Machiavellianism Essay, Research Paper
After months of routinely being metal detected and
blindly handing over my bags to be searched, I finally
stopped to think about it the other day. I realized that
all the security cameras, metal detectors and guards were
merely used to gain power over the people by oppressing them
and forcing their submission; not to protect us. We are all
blind to this. We think it s for our own good, but it s all
part of a Machiavellianist Plot.
Niccolo Machiavelli lived in Italy in the early
1500 s. He thought that if one person, namely Lorenzo de
Medici, could be the absolute ruler of all Italy, then order
could be restored. In an effort to gain favor with the
powerful Medice family, he wrote The Prince as an early
blueprint of a New World Order justifying the use of any
means, no matter how sinister, to gain and keep power.
Machiavellianism envisages: the seizure, maintenance, and
extension of absolute power by the nicely graduated use of
fraud, force and terror; control by the ruler of all
avenues of communication, thus facilitating the deliberate
molding of public opinion; and the employment of
surveillance and terrorist activities of subordinates who
can be disowned and liquidated by the ruler, who thus
escapes the blame for their atrocities. (In other words, the
big political figureheads get their lackeys to do their
dirty work and then use them as scapegoats.)
Basically, what Machiavelli was trying to say was that
if a prince conquered a city, the people would hate him, but
if the prince secretly hired terrorists to create an
insurrection, then marched into the city to put down the
insurrection, the people would praise him. (He would hire
his men to act like they were rebelling, and then the leader
would act like he was stopping the rebellion and protecting
the citizens, thus earning the community s trust.) Either
way, he would increase his domain, but it would be better
for his popularity if the citizens loved him rather than
hated him for doing it.
I see the same things happening today with gun control,
censorship and all the other so-called security the
government has imposed upon us. These are not isolated
incidents. This censorship has occurred throughout history,
whether it was censorship of religion, freedom, books or
individuality and self expression.
The first and most obvious is the case of Jesus and how
he was oppressed and persecuted because he expressed his
beliefs which didn t agree with the political leaders of the
day. These leaders did not want to be disputed or made to
look bad, so if someone got in their way, they killed that
someone. As George Bernard Shaw said, The ultimate form of
censorship is assassination. The most notorious
Machiavellianist leader would be Hitler. He not only tried
to kill a race of people he didn t agree with, but he gained
his country s support in the process. He blamed all of the
citizens problems on the Jews. The citizens were so eager
to blame someone else (who isn t?) that they blindly
followed Hitler in his destruction. The same goes for
whites in America in the middle of the century who blamed
all of their problems on the blacks. The whites believed
they were so superior to the blacks, that when an incredibly
intelligent Martin Luther King Jr. stepped forward to
express his feelings and beliefs, the whites couldn t handle
the fact that the blacks might not be inferior, so they did
whatever it took to stop him.
I think the most interesting case of this oppression of
individuality is that of Salman Rushdie who lives under
sentence of death by the Iranian government since early 1989
for writing books allegedly blasphemous to Islam. As the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed upon pronouncing his
verdict, It is incumbent on every good Muslim to do
everything possible to send Rushdie to Hell. Khomeini and
his government put a United States five million dollar
bounty on his head. Salman Rushdie is currently in hiding.
Society as a whole, not just the government, is afraid
of people expressing themselves in any way because it is
intimidating to them. People will do whatever they have to
do to get rid of individuality. This is why many schools
put a policy of mandatory school uniforms into effect.
Censorship is simply a way for the government to keep people
from standing up against them and getting in their way of
gaining power when the time for the inevitable New World
Order comes around. Television and books are censored so
that people won t get any revolutionary or rebellious ideas
from them. In the words of Heinrich Heine, Where they have
burned books they will end in burning human beings.