What did Machiavelli get wrong?
Let's try to understand why Machiavelli might have been wrong about the sociology of the stage!
If beneath everyone is predictably self-interested in matters of power, why is our society progressively getting better and more Egalitarian?
What if this assumption is wrong? What if, beneath everything, we are in an eternal battle between good and evil, and all those who claim we are inherently evil have already concluded the war with evil as the winner?
Why can’t everyone be a contrast of good and evil? At the very least, this is what psychology has found to be true: your personality is made of multiple sub-personalities, some of which are so unfamiliar to others that you may even hate that part of yourself.
And even if beneath everyone there is a monster, what law of nature states that all that matters is the lowest part of the subconscious?
What if God (or natural selection, for my atheist friends) only allowed those to survive who could keep their inner monster locked behind the layer of the conscious mind?
What if that monster is stored in the prison cell of the mind because, by its nature, it is a monster, and therefore must be socially isolated from everything that is human, and we must not become from outside what we are from inside?
because let's be honest, very, very few of us truly know what we are from the inside in the first place.
What if people who unknowingly commit small acts of evil are not people tamed by the devil, but genuinely good people who bit off more than they could chew? What if they simply made a moral miscalculation?
At the end of the day, we must also ask: what if what we consider a monster is not actually a monster, but another side of our personality that is essential to our survival?
Fight or flight.
And when, unknowingly, the wrong set of knobs gets triggered in the brain, we end up doing bad things
For two simple reasons:
We don’t know any better.
Our pattern recognition was not functioning properly.
Because it’s not as if almost everyone is trying to kill each other. Yes, once upon a time we loved killing each other for bananas (again, fight-or-flight gone wrong).
But that life is long gone. As we become a more abundant society, we will see fewer and fewer cases of fight-or-flight gone wrong.
Most ethical philosophy is based on eras where you could kill someone and, with a little cleverness, get away with it.
But today, crime’s biggest enemy is the same enemy that once destroyed miracles. When this enemy first appeared in society, we saw a drastic decrease in reported miracles—and now that this enemy has reached almost every human, miracles have disappeared too.
Its name is CCTV cameras—or simply phone cameras.
Most ethical philosophy was built in eras far below our current moral standards. Today, treating your partner with respect is not gentlemanly or faithful—it is basic human decency, a wisdom that was beyond the gods of Greece and Rome, and by transitive relation, beyond the philosophers from 469 BCE (birth of Socrates) to October 21, 1950 (when the Geneva Convention was enforced).
To judge current morality by Machiavelli’s standards is to claim that almost every human in today’s society—except a few—is more powerful and wiser than the Greek gods. And as far as physical appearance goes, we have long surpassed the idealized bodies of Greek gods.
And for those who disagree—just ask me for my shirtless photo and you’ll understand. For those who don’t want to look at me, here’s a better and more widely available example: search “Chris Hemsworth Love and Thunder shirtless” on Google.
It’s time to create a philosophical framework that not only talks about thinking, but actually thinks about how to implement ideal moral standards. Of course, we will fail—nothing ideal survives the test of reality—but philosophy must account for that and pursue the relentless pressure of perfection.
No, I don’t mean abandoning the ideas and lessons of the past. I mean learning from them and creating a philosophy for today—a philosophy for a society not judged by the standards of eras where genocide, gang rape, and human vivisection were legal, but by standards where being an exception at something good is admirable.