Transcription
I want to talk about a writer who has obviously been extremely important to me. He was the Guiding Spirit behind the 48 Laws of Power, undoubtedly, and that is my good friend Nicolo [Music] Machiavelli. Machiavelli. I remember also going to sound like I was a very strange 15-year-old, cuz I talked about him. But I believe I bought my first copy of The Prince when I was 15, and I very much remember the cover of it, cuz it was so distinctive. It had a large hand on it, and there were all these people inside the hand, as if the hand was controlling all of these people. And it was kind of this metaphor for The Prince, and I thought that was very striking. And I was attracted to it, probably because in high school and in my family and things, I was dealing with things that were going on, possibly manipulations. I, I had the sense when I was very young that people wore these masks, that they pretend to be something that they’re not, and it really fascinated and it troubled me at a very early age. So something inside me was drawn to that picture of the hand and the cover and Machiavelli.
So I read The Prince, and honestly, I don’t think I understood a hell of a lot, although you know he, he talks a lot about history and it’s fairly straightforward. But I think I was very excited by the language, because you know, often times when you’re young, what irritates you about humans and adults is how fake they are, how they pretend to be something that they’re not, right? And when you’re a kid, or you’re a child, or you’re a teenager, you see through it. You see they’re faking it; they’re putting up a front that’s not really who they are, and it bothers you. Machiavelli just ripped that damn mask off of people’s faces and said, “This is the human animal as it is. They want power.” Okay. And so he was writing about great Christian figures, like the popes of Italy, as if they were Mafia Dons, as if they were trying to gain power. And he had this idea which, to this day, um, I think about all the time—it influences my thoughts—called the effective truth, ver—I believe in Italian, don’t quote me on that. The effective truth is the truth of people is not in what they say about themselves. The Pope will say, “I am the representative of Christianity of Christ on Earth,” etc., etc., but it doesn’t mean anything. Look at their actions; their actions reveal the effective truth of who they are, of what they want and what they’re doing. And the effective truth of the Pope at that time, who was a Borgia, who, of course, was the nastiest Pope of all—so it sort of a skewed impression—was he was trying to conquer Italy; he was trying to create an empire, a Vatican Empire within Italy. Okay, that was the truth about him. So look at people’s actions and analyze them through that lens and see them not for what they say, not for what they pretend to be, but for what they actually do.
And the hardness of his language, the crystal realism of it, the ability to not look at all the people throw at you to try and deceive you, was like, whoa, it’s like a big thing of cold water in your face—that is true; that is fantastic. And we imagine nowadays that people can be pretty sharp and pretty cynical, or pretty realistic, I, because I don’t think M is cynical at all; that’s the wrong word, because he’s not cynical, but pretty sharp and realistic. But imagine being like that in 1514 or so, when he wrote The Prince, when something like that could put you in prison, where it was scandalous, where it was heretical. The courage and the ability to see through that is what made him, 500 and some years later, still being read, and all the great leaders in history have read him, and so many people have been influenced by him, both on the right and the left, because of that sharpness of his vision, of looking through and looking at the human animal in the clearest possible light.
The other thing about Machiavelli that I didn’t discover until I was older is that he’s a very rich writer. People only focus on The Prince because that’s his most quote-unquote “evil” book, but he wrote many other books that have nothing like that. The Discourses is absolutely probably his most brilliant work, in which he goes through much more of history and he explains ideas that are much deeper. It’s a much longer book. He did an incredible book on the history of Florence called The Florentine Histories, which is really beautiful; not many people read it. He wrote a book on warfare, The Art of War. Okay, he wrote a play; he was a playwright, and he was a poet. And his play—he wrote several plays—but he had a play called Mandragora, which is the most scandalous play you can ever imagine about Christian religion. It’s hilarious; it’s really funny, and it’s a beautiful thing. And nobody realizes that Machiavelli was this creative man who wrote plays, wrote poetry. He was also a great seducer; he had all these numerous affairs with very beautiful women. He was a character, the kind of characters you don’t find anymore in this world. He was a sort of kind of person that I wish I could encounter. If he were here, he would be one of my, my best friends, if he, if he liked me. I don’t know if he would, but but I felt something very human about him. It also helps that we have nearly the same birthday, so there’s some kind of weird vibe going on. But I’ve always been attracted to his realism and to his earthiness, and he was by far the guiding Spirit of the 48 Laws of Power. So Nicolo, wherever you are, I thank you.