I finished watching Dr. Michael Sugrue’s lecture on Machiavelli.
And somewhere in the middle of it I realised:
Machiavelli is basically an ancient alpha male podcaster.
Not completely.
But enough that I now cannot unsee it.
He has some genuinely interesting observations about power, people and politics.
Then he takes those observations, turns the dial all the way up and starts acting like this one part of humanity explains everything.
Which is probably why he is so interesting to listen to even when half of me is thinking:
Okay, calm down.
The annoying thing is that he does have a point
Machiavelli’s basic view of politics is brutally simple.
People want power.
People lie.
People betray each other.
Fear is reliable.
Morality can become inconvenient.
And the person willing to do things that a more moral person refuses to do often has an advantage.
That part is hard to completely dismiss.
Imagine two politicians who are equally intelligent and capable.
One refuses to lie, intimidate, betray people or do something morally questionable for political gain.
The other person is perfectly willing to do all of those things if they work.
The second person simply has more tools available.
That doesn’t mean they automatically win.
Long-term trust matters.
Reputation matters.
Loyalty matters.
People actually believing in you matters.
But those things also depend on living inside a political system that rewards them.
If the system protects honesty, limits power, punishes corruption and allows decent people to actually reach positions of authority, morality can become an advantage.
If the system rewards whoever is most ruthless?
Machiavelli suddenly starts looking less ridiculous.
And that is the uncomfortable part.
But humanity isn’t only that
This is where I think Machiavelli starts missing the point.
Humans can be extraordinarily selfish.
Humans can also be extraordinarily selfless.
Both are real.
We cooperate.
We sacrifice ourselves for other people.
We form families and communities.
We trust.
We love.
We also lie, steal, manipulate and kill each other.
There doesn’t seem to be one secret creature underneath all of that where, if you peel away civilisation, you finally discover:
Ah yes. The REAL human.
Machiavelli seems to find the selfish, power-hungry part and decide:
This one. This is the real one.
But why?
In my previous Field Note I ended up thinking about morality partly as something that grew out of humans needing other humans.
Cooperation helped us survive.
Trust helped us survive.
Living in groups helped us survive.
So rules like:
don’t randomly kill each other
probably didn’t appear because humans suddenly became spiritually enlightened one afternoon.
A group where everyone constantly betrays everyone else doesn’t work particularly well.
Which creates a funny problem for the perfect Machiavellian ruler.
He needs soldiers who trust each other.
He needs administrators who do their jobs.
He needs allies who believe agreements mean something.
He needs citizens to cooperate.
He needs loyalty.
But his philosophy tells him to betray any of those people whenever betrayal becomes useful.
At some point you are destroying the thing that makes having a society possible.
Fear can make someone obey you today.
Trust can make someone stay with you for twenty years.
Most people don’t suddenly become evil
I also don’t think ordinary people usually wake up and decide:
Today I will become a terrible person.
I think we move the line.
At first:
I would never do that.
Then:
Okay, but this situation is different.
Then:
I had to.
Then:
Anybody would have done the same thing.
Then:
They deserved it anyway.
And if you step back later, you might realise the line moved very far.
But while you were moving it, every individual step had a justification.
Which is probably one of the stranger things about morality.
People generally still want to think they are the good guy.
So rather than saying:
I am doing something bad because I want to
we say:
I am doing something bad because I have a good reason.
John Wick is allowed to kill everyone because we like his reason
Revenge stories are basically built on this.
Take John Wick.
If you describe what he does without context, this man kills an absurd number of people.
But we don’t experience the story that way.
He retired.
He lost his wife.
The dog was the final gift from her.
Someone kills the dog and drags him back into the life he tried to leave.
Now we have a justification.
And suddenly the audience is completely willing to watch him John Wick his way through what feels like a small country’s military population.
Because emotionally we understand:
Why.
The violence hasn’t changed.
Our relationship to it has.
Dune does something similar, just on a much bigger scale
Paul always has a reason.
Protect these people.
Save the people I love.
Avoid this future.
Choose the lesser disaster.
Survive.
Do what has to be done.
And because we follow him through those decisions, each individual step can feel understandable.
Then you zoom out.
And realise you have basically spent all this time following the rise of space Hitler.
That is what makes it so interesting.
You don’t suddenly become the monster in one dramatic decision.
You have reasons.
Then more reasons.
Then reasons for the reasons.
The story carries you forward.
And suddenly the person who began by trying to protect people is responsible for something enormous and horrifying.
Spec Ops: The Line takes away the excuse
Then there is Spec Ops: The Line.
You begin with all the normal expectations of a military shooter.
You are the protagonist.
There are enemies.
You shoot the enemies.
Move forward.
You are basically expecting to be the Call of Duty action hero.
Then the game starts asking what exactly makes you think you are the hero.
The white phosphorus scene is still one of the most disturbing examples I can think of.
You do what a military shooter has trained you to do.
Use the weapon.
Destroy the enemy.
Progress.
Then you walk through what you did.
And see the remains of a mother holding her child.
Suddenly the normal action-game justification doesn’t work anymore.
The game doesn’t really let you comfortably say:
But I’m the protagonist.
It basically says:
Look at what you did.
You weren’t John Wicking your way through another battalion because you’re the good guy.
You’re just killing people.
That is much less fun.
Which is probably the point.
Emotion matters more than Machiavelli seems to allow
This is another place where I think Machiavelli’s worldview becomes too narrow.
Humans aren’t purely logical.
You could theoretically create the greatest technical ruler who ever lived.
Perfect infrastructure.
Perfect economic decisions.
Perfect military strategy.
Everything calculated correctly.
People could still hate that person.
Because people care about more than whether the spreadsheet worked.
Humiliation matters.
Cruelty matters.
Fear matters.
Love matters.
Grief matters.
Empathy matters.
Yes, I know.
A designer talking about empathy.
Very original.
Unfortunately it does seem to work.
And I think emotion matters to morality too.
Imagine two people commit the same horrible act.
One goes home and sleeps perfectly.
The other person goes home and cannot stop thinking about what they did.
That doesn’t erase the act.
But I don’t think those two people are morally identical either.
If you can do brutal things to another person and feel absolutely nothing afterward, something is missing.
If it disturbs you, at least part of you still understands:
I crossed something.
Maybe guilt isn’t the only emotion involved.
Maybe it is simply the ability to actually feel another human being as another human being.
Morality might be partly justification
This is probably what I found most interesting.
Morality doesn’t only stop us from doing things.
Sometimes morality also gives us permission to do them.
I’m protecting my family.
I’m protecting my country.
I’m doing this for my people.
They started it.
There was no other choice.
The alternative would have been worse.
Some of those reasons can be completely genuine.
Sometimes something terrible actually might prevent something worse.
I don’t think morality is simple enough to pretend otherwise.
But once we believe our cause is good, it becomes surprisingly easy to expand what we think a good person is allowed to do.
We remain:
the good guy.
The line simply moves around us.
Which might explain why people can commit terrible things without experiencing themselves as terrible people.
They still have the story.
And maybe this is why emotion is so important
Humans evolved around other humans.
We survived through cooperation.
So it makes sense that we developed the ability to care what happens to each other.
Maybe morality isn’t some completely separate rational system floating above biology.
Maybe emotion is part of the machinery.
You see someone suffering and it affects you.
Then reasoning can come afterward:
Why does seeing this bother me?
Would I want this happening to me?
Should anybody have to experience this?
And suddenly a feeling becomes an idea.
This is where Machiavelli feels like he only looked at half the equation.
He sees:
competition,
fear,
self-interest,
power,
violence,
betrayal.
All real.
But he seems much less interested in:
cooperation,
empathy,
trust,
attachment,
loyalty,
remorse.
Also real.
You cannot explain humanity by choosing one list and pretending the other one is fake.
Maybe Machiavelli is interesting because he is incomplete
I don’t know if I would call Machiavelli useful.
Interesting?
Definitely.
Some of his observations about how people behave around power are probably useful.
But as a worldview?
Eh.
It feels like taking one part of humanity and stretching it until it becomes the explanation for everything.
And that might actually be why I enjoyed listening to it.
Extreme ideas are interesting.
They let you take one assumption and see where it ends up if you refuse to compromise.
Machiavelli basically asks:
What happens if morality is removed from politics and power becomes the objective?
Apparently:
a lot of lying,
a lot of betrayal,
a lot of fear,
and a surprisingly enthusiastic Italian man explaining why this is all perfectly sensible.
We really haven’t evolved that much
And this might be my favourite part.
Machiavelli was writing hundreds of years ago.
And somehow the worldview still feels immediately recognisable.
Strip away the Renaissance clothing.
Give him a microphone.
Put some LED lights behind him.
Add a podcast studio.
Machiavelli becomes:
Andrew Tate 2.0 — Modern Warfare Edition.
The message changes slightly.
The technology changes.
The language changes.
But the basic structure survives:
The world is brutal.
People are selfish.
Strength matters.
Stop being weak.
Everyone else is pretending.
I understand how things REALLY work.
And somewhere inside that worldview there are usually a few uncomfortable truths.
People can be selfish.
Power does matter.
The world isn’t automatically fair.
People absolutely will take advantage of you.
Then comes the mistake.
Those truths become:
therefore this is the entirety of human nature.
And suddenly cooperation is weakness.
Empathy is weakness.
Morality is weakness.
Everything that doesn’t fit the worldview becomes something naive people believe because they haven’t accepted reality yet.
Maybe humans haven’t changed nearly as much as we like to think.
We just keep giving the same ideas better microphones.
No conclusion
I don’t think Machiavelli is completely wrong.
That would make him considerably less interesting.
He’s right enough to be uncomfortable.
Politics can reward terrible behaviour.
People do manipulate each other.
Fear works.
Power changes people.
Morality can become justification rather than restraint.
Good people do not automatically win just because they are good.
But I also think he takes one very real part of humanity and mistakes it for the entire thing.
Humans can be selfish.
Humans can also be selfless.
We compete.
We cooperate.
We betray.
We trust.
We hurt people.
We feel horrible about hurting people.
Sometimes we move the moral line until we barely recognise where we started.
Sometimes empathy stops us from moving it.
Maybe that contradiction is much closer to what humans actually are.
Not angels.
Not wolves.
Just an animal somehow capable of being both.
Which is considerably less satisfying than Machiavelli’s answer.
But probably more interesting.
