From one piece Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer 26 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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The Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.
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and you may now use the actual Inquisition record of you having gone through censorship as the document to prove that you and only you have the right to print the book and therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing it or printing an unauthorized edition. And so, the very first version of copyright is the Inquisition.
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What it is is 200 years of original thought using the ancients as the trellis up which the rose climbs in order to bloom.
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And so Machiavelli is suddenly useful not to people who sympathize with him but to people who see him as an enemy.
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korrents.com
Every new information technology is followed by a wave of censorship in which a great many books are banned at once.Their words
mini thesis, every time there's a new information technology, there's a subsequent wave of censorship to try to censor the new technology and a bajillion books get banned all at once.
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It is often the case that a work which contains radically unusual ideas will drift along being not particularly zoomed in on by society and not widely read until it hits a moment that the new questions being asked in that century or that decade are answered by something in that text.
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It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
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This is why it's so weirdly ironic to me that the reputation, the word Machiavellian, right, means self-serving. When Machiavelli himself is one of the most selfless men I've ever read about in the history of the earth.
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The assumption is everybody sins all the time. There is no such thing as purity. Everybody sins every 5 minutes.
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this is a period in which backwards is forwards, which is to say this is not a period that like us thinks of the future as where potential is and humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome.
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They're using the art to do diplomacy and so in one sense if you're not doing the art you would have to spend more on the war. It's not that the art is being made from a surplus of the war.
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If there is a system, then you have liberty. That system may be unfair. It may be biased. It may be, in Machiavelli's case, the very system that tortured and exiled him.
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And everyone says, "Why are they liking this man? He is a cruel murdering tyrant." And the answer is for the first time in generations, they have had something close to fair justice.
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And the reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn't have a patron. He's the 99th case that time.
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The ideal of this period's justice which is much more shaped by Christianity is the purpose of the trial is the spiritual interior correction of the soul of the sinner.
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And then you look at the actual trial records, and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books.
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Therefore, by popular demand, the people want more nepotism because the system depends on it.
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Well, it's it's not that it was just more prominent, but it was the fundamental glue of the society as opposed to one of several glues of the society.
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All institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption.
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It even becomes a kind of a prisoner's dilemma system because if you're the duke and you don't manipulate the papacy, if you don't bribe the pope, if you don't work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you're screwed.
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These are the two factions for which these parties fought originally. 300 years ago, these days what these factions actually mean is those jerks murdered Uncle Tibalt and we will never forgive them.
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Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time.
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And so his power base was fragile vis-a-vis untruth. And for him because of the specific shape of his power and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him.
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They fell because half of what happens in the world is never in our control. And you can do everything right and it's out of your control, but we have to evaluate what would have happened and therefore we should imitate them, because everything they did was right.
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And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
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When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.