FUNDAMENTALS TO MISUNDERSTANDING POLITICS Chapter 1.1

FUNDAMENTALS TO MISUNDERSTANDING POLITICS
Chapter 1.1 Are We, As Followers, Too Far Beyond Driven?

(See Chapter 1.0 here.)

Oak Boat: I want to come back to that line you quoted earlier from the present-day American essayist Wesley Yang: “that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.” We might say: Let’s let Wes Yang meet Nicky Mach. And Wes, meet Nicky Mach, etcetera.[i]

Newt Monk: And who might you mean when you say “Nicky Mach?” Him I know not. (At least, I don’t think I do.)

Oak Boat: Well, Nicky Mach … I mean, you do know, it’s simple shorthand for Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). (Yes, yes, that Machiavelli.) Ole Nicky, despite the popular trash of a myth that continues, even in 2024, to ostracize him as one of the meanest, most cynical humans being to have ever walked the earth, not unlike Caine in Kung Fu, Mr. Machiavelli was actually, believe it or not, quite human and even quite humane.

Newt Monk: Yeah, I might just believe it.

Oak Boat: So, in his book of Discourses, ole Nicky Mach expressing a fundamental political maxim where, essentially, for any and all human civilizations, hunger and poverty mark (and always mark) the two fundamental drives behind all laws and politics. In other words, all statutes, precedents, prohibitions, rule-making, and other public policies, along with all the methods and motivations behind their supposéd achievements, remain rooted in the prevention, restraint, treatment, acceptance (as well as denial) of a civilization’s risk against succumbing to either/or (or perhaps, “both/and’) widespread hunger and generational impoverishment.[ii]

Newt Monk: I sort of see what you’re saying Machiavelli once said. (Sort of). I don’t know if things are quite as absolute and formulaic as you and or ole Nicky Mach say they are. But I grant that general threats like widespread hunger, crop blight, disease, famine, and trade embargos, as well as economic depression and/or the decay of affluence across entire classes—yes, these things have been, and will continue to be, at the root of most political (dis)agreements and conflicts.

Oak Boat: Yeah, you’re following me correctly. What you’re saying is like what a pair of recent translators of Machiavelli’s Discourses, Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, have suggested: that in that book Machiavelli “tries to show that to understand political situations correctly, one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they face.”[iii]

Newt Monk: Ah yes, I’m starting to see the point. Just as food prices and retirement funds concern much of today’s day-to-day politics––and by “our” I include fellow followers like myself, who are fellow non-leaders of our communities––so too did the hopes (and despairs) of farmers (which includes ranching and fishing) and the general graft of those farmers’ bankers drive the politics of Nicky Mach’s world way back in the day.

Oak Boat: Yeah.

Newt Monk: And these twin drives that beat the heart of all the politics occurred in all the centuries before Nicky Mach ever dreamed of putting his own pen to paper?

Oak Boat: Yeah, that’s why you see today, writers like Yang observing how the leaders who govern us profit off the “plight of the poor in spirit.” You see how that kind of plight continues to constitute the bare essentials to these oh-so-lovely latter-day politics we fellow glitched-out Americans seem to find ourselves stuck in as we grumble toward the fall of 2024. [iv]

Newt Monk: So, ole Nicky Mach, meanwhile, offers in his Discourses no more thantwo reasons for why humans being, so long as they remain uncorrupted, desire freedom?

Oak Boat: Yeah, but do you understand the rationales for why he limited himself to just those two reasons? Do you see the two groups of humans being Nicky Mach divides, a division obvious to all individuals affected by political life for all situations?

Newt Monk: I would guess that his first reason, or the first group involves and includes only a slender few—a perpetual, numerical minority––a few who, for whatever reason, strongly desire the freedom to command others.

Oak Boat: Yeah, those are the ones who want to be free only to make others unfree!

Newt Monk: On the other hand, for the majority of a civilization’s citizens—which may even include mildly meek and moldy me!––they instead deeply yearn for an authentic freedom simply so that they––and that we!––may find a way to pay our overdue bills, to find a few minutes to prune a few overgrown vines and perhaps water some overlooked patio cacti as an overall reflection of how we have found a way to “live secure.”[v]

Oak Boat: Yeah, but often our leaders fail in their freedom to let us (their followers) freely live our lives securely. It happens all the time in all kinds of places.

Newt Monk: So it seems to go. So it seems.

Oak Boat: More like suck it seems to go, I’d say. Suck it seems. So it seems. I mean, that happened in the jim crow American South a century ago, where, instead of secure living, the political system offered to its followers through the leadership of its leaders, it instead, to quote Isabel Wilkerson from her study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010): “mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides,” both the leaders and followers who somehow lived in that South.[vi]

Newt Monk: Yeah, but as American political philosopher Sharon Krause has pointed out––in Liberalism with Honor (2002)––even in our own modern times, a growing number of members of the nation’s non-leadership class feel a certain sense of powerlessness with what the present has decided to present to them. Presently in 2024, the present seeks to present to we non-leaders a subtle sense of powerless confinement. Krause’s examples highlight how––

the special ‘bills of rights’ that have proliferated in recent years (patients’, victims’, parents’, children’s, now even air travelers’) speak more to a feeling of powerlessness and the need for protection from forces beyond one’s control than to new freedoms. [vii]

Oak Boat: Yet it’s not just academic types who’ve lately noticed, and have later written about, the seemingly ticking temporarily behind an apparent, ever-depleting expiration date for American rights and freedoms. And it’s not just me or you. Would you believe that occasional, prominent personalities who (at least momentarily) make up our popular culture media have sometimes spotted this, sometimes even spoken about it as well?

Newt Monk: I would believe you, and I will believe you, because I believe that you are the one who most wants to be believed. (And I even believe that you mostly believe the beliefs I just stated.)

Oak Boat: So you should then believe me when I take some (modestly popular?) media figure, like Stoya, for example. She’s a retired adult film actress who has shifted her endeavors to become quite an impressive essayist and cultural observer––like when she differentiates modern American notions of empowerment from their notions of entitlement. According to Stoya, when these two concepts are set side by side—or, at least when they are set so in twenty-first century America––the idea of being “empowered feels as though that power,” whether it’s political, cultural, or spiritual sort of power, “can be revoked according to someone else’s whim.” But on the other hand, the word “entitled” tends to mean, at least for Stoya, that “it is far easier to believe that that power is actually mine.”[viii]

Newt Monk: To her intriguing differentiation I might add a blunt line once given by the great comedian and thinker George Carlin when he said: “The powerful keep the power. That’s why they’re called the powerful.[ix]

Oak Boat: “So it goes,” said some sad saint from long ago. “So it goes.”[x]

NOTES

---

[i] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.

[ii] Machiavelli contends: “It is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good. Where a thing works well on its own without the law, the law is not necessary; but when some good custom is lacking, at once the law is necessary.” Thus, for Machiavelli: “There is greater virtue to be seen where choice has less authority.” See: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi Sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio in Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), (I, iii), p. 15 (1st quotation); (I, i), p. 8 (2nd quotation).

[iii] Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction” to Machiavelli’s Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. xxxiii.

[iv] Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, p. 25.

[v] On the point that they want to be free only to make others unfree, see Edmund Burke’s various warnings:

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do….

But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. (242)

And:

In all [political] bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing … will prevent the men of talents disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects….

In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders. (284–85)

Burke goes on to say that “To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they,” that is, the leaders “ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct”: their followers. But, continues Burke, “to be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural weight and authority.” See: Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France (1791) in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (12 vols.; London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), III, pp. 242, 284–85; Machiavelli, Discourses, (I, xvi), p. 46.

[vi] Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2010), p. 31.

[vii] Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. x.

[viii] Stoya, Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn, (Los Angeles: Not a Cult, 2018), pp. 147–48.

[ix] George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 106.

[x] Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1969; 1971).