The Charlie Kirk Show - September 25, 2021


Do the Ends Ever Justify the Means? Machiavelli Demystified with Dr. Khalil Habib


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Length

39 minutes

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179.51572

Word count

7,043

Sentence count

478

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

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Toxicity

3

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Hate speech

5

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Khalil Habib from Hillsdale College joins the show to talk about Niccolio Machiavelli and why he is so important to us today. Dr. Habib is the Director of the Center for American Engagement and Engagement at the Beacon of the North, a leading center for political and social activism.

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Happy Saturday, everybody.
00:00:01.000 No advertisers except our partner, Hillsdale College, for this Saturday episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:08.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com.
00:00:09.000 That's charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:12.000 I am currently taking a Hillsdale online course that is incredible.
00:00:15.000 It's Constitution 201.
00:00:17.000 Every single person here, you've got to be taking these Hillsdale online courses.
00:00:21.000 It will bless you and it will give you wisdom and will give you a worldview that will make sense of things happening around you.
00:00:28.000 You can go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:30.000 I just started Constitution 201.
00:00:32.000 It's amazing.
00:00:32.000 In fact, since the last time we talked, I finished the Winston Churchill and Statesmanship course.
00:00:38.000 It is incredible.
00:00:40.000 The Federalist Papers course is totally worth looking at.
00:00:43.000 They have a proper understanding of K-12 education, the presidency and constitution class.
00:00:49.000 The introduction to Aristotle course, Aristotle course is amazing.
00:00:53.000 The Second World Wars course, I encourage you to check out, and so much more that you guys can look at at charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:01:02.000 That's charlieforhillsdale.com, including the American Heritage from Colonial Settlement to Current Day.
00:01:08.000 Terrific course.
00:01:09.000 Oh, and maybe an Athens and Sparta course for you.
00:01:11.000 Take these courses, everybody.
00:01:12.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com.
00:01:14.000 Machiavelli.
00:01:15.000 I'm sure once or twice you've heard people say that's very Machiavellian of that politician.
00:01:19.000 Or what is the Machiavellian nature?
00:01:21.000 We talk about that with Dr. Khalil Habib from Hillsdale College, the Beacon of the North.
00:01:27.000 Hillsdale College is terrific.
00:01:29.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com.
00:01:31.000 It's also hillsdale.edu.
00:01:32.000 You guys can check it out where we talk about who Niccolio Machiavelli was.
00:01:37.000 Do the ends ever justify the means?
00:01:40.000 Is it better to be loved or hated?
00:01:43.000 These questions we wrestle with.
00:01:45.000 Was Machiavelli right about anything?
00:01:47.000 How does he impact our world today on this incredibly important, deep, and intellectually focused episode of the Charlie Kirk Show that I think will clarify and give you, hopefully, some understanding of what's happening in the world around you.
00:02:00.000 Again, go to charlie4hillsdale.com, enroll in those online courses.
00:02:04.000 It's a free way you could support this program.
00:02:06.000 You guys can be blessed by it for charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:02:09.000 Dr. Khalil Habib is here.
00:02:11.000 Buckle up. 0.96
00:02:11.000 Here we go. 0.96
00:02:12.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:02:14.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:02:16.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:02:20.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:02:23.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:02:24.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:02:25.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:02:34.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:42.000 That's why we are here.
00:02:46.000 Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:49.000 We are so thrilled to have this episode brought to you by Hillsdale College.
00:02:55.000 Remember, it is charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:02:58.000 CharlieF-O-R Hillsdale.com.
00:03:01.000 I am currently working through the Constitution 201 course.
00:03:05.000 I started the C.S. Lewis course, and we took a little bit of a pivot away from that.
00:03:10.000 And so it's Dr. Khalil Habib back from the Beacon of the North, Hillsdale College.
00:03:15.000 Dr. Habib, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:17.000 Charlie, it's great to be with you.
00:03:19.000 So we kind of stumbled into Machiavelli last conversation, and I promised our listeners we will get back to it.
00:03:28.000 Commonly, you'll hear on cable television with almost no explanation, someone say, well, that's very Machiavellian by this politician, or that's very Machiavellian.
00:03:37.000 And I think people at best have a very surface knowledge of Machiavelli.
00:03:43.000 Who was this man, and why was he so important?
00:03:47.000 So Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, and he lived during the middle of the 16th century.
00:03:53.000 And he lived at a time during the Renaissance where there was growing frustration with politics, with the church.
00:03:59.000 Times were corrupt.
00:04:01.000 And there was a movement known as the Renaissance that wanted to revive classical virtue, stress the emphasis of moral education on restoring civic harmony and restoring statecraft, essentially.
00:04:14.000 Machiavelli comes in and crashes in on this party and says, that's a no-go.
00:04:19.000 You can't restore politics on classical moral virtue.
00:04:23.000 And so what he wants to stress in books like The Prince, which is the book he's most famous for today, although the discourses many years ago was the one that people mostly focused on, he stresses that politics requires cunning.
00:04:37.000 You have to be manipulative.
00:04:38.000 You have to be willing to use force.
00:04:40.000 There are times when you're going to have to break with traditional moral virtue to essentially affect a transition in politics.
00:04:47.000 So for example, in one of his many critiques of the Renaissance and the attempt to bring Christianity and classical moral virtue together in a modern republic, Machiavelli and the Prince talks about a situation in which a group of Christians in a small town wanted to deal with criminals, but on Christian grounds.
00:05:05.000 And he says, well, this guy, Treasurer Borgia, who was a brutal dictator, essentially, showed mercy to the innocent by crushing these people, not turning the other cheek.
00:05:14.000 So in other words, you measure your use of force in relation to your end goal.
00:05:20.000 And if it's to bring about law and order, you don't do it by upholding some kind of classical moral virtue.
00:05:26.000 Force is necessary.
00:05:27.000 And so that, of course, earns him the reputation of some kind of gangster, sort of a low philosophy of politics, but it's incredibly influential and foundational in many ways.
00:05:40.000 And so let's dive deeper into that.
00:05:42.000 You know, you mentioned how Machiavelli basically, you know, criticized Socrates and Plato and mostly Plato saying, why are we trying to build these imaginary republics?
00:05:53.000 We know what we want.
00:05:54.000 Let's just go get it.
00:05:55.000 Can you talk about how Machiavelli in some way liberated this conversation, not in a good way, of the will, of kind of how the political will should triumph the good?
00:06:05.000 Yeah, that's excellent.
00:06:06.000 Actually, you're referring to chapter 15 in The Prince.
00:06:09.000 And it's one of those chapters that are so crucial that anytime I ever teach Machiavelli, this chapter has to get almost a full day of line by long line reading.
00:06:19.000 Well, in chapter 15 of The Prince, Machiavelli says he's going to depart from all classical writers.
00:06:25.000 So forget the debate whether or not Machiavelli was doing something new or if he was just sort of an ancient and modern clothing.
00:06:32.000 He tells us that he's doing something new.
00:06:34.000 Well, what is it that he's doing new?
00:06:36.000 It just so happens, Charlie, that I have that chapter in mind.
00:06:39.000 Let me just read it to you.
00:06:40.000 He says, and because I know that many have written about this, politics and friendship, et cetera, I fear that in writing of it again, I may be held presumptuous, especially since in disputing this matter, I depart from the orders of others.
00:06:52.000 So he tells us he is not going to follow anything that had been written about before regarding moral philosophy and politics.
00:06:59.000 And then he says the following, since my intent is to write something useful, it's suggesting that classical thought is not useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to any imagination of it.
00:07:15.000 So he makes a distinction between philosophy that is simply imaginary and philosophy that is actually effectually true, which is a unique phrase.
00:07:24.000 No one's ever used that before, and I'll parse that out in a moment.
00:07:27.000 But what is he talking about?
00:07:29.000 He says that many have imagined republics.
00:07:32.000 He's referring to Plato and principalities and kingdoms, say St. Augustine, kingdom of God, that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.
00:07:40.000 Why?
00:07:41.000 Because they are so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
00:07:50.000 So now he tells you what philosophy really should be.
00:07:54.000 The effectual truth is that which preserves your life and preserves your republic.
00:07:58.000 An imaginary truth, moral or political, is that which leads to your ruin.
00:08:03.000 So if turning the other cheek in a political circumstance leads to your ruin, then it's an imaginary teaching.
00:08:10.000 And in that same chapter, he gives us a list of classical virtues, generosities, magnanimity, courage, et cetera.
00:08:18.000 And then he mixes them up and makes it almost impossible for us to determine which one's the vice and which one's the virtue.
00:08:24.000 And that's revolutionary because he's essentially saying that the virtues are not good in themselves.
00:08:29.000 What they are are only effectual.
00:08:31.000 So sometimes it's good to be merciful and sometimes it's bad to be merciful.
00:08:35.000 No one had spoken about moral virtue in those categories before, and that makes him completely revolutionary.
00:08:41.000 And so for him, anything that would lead your own personal life to ruin or anything that would lead, say, the United States national interest to ruin is an imaginary moral prejudice.
00:08:52.000 So do you think that he was onto something or, you know, without imparting too much of your own critique on this, I'm sure there's some truth in this.
00:09:00.000 Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about him.
00:09:03.000 But I'm guessing he did not anticipate a couple hundred years later how someone would pervert kind of his revelation for this and say, you know what?
00:09:13.000 There is no such thing as absolute truth.
00:09:15.000 Instead, basically a power play.
00:09:17.000 Let's try eugenics as an extreme example. 0.99
00:09:20.000 You could see where this leads you, right?
00:09:22.000 When you start to say that we're not going to have the struggle between the vices and the virtues or have, you know, some sort of golden mean, as Aristotle would say, instead, Machiavelli says, well, we kind of know what we want and let's just do it.
00:09:36.000 Can you help unpack that?
00:09:37.000 Absolutely.
00:09:38.000 In fact, Machiavelli does anticipate that.
00:09:40.000 In the same book, in the prints in chapter 25, he talks about the conquest of fortune.
00:09:45.000 Now, what that essentially means is we can put our mind and our will behind a conquest of nature.
00:09:51.000 We don't need to be submissive to nature.
00:09:54.000 We don't need to assume God has any providential role in politics.
00:09:58.000 So funny, you bring up eugenics.
00:09:59.000 Machiavelli would say that is a testament to man's ingenuity and capacity to govern his own affairs.
00:10:05.000 So anything else would be servile.
00:10:07.000 He has absolutely no problem going in that direction and in fact encourages it.
00:10:11.000 Now, whether or not, as you said, that would lead to sort of a corruption in the hands of the wrong person, that could be quite deadly.
00:10:19.000 Machiavelli would say, so be it.
00:10:22.000 They're a threat regardless.
00:10:23.000 At least I, Machiavelli, am teaching you about how the world really works.
00:10:27.000 So in the Declaration of Independence, it says the laws of nature and nature is God.
00:10:32.000 Would Machiavelli rather say the will of man and what we want?
00:10:36.000 Absolutely.
00:10:37.000 It would be acquisition, in other words, imperialism and tough military institutions.
00:10:43.000 Machiavelli never speaks of natural law.
00:10:46.000 There's no natural right teaching in Machiavelli.
00:10:48.000 There's not even a state of nature teaching from which you could deduce any of those principles in Machiavelli.
00:10:53.000 So no, he is not, I hate to put it this way, it's simplistic, but I think it would explain a lot.
00:10:59.000 Machiavelli's political teaching is very flexible.
00:11:02.000 You don't want to hamstring your political leaders or your institutions behind any moral prejudice of any kind that could get in the way of your country being effective in defending its own national interest.
00:11:15.000 So Machiavelli is used as pejorative in some sense.
00:11:21.000 What can those of us that believe in the natural law, which both you and I do, what can we glean from Machiavelli?
00:11:27.000 What can we learn from him where he says, wow, he was really right about this or he was really right about that?
00:11:34.000 Where can we say that we need more Machiavelli in our political process?
00:11:38.000 Well, where Machiavelli was right was on the importance of citizens remaining vigilant over their liberty.
00:11:44.000 One of the innovations that he spotlights for us in the discourses is he says, everyone prior to me assumed that civic harmony was the goal of politics and that liberty could be achieved when there was moral virtue permeating society and people were just in harmony with one another.
00:12:02.000 He says the secret to liberty is actually clashes and tumults properly guided by institutions to form checks and balances.
00:12:10.000 Where he's absolutely right, he thinks that if a populace becomes indifferent to its liberty, it will lose it.
00:12:17.000 And so he was not a fan of people simply just abnegating to public responsibility and just living just merely private lives.
00:12:25.000 In the discourses, he constantly ties Rome's liberty and the strength that it had as a republic to the vigilance of its people.
00:12:34.000 If you could say one thing about Rome, it had this.
00:12:37.000 It trusts but verify every one of its leaders.
00:12:40.000 Everybody had skin in a game and nobody would turn their back on politics.
00:12:44.000 There, he's absolutely right.
00:12:47.000 Yeah, even in the Roman emblem, I believe it was the Senate and the people of Rome, right?
00:12:51.000 SPQR.
00:12:52.000 It was the whole idea of the people must be involved in the Roman project.
00:12:57.000 So let me, there's so many questions I have about this.
00:13:00.000 Let's ask this question.
00:13:02.000 Who in history was the first one to dust off the prince and say, ooh, I like that, and become like a disciple of Machiavelli?
00:13:09.000 Who in history, post-1532, I think when it was published, all of a sudden said, I'm going to implement this?
00:13:16.000 Well, I mean, there's certain elements in Francis Bacon that are very Machiavellian.
00:13:20.000 He mentions Machiavelli by name and says that he had heard the clarion call of Machiavelli.
00:13:25.000 What's interesting about Bacon is he primarily focuses on metaphysics.
00:13:28.000 He focuses on philosophy of science.
00:13:31.000 He worked at the Great Institution.
00:13:32.000 He was a Machiavellian in the sense that he wanted to bring the spirit of conquest, not so much to politics, but to nature.
00:13:39.000 And so he encourages the liberation of science from theology and morality so that it can conquer disease, it can conquer geographical limits that had previously held people back.
00:13:51.000 And so Bacon in his works wants to inspire a new kind of conquest, not so much the militaristic thing that you find in Machiavelli's discourses, but one in which science can interrogate and conquer nature and squeeze her for her secrets.
00:14:07.000 That's very Machiavellian, but taken in a different direction.
00:14:11.000 There are writers like Montesquieu who clearly read him and thought very highly of him, but saw him as ultimately a corrosive influence.
00:14:19.000 And in the spirit of the laws, Montesquieu says we have yet to cure ourselves of Machiavellianism.
00:14:25.000 He thought that Machiavelli had some great insights in politics, and on Montesquieu would polish them up and reform them and take them in different directions.
00:14:32.000 But overall, he thought that he was a terrible influence.
00:14:35.000 He didn't like the emphasis on militarism.
00:14:39.000 He didn't like the emphasis on fear.
00:14:41.000 For Montesquieu, our nature inherently seeks tranquility.
00:14:45.000 Machiavelli equates tranquility with the death of liberty.
00:14:48.000 He wants tension, conflict, clashes.
00:14:50.000 He wants you to wake up every morning thinking your liberty is, somebody wants to take your liberty away from you.
00:14:55.000 And he thinks that that is the kind of knot in your stomach you should have that will incentivize you to stay vigilant and focus on politics.
00:15:03.000 What Montesquieu thought Machiavelli got right was the stress on the separation of powers that you begin to see developing in Machiavelli's discourses.
00:15:12.000 Montesquieu will adopt that, but its ultimate aim is not empire.
00:15:18.000 It's sort of a domestic commercial republic whose fundamental goal is tranquility and peace.
00:15:25.000 That's not Machiavelli's taste at all.
00:15:28.000 And so then Machiavelli influenced Bacon, who he influenced almost everybody as he kind of just upended the tradition before.
00:15:38.000 And it's important to note, I think we talked about this in the previous podcast, where Machiavelli was in the midst of warring Italian city-states.
00:15:48.000 Now, were these small republics, were these the same republics that they were talking about in the Federalist Papers, like the Genoan city-states or Genoan city-states?
00:15:56.000 Is that right?
00:15:57.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:15:58.000 And they reflected the classical republics in the sense that they were completely unstable.
00:16:03.000 But you add to the mix, though, something that wasn't in the classical world, according to Machiavelli, and that is the Catholic Church.
00:16:08.000 So he never tires of critiquing the institution of Christianity.
00:16:13.000 And in the discourses and in the prints, he says essentially what you have is an institution that is too strong to simply take over, but it's too weak to unify Italy.
00:16:23.000 And his goal ultimately is to unify Italy, but unify it with a civil religion in which the state has national sovereignty and you don't have a universal institution like the Catholic Church dictating what a nation ought to do or not to do.
00:16:40.000 A classic example of this is Shakespeare's play King John, where you have France and England at each other's throats, but it's the papal legate who's determined thus undermining their national sovereignty.
00:16:53.000 So Machiavelli's other agenda for those times that you're talking about is to also considerably weaken the church as a political player and subordinate it to the state ultimately.
00:17:03.000 And so if you were to ask kind of a normal political philosophy student at a school, not like Hillsdale, you know, what did Machiavelli stand for?
00:17:12.000 There's two things that they would say.
00:17:13.000 The most common things they would say, the ends justify the means, and it's better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.
00:17:20.000 So let's start with that one, this kind of tension between as a ruler, you have to make a decision of do you want the citizenry to fear you or love you?
00:17:28.000 Can you talk about that?
00:17:29.000 Because that is something that is commonly quoted, but I don't think properly understood as Machiavelli wrote it.
00:17:34.000 Sure.
00:17:34.000 The key to understanding almost every point Machiavelli wants to make is that chapter 15 that you would alluded to earlier.
00:17:40.000 Remember for Machiavelli, the truth is effectual.
00:17:42.000 How do you and I know a moral theory is true or not?
00:17:46.000 Machiavelli would say, if it leads to your ruin, it's imaginary.
00:17:49.000 So take better to be feared than to loved.
00:17:51.000 For Machiavelli, people rarely fall out of fear, but they fall out of love.
00:17:56.000 And if your only leverage over them is love and people are fickle, it's not effectual.
00:18:01.000 He also doesn't think that you can found government on anything such as love.
00:18:05.000 And instances where you have that have only shown that the people, especially criminals, will exploit it.
00:18:14.000 But he also qualifies that very same idea and criticizes, for example, Agathocles and Ancient.
00:18:22.000 And he talks about how sometimes you have to also adopt the persona of being loved, but only when circumstances allow it.
00:18:30.000 So in other words, if you're dealing with hostile foreign actors, you don't want to take the moral high ground and want to be loved, you're going to end up losing your lunch. 0.81
00:18:38.000 But if there's nobody really to fear and you've put your threats under control, then Machiavelli says it would be okay to be loved, but it's all optics for him.
00:18:47.000 Okay.
00:18:48.000 It's all effectual.
00:18:49.000 It's all what the circumstances determine or dictate.
00:18:52.000 So I'm going to ask you something that I personally am not able to explain well, which is the end justifies the means.
00:18:58.000 We don't like saying that.
00:18:59.000 That's usually something that we're very dismissive of.
00:19:04.000 First, talk about that.
00:19:05.000 Then I have a very specific question about that of someone that we would consider to be a hero that could be put in that category.
00:19:10.000 What did he mean by that?
00:19:11.000 As I guess we've covered this partially, but basically you have to know what you want.
00:19:17.000 And then if you have to do something along the way, then so be it.
00:19:21.000 Is that right?
00:19:22.000 Right.
00:19:23.000 So the ends justify the means, which is a phrase he never actually says, but you can infer it from what he teaches, essentially comes down to a rejection of the idea that moral virtue, say moderation, is just inherently good in itself.
00:19:38.000 For Machiavelli, sometimes moderation is good, sometimes it's bad.
00:19:42.000 The way you determine whether it's good or bad is based on what the end goal of what it is that you want to achieve.
00:19:48.000 So we'll go back to his favorite example of Treasurer Borgia, who didn't use mercy, didn't display any Christian virtue at all toward the criminals who were ransacking this town.
00:20:00.000 I forget the name of it.
00:20:02.000 He basically brought down the hammer on these guys.
00:20:04.000 He used cruelty, Machiavelli says, but cruelty, he says, well used. 0.89
00:20:08.000 Why?
00:20:09.000 Well, because the end was to restore peace and law and order.
00:20:13.000 Well, you can't be loved by criminals.
00:20:15.000 You can't sing kumbaya with them.
00:20:18.000 You can't turn the other cheek.
00:20:19.000 And if you do that, they'll going to take advantage.
00:20:21.000 And so the end, security and law and order, justifies the means, cruelty.
00:20:27.000 So what's inherent in that phrase is this idea that there's no such thing as a moral absolute that's just simply good in itself.
00:20:34.000 It's good for something.
00:20:35.000 It's good for me.
00:20:36.000 It's good for us.
00:20:37.000 It's good for our community.
00:20:39.000 And that's where you take your moral compass from, not some kind of abstract moral idea.
00:20:44.000 And so two people that I love, and we talk about frequently here on the Charlie Kirk show that Hillsdale College has actually statues to would be Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.
00:20:54.000 Now, the two critiques that some people would have towards Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln is that they were willing to kill a lot of people, suspend habeas corpus, and participate in firebombing in Dresden.
00:21:08.000 But the justification at times, and Dr. Arne would have a really good answer on the Churchill side of this, would be, no, they knew what they wanted and they knew that there was something that was greater and they had to eliminate the enemy.
00:21:21.000 Now, obviously, this was in a combat theater and in a place of war, which obviously is an exception of just kind of domestic tyranny.
00:21:29.000 But was Machiavelli totally wrong in this sense?
00:21:32.000 Is that sometimes we need to put what we would consider to be peacetime morality and suspend it if we have to crush evil?
00:21:42.000 No, he's absolutely right on that.
00:21:45.000 And where it gets tricky, though, is if you're constantly fighting foreign wars, eventually the means that you're using to conquer your enemies can often come back home and be inflicted on your own citizens.
00:21:57.000 That's where things get hairy and dicey.
00:22:00.000 So for example, if you are involved in foreign theater and you're overturning elections for your own national interest, well, it's only a matter of time before something like that can turn on your own citizens.
00:22:11.000 So yes, Machiavelli's right.
00:22:13.000 Obviously, if you have a republic, a form of government, you have principles that you cherish, you have to be willing to defend them.
00:22:20.000 But I think, you know, with Machiavelli, though, you defend him by becoming expansionistic.
00:22:26.000 He wants eventually empire.
00:22:28.000 And I'm not sure Churchill was an imperialist.
00:22:31.000 I don't either.
00:22:32.000 I'm a huge Churchill fan.
00:22:33.000 I'm saying, though, that some people would criticize Churchill for what he did at Dresden or his campaign to almost mercilessly.
00:22:41.000 Machiavelli would say he did what he had to do.
00:22:44.000 Yeah, and I agree because he was at war against that goes back to your question.
00:22:52.000 Is it better to be fear to love?
00:22:53.000 Well, if Churchill was governed by being loved, what impact would that have had on the enemies he was confronting?
00:23:00.000 It wouldn't lead to anything other than probably more aggression.
00:23:03.000 War is a tough business, and there are very few rules of engagement to it, according to Machiavelli, and you have to be tough.
00:23:10.000 And so there's a quote here that I want to ask you about that Machiavelli said, which segues beautifully.
00:23:16.000 There is no avoiding war. 0.81
00:23:18.000 It can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
00:23:23.000 Now, I suppose you could take that a variety of different ways.
00:23:28.000 Did he mean war in the sense that we mean war, or was he writing this as advice to a political figure saying, like, if you have, you have to crush your political opponents now, or else they're only going to grow stronger?
00:23:41.000 Both.
00:23:41.000 You're referring to a quote that comes, I believe, from chapter three of The Prince.
00:23:45.000 At least in that particular chapter, he lays out the differences between ancient Rome and the way modern politics conducts its business.
00:23:52.000 In modern politics, Machiavelli says there's an inclination that you think that somehow war is avoidable, that if you just avoid war, it won't come to you.
00:24:01.000 In the context of the quote that you're mentioning, Machiavelli's talking about foreign enemies.
00:24:07.000 For Machiavelli, it's natural for human beings to want to expand and to acquire.
00:24:13.000 And so it's the natural inclination of all governments to want to grow.
00:24:17.000 And that means impinge upon your own borders and national interests.
00:24:21.000 So then you're caught in an arms race, so to speak, of expanding yourself.
00:24:26.000 So for Machiavelli, he thought that the secret to Rome, a classical Rome, was they never thought war was avoidable and they always took to fight to their enemies.
00:24:35.000 Now, in the discourses, he talks about the same phenomenon domestically.
00:24:39.000 He says sometimes you're going to find that you have enemies within.
00:24:42.000 You better strike while they're still weak before they grow and become a faction, in which case you're going to have to have either a civil war or even worse.
00:24:51.000 Yeah, and that's why I believe, and you don't have to comment on this from Hillsdale, but I can, that some aspects of the Biden regime striking their domestic political opposition is taking a page out of the Prince.
00:25:07.000 So help me unpack this quote.
00:25:09.000 Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. 0.51
00:25:18.000 Everyone sees what you appear to be, but few really know what you are.
00:25:23.000 What did Machiavelli mean by that?
00:25:25.000 He was giving advice in the Prince to a ruler that has to always appear, he says, moral, has to always appear religious, but he just can't be either if he wants to be effective.
00:25:36.000 And he's trying to encourage this leader to do what it takes to win political points against one's domestic and foreign enemies and essentially tell them it's okay.
00:25:46.000 People judge with their eyes.
00:25:47.000 So if you just walk around with the Bible under your arm, they're going to just think you're pious.
00:25:51.000 But behind the scenes, don't let piety get in the way of what's politically expedient.
00:25:57.000 So he's teaching you optics there, as people say.
00:26:03.000 Yes.
00:26:03.000 All right.
00:26:04.000 So let's optics.
00:26:05.000 So just pretend to be something, right?
00:26:07.000 You know, kind of basic public relations.
00:26:10.000 So let's talk now about, and I hate to do this because I think you could learn something from everyone, but I could just already hear so many of our listeners being like, man, this guy is so dark and kind of all about earthly power and all this.
00:26:27.000 What were some of the weaknesses in kind of what he wrote?
00:26:30.000 And again, it was written 500 years ago.
00:26:32.000 So who are we to try to critique weaknesses?
00:26:35.000 But let's say like if someone were to embrace Machiavellianism, what are some of the spots that make it most vulnerable if it's employed as a governing strategy?
00:26:44.000 Well, two things come to mind.
00:26:46.000 And I'll just cheat off the smart kids like Montesquieu.
00:26:49.000 Montesquieu raised the very same question and concern.
00:26:52.000 He thought that what was wrong about Machiavelli is this assumption that empire is not only inevitable, but desirable.
00:26:58.000 So in a short work called On Universal Monarchy in Europe, Montesquieu essentially argues that if you follow Machiavelli's advice and just have this foreign policy of imperialism, you're going to lead yourself to ruin.
00:27:10.000 So he turns the tables on Machiavelli.
00:27:12.000 What's imaginary leads to your ruin?
00:27:14.000 Adopting Machiavellianism in the modern world is actually imaginary.
00:27:18.000 Why?
00:27:19.000 Monascu said when Machiavelli was writing, there wasn't anything equivalent to, say, nuclear weapons.
00:27:25.000 Commerce hadn't really taken shape.
00:27:28.000 The playing field has now evened out.
00:27:31.000 Technology has made it almost superfluous to have the kind of ancient virtue that Machiavelli was talking about.
00:27:36.000 So you're never going to cultivate that kind of gusto that he thought was necessary.
00:27:40.000 So if you wanted to adopt Machiavellian policies in the modern world, which is to say imperialism, you're going to end up bankrupting your nation.
00:27:49.000 The only way you could continue to fight these foreign wars is if you keep printing money.
00:27:53.000 This is all from Monascu.
00:27:55.000 So Monascu saw clearly that, look, what he got right was his business about institutions and mixing republics and all that.
00:28:02.000 That's good.
00:28:03.000 Where he goes off the rails is this idea that empire is necessary.
00:28:07.000 For Monascu, empire in a modern age, especially when you throw in modern weaponry and modern wealth from manufacturing and industrialization, you're going to have to bankrupt yourself, arming yourself to the teeth that would be necessary for some kind of Machiavellian enterprise or agenda.
00:28:24.000 The other thing I think he simply goes wrong is he just claims that it is natural for human beings to acquire.
00:28:29.000 And what he means by that is there's no such thing really as moral virtue, which teaches you not to acquire and indulge your desires, but rather to moderate them.
00:28:38.000 Now, the reason why I say that's fundamentally flawed is because, one, I don't think it's natural for human beings to do that.
00:28:45.000 And also, what happens is if you don't encourage restraint and moral virtue, well, then you're going to have a society of degeneracy and license rather than liberty.
00:28:55.000 So I think there's a fundamental flaw there.
00:28:57.000 And in spite of the fact that he wants us to have skin in the game and be concerned with our liberty, what he says about morality actually teaches license and hedonism and not virtue.
00:29:09.000 Yeah, I think we're living through that, an era of licentiousness, and the founders talked a lot about that.
00:29:14.000 So that's an interesting question, which is what, so Machiavelli was, he was not necessarily, he was writing for a very specific type of person or a nation or a CEO, that whereas Aristotle in the ethics was talking, was writing for all people, right?
00:29:33.000 How to be a properly sold individual.
00:29:36.000 I don't think a 19-year-old college student all of a sudden saying, you know what, I'm going to become a Machiavellian.
00:29:43.000 What I'm getting at is how, if you applied Machiavellian belief to your own personal life, forget the macro side of it, like you're running, you know, Russia or Syria or India.
00:29:57.000 Like, let's just say, you know, a regular school teacher says, you know what, I'm going to be a Machiavellian.
00:30:02.000 How does that end?
00:30:04.000 Well, I've seen books sort of like that.
00:30:07.000 I can't remember.
00:30:08.000 There's one that comes to mind.
00:30:09.000 I've read parts of it.
00:30:09.000 I own it.
00:30:11.000 It was like Machiavellian for the modern executive.
00:30:14.000 And it's essentially a watered down version of what Machiavelli did.
00:30:17.000 Machiavelli was fundamentally political.
00:30:19.000 He was interested in institutions and politics, warts and all.
00:30:25.000 What it means for our daily lives is that you essentially just live a life of duplicity.
00:30:30.000 I mean, that's what it ultimately translates to.
00:30:32.000 But you don't need Machiavelli for that.
00:30:34.000 That's just soaked in our popular culture at this point.
00:30:37.000 I think it's in our nature.
00:30:38.000 And that's where I laugh because I wanted to say, like, just indulge your desire, like, indulge your nature, and you'll independently kind of live a Machiavellian life, I guess.
00:30:49.000 Well, Machiavelli wrote such a work for that, actually.
00:30:52.000 It's called the Mandragula.
00:30:53.000 It was a comedy play, and it was performed during his lifetime.
00:30:56.000 He never wanted the prints and the discourses published while he was alive.
00:31:00.000 But in the Mandragula, it's a play about people pursuing their sexual desires.
00:31:03.000 It's a play about infidelity.
00:31:05.000 It's a play about let's just all pretend we're faithful to each other, get what we ultimately want, and just kind of play up appearances.
00:31:12.000 So he's kind of written a book, you know, for something like the prince for the average guy, and it's in the Mandragula, but it has a deeper message as well.
00:31:21.000 And I would say that somebody like Francis Bacon picked up on it, and that is it's a story about an old man who wants to have an heir, but he can't have a child.
00:31:29.000 And so they concoct a bed trick to get his wife pregnant.
00:31:33.000 Well, what Francis Bacon would say is, well, all of that would be unnecessary.
00:31:36.000 Just allow me to conquer nature.
00:31:38.000 Maybe we can find a way to overcome the limits that nature had placed on us temporarily.
00:31:43.000 So there are Machiavellian ideas that do permeate everyday life.
00:31:47.000 I would just say these days it comes mostly from science.
00:31:50.000 Well, and I just want to reinforce this and emphasize this because this is why we're doing the partnership with Hillsdale College, which, you know, I'm oversimplifying it, but that's my job because I don't have the time to do a whole four years of this.
00:32:05.000 But yeah, Charlie, yet, yet.
00:32:07.000 Yes.
00:32:09.000 That's right.
00:32:09.000 I'm telling you.
00:32:10.000 Who knows?
00:32:11.000 I would be happy to.
00:32:12.000 And so the tension is the following.
00:32:17.000 Do you respect and appreciate, at least acknowledge a natural law, or do you think the will is superior to whatever were called the natural law?
00:32:24.000 And that is what I believe is the tension in America and in the West right now.
00:32:30.000 And in some ways, that debate has been going on for quite some time.
00:32:34.000 But Machiavelli was the one that blew this whole thing open.
00:32:37.000 And that's really why we've just dedicated this conversation to it, is prior to Machiavelli, there was at least people were at least going through the motions that, yes, okay, we acknowledge, you know, the five proofs of God of Aquinas, or we acknowledge that there is a natural law giver.
00:32:52.000 Machiavelli says, oh, it's your will.
00:32:56.000 And then from there, you get Hobbes and you get Rousseau and then you get Marx and you get Hegel and then you get Marx and then you get Nietzsche and then you get Derrida, you get Foucault.
00:32:56.000 Is that right?
00:33:05.000 And the next thing you know, you're sending your kids off to college and they say, yeah, there is no such thing as God.
00:33:09.000 I don't even know if existence is real.
00:33:10.000 Is that no, but that's actually quite accurate.
00:33:13.000 No, that's quite good.
00:33:14.000 In fact, you can even trace a reading list exactly as you articulated, and you can trace the death of God.
00:33:22.000 In one way, you know, I had an undergraduate teacher who was phenomenal, and I remember he introduced us to Nietzsche.
00:33:27.000 Of course, Nietzsche is famous for saying God is dead.
00:33:30.000 And I remember the theme of this course was to ultimately claim that Machiavelli was the first to stab, you know, God.
00:33:37.000 And then what you see subsequent to that is the God's long shadow sort of, you know, waning as we get to the modern era.
00:33:45.000 So, no, you're actually, that's quite accurate, I would say.
00:33:47.000 And you put your finger on the question.
00:33:49.000 There is a tension between, say, something like a natural law, which some would argue is too restrictive for modern politics.
00:33:56.000 Yes.
00:33:57.000 And then something like the extreme of Machiavelli, where, like I said, he never speaks of natural right or natural law.
00:34:03.000 But then you have sort of a middle ground.
00:34:05.000 And I would say that that would be modern natural right, that there is a standard by nature and we have a right to protect our lives and our property and our liberty.
00:34:13.000 And sometimes that means we have to employ Machiavellian means to do it.
00:34:17.000 So I would say there is a middle ground in natural right teaching.
00:34:20.000 So 11 years from now, I want you to publish a book that says 500 years, God on trial, because that would be the 500th anniversary of the print.
00:34:30.000 If my years are right.
00:34:31.000 Yeah, 1532, that'd be 500 years.
00:34:34.000 And yeah, I would love to do it.
00:34:37.000 I'll do it if you write the forward.
00:34:38.000 I'd be happy to in my kind of very limited knowledge of all of this.
00:34:43.000 But I'm glad you mentioned Nietzsche, Nietzsche, and we're short on time here.
00:34:48.000 But that's a nice segue to actually.
00:34:50.000 I was going to say, I see a future pepisode.
00:34:52.000 Oh, I Nietzsche's phenomenal.
00:34:55.000 He's absolutely vital.
00:34:56.000 Yeah.
00:34:57.000 And what I want to emphasize, though, is that a lot of Christians and conservatives will say, well, Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead.
00:35:04.000 That is wrong.
00:35:06.000 He was troubled by this.
00:35:08.000 He said that this is going to create an existential problem of the West.
00:35:11.000 Look, Nietzsche has so many problems. 0.98
00:35:13.000 He was nuts. 0.99
00:35:14.000 First of all, he lost his mind by the end of his life. 0.99
00:35:17.000 And, you know, he influenced a lot of evil activities from Leopold and Loeb, randomly killing a University of Chicago student.
00:35:26.000 He's a perfect example of that to entire civilizations.
00:35:30.000 I believe the triumph of the will actually echoes and goes back to Nietzsche.
00:35:36.000 But he pinpointed better than anyone else and said out loud, hey, the West is going to fall apart, everybody, if you don't get this right.
00:35:45.000 And I don't think we, as people that respect the natural law, give him credit for that.
00:35:49.000 No, you're absolutely correct.
00:35:50.000 And I would say he, like Machiavelli and Montesquieu, are the thinkers you can't afford not to know.
00:35:57.000 We are living in many ways under the consequences of Nietzsche's ideas, for better or for worse.
00:36:03.000 And he did have insights, and you're absolutely correct.
00:36:05.000 He was not declaring with a triumphant note that God was dead.
00:36:09.000 He was worried that there would be anything that could replace the old tablets of good and evil, good and bad, in the modern world.
00:36:16.000 And his ultimate fear was nihilism.
00:36:18.000 Now, some would say he was a nihilist, but I think he would defend that and say, no, he's actually concerned with elevating human beings from modern decadence and modern nihilism.
00:36:29.000 So you're absolutely correct about that.
00:36:31.000 Well, we're going to have to get into Beyond Good and Evil and Zarathustra.
00:36:35.000 If I remember correctly, and that Zarathustra, among other things, was the book that inspired those two Chicago students to commit a murder.
00:36:43.000 Leopold and Loeb.
00:36:44.000 It was the pale criminal, the passage on the pale criminal and thus speak Zarathustra.
00:36:48.000 And they thought they could become the overman and the ubermensch, which is a very interesting thing when you combine that with modern science and you look at kind of what these massive billionaires are doing to try to live forever and challenge, you know, kind of how we were made.
00:37:06.000 This is all very interesting questions, but I think that our listeners, you know, we have all people of all faith backgrounds that listen.
00:37:12.000 You know, we have a lot of Christians that listen.
00:37:14.000 This is so important because the unraveling of society you see around you can go back to thinkers that might have just been passed over in your college experience or in your life experience.
00:37:26.000 But that's why we're unpacking them and giving the good and the bad.
00:37:30.000 And because we actually acknowledge good and evil, unlike some of these other thinkers.
00:37:34.000 So any final thoughts, Doctor, as we summarize this one?
00:37:39.000 And we tease Mr. Nietzsche.
00:37:41.000 We go to Germany next.
00:37:43.000 Yeah, let's do that.
00:37:44.000 I would love to.
00:37:45.000 No, Charlie, just wanted to thank you again for drawing attention to not only Hillsdale College, but the importance of these books.
00:37:52.000 And like you said, we're living in a world where we're affected by these ideas.
00:37:55.000 And so if you're interested in seeing the direction of where our culture may or may not be going, it's crucial to go back to the sources, the intellectual sources of those ideas.
00:38:04.000 So I think you're doing an enormous public service here.
00:38:06.000 Thank you.
00:38:07.000 And I will go a step further.
00:38:09.000 For me and the work we do on the show and Turning Point, we're actually more effective because we know what motivates some of these people.
00:38:17.000 We know what they're going to do next.
00:38:18.000 And it gives us a piece of a piece and some comfort saying, okay, we kind of understand the philosophical underpinnings and we can more effectively counter them.
00:38:29.000 I know that's more my job than your job, but it's so important to be able to pinpoint it because we all are born into a world we did not create.
00:38:36.000 And in some ways, we're living in Machiavelli's world.
00:38:38.000 And that's absolutely.
00:38:40.000 And increasingly, Nietzsche's.
00:38:42.000 And that's what I want.
00:38:42.000 Yes.
00:38:43.000 So that is a perfect tease for our next conversation.
00:38:46.000 So consider it, Charlie.
00:38:48.000 Reinvited.
00:38:49.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com.
00:38:50.000 Sign up for a course.
00:38:51.000 Thank you so much, Doctor.
00:38:52.000 You got it.
00:38:53.000 And safe travels, Charlie.
00:38:54.000 Thanks for having me again.
00:38:55.000 All right.
00:38:55.000 Take care.
00:38:55.000 All right.
00:38:58.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:39:00.000 Email us your thoughts.
00:39:01.000 Freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:39:02.000 And if you want to support our program, it's charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:39:06.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
00:39:07.000 God bless.
00:39:10.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.