Proof of great prudence

 

Don't quote me on this, but sometimes I think the world might be a better place if more people studied Machiavelli. 

OK, not so much the advice about how a prince who came to power by unusual means might need to seem to be good while doing nasty things. Or the whole means/ends thing.  But there was a lot more to him than that. 

I don't know of any other author who wrote so clearly about the role of fortune in human life and the need to be ready when the floods come, the difficulty in enacting major reforms, and much more.

He was also a supporter of small-r republican government in his home city of Florence and was even tortured for it. The 18th century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said of him that "Whilst pretending to teach lessons to kings, he taught great lessons to the people."

The particular nugget of his that's on my mind these days has showed up here before, but it seems particularly timely advice these days to some major struggles in progress:

"I hold it to be proof of great prudence for men [sic] to abstain from threats and insulting words towards anyone, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you."

Annals of bad tactics

Lots of people in West Virginia are understandably enraged over the Freedom Industries chemical spill and the way it's been handled by everyone from the water company and the governor's office. And this surely has not been Governor Tomblin's finest hour.

Still, when a friend told me that a small group was planning on marching on his office and demanding his resignation, my initial reaction, which still holds, was that this approaches the level of the Platonic Form of Bad Tactics.

One, what do you reckon would really happen? Would the governor say "OK, you're right. I'm outta here"?

Two, nothing is more pathetic than a show of force where there isn't any.

Three, issuing demands is generally useless unless one has the power to enforce them, in which case it isn't necessary.

Four, as my beloved Niccolo Machiavelli observed nearly 500 years ago, insulting or threatening someone doesn't actually do them any harm but it puts them on guard against you and makes it harder if not impossible to deal productively with the person in the future.

He said it much better:

"I hold it to be proof of great prudence for men to abstain from threats and insulting words towards anyone, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you."

I think people who want to influence public policy would do well to memorize that verse. While it's not necessarily true that people who are insulted or threatened will hate or try to injure us, it's a sure bet they will be less likely to cooperate at some future point. And in places like WV, people tend to stick around for a good while and they have long memories. It's hard to unburn a bridge.