Machiavellianism

and the immediate crisis collapsed.

Hamilton, however, saw an opportunity, and he would give a rather Machiavellian suggestion to Washington that maybe the army could be used to put pressure on states like Rhode Island to support Congress's revenue proposals.

To put it mildly, I think this is a terrible idea.

For one, the soldiers never march on their state governments, they march on Congress.

When a resource depletes, the opportunistic brain doesn't mourn, it instantly scans the horizon for the next shift.

So now let's step out of the biology lab and into the philosophy seminar, because once our biology drives us to seize the moment, how do we justify it in our own minds? That's where we see a clash between Machiavellian pragmatism and virtue ethics.

Niccolò Machiavelli taught that outcomes justify the methods.

Aristotle taught that character and moral habit form the foundation of a good life.

His purpose was not to write a learned treatise on Renaissance history and philosophy, but to elaborate on empirically sound method of analyzing human political affairs.

The tradition of political thought by Burnham labeled Machiavellian did indeed derive many of its ideas from the 16th century Florentine, but whether this was an accurate derivation and whether Machiavelli himself would have endorsed Machiavellianism are separate and secondary questions.

I've heard that critique before.

Would Machiavelli have agreed with Burnham? And I...

That's why predicting things is so fucking hard.

There's too many goddamn factors.

Nevertheless, because Burnham and the Machiavellians saw politics in terms of a struggle for power, and the struggle for power was central to the nature of an elite and to all other social relationships, it would not be inaccurate to describe Machiavellianism as a kind of political determinism paralleling the economic determinism of Marx.

Let me ask you this.

Yeah.

There's a personality type of a person called, there's that condition, a condition called Machiavellism.

Machiavellism.

Like Machiavellism.

Then there's another one.

You have already downloaded it.

And how to do that, like, that's, you don't just do that, right? Like, you can't just decide from a corporate strategy level, "Okay, we'll be the Switzerland of corporates." Eh, like, you're gonna have to figure out how that actually works.

Well, this goes back to a, a conversation we've had in the past, which is, like, this rise of Machiavellianism, you know.

Machiavellianism is a pejorative.

Like, someone who's Machiavellian is very self-centered, self-interested, uh, to the point where like fear is more important than love, all that stuff.

And what I would say is that we need to qualify your statement that middle powers-