You Know, For Kids: Machiavelli's "The Prince"

Such is life in the Oslo compound

So you see, that’s where the trouble began - that smile. That damned smile.

It is plausible that this experience does not generalize, because a certain amount of the ‘tism certainly must be genetic. And who cares about the content of bedtime reading anyway? You can get away with quite a lot in that semi-lucid wind-down ASMR dream state - we read Snow Crash (censoring the totally superfluous sex stuff in favor of cool glass-tipped spears), we read Moby Dick (quite a bit of harpooning in the following weeks), and we read some Machiavelli. You know, for kids.

The thing about reading Machiavelli to kids is that it starts off as a power fantasy - the same way children will think about what they would do if they were a wizard or a knight, they might be willing to think of what they would do as a prince. Would you rather have the shopkeepers and such on your side, or the barons? If you need taxes, should you try to grab them up front when you take over, or string them along over time? What do you think? Discuss.

But where it gets interesting is when Machiavelli actually starts constructing an ethical system, first implicitly and then explicitly in the second half of the work. This is surprisingly accessible to a smart 8 year old. The default ethical system children are exposed to, particularly in schools, is a sort of authority-worship virtue ethics. Institutions you are subjected to against your will define what is “nice”, by fiat, and often in blatantly hypocritical ways, filled with unprincipled exceptions. This frankly requires quite a bit of deprogramming in adolescence in the case of the autiste who was naive enough to take them at their word, and often leaves lasting scars. Cynicism that posits people as completely capricious, rather than acting within a flawed system where they cannot be honest; mind-killing buy-in to this system and donning the mantle of the Male Feminist; sublimation of these contradictions into a hatred of capitalism, maaan; identification with population slices that are seemingly immune from these imperatives via voluntary wiggerdom or aspirational downwards mobility; sociopathic striverism as one tries to acquire the power and blessing of those institutions. Really, a poasting career is an above-par outcome.

Machiavelli is a breath of fresh air here. The caricatured version of Machiavelli is “it’s okay to be a little bit evil to get what you want”. On its own terms, that caricature isn’t exactly wrong - Machiavelli himself points out that if you win, most sins are excused or retconned anyway. But stopping there misses the actual meat of the work - what does it mean for something to be “okay”, anyway?

The important nugget here is almost psychological. Machiavelli’s claim is that you can choose what kind of person you want to be, and then cultivate your character, that is, your virtues, vices, and even preferences, so that you are able to achieve something. This is remarkable, and I think an excellent ethical system to expose children to in their formative years.

The most concise statement of this is in Chapter Fifteen, where we are informed that “… it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how to be able not to be “good”, and to use or not use this ability according to circumstances” (Constantine translation). You can insert the “we might need to be a little bit evil” clip here, if you can still find it. But in further chapters, Machiavelli clarifies that we’re not merely talking about “good” and “evil”, but what we might call virtues that purport to be good, but cause evil, and vice (heh) versa. Immediately we focus on the relatively anodyne example of generosity versus parsimony - generosity is thought to be “good”, but the only way to be generous enough for everyone to notice is by taxing your people into immiseration. A stingy ruler, by contrast, will have funds to spare when times are tough. Virtue and vice morph into their facial opposite, so cultivate both, in reputation or substance as needed - the only thing that matters is the outcome. And because one cannot cultivate every virtue nor avoid every vice, men being what they are, choosing between them to mitigate the danger of one’s flaws and to secure one’s desired result is the essence of the personal form of statecraft.

It strikes me as a bit Nietzschean, even though I am not remotely a Nietzsche scholar (everyone with a right wing internet presence is supposed to pretend this; I grasp the nettle and say out loud I only had time for the Cliff’s notes back in the day) and Nietzsche himself only mentions Machiavelli in passing. But it seems clearly related to the concept of self-overcoming and the will-to-power, that is, cultivating one’s own values as part of the project of imposing one’s self on reality.

Nietzsche is a digression, in any case - Machiavelli does not posit this process of deciding one’s character as being part of a larger metaphysical project, but rather as a necessity driven by reality imposing its will upon you, and you deciding to adapt or die. Late Renaissance Italy was not a place for “just be a heckin decent human being :) ”. It was simultaneously the richest and most cultured place on Earth and a center of hellish war and betrayal. If you choose poorly which virtue to pursue, you die hemorrhaging your guts out from the poison your erstwhile ally slipped you while your city burns and your family’s corpses line the streets. The fact is that while our geopolitics may not be so cinematic on a year-by-year basis, in the current year pursuing the wrong virtues and the wrong vices will wreck you personally just as badly as a French army.

Convincing your kids in the midst of a contemporary hellscape that at least they are not as screwed as a Borgia henchman, and can choose to be the kind of person who makes it, is worth the price of admission.