A friend of mine told me she had been ‘unfriended’ by a long time friend who called her a troll. I wrote back:
"She works for the schools. She has known you for some time? And yet she calls you a spreader of evil and damaging lies, which is what "troll" would mean? She must be afraid you will cause her to have a bad attitude to what she is doing at work. That's interesting. It's just a little cross section explaining why (formerly) decent people are co-operating with the machinery of lockdown.”
This seems to me to shine one small light on the dilemma we are all caught in, that all of us are at the cusp of decision. Shall we follow our own instincts, look plainly at the facts we see demonstrated all around us and try to live honestly even if it costs us our livelihoods? Or shall we (for example school teachers) ignore such facts as the children in our school complaining of headaches and the parents complaining that their kids can’t breath properly and are fainting in gym class from having to wear masks? Shall we teachers who are confronted with this truth – as surely my friend’s former friend has had to ask herself – call the truth a lie to keep our jobs? This one person who called my friend a troll because information she knew to be true was too dangerously seductive, has chosen the dark side, has fallen to the seduction of lies in fear of the seduction of truth.
This one small tragedy shows an example of what Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in his Discourses in 1517 in explaining how Corruption destroys a republic. "When the material has changed the form can no longer be maintained," he said with his characteristic concision.
Niccolo had been an ambassador for the Republic of Florence for decades until the Medici family overthrew the Florentine Republic and assumed dictatorial power. Niccolo was put before their tribunal and tortured but not executed as many of his former colleagues were. He went to live on a little farm in a nearby village. He wrote his more famous work, “The Prince” to examine how dictatorships work; this little book is in the then time-honoured form of advice to the Prince. He dedicated the book to the dictator and prefaced it with praise and the hope that it might get him a job. This has branded Niccolo as a lover of dictators. But he wasn’t that at all; he was all but starving at the time so I cut him a lot of slack, besides admiring his no-bullshit style. He didn’t get a job. He did get immortal fame which he richly deserves.
Then he wrote his “Discourses on the History of Titus Livius” about republics. Niccolo was the first real historian in the modern sense. He examined historical facts as he knew them to formulate theory about the whys and wherefores which might form some general principles to anticipate the future. That’s the kind of historian I respect. Barbara Tuchman is like that. Facts before theory, not jamming facts into a predetermined theoretical mold. So I loved Niccolo from the first time I read him as a teenager. Niccolo is blunt and terse and calls it like he sees it with no bullshit taken or given.
So. “When the material has changed the form cannot be maintained”. What does that mean?
A republican constitution and government is a state wherein laws are made by some representatives of the people in the interest of the people and the maintenance of their customs and their sovereignty. The 'material' of which such a state is made is the daily actions of the people, especially those whose honest work in accord with the laws makes government run according to the republican ideal.
But when the powerful and wealthy few gain control of the state and enable themselves to buy and sell power in defiance of the law this corruption, for that is the definition of political corruption, begins to drip down from the top, as it were. The common person sees that the rich man gets away with crime while an ordinary man is strictly held to account. Eventually it becomes obvious that the legalized powers are themselves criminal and lawless and an ordinary man can survive only by evading the law.
At that point 'the material' has changed'. As it is with an ice sculpture melting in the heat, first the republican form has softened and then it will suddenly collapse. The consequence for a republic of the corruption of the people from top to bottom is that democracy has become an enemy of itself and the only way to restrain the powerful and lawless few is the institution of some sort of "Royal" despotism.
This, said Machiavelli with sorrow, has been the tragic fate of republics down through history. It was the fate of the ancient Roman Republic as he saw it. It was the fate of the Republic of Florence for which he had worked all his life. He wrote his Discourses to explain for himself what had befallen his country of Florence; he wrote in exile and under suspicion and after having been tortured by the new dictatorship of the Medici. He predicted that Rome would be sacked in his modern time just as it was in ancient times because of the evils attendant on corruption and lawlessness and perversion. A few years after his death Rome was sacked by the Austrians. And Italy fell into disunion and subjection to foreigners for the next 400 years, just as he had feared.
Niccolo’s chapter on corruption especially attracted my attention. From my reading of it I formulated an aphorism in imitation of his voice. Good laws need good customs in order to be obeyed; good customs need good laws in order to be maintained.