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A little Machiavelli.
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Niccolo Machiavelli shocked his contemporaries, and can still shock us, with his easy acceptance of the role of violence and cruelty in worldly success. At one point in his best-known work, The Prince, he argues casually that Fortune should be raped: "Fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust … she's more likely to yield that way."
It's a horrible picture that manages to upset us in a way that the book's central theme upset its first readers: what if the Christian idea that politics must be subject to justice was wrong? What if might is actually right?
[...]
Instinctively, we want morality to show us a world where these choices don't have to be made. But the challenge of Machiavelli, for Christians and atheists alike, is that he confronts us with a terrible argument: we cannot do good without power but we cannot gain power, nor keep it, without doing evil.
-- Nick Spencer at The Guardian
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And why bother doing good at all, save for what is good for oneself?
_ _ _
Niccolo Machiavelli shocked his contemporaries, and can still shock us, with his easy acceptance of the role of violence and cruelty in worldly success. At one point in his best-known work, The Prince, he argues casually that Fortune should be raped: "Fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust … she's more likely to yield that way."
It's a horrible picture that manages to upset us in a way that the book's central theme upset its first readers: what if the Christian idea that politics must be subject to justice was wrong? What if might is actually right?
[...]
Instinctively, we want morality to show us a world where these choices don't have to be made. But the challenge of Machiavelli, for Christians and atheists alike, is that he confronts us with a terrible argument: we cannot do good without power but we cannot gain power, nor keep it, without doing evil.
-- Nick Spencer at The Guardian
_ _ _
And why bother doing good at all, save for what is good for oneself?
