A thought I’ve meant to express is how the use of leftist ideology fits into political dynamics as described by Machiavelli in his famous book The Prince from the early 1600s.
These two different dispositions are found in every city: that the people are everywhere anxious not to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles are out to dominate and oppress the people.
When the nobles see that they cannot withstand the people, they start to increase the standing of one of their own numbers, and make him a prince in order to be able to achieve their own ends under his cloak.
The people are more honest in their intentions than the nobles, as the latter want to oppress the people, whereas the people only want not to be oppressed.
The nobles have more foresight and are more astute; they always act in time to safeguard their interests, and take sides with whom they expect to win.
Machiavelli takes it as a given that this dynamics is in play, that there is an inner drive by the nobility or ‘ruling elites’ towards oppression and ultimately, if completely successful, totalitarian and unthreatened power over the masses. And Machiavelli offers his intellectual services in detail.ing how best to go about the process! Everything is a tool to this end, be it military force or use, corruption of the judiciary, illusory threats to people’s safety and so on, but the bit I want to draw attention to is:
When the nobles see that they cannot withstand the people, they start to increase the standing of one of their own numbers, and make him a prince in order to be able to achieve their own ends under his cloak.
Lifting from something I wrote years ago: And so ideally for the nobles the people think they are in power, as in a democracy, but the nobles, or aristocrats of worldly power, ensure that it is they who covertly maintain power, by secretly manipulating the democratic process, placing in power one of their whom the people imagine to be one of their own, and so "achieve their own ends under his cloak." A particularly crude example being the, almost out of nowhere, the crassness of the ecstatic foisting of the declared messianic figure of Barack Obama on the people as this wonderful antidote to the obvious villain figure of George Bush and his neocon gang. Or prior to him, for instance, Tony Blair, who was also ushered in in Britain in a similar spirit of ecstatic optimism.
What I want to add here though is that the leftist ideology itself can take the place of the person the nobility use to achieve their ends under his cloak. Obviously it is the will to power that is the crucial element, and an ideology is just a tool towards that end. And thus the ideology of our times is made a prince to achieve the elites’ ends under its cloak. Going back to the nineteenth and some of the twentieth centuries, socialism in its various manifestations appeared to be an ideology of the people, and fits within Machiavelli’s dynamic of the general populace pushing back against the oppression by the nobility.
You’d have to be some idiot to still see things in that light now though, and now that ideology is blatantly the instrument or ‘prince’ used to achieve their ends under its cloak. We’ll erode your right to dissent with Hate Speech Laws and so on, ideally you can’t even think thoughts contrary to the nobility/ruling elite. Thus arrest for silent prayer in Britain. And to finish with Aldous Huxley’s line:
Idealism [Ideology] is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
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