Niccolo Macchiavelli is a universal man. His works and studies of a bygone time hold many words of wisdom and cunning that the people of today can appreciate and the people of tomorrow will admire. I'm in the middle of quite a severe summer nowadays and the hot weather often has me lounging outside with a pack of smokes and a book. Today it was Machiavelli's Discourses and I there is one thing in it's earlier chapters that echo throughout my readings:
Necessity governs the world.
This is a thought that finds great expression in his other works especially The Prince. When an individual feels that necessity is clawing and biting at his heels, he is moved to respond in a decisive manner. When it comes to necessity, it is either respond or die. When you do not feel necessity, your actions lack purpose, your spirit wanders, you grow complancent, lazy, and dependent.
Examine your social environment and how tight or loose it is. When your environment presses upon you restrictions and limitations for example, curfews, you feel it all of the time, and you have this instict to respond in some way. That tightness makes you hunger for more, to break beyond the set limit. This afflicts especially people who are poor, who start with nothing but numerous restrictions in their lives. Machiavelli has what he calls Neo-Princes, those who rise to the top from the very bottom, what we now like to call "rags to riches". The Princes are backward and regressive.They are those born to privilege. They find themselves in an environment that is loose, surrounded by excessive luxuries, and have few constrictions all. Most Princes have no urge to progress beyond their limits and often create nothing worthwhile in this world; they are good at squandering what others have accumulated.
This pressure from the environment does not have to be material poverty. It can sometimes be psychological. You feel unhappy with the world around you and compelled to change something about it or yourself. This dissatisfaction is constant, it gives you direction. and it focuses your energy. I would fall into this category. I must constantly create challenges for myself, find some way of feeling limited and pressured, never resting on what I have done in the past. I see myself as constantly starting with nothing, and compelled to outdo what I have done before.
It matters not what I've succeded in. All that matters is what I'm failing at.
Some people come to rely on others to give them what they want and need. They wait....and complain. Others learn early on that the only thing that is worthwhile is that which you get for yourself, that you make your own in some way. Such types don't like the feeling of dependence or waiting for others to help them.
When I look at our country I see a lot of people who feel no necessity, who have lost the sense of limitations, of their days being numbered, of feeling compelled to move in a particular direction. Too many Princes, not enough Neo-Princes. In countries like China and Russia, it is much different, where almost a national inferiority conflex is taking place.. All nations rise and fall in patterns, and to Machiavelli the fall of the Roman Empire happened when it had become so vast and powerful that it lost the necessity to create and expand. It became a nation of fat, privileged princes...that fell in the end.
When I look at the insurgency in the hills of the communist controlled countries, I see one side compelled by necessity to adapt and be creative. It is either that or die. The other side does not feel such compulsion. To the government , it is not a matter of life or death. To them, they can let the communists slowly grow in power and influence without being a direct threat to their lives. As Napoleon says, the moral to the physical is three to one, and in that area, we are at a disadvantage.
How many times in sports do we see one side fall behind; this acts as an incredible spur to their morale, and they respond by ratcheting up their effort.
Why is it that the Democrats and Obama finally had success while the Republicans and McCain went into free fall for several years?
Necessity, born out of a lack of power.
Anything that is created out of necessity has a power and force. This could be a state like ancient Rome. The ideas and principles that stood at this origin turn into dead forms and conventions over time. People drift away from the beginning and lose a sense of why certain things were created. They become like zombies. A nation or individual must either find a way to return to their origins, to what sparked their creation, or start over and create a new order of things.
Out of power for many years and wandering in the wilderness, the Nazi Party created a new ideology in the 1930s to hang their hats on and remained incredibly focused on this. Slowly they came to power and a position of political dominance with the focus of national security and progress. But growing soft and overconfident with power, they moved away from this origin, lost their sense of original purpose and lost power (and in the end, their lives!).
I find that in my own youth, I hit upon certain ideals and values that related to my individuality, to what separates me from others. Some of this was false rebellion, but some of it was very real and very related to my nature. When I return to those values, to that faith in my peculiarity, I have power. When I conform, when I go astray from that, I wander without purpose. That is why I return to Machiavelli's works, time after time, I return to read and re-read.
The origin of anything is like a root ball for a great tree. When those roots wither or rot, it can take years to notice, but the whole tree slowly dies.
