If you're so smart, how come you're not Machiavelli?

We live in a world where the adjective 'Machiavellian' connotes material success gained by unscrupulous means. How is it, then, that Machiavelli spent time in jail? I don't know the answer to this, and it's a question that's been plaguing me for years. So I thought I'd muse aloud, here.

If you haven't read Machiavelli's The Prince, I strongly recommend you do. It's Free. Ok, back now? Good book, isn't it.

Machiavelli wrote that book in the tradition of Mirrors for Princes, seeking to influence the Medici rulers of Florence. My learned mother-in-law says The Prince is an example of a style of literature called 'de Regimine', but whether this means 'on Ruling' or is a shortened form of 'de Regimine Principum' and means 'on Ruling Kings' I cannot say.

What is clear is that (through his writing) Machiavelli sought influence over his Prince through reason, which could be considered a pretty noble aim (or if you're an unreconstructed Nietzschean, a ruse by which Sklaavenmorale sought to undermine then overpower its more noble oppressor.)

I'm assuming that Machiavelli wanted to govern by proxy, by dint of reason, through articulation of principles, under the precept that the pen is mightier than the sword ... and given that he's pretty confident and unequivocal in his assertions in the book ... how come he was first suspended from a ceiling like some kind of highly literate chandelier?

Why did Machiavelli find himself being tortured in prison?

Sun Tzu says the greatest general is not he who fights the most battles, but one who wins every battle he fights. So why did Machiavelli lose the battle when the Medicis came to power, and find himself subjected to the medieval version of waterboarding?

Is it rather that something was revealed to him as he hung from the rope by his wrists? Some kind of epiphany-in-mortification? They showed him the instruments of torture and he suddenly realised he needed a whole new career?

I don't know Machiavelli the man, can't know his innermost thoughts, but still I want to understand his mistake, so I'm going to present some cases:

Was his book an attempt to re-narrate his own part in history, sublimating his rage and explaining to himself and his new boss why he'd been cast down from his walk-on part as military diplomat. Was he sharpening himself as a willing tool, to be bent to whatever purposes his Prince desired. Was it an apologia for the cruelty of the Prince? Was it a Resume, a desideratum, a memoir?

Or was his imprisonment due to a last ditch personal resistance to the new Medici rule, akin to Thoreau's

if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.

Or was The Prince a big old 'Told you So!' to the people to whom he'd been loyal? Perhaps he'd given the previous regime advice that'd been ignored, and he now wanted to get it down on paper.

Or was Machiavelli just not quite as clever as he thought he was?

Or was it just a new broom sweeping clean? The Medici came to power, Machiavelli was on the wrong side and was tortured as a matter of course?

Or are we entitled to summarize Machiavelli's mistake as "It's all about the capricious exercise of power, Stupid!"

Adventures in Terraforming 1

This is a story about the only thing I learned from HS Geography.

Way back in the 1980s some friends and I went off to see the Leonid meteor shower ('a celestial event' says wikipedia, and so it is) from a place of power called Diamond Head. You know the kind of place I mean ... imposing, spectacular, unusual, a place you'd revere.

We wandered along the beach to the South (Kylie's beach, named after Kylie Tennant) and could see a sandmining operation in the hinterland (rutile mining, to the West) and came to a creek which was intersecting the beach. I say 'intersecting' but what the creek was really doing was eating away the beach. As we watched the bank or dune was falling into the creek and being washed to sea. Sections were sliding away, the bank was being eroded and destroyed.

It just didn't seem right to us children.

So we hove-to, and determined to fight the creek with our boyish enthusiasm and testosterone. Three of us shoveled with our hands, trying to bank up the sand ... with more sand. Of course it washed away as fast as we could dump it. So we set our sights higher and dug with our feet, bringing down half the bank in the process, piling it onto the fast-eroding bank of the creek. Where it washed away as fast as we could pile it. Doubling, redoubling our efforts made no difference. As fast as we could shovel, the creek carried our new dike away.

Eventually, common sense and the noon-day sun made us see the futility of our war on moving water. The creek had won, it would always win, it would work ceaslessly to undermine the dune. The beach would inevitably wash away. It was history, that dune.

Then I looked at it dispassionately, and saw that the creek was curved, its outer curve was the cutting edge, and deeper than the side opposite our bank. I'd seen that before ... in HS Geography. Rivers are dynamic things, and over time they whip about. Their outer curves are deeper and faster than their inner curves and they take material from the channels they dig to deposit on the next inner curve.

What we needed to do to protect the dune was to dig a channel in the opposing side! We had a go at it, and it seemed to work, but the creek is far more powerful than even three gung-ho guys on a mission.

Then I saw ... the long flat rock lying nearby, less than half a meter long, with a definite airfoil shape! I reasoned that by placing the larger side lower we would get something like the equivalent of lift, but pointing down, by action of water over the surfaces, thus digging a channel and redirecting water away from the dune. We placed it properly, and went off to do something else.

The Leonid shower was pretty. I don't remember much about it, but there were lots of lights. We slept in the car (the things you can do when you're young) and woke up hungry next morning. Then, for some reason, we traipsed down to the creek to see what'd happened.

The creek had rotated nearly 90° about the point where we'd placed the airfoil (waterfoil?) and was no longer touching the dune bank. I was gobsmacked. We had used the nature of flowing water, and the passive properties of a simple rock, to make tons of water move itself. I have always considered this experience a metaphor for general problem solving.

Another possible interpretation is: if you have a problem you can't solve, try dropping a rock on it.

So we went to Laurieton to drink beer and eat cheese, feeling like we'd made this.

Update: One of my co-terraformers snapped a recent this photo of the creek. It's still there, so we didn't move it too far.

Why Emperor Constantine has no Armani Suit

Borrowing from John Ralston Saul, some excellent economist, and some excellent and scholarly work on the late Roman Empire, we bring you the first in a collective-noun of Panchrestons concerning The Corporate State.

Large corporations are inefficient. That's not news. They don't really or fully satisfy the requirements of a modern 'post industrial' economy, they are maladaptive but present everywhere. They can't really innovate to adapt to change, so they parasitize smaller, more innovative organisations - buying them, sucking out the creative juice, and discarding them in a later 'restructure.'

Large corporations don't create, they market (although some of them are so large they create their own weather.) If there's any way to do it, they collude and monopolise and charge rent. Increasingly, they are given wide latitude to do this, even though it is considered to be bad for the 'conomy.

Large corporations don't follow the law, they create it. They lobby continually and if that fails they finance attack ads.

Small and Medium Enterprises are far more agile and innovative, they employ more people, they get stuff done. But SMEs aren't really fostered by the state.

How come?

I think some insight may be gained by considering this fascinating fact: Tax Recovery Rates from employees of corporations runs over 90%, but for independent contractors it runs at around 30%. (cite excellent economist here.)

Emperor Constantine became a Christian, reportedly because he saw a miraculous vision which vouchsafed him victory in battle. It was a cross, so he said, and who am I to gainsay that? People see crosses, and arches, and UFOs everywhere. Maybe he was having a migraine.

Coincidentally, at the time Constantine became a Christian, and declared it the official state religion, he had recently reunited the Roman Empire, which had been bifurcated with an Augustus in the East and one in the West. It wasn't easy to control the empire, it was very difficult to collect taxes over such a wide geographic area with the social organisation of the time.

Enter the Bishops. They had a nice efficient decentralised tithe-collection system, they had efficient hierarchal comms, they could collect taxes for Constantine. The price was wholesale conversion, and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion.

Not bad, huh? From being sacrificed as atheists (they didn't believe in enough gods) to holding the imperial purse strings.

This kind of strange inversion, I think, has occurred in the lifetimes of some living today. Was a time when corporations were aggregations of human beings, formed to get something done then to distribute their earnings and dissolve. A convenient way to collect enough capital to cooperate on big jobs. That was the Joint Stock Corporation. Nice concept. Then corporate personhood was surreptitiously inserted into the law.

So corporations could sue, be sued, own property in their own right, generate new corporations, own them as property, avoid taxation on those things needed for a corporation to survive, and most importantly: live forever. Wow. Where do I get a gig like that? Under US law, it's not legal to discriminate against a corporation, 14th amendment or something.

From being the representative of a collection of persons, corporations became persons collecting people for their own ends.

John Ralston Saul said that modern state leaders changed their attire from military uniform to business suit as economic power became more important than military power.

Summary: It is my considered opinion that the State colludes with the Corporation because otherwise it would be unable to collect taxes, anything but corporate serfdom having fallen into disfavour a couple of hundred years ago.