers where no other person or authority can legitimately force me to compel, areas where I am the only legitimate compulsion.

I'm inspired quite a lot by Deleuze and Guattari, whose work together
was a groundbreaking masterwork in political ontology. The tradition
shouldn't be loyal to them by following all their terminology. Their
direction to us was clear – "You've read ours. You know how to do it.
Now write your own."

We call them freedom only because we think of them as territory that must be staked, an inviolable border never up for negotiation. When we think of power as sovereignty of command, all politics reduce to competing claims for command. Negotiated to create contracts called constitutions, charters, legislation, and regulations.

Social contracts, by which we subject ourselves to authorities, each among the other.

That’s the politics of the state.

We’re very familiar with that. Now, the task for Utopias – take a really good shot at figuring out what a politics of the people would look like in real life. It'll be a work of political ontology.

Don’t Forget the Black Jew III: Looking Back, Research Time, 19/05/2017

The last two posts have been cracks at figuring out how to relate what I want to do with Jacques Derrida’s ideas to what I want to do with Machiavelli’s. Derrida developed destructive powers for philosophy, but their aim wasn’t the indiscriminate violence that deconstructionists apply them.

Derrida wanted to destroy, in the most profound way possible, the mainstream tradition of philosophy as the only set of ideas that mattered. He fundamentally concentrated, in the early years of his career, on those destructive powers. This was deconstruction.

He wanted to replace the metaphysics of presence, being, and the sovereign subject with a philosophy focussed around differentiation, change, and becoming. That’s why he developed the concept of differance.

If you know anything about the general shape of Derrida scholarship, then you know that differance was largely a failure as a positive philosophy. Derrida scholars spend their major debates over their complicated and divergent conceptions of what differance could be.

If Derrida could have known how he'd be
received and remembered, would he have
written what he did, the way he did?

Truth is, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were best of that whole school of thinkers surrounding Paris VIII University in the 1970s, when it came to building a positive, complex, useful metaphysics of becoming.

When I read Mercier’s paper, an interesting line stuck out for me (among many). He referred to the recent radical democrats (Antonio Negri, among other lower-profile scholars) creating a tradition of radical materialist politics in the modern period.

That tradition starts with Machiavelli and Spinoza, picks up steam with Marx and Nietzsche, then continues in the explosion of radical democrat ideas among Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Sartre, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Negri, and others in their crew.

Mercier seems to think that the Machiavellian roots of this tradition were a bit of a reach – Niccolò never described himself as an ontologist. But his critique forgets that a tradition is created retroactively. So what does this retroactive tradition achieve?

Here’s the point as I’ve been able to distill it so far. It follows from some of the reflections about subjectivity in the last post.

The politics of sovereignty conceives political activity as a matter of battling subjectivities. You can’t have sovereignty without a sovereign, of course, a law-giving voice. Humanity’s world is a matter of these voices fighting to dominate over each other.

The radical democrat philosophers of the last 60 or so years have picked out Machiavelli as a thinker of the earliest time of modernity, who articulated an alternative.

Machiavelli found a vision of democracy that conceived of politics as a collision of forces. People come together in communities driven by their desires – and those desires are shaped by the moral beliefs flowing around their families and societies.

Human society is fundamentally a product whose shapes emerge from countless collisions and conflicts among people, organizations, institutions, and ecologies. That’s what an ontology of forces is – to answer Mercier’s question in that paper about a complex and concrete concept of force.

More about this next week.

What a People Are Ready For, Research Time, 16/05/2017

Here's another troubling parallel from Machiavelli’s writings to our own time. Late in Book III of the Discourses on Livy, he talks about what kinds of government are best for different cultural characters.

It’s a pretty common refrain in his writing, generally. But I’m thinking of one of his returns to this question produced a very disturbing answer. He asks what kind of leadership is suited to free people, and what’s suited for a subject, beaten-down people.

Free people make up a population who chafe against any authoritarian attempt to control them. Such people live by norms of free expression, free association, mutual respect, and dedication to the public good.

They need a government that respects them. A free people won’t want to be ordered around by authorities – at least not without good reason.

I never want to live in a society where I have to act as though
someone like Bashar Assad would be my potential boss. Worse
even than that is something even more horrible – a mind-set
that takes such a possibility as something utterly ordinary.

Free people won’t revolt against paying any taxes at all, for example. At least not free people who have the robust dedication to the public good that Machiavelli described as the popular attitude of Republican Rome. It’s a very current example today, because there’s such a powerful American movement for a flavour of libertarian philosophy that seeks to shrink the entire state to almost nothing in the name of freedom.

That's not what I mean. I mean that a free people in this sense will gladly go along with the orders of their government if the government is explicitly answerable to them and shares the same zeal for the public good.

So far so wonderful. Naturally, it all teeters on the edge of collapse.

Remember that Machiavelli conceives of human societies as having a life cycle. Societies with the best starting and development conditions for the best human life will be fantastic places. For a while anyway. But all societies grow corrupt – small inequalities interact to magnify each other until we live in an oligarchy.

Machiavelli argues that a subject people are best suited to a tyrannical government. They have no devotion to the public good, to the betterment of their community. They’re power-hungry would-be killers – a subject people are a society of thieves.

Those thieves don’t need a government that answers to them. If the government answered to a society like that, it would turn into a kleptocracy. The seats of government would be occupied by people dedicated to raiding the treasury and enriching themselves through backroom deals with powerful businessmen.

That doesn’t sound familiar to anyone today, does it?

And as far as Machiavelli knows, a society at that point of degradation won’t be able to heal itself from a state like that without a complete renewal. It would be a wholly new society, having transformed itself so radically to change from a corrupt oligarchy to a society of free people. So what’s the hope for us?

There’s a curious comment in that chapter. Machiavelli writes that such oligarchies – dens of hundreds of thousands or even millions and billions of thieves – are prone to revolution as the public grows disgusted with their tyrants.

In that revolution, maybe renewal can be found. You can make a whole new society.

A Gift For Monstrous Men, Research Time, 11/05/2017

Here’s an analysis from Machiavelli that has some troubling relevance for 2017, as if we needed to be troubled any more than we are already.

In yesterday’s slightly rambling post, I commented on a couple of chapters from Book II of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It was about how the growth of oligarchy and the corruption of institutions wrecked the people’s faith in democracy.

Yet their freedoms to speak and organize still existed, allowing the faithless and resentful to organize a full overthrow of the democratic institutions they felt were worthless. That was disturbing enough because of how similar the political and social situation in the United States today is to that five century old description.

This is Donald Trump with his friend and longtime business partner,
Uzbek billionaire Lev Leviev, a diamond magnate who rose to the top
of the business class of an autocratic police state dominated by a single
ruthless man. Donald would be envious.

There's a set of chapters in Book III that I find even more disturbing when I watch the open kleptocracy of the Trump family.

Machiavelli writes that a kind, virtuous person dedicated to the public good in their work and life can only thrive in particular circumstances. So what kind of society lets such a good, generous person rise to the top? Where do the nice folks finish first?

Your society has to be dominated by values of equality, respect for everyone, and the fair submission to the rule of law. Not only must we profess that, we actually have to live by those values.

The most successful businesses are the ones who never cheat or cut corners, and provide services and goods that are primarily benefiting society. We have to live diligently, frugal but with an aesthetic sense to appreciate fine things. No one is greedy and no one cheats.

Police and security forces are never out of line, never too rough, always serving and protecting all people equally. No racial biases (conscious or not), no systematic pressures on minorities, no corruption, no allowing solidarity among cops to defend the violent or greedy. Everyone answers to the law not because it’s powerful, but because it’s just.

As I describe this, I find it very hard to believe that such a society has existed for centuries. Machiavelli describes Republican Rome in those terms, but even there, I doubt such harmony was ever universal.

Such a society is utterly unrealistic, but that near-impossibility is the only kind of community where our ethics would actually be adequate to the world. Where doing the right thing always resulted in your benefit, fame, and wealth.

But even the money didn’t matter! Everyone considers more income than would make you and your family pleasantly comfortable utterly unfair and gauche. We would all actually be satisfied with enough to live a nice life, and spend our excess wealth and power on the public good. That would bring everyone happiness.

As a society corrupts itself, says Machiavelli, such virtuous people dedicated to public good find it more difficult to thrive. It’s a downward spiral from the first misstep to ruin. Virtuous, good people have more trouble in society the more greedy people surround them. The greedy’s name for the good is the sucker.

The more corrupt, monstrous men dominate and hold powerful positions in a society, the more public life will be a gift to the monstrous.

A Problem That’s Gone Unsolved for 500 Years, Research Time, 10/05/2017

Thinking about democracy these days brings up its paradoxes. Try googling the phrase ‘paradox of democracy,’ and you’ll find a ton of different paradoxes. Social and institutional forces in a tension that threatened to pull the whole edifice of the country down around its knees.

Something essential will disappear from human civilization if democratic values and governance disappears again. There are good signs – Canada’s still robust multiculturalism, for example.

Look at South Korea’s election yesterday! Their democracy was under its greatest threat over this year, under Park Geun Hye’s corrupt administration. The daughter of the Republic of Korea’s most brutal dictator, in the thrall of the same family of demented gurus.

The new President of the Republic of Korea on the night of his election
victory. Moon Jae In's victory, to me, signalled the idealism that still
exists in South Korea's people for democracy, freedom, and peace,
despite the deathly serious problems the country faces. Hell, Korea
faces its literal near-extinction as a society and people through the
prospect of a short-range nuclear war. But they weren't so afraid of
this that they turned to authoritarian tactics in the name of security,
like the people of one of the world's oldest democratic societies.

Her impeachment and imprisonment led to an embrace of democratic idealism, a rejection of the ineffective steel eyes of the last ten years of hawkish leadership. Moon Jae In, and the new tradition of Korea’s Democratic Party, have the ideal of peace on the peninsula at heart. They’re pragmatists, but let that ideal govern their approach.

That stance earns the name ‘democratic.’

One paradox that jumped out at me reading Machiavelli is the paradox of tolerance. The snarkiest but sadly in-progress tension ripping at democratic values in the West. We’re facing a youth subculture of disaffected, resentful racist, sexist, gleefully disgusting punks who demand to scream their bile as an expression of absolute free speech.

Milo might have been fired, but taking out a figurehead won’t crush a whole cultural movement.

The question of tolerance is an old one. Must a democracy, in the name of universal freedom and tolerance, also tolerate the free expression of advocacy to end democracy?

Karl Popper’s answer was no. And we lean back on the idea in The Open Society and Its Enemies as a defence. But that reference alone doesn’t stop the subculture. That community continues to fester and grow.

It’s a serious threat to our optimism that this idea has existed since Machiavelli’s time. He deals with this when he talks about some of the reasons why democracies collapse.

A democratic government, even the city-states in Machiavelli’s time, were more vulnerable in some ways than the autocratic cities with their princes and military rulers. Democratic government is open – there is always free speech, freedom of association and thought.

The leaders and influencers in the world's older democracies, in
growing numbers, reject democratic methods and ideals in their
governance and missions. Most disturbing about reading the
Discourses on Livy is Machiavelli's idea that the erosion of
democracy and freedom is a natural process in the development
of human societies. For someone raised in an atmosphere of
modernist optimism, it's difficult to face the fatalism of a more
medieval mind.

So that includes the freedom to advocate the end of democracy, and plot to overthrow it. You will always find discontents with the order of things. Sometimes, those discontents are democrats themselves, wanting a more free society. Those are the good ones.

But you can definitely have discontents and malcontents enraged at the freedom of people around them. That was Machiavelli’s problem just as it seems now to be ours.

Yet Machiavelli’s problem was just a little different. Malcontents against democracy didn’t arise in isolation from wider events. The societies that developed anti-democratic movements arose when wealth and power consolidated enough to turn a government into a practical oligarchy. Only a few powerful people really had effective power over the state.

That betrayal of our institutions was the leading edge. There wasn’t yet enough free speech oppression to shut down all criticism. So a generation arises in the wake of democratic institutions having been corrupted, but which still has their personal freedoms.

But they’ve come to associate their institutions – still democratic in name – with corruption and opposition to the people’s freedom. That hypocrisy of the democratic name and its oligarchical control drives the hatred of democracy.

So, Niccolò, how do we combat this self-destructive social trend? . . . . . . . Oh, you mean we don’t? This is just part of the natural causes of a democratic society’s death?

Okay, you’re a very insightful doctor when it comes to diagnoses. But you’re no help at all with cures. Unless I really am asking to cure a natural cause of death.

Renewed? Yes You Could Say We Need to Be Renewed, Research Time, 05/05/2017

Because sometimes, I want to start a more meditative post about
strange and troubling political philosophy with a Doctor Who
reference. "Renewed? Have I? That's it, I've been renewed."

Enough confessionals. I’m back to cracking sidelong jokes about Doctor Who while I talk about extremely weird political philosophy.

These days, most political philosophy is about principles, right, and law. It all exists along this one plane of moral ideas about how society should be. All well and good, and some fantastic ideas come out of that way of talking about political existence.

But what could we learn from another approach? Political philosophy from an ontological approach. Machiavelli does that. I mean, he’s writing an analysis of a historical text, drawing pragmatic and idealistic political principles and guides from ancient Roman and contemporary Italian examples.

That's what it says on the tin. But the concepts he develops in doing so aren’t so much about principles and reasons for actions. The most innovative concepts in Machiavelli’s political guidebooks are of social solidarity and patriotism not as a principles, but as a force.

It’s easy to slip into what sounds like fascist territory. Machiavelli slips like that occasionally. That’s what separates a good reader from a sloppy one – a sloppy one will see the slip as the truth. A good reader keeps in mind the scope of the whole book, so knows a truth from a slip.

He writes that a good leader for a community will be “devoted to antiquity.”* It definitely sounds a lot like a seductive Golden Age that only ever existed in xenophobic fever dreams of a pure and potent society.

* Chapter 2.39, page 239 of my beaten up second-hand Oxford paperback.

But remember what Machiavelli spends the entire Discourses on Livy doing. He recalls and analyzes antiquity – it’s his own devotion to it. In antiquity, he finds the principles of a sustainable, empowering, democratic solidarity, which inspires his devotion.

He describes that solidarity as a force – the physical power of personalities dedicating themselves to the health and happiness of their entire community. The patriotism that unites a community in real and constant acts of mutual devotion to each other’s good and the public good.

But that force’s power wanes over time, for a huge variety of causes. Turmoil from war, factionalism growing bitter in the community, growing inequality that divides a society between oligarchs and those without dignity. A society like that is decadent.

Appropriate to read Machiavelli while that paragraph basically describes most of human civilization. So a pretty pertinent question is how we get ourselves out of this mess. It won’t be easy. The environmentalist slogan applies just as well to planetwide decadence.

The original Founding Father James Madison (far left).

The answer is, broadly speaking, renewal. That’s what Machiavelli means by devotion to antiquity. It’s what the lawyers of our time should properly mean by “originalism.” Not that grotesquely pious over-literalism about a country’s constitution. I mean the time when the forces of constructive patriotism that first brought your society together.

What James Madison called the one time Americans** from all over the country actually managed to agree on something tremendously important.

** Yeah, I know. Just the white ones. But you can’t even get all the white people in a society to come together anymore. Thank God.

How exactly do you go about renewing that energy of free, spontaneous, active solidarity? Machiavelli doesn’t have much of an idea, as far as I can tell. Neither do I, of course.

But part of what I want to do through writing, publishing, and promoting Utopias over the next few years is crawling close to a few answers.

To Be Incorruptible VI: Pushing Democracy’s Limits, Composing, 26/04/2017

This set of six posts turned out to be pretty important for my thinking as I put together the outline of Utopias. So I thought I'd lay out the basics of the idea and the contents to go back through.

One: Virtues of Free People
Two: Deliberation
Three: Virtues for the Public
Four: Introducing Patriotism
Five: Violence for Refuge
• • •
In Machiavelli’s time, democratic patriotism was limited to the walls of a city. It was a spirit that grew from within a community’s bonds of familiarity as an extended family.

The patriotism of the free in Renaissance and Medieval Italy is that of a tribe ruled by its members – the guilds and assemblies were literally the voice of the people. But if you weren’t already a member of that community, you were an interloper. If you were Venetian or Milanese, Florence could never be your home.

Refugees from a natural disaster had no hope of receiving refuge from a neighbouring country. We’re close to returning to that morality today, since the scale of the refugee crisis has overwhelmed so many of Europe’s welfare state institutions.

Not to mention that European cultures haven’t come nearly as close as they should to eradicating their own racism.

But there remains much in Machiavelli’s thinking about how to guard against corruption in our society. Even as, in the pressure of our globally networked community, we need to grow beyond the small horizons of his culture’s communitarian values.

Patriotic immigration is possible, and its successes – though not perfect – demonstrate that an open community built on the creative power of diversity is stronger than a homogeneous, closed one.

I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius:
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat:
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

I’m thinking of modern southern Ontario, and what seems to be the case in Swedish cities like Malmö and Stockholm. An open city with a variety of people can call on more social networks, powers, ideas, and intelligences for public service. Democratic patriotism is the spirit of building a community from differences.

Machiavelli wrote that a society of free people – free from tyranny, governing its affairs through open offices and moralities of universal respect – is the strongest bulwark against corruption. Against the social, political, and institutional rot that collapses a society into tyranny and chaos.

A successfully free society has institutions devoted to protecting the freedom and dignity of its people. A free people are devoted to these institutions, and has a strong civil society encouraging people throughout their lives to stand up for their dignity.

Such a society grows their population through patriotic immigration – integrating newcomers by building the society together, negotiating their dignity in good faith with all. A free society treats its neighbouring societies with a parallel respect – such a state doesn’t make enemies, but allies and partners.

A free society has, as its fundamental political principle, that no one be subject to the will of any other, except to help them develop each other’s dignity and capacity to live a good life. There are no hermits or egotists – no jerks – but a society of friends.

A deeply, profoundly free people would be devoted to the public good to such a degree that even the super-rich of society would give almost all their fortune to the public treasury. They’d give it willingly, happily, knowing that it would benefit their compatriots.

None of this “taxation is theft.” I’m talking about there not being a need to tax at all because people will give of their own spare fortunes to help others. That’s the ideal of a free society.

It sounds utterly impossible. But it seems a society which genuinely and universally held to this principle in all their thoughts, hearts, and souls, would be a truly incorruptible society.

Will you be a pessimist? How can you not?

To Be Incorruptible V: If You’ve No Shelter You’ll Have No Peace, Research Time, 25/04/2017

Continued from previous . . . I find a lot that’s valuable in Machiavelli. But there are limits, of course. Someone like him writing in the 1530s is in a very different historical position than someone like me writing in the 2010s.

I mean, the reasons why are obvious, of course. But I want to call attention to one reason in particular – it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of good ideas in the same tradition of materialist radical democracy in the intervening five centuries.

However much I value Machiavelli’s concept of patriotism as devotion to the public good of your community, other questions related to the nature of the community generate troubling answers. Not a reason for rejecting Machiavelli as a whole, but a reason to be careful with how his thought might influence you.

Here’s a serious problem of the 2010s that Machiavelli’s writings can’t break through – the boundaries of a community. Globally, there’s a near-universal political crisis over the nature of the border.

I draw a sword against conspirators;
When think you that the sword goes up again?
Never, till Caesar's three and thirty wounds
Be well avenged; or till another Caesar
Have added slaughter to the sword of traitors.

For decades, we’ve been troubled over the dangers that come from borders in trade, and investment fall away. The erosion of borders in these cases has encouraged explosive social problems as terrible inequalities entrench themselves.

The most intense iteration of border erosion facing the West is state attempts to control the movement of people. Most in our faces is the refugee crisis – literally millions fleeing horrifying wars and oppression across North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Many crowd into slums and makeshift camps like the squalid tent cities at Calais.

I go to Machiavelli thinking there might be an answer to this question in his book on the strengths and safety valves of democratic society. I don’t find the answers I want. Machiavelli, living in a time of wars and invasions, sees in the movement of desperate people only more invasion, violence, and war that desperation has driven to extremes.

Most often, in his era and in the time of Republican Rome, Machiavelli encounters refugees as literal invading armies. If some natural disaster rendered a city-state unliveable, its leaders and people would invade another country’s territory and set themselves up.

War was the only response to what we’d today call a humanitarian crisis. Yet he does describe a material root of the erosion of human capacities for kindness as well as our state borders.

Returning to his golden age of Republican Rome, Machiavelli sees the root of the fear of refugees in what – during that ancient era – were the most common causes of whole cities uprooting themselves.

Resource wars. A drought would ruin a harvest, or a flood would wreck too much farmland, and a city wouldn’t have the material to support itself. All they could do was invade their neighbours and hope to plunder enough loot to sustain themselves.

A battle over scarce resources, made more scarce by massive disasters, would bring ordinarily peaceful cities into deadly conflict. Their means of survival itself was at stake. Life was inescapably fragile. Risk was great, and likely perceived to be greater in the moment.

If there isn’t enough to keep everyone alive, our peaceful ideals can all too easily be pinched into nothing. A flame between two calloused fingers.

It was a catastrophic drought in the late 2000s that drove Syria into upheaval. A time when, in a state with tight borders, there was no longer enough to keep everyone alive and prosperous.

To Be Incorruptible IV: Directions of Force, Jamming, 21/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, you can find a positive, progressive concept of patriotism – knowledgeable devotion to work for the public good of your community and country.

This patriotism of the public good is the patriotism that progressives need to take back from the reactionary and nationalist forces who seem to have a monopoly on patriotism, at least when it comes to public relations. For most of my adult life, folks on the left have been tarred as anti-patriotic.

I came of age at a time when Americans and many Canadians had been overcome with hysteria after the September 11 attacks. We think back on this era with kitsch like Come From Away now, but at the time, a culture of 300,000,000 people were thrown into mass hysteria and rage.

Patriotism was a blunt instrument of intimidation and contempt swung blindly around the Earth’s furniture smashing the architecture of our fragile civilization. It justified the toppling of governments – however grotesque those governments were – and unleashing a never-ending war in the Middle East.

Patriotism was a personality-consuming devotion to country that justified the rapid inflation of the surveillance state. So many patriotic Americans believed the military could do no wrong.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.

As a result, there’s enough military equipment trickling down to police forces that every county with more than four cows got its own squadron of armoured personnel carriers, mortar-proof flak jackets, and enough crowd control gear to evacuate downtown Chicago at rush hour.

Patriotism today means that anyone who believes that maybe we should step back from militarizing your own country is a traitor. Patriotism is all-too-often becoming a victim of nationalism. Less than two decades after America’s most recent great trauma, love of country is flowering into hatred of Muslims, Hispanics, and African-Americans.

Machiavelli is a key figure in the tradition of Western thought that gives us a patriotic antidote to this hellmouth.

His patriotism is distinctly minoritarian* – punching up for your own power. Rather like the original American revolution, actually. Machiavelli’s patriotism is the spirit of revolt against oppression or control. It’s the spirit of the colony becoming a country, of a slave breaking her chains. The spirit of a new beginning.

* I’m saying this to emphasize Machiavelli’s connection with modern radical democrats, particularly Gilles Deleuze’s vocab, a radical democratic vision of reality itself. An ontology for free spirits.

Machiavelli’s patriotism is the creative energy of a new society coming to consciousness as they carve out a niche for themselves in a world of long-established powers. It’s national self-consciousness of a shared desire for freedom.

Patriotism is the desire that others respect and recognize your community as an equal. It’s the same drive as an individual human’s desire to be an equal in her society – only articulated on a cultural scale.

It’s an antidote, for sure. But it has its own problems.

To Be Incorruptible III: Our Best Wishes in One Voice, Research Time, 20/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Before you can know if an institution’s structure and rules will lead people to make the best decisions, you have to know what kinds of decisions would be the best.

It sounds like I’m moving in circles. I’m not. I’m looking for presuppositions. The questions that need an answer if you’re going to develop a clear answer to the question you asked in the first place. So what makes a decision good for a community?

This is a question of the common good of a community. Well, what constitutes that common good depends on how we understand good. Are we thinking like a typical utilitarian? Not when we read Machiavelli. Nowhere in the Discourses on Livy does he perform the callous mathematics of a too-simple utilitarian.

His examples of noble behaviour discuss plenty of sacrifices. He praises, in multiple places, the decision of a Roman republican ruler executing his own sons when their actions and personal ambitions put the republic at risk of invasion or tyranny. Machiavelli is no stranger to cruelty to save the common good.

But this isn’t an everyday cruelty. The libertarian right is today’s most popularly powerful philosophy of freedom thanks to modern think tank networks. Think of how they and their founder philosophers think of cruelty in the name of the common good.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

For a libertarian, cruelty in the name of the common good is described with images of a Stalinist omnipresent communist state. Bureaucratic arms control whole industries, billions and trillions of dollars worth of people’s property is expropriated and collectivized. Even on a less grandiose scale, the act of collecting taxes is akin to theft.

This isn’t the kind of common good Machiavelli talks about when he describes the cruelty of necessary sacrifices. The sacrifices of Roman and Italian republicans are rare – they occur only at times of domestic instability, coups, wars, invasions from imperial war machines.

The common or public good, as Machiavelli describes it throughout the Discourses, is for everyone in society to stand before each other in equal dignity. Now, this does require some financial levelling. He describes the corrosive effect on society of too large a class of the idle rich.

These are people whose riches are so great that they encourage laziness and self-absorption. The super-rich are isolated from any association with anyone other than those they employ to serve them. Their money even isolates them from the need to be kind to others. Even the smallest altruism required for minimal participation in civic life disgusts them.

Such people are socially cancerous – their personalities degrade and insult the dignity of everyone around them. The only goods that matter to the idle rich are private goods, that which makes the rich richer. “It is not the private good but the common good that makes cities great.” That’s in Book Two, Chapter 2.

Contrast the private, egomaniacal goods that the idle rich seek with the public goods that democratic citizens seek – You see more clearly what the public good is.

Whatever the situation of your community, whatever problems you face in your economy, society, infrastructure, whatever – If you think with altruism and work together with your neighbours and compatriots, you’ll understand the public good and work toward it.

That altruism is the expression of the best patriotism. As long as altruism is at the heart of community action, you’ll fend off corruption and corrosion.

If you think only of your own personal good and see others only as means to your advancement, enrichment, prestige, and pleasure . . . The word you’re looking for is ‘tyrant.’

Now, this is fine for a clearly defined community. But at the borders, who is and isn't your compatriot gets slippery.

To Be Incorruptible II: Talking and Talking, Research Time, 19/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . You have to laugh. I can barely keep from laughing myself when I say it. To say that democratic institutions encourage trust among people seems ridiculous to someone living in 2017.

Democracy across the West is under siege from nationalists – UKIP and Brexit, Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the Breitbart wing of Donald Trump’s combover.

Nationalists who profoundly distrust everyone who thinks differently from themselves – libtards, SJWs, etc. Conservatives so ideological, they prefer making their own country a functional one-party state to any compromise in running things.

There are many causes for why our society has become, in Machiavelli’s words, so corrupt. I’m going to get to all of those. Reading the Discourses on Livy today is like a diagnosis of our own time in someone else’s history. The institutions of his world were so different, but share so much with our time in the causes of their collapse.

I have, when you have heard what I can say:
And know it now: the senate have concluded
To give this day a crown to mighty Caesar.

One thing at a time.

How would democratic institutions engender trust? Contrast the republican assemblies and elected offices of 1530s Italy with their rivals – absolute monarchies. In a monarchy, a single person is the seat of all state power, so access to the prince is the only way to take part in government.

Not many people can occupy that space – not much space around one man. So only a few people ever make policy and decisions. There are no checks on their power, virtually no time between a command and an order followed. Whole armies can move on the word of an individual. The word could be a solemn choice. Could be a whim.

That’s serious instability. The quick time between command and action makes a dictatorship look stable and strong. But commands could be, and too often are, whims. A command affecting millions requires a small gesture, same as a reversal affecting millions more.

Your life could be upended at any moment, all on the word of a king. You’re always on guard, as if anyone around you could become the enemy, as if you could be declared an enemy yourself. A tailor or a merchant could find himself a soldier or a prisoner as casually as we get our electric bills.

In such a regime, your own fear and anxiety obliterates the difference between soldier, prisoner, and citizen.

There’s lots of room in a parliament, though. Lots of perspectives, attitudes, personalities. Some are organized into political parties, some political parties can barely organize themselves. In Machiavelli’s day, city-state republics like Florence were ruled by the assemblies and elected leaders of workers’ guilds.

All these different people and groups must have their hands in the decision process of the government. The institutions of the state put all these different people in charge of the decision process. It’s literally their jobs.

This slows down the decision process immensely. Legislation, policy, governance activities – all require the input of so many people and offices that it takes a long time to get stuff done. Government may appear decadent and impotent.

Democracy is remarkably stable as a government because it takes so much time to get things done. Everyone – legislators, officials, citizens – can all deliberate and debate on matters of state. So we can at least do our best to understand the effects of everything we do. Governance by whim is practically impossible.

Democracy institutionalizes solemn, patient decision making in government because it forces so many people to be part of the decision process. But will they always make the best decisions?

To Be Incorruptible I: The Virtues of Free People, Composing, 18/04/2017

The series of posts I’m starting now is very important to my thought process putting together Utopias the book. I’ll be writing about an answer to the core question of utopian political thinking that I found reading Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.

I’m considering utopian thought at three scales. The most broad scale of thinking, you can call the problem: Figuring out the relationships of our ideals with real-world action, and what of those relationships are best for democratic life.

Make your thinking a little more concrete and it becomes a question. You’re focussing the problem around a particular inquiry. Reading and reacting to Machiavelli’s thinking, that question is: How can we change human nature so that no one will ever be corrupt again?

The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent.

Increase the concreteness of your thinking one more time. Now you have a hypothesis, a detailed argument responding to that question, an answer. Identify an answer to that question that Machiavelli offers in the Discourses.

I'm going to talk about one answer that he returns to at different points in that book – institutions that engender trust in each other throughout the community, a love of freedom, and a devotion to the public good.

Machiavelli considers those three values to be most important for maintaining a free society. People who hold fast to these values will always be virtuous people, whose lives will include a devotion to public service that strengthens their community.

Since he understands corruption inescapable in life, Machiavelli also concludes that these values won’t dominate a society forever. Spoken like a man who’s worked in government for years.

But you can encourage those values to grow in your society, and promote them in daily life. Institutions – basic frameworks of your community life from birth to death – can boost these values so that people will naturally fall toward them.

I’m not talking about the state in a modern sense, but any powerful organization whose structures and actions shape public morality. It’s been churches or shamanic traditions, groups of elders, elected leaders, any propagator of moral ideas, imperatives, and virtues.

Education is only the most obvious of the institutions that propagate values. Here’s one example that Machiavelli makes pretty explicit. I’ll even give you a direct reference this time – Book One, Chapter 59.*

* If you want to read the book, don’t be intimidated by the number of chapters. They average maybe three pages apiece.

If you run your government on democratic processes, it will tend to increase trust in your society. Yes, today this sounds hilariously unrealistic. But the way democratic institutions are supposed to work, it makes sense.

I mean, I’ll tell you tomorrow, because it’s going to take a while to lay all this out. But I promise you, it’ll make sense.

“She Said Hang the Rich!” Research Time, 11/04/2017

We live in an era when inequality has defined the cracks and fault lines in our society. The American government is ruled by plutocrats who campaigned in the name of returning prosperity to the people, and their base is slowly eroding as those promises are revealed for the hypocrisy they always were.

One indelible image of the psychopathy and hatred of society that
consumes the super-rich is the story of Patrick Bateman. It was the
one hit of Bret Easton Ellis' whole career.

American society – Western society more generally, as well as human society around the planet – is under a lot of pressure from social inequality. Leave aside the racializing crimes of genocide like slavery and the forced relocation of indigenous peoples. They’ve left horrendous scars on American culture and character, but I want to talk about one particular vector of inequality today.

That's the vector of the distinction between the very rich and poor. American society produces multibillionaires who behave like entitled pirates whose riches give them the right to buy citizens and the government.

At the same time, it produces people who are driven so far into debt pursuing education and training, or basic medical care. The United States economic system essentially bankrupts its working people as they try to improve or save their lives. Even keeping an even keel too often results in a life of danger, drudgery, and suffering.

Into this social-political shit tornado comes the words of Niccolò Machiavelli, essentially, I told you so. In his philosophical meditations on Roman Republican history and the chaotic Italian politics of his own time, the Discourses on Livy lay out one way* where modern America has gone wrong.

* Of many concurrent, integrated, interdependent ways.

Today's title comes from the lyrics to a song I've been listening to
since I was a little kid, "Somewhere Down the Crazy River" by
Robbie Robertson.

Democratic government, writes Machiavelli, becomes impossible in a society where there are too many rich people. Now, he’s not necessarily talking about those who’ve become rich through building businesses and industries. These are people who are still working hard running enterprises that raise the public good.

No, Machiavelli’s talking about the idle rich. People who live so drenched in wealth that they don’t even have to do any real work. Actually, the problem isn’t just that they refuse to work for a living.

Even more contemptible and destructive to the common good are people whose absurd wealth isolates them from even the need to be reasonably kind to other humans in daily life. The smallest, most inconsequential act of altruism becomes an enraging imposition on their freedom.

Civic life isn’t empowering for these people. They’re enraged at any suggestion that they give anything of themselves for the common good, or that they owe anyone else in society any generosity. These are the attitudes that tend to come from having been raised in the perverse comfort of extreme wealth.

What to do about them? Let’s just say that Machiavelli doesn’t recommend very pleasant ways of removing these spoiled people from society, or from positions where they could endanger society with their piracy.

I think a growing number of folks today can sympathize with that approach.

A Discourse on Manitoba, Composing, 10/04/2017

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It’s a book of commentaries on different events in the history of the Roman Republic, where a concept, principle, ethical guideline, or virtue becomes clear through examining a few examples from ancient Rome or his contemporary northern Italy.

I thought I’d try writing today’s post as a piece of writing in the same style.

I work in political activism and in organizing my local social democratic party, the NDP in my part of southwestern Toronto. So I’m interested in news and developments throughout the party around Canada. Here’s a little discourse, inspired by Machiavelli, on one lesson to be learned for democratic spirits everywhere.

Growing Accustomed to Power Encourages Factionalism and Weakness; Their Only Remedy Is Total Defeat

At a party last night, I met someone from Manitoulin, who told me
that she knows people so broken by their family's experience in
residential schools that they don't even know what indigenous nation
they come from – whether they're Cree, Ojibwe, or Iroquois. Wab
Kinew has come through this generations-long crime against
humanity as a strong, virtuous leader. He has the potential to
restore Manitoba's NDP to greatness, and maybe even begin the
long nation-building process of reconciling indigenous and
settler cultures in Canada, so that we can ask their forgiveness
as a people for our attempt to destroy them.

How the New Democratic Party develops in Manitoba is particularly important to the party as a whole. It’s part of the party’s heartland in the prairies, and the only voice in state government for progressive policies and philosophies.

As a province, Manitoba has a lot of disadvantages. Few industries are there, the economy has never been strong beyond Winnipeg, and many of its indigenous communities – a considerable minority of the population – suffer horribly from the trauma of Canada’s genocide machines of the residential schools.

During their 17 years in power over the provincial government, the NDP achieved a lot to build a more fair and equal society throughout Manitoba. Gary Doer was a wise and moderate premier, designing a more fair tax code to invest in healthcare and education institutions.

Doer’s great virtue was knowing how to consolidate the security of his party’s electoral victory in 1999, making modest yet transformative changes to the government to help Manitobans become more prosperous, defending themselves from economic downturn with government services they could rely on and lowering the tax burden of the poor.

Machiavelli’s analytic frameworks focus on the virtues gained from how you react to where fate has placed you. The roots of Doer’s wisdom were in his experience having taken over the NDP when they were in disarray as a party.

Howard Pawley had presided over a party that had descended into rebellion against him and his cabinet, and resigned in disgrace after an election defeat in 1988. Doer rallied the party members throughout the province, and his growing esteem in the eyes of the people slowly rallied enough of them to win after a decade in opposition.

Doer stepped down as Premier of Manitoba after ten years, a man loved by Manitobans and many more across Canada. Greg Selinger took his place. But Selinger had not been shaped by years of building his reputation through public leadership, nor had any years of rebuilding a party from difficult defeats shaped him.

Selinger had arrived at political prominence in the halls of power themselves. He’d grown accustomed to their comfort.

Greg Selinger was a man who was able to walk into power, and so
never understood how fragile power is when you inherit it from
inside its own halls. He may have won elections, but elections are
battles, just like the clashes of armies Machiavelli described. They're
determined by the virtue of combatants and leaders, but also by
contingent events and chance. An election is an institutional
legitimacy for your access to state power, but it doesn't give you
moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people. That takes politics.

Taking power for granted, he quickly revealed himself to have lost the virtues that his predecessor had gained through years of hard work rebuilding the nobility of the NDP in Manitoba, and building the nobility of his own soul. Selinger had never gained power.

The party membership may have voted for him to be their leader, but he had won the party itself no victories. Selinger became the Premier by designation, not victory over the people. Even those victories he did gain, he gained from the seat of power itself.

Selinger reversed his promise not to raise sales taxes, a decision that not only hurt the poor more than the wealthy; the act itself was a transgression against a vow he’d made to the people. The public coffers now had more funds, but they were raised on the backs of the poor and with hypocritical speech.

Selinger’s broken promise made the people reject him. Sensing their leader’s weakness, factions split the NDP caucus. Theresa Oswald, one of Selinger’s trusted ministers, joined with other party leaders to demand his resignation. But the rebellious faction never spoke of regaining trust with the people, instead framing their rebellion entirely in tactical terms.

Selinger’s popularity was so low, he’d be unable to win another election. They argued in terms of the NDP’s ability to keep power over the state, never about the true source of that power, the love and trust of the people.

That Selinger would lose 2016’s election was obvious, an inescapable fact. Now he’s resigned, and the factions themselves are adrift. Separated from the offices of power, they’ve lost the fuel that fired their faction’s engines.

Gary Doer understood that you only have a right to power when you
have earned it through the genuine trust of the people. That's not the
same as winning an election, even though election victory is the
institutional test to gain state power. Just because you can pass one
test on our peaceful battlefields of electioneering doesn't mean you
have a right to the power you gained. His remarkable actions as a
spokesperson for an enlightened, kind government for Manitoba
as opposition leader and Premier earned him that right, when they
earned him the respect of the people.

Now that the power of state control is farther from their grasp, the leaders of Manitoba’s NDP can now focus on the true task of politics – organizing and rallying the people to win their love and trust.

Wab Kinew is an NDP politician that, to my eyes now, holds the greatest promise for this, since there’s a dedication deep in his heart to forge an entirely new social compact between Manitobans and their state.

He’s a flawed man, but has the potential for greatness because of the idealism and strength of his soul. He’s survived the fires of Canada’s century-long genocide against its indigenous peoples without breaking. Such a person has potential for greatness, and the opportunity to rebuild a party whose fundamental values lie in prosperity and progress for all offers a long path of growing nobility.

Restore virtue to politics and you’ll earn the love of the people, who will join you for transformative acts that will bring prosperity, happiness, healing, and hope to all. This is the message of Machiavelli’s Discourses.

Patriot Acts, Composing, 06/04/2017

I’ve seen the term patriotism misused for such wretched, hypocritical, violent, utterly self-absorbed political stupidity that it’s easy to forget how important it once was.

How has the concept of patriotism been ruined for me? If I went into detail, we’d be here for days.* There’s George W Bush’s Patriot Act. Freedom fries. The dour and dorky monarchism of Stephen Harper’s War of 1812 propaganda. Danny Williams’ ignorant, oil-soaked nationalism. The ongoing trajectory of Trumpist white nationalism.

* Instead of just one day at a time.

There was a time, however, when patriotism was a form of liberation. That was Machiavelli’s time.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Throughout the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli discusses patriotism as the community spirit of a city’s populace. Patriotism is the fundamental social glue of a community. It feels strange to a democratic thinker of the 21st century.

Yet that’s how patriotism does work. He explores the nature of patriotism from a lot of different perspectives throughout the book. Here’s one that I think sets the concept in the most stark, visceral terms. It also helps understand how patriotism can be a force for good, and why it isn’t anymore.

Patriotism, says Machiavelli, is the spirit of devotion common throughout a community, that inspires the members to risk their lives and be prepared to die for their community.

Machiavelli lived his entire life in a long period of war, conquest, and strife in Europe. Italy’s proud principalities and republican cities were constantly under attack from the massive armies of three expanding European states. France, Spain, and Switzerland dwarfed Florence, Genoa, Milan, Torino, and all the others.

That’s the political context where Machiavelli explains the virtue of patriotism. A patriotic people, in this sense, will provide much better troops than the mercenary armies that Italian principalities often hired. Those mercenaries were usually overrun by the superior force of imperial armies.

The Italian cities that could defend themselves drew their armies from their populace, as Republican Rome did. Mercenaries fight to survive a battle and get their paycheck. Patriotic citizens with their backs to the wall are prepared to die to defend the freedom and glory of their country.

Today we have our gangster kleptocracies. Putin, Yanukovich, Manafort,
Kushner, Trump, and in my home country of Newfoundland, Williams.

Patriotism is the vigorous fire in your soul when you stride into battle prepared to die for your people. In the 1530s, it was a virtue. It was required to defend the existence of your city, its culture, its independence from growing empires and gangster kleptocracies like the Borgias and Medicis.

I’ve thought about Machiavelli’s concept of corruption, which he applies to cities, cultures, and countries. But then I contrast today’s perverse, oppressive conception of patriotism with the genuinely liberatory power of patriotism in Machiavelli’s day.

And I wonder, can a concept become corrupt?

Corruption has several meanings in Machiavelli’s thinking. One is the ordinary sense we give to the word today, of a political class defined by bribery, immoral acts, and hypocrisy. But there’s also the sense of decay, the malfunctions of aging, processes that normally give life flying into self-destructive whirlygigs and spirals.

As he uses the word corruption, the two meanings blur together. Not in a sense of confusion, but of being two aspects of the same phenomenon. Corruption is the mortality of a culture. As a society marches generation through generation, the devotion to public good fades away in its most prominent, powerful people and families.

As a people take their freedom for granted, they lose their feelings of brotherhood, see only self-interest where they used to see public good. The children of privilege, if given enough generations, become the arrogant resentment of greed. Gears shudder. Fanbelts fly. Oil drips and drips along the pavement.

Or perhaps, as I quoted John Dewey the other day, the solutions of today simply become the problems of tomorrow. The patriotism needed for survival of small cities against ravenous empires becomes poisonous and violent when expressed with cluster bombs, ICBMs, and sarin gas.

Or are even these ideas two aspects of the same process?

Real Republican Freedom V: Crush the Corrupt, Research Time, 05/04/2017

Continued from previous . . . If all institutions of life are mortal, will inevitably corrupt themselves and decay into tyranny or chaos, then why not give in to despair? The only response to this question is to reframe it.

As corruption grows among the elite of society, the power and freedom
of the people fall into disrepair. The people are abused and degraded by
the rich and powerful and told that this is freedom. Eventually,
they're not going to take that shit anymore.

Because in that formulation, there’s no way out. If you think your actions and your society will only be valuable if they build institutions or achieve some greatness that truly will last forever, then you’ll be disappointed. An inescapable fact of material life is mortality – not just for organisms, but for planets and stars themselves.

The answer to that existential despair at mortality is to accept your limitations. We don’t have the power to control events thousands or billions of years from now. But we can give our successors a better starting point than we did. We can anticipate the problems they’ll face and get started on the work of dealing with them while we can.

The only pithy thing John Dewey ever said was that the solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow. So at least put a little effort into your tomorrow and its problems. The struggle will continue – struggle is life itself. Victory is never final, but is always the security of your own generation and handing over a good situation to the next.

Now, even at the much more modest scale, we’re still fucking up pretty royally. So what can Machiavelli’s writing tell us about how to avoid those fuckups in our political institutions?

The most important lesson, which returns in many different contexts all over the Discourse on Livy, is to avoid corruption. What is corruption? It’s a state of political affairs when the state is run through bribery and access to powerful offices instead of objective and transparent laws.

Humans are not capable of building institutions that can survive a
supernova. If we were, we'd have a whole different set of problems
to solve as a civilization.

In such a society, people with any kind of power aren’t accountable to the people, but to whoever is giving them their kickbacks. And if it’s widely known that bribery and lobbying is the real motive of any ostensibly public service, all faith in the fairness of society will be lost.

Corruption sets in most easily as the go-to mode of governance when only a few people have regular access to the powerful offices of the state. This is why oligarchical, one-party, monarchist, and dictatorial states are often the most corrupt.

People settle into their positions of power and take them for granted. This goes beyond the perspective of the high-ranking career civil servant – if they maintain their democratic ethics, such virtuous civil servants can be inspirational guardians of freedom.

Institutions designed according to civic republican democratic values – especially encouraging public accountability and participation in political institutions – guard against corruption. So many people are involved in decision making and discussion that corruption becomes impossible. A bribe is useless when the bribed still faces huge hurdles to fulfill the wishes of his secret patron.

Another way to safeguard against corruption is to prevent anyone in society from becoming too popular. It’s possible for someone to hold a position of such incredible prestige that it’s literally untouchable. Think of monarchs or royals in Machiavelli’s day. Or our contemporary monarchs and royals.

FYI. Here's another corruption scandal we don't hear too much about in
Western media. The Prime Minister of Malaysia Najib Razak (son of
one former PM and family friend of another former PM) is under
investigation for stealing nearly $1-billion from a national infrastructure
development fund. Something to watch for in the United States if
Donald Trump's infrastructure plan moves forward.

But there are also prestigious positions in more democratic societies that enable vast corruption and abusive practices. Consider any of the scandals or abuses of the people perpetrated by the elite of America’s financial sector, and the piracy of Silicon Valley bro culture companies.

They’re able to get away with so much because their positions as wealthy venture capitalists earn them a large cachet of social power. That prestige is a presumption of untouchability, and it constitutes a large clique of worshipful people among the general public.

“No one so wealthy and who’s achieved so much success could possibly do anything wrong!” Too many people believe shit like this. Wealth, success, and prestige actually enable corrupt behaviour because it creates this aura of untouchability around people. Not only does it encourage corrupt behaviour, it encourages people to let him get away with it.

From such corruption emerges the collapse of a people’s freedom. The most clear sign is the increasing paranoia and hostility of a republic’s authoritarian leaders.

Oh shit.

To be continued

Advice for the Ruthless, Jamming, 04/04/2017

It’s weird to read Machiavelli. Especially the Discourses on Livy, where he’s blatantly a democrat, constantly praising the transparent, free institutions and citizens of Republican Rome.

Niccolò Machiavelli has a reputation as an absolute bastard, a villain’s villain. But that reputation is based on one book, The Prince. For centuries, that book was taken literally by its readers and in its reputation.

One of my favourites of Shakespeare's plays is Richard III, whose
lead character is a textbook example of the popular meaning of
'Machiavellian.' But the Italian himself was a democrat and,
unfortunately for his reputation, a master of a far-too-subtle irony.
I've seen four or five different versions of Richard III over the
years in theatre and film, and McKellen's is still so good. He's my
favourite King Lear as well.

So its advice to rulers seeking to establish an unassailable tyranny was considered a serious and straightforward statement of Machiavelli’s own political beliefs. That’s how the phrase “Machiavellian” came to have such a chilling meaning.

Yet when you look at Machiavelli the man, you see someone who worked for the government of a free city for most of his working life. He lost his diplomatic job when the Medici-controlled Papacy returned dictatorship to Florence. Someone who devoted to evil would have been a faithful servant of the Medicis instead of a determined opponent.

I say determined. After the Medici family overthrew Florence’s republican government, they arrested Machiavelli as a political prisoner and tortured him.

The popular reception of Machiavelli is as the writer of a handbook for tyrants. Yet his most famous and intelligent readers – Spinoza, Rousseau, and Diderot, as well as Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri – knew better.

Democrats give the ruthless advice only with irony. The Prince isn’t a sincere work to attempt to get back into the good graces of the Medici family. You should read it as an early, sustained, and frankly brilliant work of philosophy and trolling.

Of course such ruthless behaviour is fit for a Medici. The Prince is a demonstration that such ruthless figures as monarchs and dictators are unfit to rule at all.

As much as I can have a good time taking in the fragrant garlic cheese
of a quality episode of House of Cards, it is easy to tire of such
straightforwardly evil and devious characters. I loved the first
season because the story was Frank Underwood's struggle to crush
and dominate his enemies. But in the second season, he didn't have
to struggle at all. You just watched him destroy, and I felt bored.

Machiavelli’s works are remarkable because, when he does give advice to monarchs and tyrants, he’s simultaneously philosophical and practical. He’s a thoroughly material thinker, one of the earliest such people in the Western tradition.

He’s a practical writer because he really is dispensing advice. ‘If you want to rule as a tyrant, do these sorts of things in these kinds of contexts. . . . If you want to rule as a democrat, do these sorts of things in these kinds of contexts.’

He’s a philosophical writer because he examines the fundamental political and social causes of why his advice is so effective. He examines the social processes and moral concepts for why one kind of ruler and government gains his people’s love through one path, but a different kind of ruler needs another method.

Machiavelli unites all the different levels and processes of how to achieve some political end, and such a comprehensive how itself becomes a why. It’s a model for practical philosophy.

The tyrant lies to his people and holds them in fear, but always has to guard against his people with personal militaries and police precisely because they fear him. A democratic government is capable of being sincerely loved, as long as their rule continues to enable people to live freely and happily.

The choice is clear, but you’re still free to make a bad decision.