In this episode, we continue our series on Machiavelli and discuss his thoughts on how to conquer and rule a country, and why it is important to be a singular sovereign who controls your own arms, and not split them among others.
00:03:12.000So Machiavelli says, so Louis, and remember in this moment, he's talking about the king of France and his attempts to conquer in Italy and why they ultimately failed.
00:03:20.000He says, so Louis eliminated the minor powers, increased the strength of Italy's greatest powers or greater powers, brought in a foreign power, didn't settle in the country and didn't establish colonies.
00:03:36.000So these are errors that he's saying that Louis did not follow.
00:03:41.000He didn't follow Machiavelli's rules for what you should do in a scenario when you're trying to conquer a foreign nation.
00:03:47.000He says, first, he eliminated the minor powers, which are the ones that you could already control, the ones that you didn't need to worry about.
00:03:57.000So now there's no competition in the lower stratosphere, only competition in the great power layer.
00:04:04.000Then he increased the strength of one Italy's greater powers.
00:04:08.000So not only did he get rid of the minor powers that might have competed against the other major powers, he increased the power of Italy's other greater powers.
00:04:17.000So he's eliminating any of the guys that might have allied with him against those greater powers while bolstering the position of the powers that are already there.
00:04:29.000Remember, in the last episode, we talked about how he was impatient in taking land.
00:04:34.000He had believed it was the kingdom of Naples he wanted to get to.
00:04:37.000So he invited the Spanish in to help split the duty with him.
00:04:41.000So not only did he get rid of the minor competing powers, he increased the strength of the existing powers.
00:04:47.000And he brought in other great powers who were not already in the conflict, making sure that there could be additional additional people pushing back.
00:04:57.000He didn't settle in the in the country.
00:04:59.000So he didn't make his personal presence known.
00:05:01.000He didn't put exert enough control over the area and he didn't establish colonies.
00:05:06.000Again, he didn't bring the level of control he needed in this foreign area.
00:05:11.000So all major mistakes he made as he was trying to conquer.
00:05:16.000But these heirs wouldn't have done him any harm during his lifetime if he didn't also deprive the Venetians of their power and if he hadn't strengthened the church or brought Spain into Italy.
00:05:27.000It would have been reasonable, even necessary to humble the Venetians.
00:05:31.000But given that he did take those two other steps, he ought to never have consented to pulling down the Venetians.
00:05:38.000As long as the Venetians remained militarily strong, they would have protected Lombardy from attacks from the outside and they would have permitted such an attack.
00:05:46.000Or they would have never permitted such an attack unless it led to their getting more territory and no state would want to take any part of Lombardy from France in order to give it to the Venetians.
00:05:57.000Nor would any state have had the courage to tackle both Venice and France together.
00:06:02.000So basically, by going out of his way to humble these people, he basically drove off what could have been a valuable ally in that moment.
00:06:11.000If anyone objects, King Louis let the Pope have Romania and let Spain have half of the Kingdom of Naples to avoid war.
00:06:19.000I repeat what I have already said, namely that you should never let yourself be driven off course by your desire to avoid war, because in such a case, you won't avoid it, but you will merely postpone your disadvantage.
00:06:33.000So once again, as he did previously, he warns that if war becomes necessary, just do it.
00:06:40.000Don't sit around and perhaps people will take that the other direction when it comes to Donald Trump. Right.
00:06:45.000Looking at maybe war in Iran is necessary and perhaps delaying it is simply foolish.
00:06:51.000I'll let you decide that. But these are the this is the advice that ultimately Machiavelli is giving to the ruler.
00:06:58.000So King Louis lost Lombardy through not doing any of the things that others may have done when taking possession of the country and wanting to keep them.
00:07:07.000There's nothing weird or mysterious about this. It is all very reasonable and natural.
00:07:12.000During a conversation about these matters that I had in Nantes with the Cardinal of Rowan, he remarked that the Italians don't understand war.
00:07:22.000And I replied that the French don't understand politics because if they did, they wouldn't have allowed the church to become so powerful.
00:07:29.000And so it turned out France caused the church and Spain to be great powers in Italy, which then led to France's downfall.
00:07:37.000We can we can get from this a general rule, which which never or hardly ever fails.
00:07:44.000Namely, someone who causes someone else to become powerful brings about his own ruin because it takes skill or power to do that.
00:07:53.000And these attributes will be seen as threatening by the one who has benefited from them.
00:07:58.000So he says, look, never, never go out of your way.
00:08:03.000To make another person strong, to make another country strong, because that person will look at you and realize, oh, no, you have skill.
00:08:13.000You have these things that are threatening to me.
00:08:18.000So they're never going to look at you and say, I'm so grateful.
00:08:21.000And now that this guy has just won me this territory, I'm going to be so happy.
00:08:25.000No, they're immediately going to look at you as a competitor.
00:08:27.000Oh, if they can do this to the country that I wanted them to do it to, they can do it to me as well.
00:08:33.000And so ultimately I have to be very worried about empowering these people in a country where I'm moving in because they might then eventually turn on me because they see me as a threat because I am the one ultimately with the skill.
00:08:49.000You don't go out of your way to empower other countries and then say, oh, well, now that I've made you powerful, you must be really, really grateful to me and you'll just be my ally.
00:08:59.000No, Machiavelli says, actually, that will only increase their jealousy and their worry about you and they will probably turn on you in the end.
00:09:11.000Why Darius's kingdom conquered by Alexander the Great didn't rebel against his successors after his death.
00:09:18.000Alexander the Great conquered Asia in a few years and died before getting a proper hold on it.
00:09:25.000Given how hard it is to hold on to newly acquired states, one might have the thought that the whole territory would rise in revolt.
00:09:33.000And yet seemingly strangely, his successors managed to hold on with no troubles except ones arising from their own ambition and jealousy.
00:09:41.000You might not know this, but for instance, in Egypt, Cleopatra has that name because she was descended from from the Greeks, more well, Greek adjacent states, you know, from from the states that Alexander and his father had been involved in.
00:10:02.000And one of his generals, Ptolemy ended up owning that area, ended up taking care of it after his death.
00:10:10.000And so it is from Ptolemy's bloodline that Cleopatra descends.
00:10:16.000So that's how long the impact of Alexander's conquest lasted.
00:10:21.000There were still descendants of Alexander's generals ruling Egypt when Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony were arriving.
00:10:31.000That's how long that impact was in that area.
00:11:01.000So this is a little bit of the recognition of the iron law of oligarchy that we've talked about from from elite theory from Robert Michels saying that you always end up with this ruling class.
00:11:16.000He says there's two ways that you have a ruling class, either it is just the king who is appointing all these people and they serve at his pleasure.
00:11:23.000He can dismiss them or put them in power because they're his ministers and he completely controls that.
00:11:29.000Or it's the it's the prince and his barons.
00:11:33.000These other nobles who have their own rank and they are the ones who they have that through heredity.
00:11:42.000And so the people are used to them having it wasn't that the king just gave it to them.
00:11:45.000So you're always going to have this ruling class.
00:11:47.000You're always going to have this kind of oligarchy that you arrive at.
00:11:50.000But you might either have a version that is entirely dependent on the king for their power, or you might have a version in which the nobles, the other ministers, the other people involved actually have established power because of their position in the ruling class.
00:12:06.000These barons have lands of their own and subjects who recognize them as their lords and are naturally devoted to them where a prince rules through his servants or ministers.
00:12:17.000He has more authority because throughout the land, he's the only person the people recognize as above them.
00:12:23.000If they obey anyone else, they're obeying him merely as a minister or official, and they have no special love for him.
00:12:30.000He's fleshing out either the way the loyalty works.
00:12:33.000Either people are following a minister, a governor, just because the king has appointed him, and therefore all their real loyalty is to the king, or they're following the barons because the barons have been the lords of their land for a long time.
00:12:46.000They have built up trust or loyalty with the individual people there, and so they are loyal to the barons in addition to the king, not just because of the king, and this creates a very different power dynamic.
00:12:57.000These are two forms of government that are illustrated in our own day by the Turk and the king of France.
00:13:03.000The whole Turkish empire is governed by one lord, with everyone else who is involved in government being his servants.
00:13:11.000Dividing his kingdom into districts, he sends them different administrators, whom he shifts and changes at his pleasure.
00:13:18.000The king of France is surrounded by a host of nobles with long-established hereditary titles, each acknowledged and loved by his own subjects, and each with a high rank that the king can deprive him of only at his peril.
00:13:34.000So this is really important because this is where our Western understanding of limited government comes from.
00:13:40.000Everyone looks at kings and says, well, kings had all the power.
00:13:43.000But Machiavelli is saying, no, kings do not have all the power in the Western tradition.
00:13:48.000Maybe in a more Eastern tradition, these guys are all the Turk, the head of the empire.
00:13:55.000He just runs it. He puts everybody in charge. Everybody obeys him.
00:13:58.000But in the West, in places like France or England, you have these landed nobles who have been in charge of their area, their fiefdom, for often centuries.
00:14:09.000And the people there have built up a respect. They're entrenched.
00:14:12.000And so the king can't just go in and pull these barons, these nobles out of those positions without a cost.
00:14:18.000In fact, he relies on them to govern those areas, and he pulls the noble out of those areas at his own peril.
00:14:25.000He has to be very sure that he's going to be able to win if he challenges a noble, because if not, he might spark a full-on rebellion.
00:14:32.000And so the king in the West is actually far more restrained than the king in the East.
00:14:38.000And so this tradition of limited government might have ended up in our kind of modern American understanding of perhaps, you know, constitution and division and all of that stuff.
00:14:49.000But where it starts is in this tradition of the landed nobles having their own bases of power.
00:14:55.000And this is, again, something I have tried to impress on you when it comes to Bertrand de Juvenal and his spheres of power is the idea that it is not just the Constitution itself.
00:15:05.000It's not just written words that restrain power. It is these deep alternative forms of political power that are seeded into your tradition, into your beliefs.
00:15:16.000The king in France can't unseat his nobles because not because of some written piece of paper, but because that tradition, that longstanding political power exists in their hands.
00:15:29.000Now, eventually, the French would create, would move towards a more absolute monarchy.
00:15:35.420And one of the ways they did that was actually to create the palace in Versailles, where the king drew all of his nobles together, separating them from their local areas and their local people who supported them.
00:15:50.060So the way that the king transitions from being a more Western and restrained king to becoming more like a more like an Eastern king without those restraints, a more totalizing power, he does that by unsettling the balance that had existed for hundreds of years with the nobility.
00:16:10.040By cutting the nobility off and making the nobility obsessed with pleasing the king and isolating them from their peasants, their normal subjects, he actually removes more of the political power from them, removes more of the political opposition, removes more of the constraints on his authority.
00:16:29.800And so that's why I talk so much about this. I want you guys to understand we talk about restraint for government, but where does it come from?
00:16:36.440Does it come from ideology? Does it come from pieces of paper? No, it comes from these traditions.
00:16:43.900This is where it comes from. It's not that these goals aren't good. It's not that the Western way of doing things isn't important.
00:16:50.040It's that we need to understand where they come from and why we got them, because if we misdiagnose that, then we would try to apply that to our current position.
00:16:58.620We don't understand why it's failing. And that's what I want us to get when we're reading a text like this.
00:17:02.940If you think about the difference between the two states, you'll see that one, if it would be hard to conquer that of the Turks because they they because sorry, I got lost.
00:17:15.760If you think about the difference between the two states, you'll see that it would be hard to conquer that of the Turk because that once conquered, it would be easy to hold on to hard to conquer, hard to conquer.
00:17:28.820However, because an invader can't be brought in by a native nobility or expect his enterprise to be helped by the defection of those whom the sovereign has around him.
00:17:40.060I've explained why it's because all these people are the prince's servants and they have obligations to him.
00:17:46.200So they aren't easily corrupted. And if they are corrupted, they can't be they can't be of much help.
00:17:51.620As I explained earlier, they can't carry the people with them.
00:17:55.920So whoever attacks the Turk must reckon on finding a united people and will have a to rely on his own strength rather than a division of the other side.
00:18:06.760So Machiavelli says, look, you know, we here in the future might have talked a lot about how much we love restrained government, but he says it has a weakness.
00:18:17.440Because when you have this multidimensional power, when you have this power that's spread out and restricted by these barons, you can turn the barons against each other.
00:18:27.580There might be something there might be something valuable in overturning the king.
00:18:31.160And maybe you can offer the baron, hey, you know, if you swear allegiance to me instead of your current king, then maybe you're going to get that thing you always wanted.
00:18:37.800Maybe you're going to get to, you know, throw off the yoke of this guy who has been trying to take over your area.
00:18:43.860But when you have a king who's all of his ministers and all of his power is centralized because they all owe him a job, then you're going to be fighting everyone because there's no there's no upside in defecting.
00:18:55.520But why am I a guy in power who's only in power because of another king?
00:19:00.320Why am I going to turn around and say, actually, no, I'm going to overthrow that guy because then I lose all my status.
00:19:05.660I don't have organic support of the people.
00:19:07.760I can't expect to continue in my position once the king is gone.
00:19:10.800So I'm going to fight even more rabidly for the king.
00:19:17.320Like this is this is how Soviet Leninism takes over, because you take all the people who are disenfranchised and you say you are completely worthless in the old system.
00:20:26.200But if an attacker overcomes the prince of a country governed as Turkey is, defeating him in battle so that his armies are beyond repair, he has nothing more to worry about except for the prince's family.
00:20:38.340And once that is exterminated, there is no one else to fear.
00:20:44.140Like, if you have this unitary system where all power flows from this, like, prince or sultan or whatever we're calling the head of Turkey at the time.
00:20:52.100If all power flows from him, then you can't, like, turn these other people against him because they're all dependent on him for power.
00:21:02.140There are no nobles who have independent power.
00:21:04.620So, you just, you know, are going up against a unified nation because there's nothing that you can offer these people.
00:21:12.440However, the downside for that system is once it's defeated, it just completely collapses because there's no other power centers to push back.
00:21:23.240If you conquer a king more like the king of France at the time, then you are going to have to contend with all of his nobles.
00:21:30.920Yes, maybe you beat the king, but all of those nobles still have knights.
00:22:20.900Because there was no individual political powers, you couldn't wedge them against the king.
00:22:25.200But once you get rid of the king, there's no one left to fight you because there's nobody who has the ability to push back.
00:22:31.900The opposite is the case in kingdoms governed in the French way.
00:22:34.700You can always make inroads into such a kingdom with the help of a baron or two.
00:22:40.240Because there are always some who are disaffected and want change.
00:22:45.900I've already explained how much people can open the way for you to invade their country and help you be victorious.
00:22:51.720But the effort to hold onto this territory will involve you in endless difficulties, problems concerning those who helped you and those who you have overthrown.
00:23:03.000It won't be enough to merely destroy the prince's family because there will be barons who are ready to lead new revolts.
00:23:09.500You'll never be able to satisfy them or destroy them.
00:23:12.600You'll lose to the state as soon as they see a chance to take it from you.
00:23:17.420So, again, positives and negatives to the Western model.
00:23:23.860Yes, you can pretty much always find someone who's willing to defect.
00:23:27.840There's always someone who's fed up with the king, who's been run down, cheated, lied to, scorned in some way.
00:23:36.360Again, he's mentioned multiple times previously in this text about how often you get someone inviting you in.
00:23:43.460Really, it's very rare that you just go in by yourself.
00:23:46.620Usually there's some locals who have some kind of disagreement that you're expecting to use.
00:23:51.700And, again, you can think about American military attempts.
00:23:55.200Every time we go in, we try to find someone in Vietnam or Korea or Afghanistan or Iraq, and we say, oh, these are going to be the new leaders.
00:24:04.580They're going to be the people who are the ones who are ultimately going to stand up with us.
00:24:09.460And they're looking to do what we're doing, and we're going to use them to defeat the bad guys in the area.
00:24:17.080However, he says, if you have this model, yes, you can always turn a few people in and get a foothold in the area.
00:24:24.080But it tends to be a lot harder and a longer slog to completely control things.
00:24:30.020Because you just always have these independent areas that still have political power, that still function, that are still able to push back.
00:24:37.340So you're constantly fighting against them.
00:24:39.300And if for even a moment you hesitate, if for even a moment you lose something, all of a sudden these guys are going to try to take the state away from you because they see that weakness and they are still in power in their areas.
00:24:51.820Now, if you look at the kind of government that Darius had, you can see that it resembled that of the Turks.
00:24:56.940So that Alexander had first to defeat him utterly and take control of the territory with no inside help.
00:25:03.440But after he had done that and Darius had died, Alexander was securely in control of the country.
00:25:11.200If this successor had stayed united, if his successors had stayed united, they would have enjoyed it undisturbed.
00:25:19.180Because the only disturbances in the kingdom came from their own infighting.
00:25:24.760But kingdoms organized in the French way can't be held together by their conquerors as easily as that.
00:25:33.260Hence, the repeated uprisings against the Romans in Spain, Gaul, and Greece.
00:25:39.520Because each of these lands was divided up into many smaller principalities.
00:25:43.740For while the memory of these lasted, i.e. as long as the people felt loyalty to their local baron, the Romans couldn't feel safe.
00:25:51.580So Alexander comes in, he takes over Darius' kingdom, and because so much of it is organized under the authority of Darius, he has to work really hard.
00:26:03.200But once he's in, there's just nothing they can do.
00:26:06.280There's no longer an effective warrior class or leadership class that can continue to battle on, and he can just put his own people in there.
00:26:13.560However, he then points to the Romans in Spain or Gaul or Greece, these places did not have unified command structures.
00:26:22.660And so even though the Romans entered in and took control and often were able to leverage these people against each other,
00:26:28.300there was this constant threat that some other chieftain, some other warlord, some other ruler would be able to step in and create problems.
00:26:36.180But after a long period of Roman rule had erased those memories and thus extinguished the local loyalties,
00:26:43.060I'm going to read that sentence again because it's super important.
00:26:47.100But after a long period of Roman rule had erased their memories and had thus extinguished local loyalties, the Roman grip became secure.
00:28:30.980But this is still a dynamic we're watching.
00:28:33.660Whether you think that it's right or wrong that it happened in any given place, that's not the question here.
00:28:39.720The question is, is Machiavelli's analysis something that we can recognize and understand in a more modern context so that we can check the validity of his theory?
00:28:51.980We can see this play out in our own history, not just the Romans or the Italians.
00:28:58.000It has maintained even when the Romans were warring against one another in that infighting, each Roman governor could rely on the support of the territory he had governed and had influence in.
00:29:11.640Because once the families of that former prince had been wiped out, the natives had no authority that they could recognize except that of the Romans.
00:29:19.180So even after, so after the local loyalties are dissolved, the local identity is dissolved, even when the Civil War breaks out in Rome and you have Julius Caesar against Pompey and all these, you know, you have Mark, you know, they have.
00:29:32.420I can't remember people's names all of a sudden.
00:29:39.380Anyway, when you have these different Marius and Sulla, that's OK, that's what I was reaching for.
00:30:08.200And so even when the Romans were fighting amongst themselves, the only thing the people knew how to do was organize behind their new Roman identity.
00:30:14.420They couldn't take that opportunity, even in the middle of the Civil War, to break out and say, no, we're going to be free people again.
00:30:20.240No, they lost that local identity over generations.
00:30:23.700And now they were powerless to do anything but follow what the Romans were doing, even when the Romans were obviously weak and could have easily been thrown out of those provinces.
00:30:34.060If you bear all this in mind, you won't be surprised by how easily Alexander got a firm grip on Asia or how hard it was for many others.
00:30:42.220You know, Pyrrhus, for example, to retain the territories that they had conquered.
00:30:47.640This came not from these conquerors differing in virtue, but from a difference in their characters, in the difference of the characters of the states that they had conquered.
00:30:58.020So when you're conquering, it's not enough to think, oh, well, it's just one size fits all.
00:31:40.400How to govern cities or principalities that lived under their own law before they were annexed.
00:31:46.140Next, when a conqueror acquires a state that has been accustomed to living under its own laws and in freedom, he has three options if he wants to hold on to his conquest.
00:31:58.080He can destroy it, smashing everything, go live there himself, or let them continue with their present system of law while paying taxes to him and setting up there a small governing group which will keep the state friendly to you.
00:32:13.820So if you go in and you conquer an area, you can either just wipe it out, say, okay, get rid of the inhabitants, get rid of the structures.
00:32:24.360Or you can go there yourself and impose your will directly.
00:32:29.560We talked about that in our last reading.
00:32:31.960Or you can allow them to continue as they were, continue their laws, but just have them pay taxes and send, like, some people there to govern them and set up a friendly state, but don't put too much on them, right?
00:32:45.300And, again, this is a reiteration of much of what he said about conquering last time.
00:32:49.940You don't want to shake things up if you're not going to be there yourself.
00:32:52.860You want to keep things about as consistent as possible so that you're not encouraging rebellion.
00:32:59.300Such a governing group, having been set up by the conquering prince, will know that it can't survive without his friendly support, so it will do its best to maintain his authority.
00:33:08.760Someone who wants to retain his hold on a city accustomed to freedom will do best to get its citizens, cooperate with them.
00:33:15.640All right, so he says, if you're going to continue to govern a place that has already established itself, is used to being free, is used to governing itself, you don't, again, you want them to cooperate.
00:33:26.920And the good news is that the people you're putting in charge, they're going to be entirely loyal to you because they know they're only there because of you.
00:33:33.520They don't have any illusions about having control of the area, having any local authority or power.
00:33:38.680They are very much like the Turkish vassal, like, entirely dependent on you for power.
00:34:23.520Like, the only 100% way to make sure that you can continue to hold on to a territory is to wipe out all the people inside of it.
00:34:29.840Someone who becomes a master of a city accustomed to freedom and doesn't destroy it can't expect to be destroyed by it because in rebellion, the rebels will always rally to the cry of freedom and to the old ways of doing things, which is never forgotten.
00:34:44.100Whatever steps are taken to prevent this, unless the people have fallen into disunity among themselves or have been scattered.
00:34:52.560They will always remember the label free and their old ways and will rally to them at every chance they get, as Pisa did after a century of bondage in the Florentines.
00:35:02.780So always dangerous to try to conquer a people who are used to freedom, used to having their own control because they're going to remember that they're going to keep it in their memory until you've let it fade.
00:35:12.320Like we talked about the Romans over a very long period of time, people are going to fight back and they're always going to rally to that cry.
00:35:19.280You have to wipe them out or kind of like culturally extinguish them and by kind of owning them and making them forget their history, forget their culture, making them entirely dependent on you.
00:35:30.140But if you let them just continue to like keep those old ways, keep those laws, keep those dreams alive, then they're eventually going to want to fight back against you.
00:35:38.940They're eventually going to buck up against your control of the area.
00:35:41.920But but but when a city or country has been living under a prince and his family has has been exterminated, the people won't be able to choose from among themselves a new prince to replace the old one.
00:35:53.120And having acquired the habit of obedience, they don't they won't know how to live in freedom.
00:35:59.200So they'll be slow to give up to take up arms, making it easier for invade for an invading prince to win them over to his side.
00:36:06.100And republics, on the other hand, have more vitality, more hatred and a stronger desire for revenge, which will never allow them to forget their former freedom.
00:36:14.620So they have this. So the safest way is to destroy them or go and live among them.
00:36:19.780So as he's been reinforcing here multiple times in multiple ways, it is way easier to conquer a kingdom, even though it's harder to get your foothold in once you've got it.
00:36:29.400Once once the monarch is dead and his family's dead, there's really just going to be no resistance because the people are used to being ruled.
00:36:36.860You're just a new guy doing the same thing. Not a big deal.
00:36:40.440However, republics have to be individualistic. They have to have a certain level of vitality.
00:36:45.200They have to have a hatred and a strong desire for revenge.
00:36:49.180Interesting perspective. You probably won't hear that one from people calling America constitutional republic.
00:36:55.120But Machiavelli says these are key aspects of a republic.
00:36:59.700And so if you do conquer a republic, you should either just wipe the people out because they're just never going to be your subjects or you need to live among them.
00:37:07.060You need to convince them from your direct rule and assert your own direct rule over the area.
00:37:16.600New principalities that are acquired by one's own arms and virtue.
00:37:20.500I'm going to I'm going to be dealing with entirely with entirely new principalities in this discussion, and I'll take the best example of print of prints and of state.
00:37:31.080There's nothing surprising about this.
00:37:32.820People nearly always walk in paths beaten by others, acting in an imitation of their deeds.
00:37:39.680But it's never possible for them to keep entirely to the beaten path or achieve the level of virtue of the models that you are imitating.
00:37:46.820A wise man will follow in the footsteps of great men, imitating ones that have been supreme so that if his virtue doesn't reach the level of theirs, it will at least have a touch of it.
00:37:59.360Compare an archer aiming at a distant target, knowing the limits of his bow's virtue, he aims high, hoping that the arrows as it descends will hit his target.
00:38:07.960So this is very much Thomas Carlyle's great man theory, right?
00:38:12.800Like, how do you become a great leader?
00:38:16.180You're probably never going to do exactly what they did.
00:38:20.620You want to follow in their footsteps, but they will have been in a different situation.
00:38:25.680And in fact, you probably won't even be as virtuous as they are and probably never achieve exactly what they achieved.
00:38:31.300But if you're aiming for that high target, if you're aiming for something beyond what you are capable of, you're far more or less likely to completely fail when you fall short.
00:38:41.360You're far more likely to hit the target.
00:38:43.160He gives the archer aiming well above the target, hoping that over time, the power of his bow drives the arrow to at least hit the target as the arrow falls.
00:38:53.600So if you're aiming for greatness, if you're aiming for the deeds of great men and you fall a little short, well, at least you were a good man.
00:39:41.020I wonder if there's any reason that our whole society is moved to try to more or less expunge this idea.
00:39:47.760I say, therefore, that in an entirely new principality headed by someone who has only recently become a prince, how much difficulty the conqueror has in keeping his new acquired state depends on how much virtue he has.
00:40:04.200Now, he can't have risen from being a private citizen to being a prince without some help from either virtue or fortune.
00:40:11.080And clearly, either of those will somewhat lessen the difficulty in holding on to the new state.
00:40:16.760Though undue reliance on fortune doesn't work well in the long run.
00:40:22.000Although aid such a new prince will have is that having no other state where he can live as a prince, he is compelled to take up residence personally in his new state.
00:40:34.580So it says, okay, if you weren't a ruler before and you're becoming a ruler, right, you are a new prince, you're a new monarch, then there's really only two ways you elevated yourself into that position since you weren't born that way.
00:40:47.920You either were very, very good at what you did, you were high in virtue, or you were very, very lucky.
00:41:10.860However, you should minimize your reliance on luck as much as possible.
00:41:16.800And if you're a prince that has acquired this area because you're a new prince, well, you don't have anywhere else to go to.
00:41:23.480It's not like you were the king of France and then you decided to conquer Italy and whatever, I'm not going to go over there because I like living in France.
00:41:30.560And if I lose it, it's not a big deal.
00:41:32.040No, if you're a new prince and this is the only place you control, you're going to defend it to the death.
00:41:47.020Now let us turn to the proper subject of this chapter, namely those who become princes by their own virtue and not through fortune.
00:42:12.120Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and they're like are the most excellent examples.
00:42:19.300In the case of Moses, there isn't much to discuss because he simply did what God told him to do, though he should be admired for being found worthy to have conversations with God.
00:42:30.860So this is a very interesting passage, all right?
00:42:33.400This is where your Leo Strausses would start to see different layers in Machiavelli.
00:42:40.800So he is praising simultaneously Moses as one of these princes that should be emulated.
00:42:48.240He knows that this is a guy who is elevated, created more or less the Jewish nation, and is understood as a great figure in his tradition.
00:44:09.700But an interesting thing to stick your pen in and kind of notice because that will come up later throughout the book.
00:44:15.900But when we look into Cyrus and others who have acquired or founded kingdoms, we'll find that they're all admirable and their actions and governing structures won't be found in fear to what Moses did under his great instructor.
00:44:29.300So he says right here, basically, look, yeah, these guys did it on their own.
00:44:32.720And unlike Moses, they didn't have the help, but they end up with the same result.
00:44:37.680Even though he had God on his side and he was just listening to God, these guys are just as good.
00:44:43.500And in explaining their and in examining their lives and their achievements, we don't find them owing anything to fortune beyond their initial opportunity, which brought them the material to shape as they wanted.
00:44:57.740Without that opportunity, their virtue of mine would have come to nothing.
00:45:01.800And without that virtue, the opportunity wouldn't have led to anything.
00:45:05.460So, again, we always see this acknowledgement that fortune is critical, right?
00:45:08.740Look, if you don't end up in the right place, if you're not provided the opportunity, it doesn't matter.
00:45:12.960You could be the best guy in the world.
00:45:14.800But if you never get that crack, if forces don't align, then it just doesn't matter.
00:45:19.140But once you get the opportunity, it's all about you.
00:46:12.380But consistently, the difference between, you know, everyone's got a random chance.
00:46:17.100But of two people who get the same chance, the difference is almost always the guy who seizes it.
00:46:21.820And we've all seen the person who's been repeatedly, you know, offered the chance and they don't seize it.
00:46:27.620But they complain and they pretend that they're somehow a victim of fortune.
00:46:32.200And that's what Machiavelli is trying to avoid.
00:46:35.280For the Israelites to be willing to follow Moses, he had to find them in Egypt, enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians.
00:46:41.500For Romulus to become king of Rome and founder of the state, he had to be abandoned at birth, which led to his leaving Alba.
00:46:50.240For Cyrus to achieve what he did, he had to find the Persians discontented with the government of the Medes and the Medes soft and effeminate through their long peace.
00:46:59.140Theseus couldn't have shown his virtue if he hadn't found the Athenians defeated and scattered.
00:47:05.780So these opportunities enabled those men to prosper and their great virtue enabled them to seize the opportunity and lead their country to being noble and extremely, extremely prosperous.
00:47:15.880Men like these who become princes through the exercise of their own virtue find it hard to achieve the status, but easy to keep it.
00:47:23.920Once the sources of difficulty in acquiring the status of prince is having to introduce new rules and methods to establish the government and to keep it secure.
00:47:34.860So this is something, once again, that Machiavelli hits on a lot.
00:47:39.800If you acquire these things who are hereditary means, you're just fortunate to have been born this way.
00:47:46.060Well, you're going to have a pretty easy time keeping them, but you don't get the credit.
00:47:52.300But if you're a new kid, you have to do the biggest thing.
00:47:56.560You have to do the biggest thing and you have to, you have to, sorry, you have to do the biggest thing and you have to create new modes and orders.
00:48:07.720You have to create new rules, new understandings, new institutions, new armies, new borders, new cultures.
00:48:17.940That's an incredible feat if you can do it, but it's very difficult.
00:48:22.180But if you can, you create something amazing.
00:48:24.800We bear in mind that nothing is more difficult than to set up, more likely to fail and more likely dangerous to conduct than a system of than a new system of government, because the bringer of the new system will make enemies of everyone who will be under the old, who did well under the old system.
00:48:43.020While those who may do well under the new system won't support it warmly.
00:48:48.880Partly because of fear of their opponents who have the laws on their side and partly because of men who are hard to convince of anything and don't really believe in new things until they have had a long enough experience with them.
00:48:59.400So those who are hostile will attack whenever they have the chance, while others will defend so halfheartedly that they don't get the prince or themselves out of danger.
00:49:08.820So he says, this is the problem with founding new modes and orders, because when you try to set up this new system of government, you're always in the most dangerous period because the people who were benefiting from the old system, they'll hate you because obviously they're losing all their benefits.
00:49:25.060They organize the whole system to be under their control.
00:49:28.960So they're going to be very angry when they lose that system and therefore lose all the benefits that they had oriented themselves towards.
00:49:35.900And all the new people who are going to benefit from your new order, well, they're wishy-washy.
00:49:48.140What if they don't get everything that they were promised?
00:49:51.240And so all of a sudden, you have to be far more worried about the hostile elements, the people who are not benefiting, because they're losing everything they have.
00:50:00.200And you have to worry about your allies because they're only halfheartedly committed because they don't see what the benefits could be.
00:50:06.440Once again, we can kind of apply this to the Trump scenario, right?
00:50:11.060Comes in, tries to set up this new MAGA coalition.
00:50:15.280The old Republicans are scared because they're oriented around Con Inc.
00:50:19.700They've got their whole system built around siphoning money from these neocon organizations, all these mainstream organizations.
00:50:27.660They don't want the order to be overturned.
00:50:30.100And the new Trump allies, the new MAGA coalition, maybe some of the tech bros, you know, the Bernie bros who came over, they're kind of supporting you because they hate the old system.
00:50:39.640But are they really going to sacrifice for you?
00:50:42.600You know, is Elon Musk, is Mark Zuckerberg, is Jeff Bezos going to start performing and putting themselves out there for you?
00:50:51.180I mean, what if they don't get enough?
00:50:52.700What if they don't get enough from the new system?
00:50:54.160I mean, many of those guys were already getting plenty from the old system, so they probably fall more under Category 1.
00:51:01.080You know, you get a lot of half-hearted support from these people because ultimately they haven't seen the Trump doctrine work.
00:51:06.880You know, think how hard it was to get people to believe you could do deportations or tariffs or these kind of things.
00:51:11.920They hadn't seen it work in a long time, so they're very skeptical.
00:51:15.140And the people who are bought into the old system with no tariffs or open borders, they wanted to keep that.
00:51:20.300So you had half-hearted support from your supporters and full-throated pushback from your enemies.
00:51:26.280For throughout exploration of these matters, therefore, we have to ask concerning these innovators, these stirs up of new states, to carry through their projects.
00:51:39.940Must they depend on others or can they rely on themselves?
00:51:42.680That is, must they ask others for help or can they use force?
00:51:46.520If they need help, they are sure to fail and they won't achieve anything.
00:51:50.160For when they rely on themselves, they use force and aren't running much risk.
00:51:56.360That's why, excuse me, that's why armed prophets always conquered and unarmed ones have always been destroyed.
00:52:04.580Along with all the, along with all these, sorry, all along with all this, there is the fact that people don't stay steady.
00:52:14.040It's easy to persuade them of something, but hard to keep them persuaded.
00:52:17.420When they stop believing in their new prince, force must be used to make them believe.
00:52:23.640And provision for doing that must be made beforehand.
00:52:28.180So he says a couple of interesting things here.
00:52:30.580Like, if you need to rely basically on your own power, don't rely on anything else.
00:52:35.680If you're relying on other people, you're just going to lose.
00:52:37.800Because you are not going to have control.
00:52:39.840And when the hard times come, they're just going to abandon you or they're going to fight for themselves.
00:52:43.320Like, they're just not going to do that.
00:52:44.300So he says, that's why you need to be an armed prophet.
00:52:47.180The armed prophets always conquer and the unarmed ones are destroyed.
00:53:15.540Like, people will basically walk away from the revolution.
00:53:19.780They will walk away from the new king.
00:53:21.220They will walk away from the new modes and orders.
00:53:23.180And you must be able to crush that rebellion immediately at that time.
00:53:27.560Now, this passage, this famous phrase that all armed prophets conquer and all unarmed prophets are destroyed is also famous because it has some interesting implications.
00:53:39.920Was Jesus an armed prophet or an unarmed prophet?
00:53:45.040I mean, most people would say an unarmed prophet.
00:55:40.920Yes, he might have a harder time coming in and conquering, but once he's there, he will have a better ability to hold power.
00:55:49.340A fifth example is not on the same level as the other four, but his case is somewhat like theirs.
00:55:54.600And I will bring it in as a stand-in for all the other cases that are like it.
00:56:00.000I am referring to Jairo the Syracusan.
00:56:02.720From being an ordinary citizen, this man rose to be the prince of Syracuse.
00:56:07.980And he, like the others, owed nothing to fortune except the opportunity.
00:56:16.100In a time of military threat, the Syracusans chose him to head their troops.
00:56:21.780Afterwards, they rewarded him by making him their prince.
00:56:25.280He was of such great virtue, even as an ordinary citizen, that someone wrote of him that he had everything he needed to be a king except a kingdom.
00:56:37.800He abolished the old army and established a new one.
00:56:40.760So, abolished the old order and completely created anew.
00:56:45.120Gave up on old alliances and made new ones.
00:56:49.960And that gave him the foundation, his own soldiers, his own allies, on which he could build anything he wanted to build.
00:56:56.640Thus, it was very hard for him to acquire something, his position of power, and that he had little trouble holding on to it.
00:57:17.720He's inheriting a system that already has its own biases, that already has its own little fiefdoms, its own little power structures, its own little loyalties.
00:57:26.220And so, even though he's technically in charge of it, he's not really in charge of it because he didn't found new modes and orders.
00:57:32.460He's relying on old people's arms, old people's systems, old people's alliances.
00:57:37.220And so, he's a creature of that system until he gets rid of them.
00:57:46.360It's still full of people who hate conservatives, hate right-wingers, would have loved to see, you know, every J6-er rot in jail along with Donald Trump.
00:57:56.820We're probably rooting for him to get assassinated.
00:57:58.700And then you have the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
00:58:04.160And ICE has been given a military-style budget almost entirely built up under Donald Trump.
00:58:10.000So, the FBI, the old order, full of people who are no longer loyal because they don't like Donald Trump.
00:58:19.760You've got ICE largely built up of new people who are loyal to Donald Trump because he founded the order.
00:58:26.860So, Donald Trump is somewhere in between.
00:58:29.160He has not abolished the old modes and orders, but he has founded some new ones.
00:58:33.740And he's more powerful in the new orders than he is in the old, as we would expect from what Machiavelli is saying here.
00:58:40.000But if you want to take full power, you need to be able to crush all of it.
00:58:45.300And this is what Curtis Yarvin talks about.
00:58:47.160He says, look, the Trump administration simply has not been thorough enough in dismantling the system.
00:58:52.380They became just another administration instead of becoming a whole new government.
00:58:56.740What we needed was a whole new set of modes and orders.
00:58:59.960And what we got was an attempt to kind of do some of those things, but also try to hold on to the old system.
00:59:05.700But as we're going to see here, Machiavelli says that's the worst position to be in because you look just threatening enough for the old orders to try to truly crush you, truly destroy you.
00:59:19.940But you're not dangerous enough to actually get rid of the old orders.
00:59:22.980So you're just enough of a danger to draw the full power and the full destruction from the old system.
00:59:32.320But you're not committed enough to destroy that old system, free yourself from its control, and create your own thing.
00:59:39.220And that's the middle ground that is the worst to tread.
00:59:41.940But we'll carry on with Machiavelli here in the next episode.
00:59:46.820But trust me, that lesson only gets hammered home more and more as Machiavelli goes on.
00:59:55.260Let's go to questions of the people who are real quick.
00:59:59.620Joe McDermott says the difficulty of conquering the Turks because of their lack of connection to that nobility has frightening implications for a country like the U.S.
01:00:45.240I like to use playlists because I like to organize the thinkers that we're talking about.
01:00:49.700It's kind of nice to be back to talking about political theory, to be honest.
01:00:54.020The news of the day was getting pretty tiring.
01:00:55.780So I'm very glad to be diving back into this.
01:00:58.780And I'm glad you guys are enjoying it.
01:01:00.880That definitely helps motivate me to do more and more of this content because it's not always the most algorithmically successful.
01:01:07.460So knowing that the hardcore audience really loves and appreciates it and wants to have playlists of it and share it out and enjoy it means a lot to me.
01:01:16.360All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this one up.
01:01:19.260Thank you guys so much for your support.
01:01:21.340If it is your first time on YouTube watching this, you need to click subscribe, the bell, notifications, all that stuff so you know when we're going live.
01:01:28.960If you want to get these broadcast as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the Orr McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.
01:01:36.140And if you do, please leave a rating or review.
01:01:38.180It really helps with the algorithm magic.