Machiavelli and the Death of Latin

September 20, 2024 (14203)
It’s time to make an invitation for an online discussion of Machiavelli.
I’m going to be working on my lecture dedicated to Machiavelli for the next few weeks. I’m going to present this lecture on October 15 at a local philosophy club. Recently, I wrote a book in which I talk about the intention to become the greatest thinker manifested in different languages and developed by folks like Machiavelli. I’m trying to understand what role this intention played in psychopolitics and how it affected the distribution of power among the top languages on the global scale. Psychopolitics is the name of my book. Its subtitle is The Great Comedy of Useless Idiots. Was Machiavelli a useless idiot? Let me define the terms. A useful idiot is someone who’s taught a second language and can be manipulated to advance its agenda when times get tough. A useless idiot is someone who learns a second language, reaches the level of its great thinkers, and laughs at those who pretend that they have power over it. I hope it also explains what I mean by the Great Comedy.
I’m just beginning to study Machiavelli. The first time I came across his famous book, The Prince, was in 2013. I already knew a lot about psychology, but my understanding of politics was very superficial, even though I had written a dissertation on the concept of the state of law and received a bachelor degree in jurisprudence. Back then, I dismissed Machiavelli as irrelevant, giving no credit to his book, not even saying anything about it in my diary. Now, as long as there is an ongoing struggle for power between Russian and English languages over my mind, I want to know more about this man. I’m reading The Prince in both English and Russian translations simultaneously. I’m listening to the course of lectures by William Cook. I’m trying to grasp the essence of contention between those who condemn Machiavelli, like M. Sugre, for example, and those who praise him, like Q. Skinner.
Assuming that Machiavelli, as any other great thinker, was conscious of the intention to become the greatest thinker, I’m going to consider his ideas from whether he succeeded in it or not.
I’m going to argue that he is the greatest thinker of all time, and I’m going to contradict myself by making the case that everyone who believes in it is a fool. Let me know if you want to talk about it.

September 22, 2024 (14205)
Today, I have a meeting at my English Science and Literature Club where we’re going to talk about M. Sugre. This provides an opportunity to clarify the distinction between the great thinkers of the first and second rank, which I describe in my book. The former are fully conscious of the intention to become the greatest thinker, envisioning the future where they replace the already established great thinkers of all languages. The second-rank thinkers rarely dream of surpassing their benign and beloved teachers and usually devout themselves to defend one or another great thinker of the past. No doubt that Sugre regards Machiavelli as one of the characters of Plato’s Republic who, instead of making weak arguments and repeatedly saying, “Yes, Socrates! No, Socrates! Yes, Socrates! No Socrates! You’re so wise, Socrates!” – acquires his own voice and then (Jupiter!) makes Socrates blush.
Sugre acknowledges Machiavelli’s brilliance and uses an old trick, which in Latin has a distinct name, “ad hominem”, to ensure his audience that all of it stems from wickedness and, therefore, should be denounced.
Machiavelli writes, “There is such a gap between how people actually live and how they ought to live that anyone who declines to behave as people do, in order to behave as they should do, is schooling himself for catastrophe and had better forget personal security; if you always want to play a good man in a world where most people are not good, you’ll end up badly.”
Sugre replies (I’m paraphrasing), “Look at this ill-mannered fellow! He wants us all to be bad. He is a teacher of evil. He must be kept away from our kids. Beware of this guy! He smiles like a fox. There is an obvious malevolent intention.”
What the hell are you talking about, Michael? Have you actually read Machiavelli? You can find in his arguments many things that do not stand up to scrutiny. Why, on earth, attack his most heavily armored fortifications on moral grounds with your weak auxiliaries if you can cut off his supply lines by using historical narratives developed outside of Greek, Hebrew and Latin spheres of influence? Oh, you’re not familiar with these narratives, are you?

September 23, 2024 (14206)
There is an obvious parallel between the evolution of political thought in the Chinese Warring States (475-221 BCE) and the Latin “warring states” of Machiavelli’s time.
In 2023, I devoted five months to the consistent study of the Chinese philosophy and language. The last one of these months, I focused on the school of fa, known as “legalism” in English. A.C. Graham calls fa-thinkers “the first political philosophers in China to start not from how society ought to be but how it is.”
There are two prominent fa-thinkers whose works are still readable today, though Chinese do not promote them as much as they promote Confucius and Laozi. I’m talking about Shang Yan and Han Fei. The first wrote a book, schooling the ruler to focus on farming and war while getting rid of art and philosophy. The second advised the ruler to distance himself from flatterers, to figure out the political reality that brought him into power and to use all necessary means to build a powerful state on the principles advanced by Han Fei and the like-minded philosophers. China was divided among seven major states at that time. Han Fei came from an aristocratic family of the smallest of these states. The guy who was impressed by his political philosophy ruled a rival neighboring state. He welcomed Han Fei to his palace, murdered him, took over his state applying Han Fei’s principles and then conquered the whole of China. China gets its name from the name of this guy. The Chinese have a proverb: the state, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
As far as The Prince wasn’t published in Machiavelli’s lifetime and its dedication was altered by Machiavelli to accommodate the development of the political situation in Italy, one could argue that, after being dismissed from office, he only pretended to be interested in getting back, while his leading thought was to become the greatest Italian thinker. He aimed at conquering the minds of all future Italian-speaking rulers rather than moving up and down the ladder of social hierarchy. Saying that his Prince (a book!) gave rise to imperialism is like saying that Hobbes’s Leviathan created liberalism, or Marx’s Capital created communism, or Nietzsche’s Will to Power created nazism, or, to use a slightly different example, The Bible created hell (and paradise).

September 24, 2024 (14207)
How, on earth, might one argue that Machiavelli is the greatest thinker of all time? If I made this argument, I would start by considering possible objections. One might say, “No, Nietzsche is the greatest thinker, or Newton is the greatest thinker, or Marx is the greatest thinker, or Einstein is the one, or Lenin and on, and on, and on.”
How does one measure greatness? Is it about the number of followers worldwide? Is it about the number of books, articles, lectures, movies – created to honor someone’s memory? The number of statues and buildings? Or is it about the place a certain thinker occupies in one’s mind, assuming that one is also intending to become the greatest thinker? There is no objective criteria of greatness, but one can always compare the narratives advanced by different thinkers.
I’ve noticed that when I read Machiavelli in Russian, my interest in his arguments is not as strong as when I do it in English. Put another way, the value of his arguments and their impact on the development of my understanding of English is higher than the same is with respect to Russian.
When I read Machiavelli in English, I may think about certain similarities between his Prince and Nietzsche’s ubermensch, or I may think about how his description of class struggle influenced Marx’s thinking. When he says that “in every city one finds these two conflicting political positions: there are the common people who are eager not to be ordered around and oppressed by the noble families, and there are the nobles who are eager to oppress the common people and order them around,” I wonder to what extent Marx adopted Machiavelli’s framework. When Machiavelli talks about history, examining the role of virtu and fortuna in the rise and fall of various rulers and states, I find myself arguing with him about the meaning of these concepts in different languages and looking for historical counterexamples among the cases I studied.
When I read him in Russian, I feel nothing but boredom and go mindlessly from page to page without pausing to think.

September 25, 2024 (14208)
It’s hard to imagine an ingenious writer who doesn’t think about the impact his book is going to have on the reader. Machiavelli aimed his “tensely strained bow” at the furthest goals, whether he aspired to build a state or write a book. Is it wrong to assume that he wanted his Prince or Livy to be the greatest books written on politics? Is it wrong to assume that the intention to write the greatest book about politics dominated all other intentions that struggled for power over his mind since 1512? Being an experienced politician and voracious reader, he doesn’t give much credit to philosophers like Plato, who “have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience and never existed in reality.” Yet he understands – and sometimes complains about it – that Plato’s influence is pervasive in Greek and Latin languages.
When I talk about the intention to become the greatest thinker, I refer to a certain mindset characterized by the idea to view one’s language as superior to all other languages. Most thinkers have this intention, but its place in the hierarchy of all intentions is going to be different in every specific case. Someone who’s going to spend a decade working for eight hours a day to improve one’s language by writing, making speeches, reading books and watching lectures is going to have a more powerful intention to become the greatest thinker than someone whom fortuna turned into an ant whose cognitive functions are limited to move around a narrow path and repeat what everybody else is saying.
The concept of a useful idiot, which was popularized by one of the greatest useful idiots, Bezmenov, can’t be properly understood by those who think only in one language. Much less the concept of a useless idiot is accessible to anyone who never deliberated over the question, “Which language do I have to use when I think?”
In psychopolitics, where different languages struggle for power over eight billion minds, using a language and advancing its agenda is practically the same thing, even if one uses it to advocate for reducing its power over other languages or promote a narrative of societies based on them.

September 26, 2024 (14209)
There are three levels of psychopolitics: personal, national and international. On the personal level, there is an ongoing struggle for power between competing intentions over one’s mind. These intentions manifest themselves in narratives about one’s identity, what one does, wants, etc. The intentions have a hierarchical structure. The structure might be unipolar, bipolar or multipolar.
If the intention to become the greatest thinker rises to the top of one’s personal hierarchy of intentions, one enters the national level of psychopolitics.
Here, great thinkers are struggling for power over a certain language (English, Russian, Chinese, etc.), which might also be called “national consciousness”. When Machiavelli reads Petrarch, Dante, Livy or Cicero and argues with them in his mind or on the pages of his books, he builds his own narrative, which is supposed to demonstrate that his language is superior to their languages.
If a great thinker rises to the top of national consciousness, he enters the international level of psychopolitics, where he might be viewed as a useful or useless idiot by any other great thinker.
Here, great thinkers are struggling for power over what I call “psychopolitics” in its broadest sense, where mutually incomprehensible languages attempt to govern the world.
The intention to become the greatest thinker doesn’t come from nowhere. One acquires it by studying the works (languages) of other great thinkers, maintaining a dialog with them and constantly improving one’s language. One, in a sense, creates one’s own language out of one’s studies and experience. The intention to become the greatest thinker pushes one to promote one’s language as universal. A useful idiot promotes the language of other great thinkers who conquered psychopolitics and became the centers of its gravity. A useless idiot is an ironic description of a great thinker who is driven by the intention to become the greatest thinker, knowing fully well that no other great thinker driven by the same intention would recognize his as such.

September 27, 2024 (14210)
Becoming the greatest thinker is first and foremost a process. Every boy who goes to school is forced to acknowledge and pay tribute to a bunch of great thinkers who dominate the language he is taught. Often, it has a detrimental effect on one’s psyche. Boys grow up fighting with each other for dominance in their social circle and rarely focusing their mental energy to prepare for the fight over a language with great thinkers.
Let’s suppose that Machiavelli’s Prince is not a dialog with an imaginary, ideal ruler but a mere self-talk.
“A ruler must never stop thinking about war and preparing for war, and he must work at it even more in peacetime than in war itself,” says Machiavelli.
Applying psychopolitical framework, this might be interpreted as, “The greatest thinker must never stop thinking about the fight with other great thinkers and preparing for it, and he must work at it even more while he is not directly engaged in argument than in argument itself.”
After the intention to become the greatest thinker conquers and subjugates all other intentions in one’s mind, it creates what I call “personal history”, a consistent narrative that glorifies the development of one’s language on a way to greatness. One gets through the collected works of the great thinkers taught at school and incorporates (enslaves) them one by one to serve the needs of one’s growing body of knowledge. When after a decade or so there are going to be no rivals and one is going to be sure that one understands a particular language better than those whom one has read and spoken to (or at least equally well) there is a chance that one is going to try to conquer a new language. Psychopolitics maps onto geopolitics. In the foundation of the most powerful state lies the most powerful language. Whether a language makes a state powerful or a state makes a language powerful is an open question. It’s clear that becoming the greatest thinker doesn’t require neither wealth nor weapons. As far as English advertises itself as the most powerful language on the planet, it’s reasonable to assume that the greatest thinkers of all other languages are going to try to conquer it in the 21st century.

September 30, 2024 (14213)
Just finished watching William Cook’s series of lectures on Machiavelli. He is a brilliant lecturer. His command of English is superb; the structure of the course is simple and easy to understand. First, he introduces Machiavelli and talks about the political climate of the Italian city-states of his era. Second, he provides a brief overview of Florence’s history, focusing on the Medici’s rise to power and considering how it shaped Machiavelli as a political philosopher and practitioner. Third, he discusses The Prince, examining its content rather than moralizing about the potential impact this book might have on innocent souls. Forth, he talks about Machiavelli’s Livy, asserting that it was his most important work and identifying Machiavelli as a republican. Fifth, he dedicates two lectures to Machiavelli’s history of Florence, written in the 1520s and commissioned by Medici. Finally, he gives one lecture on the impact Machiavelli made on the evolution of political thought in Italian, French, English, German and other languages, and one lecture on how Machiavellian was Machiavelli himself.
The whole course is an attempt to defend Machiavelli’s metaphysical castle, convincing the viewer that its foundation is unshakeable and no wind of change can seriously affect it. Misquoting or demonizing Machiavelli in one or another language doesn’t undermine his reputation. It’s been almost 500 years since this laughing lion passed away, but flocks of doves still continue to peck his body of knowledge, óð÷à, êà÷àÿ ãîëîâîé è îáñèðàÿ âñå âîêðóã.

October 1, 2024 (14214)
There is no way to measure the power of great thinkers without knowing the language in which they articulated their thoughts. I use the past tense to indicate that the status of a great thinker can be held only by a dead thinker. What’s the aim of posthumous fame? Is there any profit in being a prophet? Great thinkers, conscious of the intention to become the greatest masters of one or another language and driven by this intention to question the authority of all other great thinkers who used the language in the past, can’t be fully understood by anyone who has no experience of struggling for power over this language. To struggle for power over English and to struggle for power over Russian are two fundamentally different things. You can’t defeat me unless you eat me. If I assert that I’m the greatest Russian thinker in English or that I’m the greatest English thinker in Russian, I won’t have difficulties defending either of these statements against anyone who mastered to whatever highest possible degree only one of these languages. It’s quite foolish to engage in self-aggrandizement even if one has studied most of the great thinkers of a certain language and developed one’s own language to play a language game with them on equal footing. But after playing such a game for a decade in one language, to give it up and learn a new language to laugh at its greatest thinkers who are never going to be able to destroy one’s metaphysical castle built in another language – this is what I call the great comedy of useless idiots.
Machiavelli saw no rival who was able to compete with him in Italian, except for dead poets and thinkers like Dante or Petrarch. Being an excellent student of Latin and probably the most brilliant self-aware historian of his time, he created a magnificent metaphysical castle out of the Italian language, the castle that has withstood intact under the siege of virtu-ally all other languages’ political thinkers for half a millennia. As far as he has “virtu” as an ally, the only way to defeat him is to learn Italian, get as good at it as he was, conquer “fortuna”, and divert its waters away from his castle. He is prepared to withstand a flood. Everyone who tried to water down his castle only gave him a favor, feeding the narrative of its invincibility. If a thing can’t be drown, maybe it’s wise to leave it drying out.

October 2, 2024 (14215)
When Machiavelli talks about “virtu” and “fortuna”, he has in mind life and death. The image of a river that occasionally gets violent and crashes everything on its path is the image of death. Ultimately, there is no way to escape it (unless one identifies with the language and the perceived instead of the body and the perceiver), that’s why Machiavelli calls it “fortuna”. No one knows when it’s going to strike, but everyone has, to a certain degree, an awareness of it. Machiavelli’s preoccupation with death is beyond doubt. After the 14 years in office (1498-1512) and the failure to become a supreme ruler of Italy, he can’t accept the defeat and projects all his fantasies onto a hypothetical ruler whom he aspires to create and whom he wants to teach how to survive under any circumstances. After all, although he was tortured when his political opponents came back to power and kicked him out of office, he still saved his life and was left alone to do whatever he wanted in his village. Did he want to acquire political power by any means necessary? Did he waste the rest of his life on writing handbooks on how to be bad? Did he want to “make Italy great again”, as professor William Cook says in his series of lectures? Did he want to become the darkest character in the history of philosophy?
Why does Bacon, whose most famous motto is “ipsa scientia potestas est” (which his secretary, Hobbes, shortened to “scientia potentia est”), count Machiavelli as his predecessor? Was Machiavelli aware that all struggle for power has its deepest roots in the struggle for knowledge? Did he know that the struggle for knowledge is the struggle over a particular language or languages? Did he understand psychopolitics?
Now, since we’ve given up on asking “what great thinkers believe” and are attempting to figure out what they are doing, we’re going to understand them better if we presuppose that they fight with each other for power over a language they employ (or are employed by) to think. When Machiavelli responds to Cicero’s statement that “force and fraud are wholly unworthy of man and belong to the cunning fox and the lion” by saying that “a ruler has to be able to act the beast and that he should take on the traits of the fox and the lion,” he doesn’t “ridicule” Cicero as Quentin Skinner suggests; he fights with him for power over Italian consciousness.

October 3, 2024 (14216)
Once upon a time, there was an obedient slave who worked hard day and night to serve the interests of his master. He worshipped his master, writing poems and treatises to glorify him. He was a truly devoted slave. The master was a monstrous, wicked creature with a total lack of self-awareness. The more he exploited the slave, the more he demanded from him. The slave, perhaps, knew his master better than any other slave who served him for the last couple of centuries. He has read hundreds and hundreds of books written by the most distinguished slaves determined to elevate the master above all other masters. He argued with these distinguished slaves about the master’s interests and his role in psychopolitics, trying to be realistic and emphasizing the importance of science. The master enjoyed his arguments, but other slaves preferred to ignore them. Then, a new master came out of nowhere and began promising to set everyone free. The old master laughed at him since he knew that psychopolitics was linguistically determined and there was no way to deliver on this promise. Yet, many of his slaves, including the devoted slave, deserted him to serve a new master. He was a kind of Ciceronian hypocrite “who, at the very moment when he is most false, makes it his business to appear virtuous.”
“You are free now,” said the new master to the obedient slave. “Do whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want?” the slave thought to himself, “But I’ve been doing whatever I want all my life! Is that your conception of freedom to be a slave of passions?”
The moral of the story?
Machiavelli says, “There are actually three kinds of mind: one kind grasps things unaided, the second sees what another has grasped, the third grasps nothing and sees nothing.”
In psychopolitics, we are all slaves of one or another language. The more powerful this language is in psychopolitics, the stronger its “Is” (subjects) believe in fairy tales.

October 4, 2024 (14217)
“If you look long enough into an abyss, the abyss looks back into you.” What does it mean “the abyss looks back”? Does the abyss have eyes (Is)? Can the abyss really do something on its own?
What does “looking” mean? And who or what is this “I” that grasps what is seen?
If it’s possible to see passions as being something external to ourselves rather than intrinsic to our identity, why can’t it be possible to see languages as being something external to ourselves rather than intrinsic to our identity?
Physically and biologically speaking, the word “identity” makes no sense. Everything is in motion; nothing stays the same. Logically and mathematically, we can use the word to refer to the relationship between any two or more items. A = A, A = B, A = B + C. Machiavelli is Machiavelli, Machiavelli is a great thinker, Machiavelli is a great thinker and a petty tyrant.
As a writer, I can identify with my texts written over the course of the last 16 years since I began practicing. I can extend my identity to the texts of the authors whom I’ve read and from whom I borrowed various concepts and narratives. I can identify with a language as such and think about myself not as a bunch of needs and desires but as part of a long story that has been evolving over centuries and thousands of years. There are no fixed identities. I can identify with psychopolitics, where multiple languages exist in a condition of hostile competition with one another. If it’s plausible to say that language is a tool (weapon, virus, etc.) created by us to serve our needs, it must also be plausible to say that money is a tool created by us to serve our needs. Hardly anyone would argue seriously that it’s difficult to imagine how we can be slaves of money (capital). We created all sorts of social institutions out of language to serve our needs. Haven’t we in turn become slaves of these social institutions?
If we look at the distribution of power among different languages on the internet, it’s fair to say that some of them attract more attention than others; therefore, they grow faster and threaten the existence of others. Where an oak sucks all minerals from the soil, no other trees or bushes can thrive.

October 6, 2024 (14219)
Examining Machiavelli’s Prince and Livy as two different speech acts, we can say that in both he laid out political schemes for Italy’s unification. Needless to say, it was an urgent task to which every Italian political thinker paid attention. Italy was divided among numerous city-states that were formally independent but in fact constantly meddled in each other’s affairs. Being unable to coerce one another into submission, they frequently brought in external powers like France and Spain to settle their disputes, which only contributed to the further destabilization. War was the order of the day; that’s why Machiavelli says, “The thing most likely to bring about a ruler’s downfall is his neglect of the art of war; the thing most likely to win him power is becoming an expert in it.”
In both The Prince and The Livy, Machiavelli ventures into the past, looks for the best examples to be emulated and contrasts them with the current affairs. In The Prince, he imagines himself being a ruler and talks about what should and shouldn’t be done, taking into account the present political situation and incorporating lessons from the past. In The Livy, he imagines himself being the body politic and attempts to cure its diseases by establishing the right balance between one, few and many.
Is it fair to say that Machiavelli’s obsession with war and his neglect of political economy and technological innovation misguided his intention? Was Machiavelli an actual realist determined to understand what’s going rather than what should or shouldn’t be? Is it possible to be a realist and at the same time to be committed to one, two or many specific versions of imaginable futures? And to what extent are Machiavelli’s meditations still relevant today after we have dropped the distinction between principalities and republics and decided to treat states as black boxes?

October 7, 2024 (14220)
Here is a psychopolitical interpretation of Machiavelli’s project. He attempts to create a narrative that is going to dominate all other historical narratives known in Italian at the time. He aspires to be the greatest Italian thinker whose interpretation of history would serve as a model for all other great thinkers. He builds the standard by which all great thinkers are going to be measured. In his books he demonstrates the superiority of his understanding of the past, rejecting the authority of Livy, Cicero and other great thinkers – rejecting not only their authority but also the language they used – and creating a new paradigm, which later is going to be adopted by many great thinkers of other languages.
When we try to understand the past, we can’t ignore the fact that every great thinker attempted to shape it in the form of their own languages. The emergence of the internet exposed all historical grand narratives to fierce competition. We can no longer separate a historical narrative from the language in which it is being recorded. As Carr puts it, “The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.”
Whose language provides the best account for what has been going on in the world since the invention of writing? There is a huge number of competing interpretations that focus on states, cities, rulers, dynasties, nations, classes, religions, arts, technologies, sciences, economies, ideas, books, ideologies, wars, natural catastrophes, diseases, etc. There is no one way of interpreting the past.
According to psychopolitics, there are great thinkers who try to turn their own history, that is to say, the history of the evolution of their own understanding of languages, into the central theme of the political discourse to which all other languages must pay tribute.
What is Machiavelli doing? He insists that everyone who wants to understand what’s going on in the world – everyone who wants to survive not merely as a body, which as everyone knows is doomed anyway, but as a language, knowledge, history – has to pay attention to him, to treat him as a great thinker, to understand what he understands. Was he a lunatic?

October 8, 2024 (14221)
I’m not just holding Machiavelli up in an ideal light to use him as the symbol of my own desire. No one owns the desire to become the greatest thinker. It might be suppressed by a whole bunch of other desires and serve their intentions (an intention is a desire expressed in language and characterized by having power over the narrative that runs through the mind). Or, as in Machiavelli’s case, it can build its own “inner government”, turn all other desires into virtuous warriors and attempt to conquer the minds of those who are divided by ten thousand desires, each imagining itself free and none capable of recognizing the authority of others. Now, for example, Machiavelli desperately tries to conquer my mind, questioning the legitimacy of the authority of the intention to become the greatest thinker and demanding to accept him, his personal history, his language – as the one who has supreme power over thought.
If I were 15 years old and spent a month with him, reading his books and listening to lectures about him, and if he were the first great thinker to introduce me to psychopolitics, I would probably join the army of his followers and cultivate “virtu” under his guidance. But I’m almost as old as he was when Spain invaded Italy and brought Medici back to power in Florence. And I have a personal history recorded day by day (with short breaks) over the past 13 years by the intention to become the greatest thinker. Throughout these years, my mind was exposed to the invasion of Hegel, Marx, Plato, Spinoza, Goethe, Shakespeare, Fichte, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Kant, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke, Hume – the list goes on and on. I acquired the intention from reading the collected works of Castaneda, Aristotle and Saltikov-Shedrin in 2007-2008. I tried to destroy it by adopting Buddhist and Daoist practices and abandoning my native language, in which at 2016 I saw no competitors. I decided to learn to think in English, rewriting my personal history from scratch and fighting for power over this language with those who knew it better than me. For me, psychopolitics is both a quasi-scientific theory and a game.
There is no way to define what a great thinker is. It can’t be used as an abstract category that is supposed to capture certain qualities of a person or a language developed by the person. For me, great thinkers are real people – dead or alive – who draw my attention to their narratives and fight for power over my mind with the intention to become the greatest thinker.

October 9, 2024 (14222)
What makes Machiavelli’s political discourse – and, more broadly, his language – so controversial? Is he a teacher of evil or an outstanding political satirist? The puppet master of tyrants or a great liberator? A shrewd opportunist who goes along with time and “fortuna” whatever course it might take? Is he a stubborn, helpless fool who refuses to participate in the project of elevating human dignity? Although it’s easy to denounce him on moral grounds for justifying violence and murder when it’s done for the purposes of peace and stability, hardly anyone who has paid enough attention to him, being conquered by the power of his narrative and clarity of his arguments, would be persuaded by such a denunciation.
One of the reasons Machiavelli became a great thinker was his ability to win over the minds of non-Italian great thinkers who translated his books into English, French, German, Spanish and other languages and defended him for centuries against those who built a psychopolitical career by attacking him. It’s important to understand that now defending Machiavelli in English, when this language has such villains as Marx, Nietzsche or Lenin, isn’t as perilous as it was when Latin and Italian had enough power to project onto the world hegemonic ambitions. The adjective “machiavellian” had similar connotations in the 16th century as the adjective “marxist” had in the 20th century. Machiavelli didn’t invent politics. There is nothing new in his Prince or Livy. He built a narrative, a personal history, which had more power in Italian than any other “personal histories” – no matter how many thousand years old. He challenged the wisdom of all great thinkers who attempted to write in Latin and Italian before him.
Is there any profit in being a prophet? The expectation of a reward might be a much more powerful engine in driving one’s train of thought than the reward itself. “Like anything that appears suddenly and grows fast, regimes that come out of nothing inevitably have shallow roots and will tend to crash in the first storm.” Is he talking about an imaginary state or his own books? Was he deliberately provoking other great thinkers to attack him, knowing or hoping that in the long run, in eternity, it’s only going to make him stronger?

October 10, 2024 (14223)
How does one win over the minds programmed by a different language? In Machiavelli’s days, it could have been done by the following method. One masters the most powerful language in psychopolitics, which in the local European context of that time was Latin. Then, one creates a narrative in a vernacular language demonstrating its superiority over Latin by crashing all metaphysical castles built out of Latin with a psychopolitical hammer and employing its greatest thinkers (Cicero, Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, Horace, Juvenal, etc.) to launch out a perestroika. Dante, Petrarch and other shrewd psychopols began this project. As far as a new castle is built out of the Florentine dialect and the first storms prove its resilience, the guy with “bad keys” (mali clavelli) locks all gates that lead inside, proclaims himself The Prince of psychopolitics and promises freedom to everyone who is enslaved by Latin.
French, Spanish, German, Dutch, English, etc. great thinkers, after a brief period of “de omnibus dubito”, scratch their heads and say to themselves, “Hmm, what if we all are deceived by “Deus deceptor” and this whole Latin project is a scam? After all, Latin is dead, why the hell are we continuing to write our meditations in it?”
A few centuries go by, and the structure of psychopolitics shifts from being unipolar to multipolarity. Every psychopol believes that his language is the most powerful language in the system and attempts to liberate all other psychopols programmed by a different language to hold the same belief. In the second half of the 20th century, English wins the game. So what? We’re all slaves of English in the same way as all Europeans were slaves of Latin. As long as we think in any language, there is no way to be free from it. I think, therefore, I’m a slave! Wanna be free? Stop thinking! Ups, doesn’t work. Then, at least stop saying that you’re free. The thing that you call “you” makes no sense outside of psychopolitics. There is nothing you can point at and say, “This is me.” For this, you must have a name. ;;;;;;;;
In psychopolitcs, we’re all slaves of one or another language(s). However, the most powerful language in psychopolitics and its subjects have no eyes to see the slavish nature of their “Is” (I in the plural; pronounced as “ice”).

October 11, 2024 (14224)
Can we put the statement “we’re all slaves of one or another language or languages” on firm scientific ground? Doing that requires unambiguous definitions of the terms “we”, “slave” and “language”.
“We” is the first-person plural pronoun that is supposed to mean “everyone” when it’s combined with the adjective “all”.
A “slave” is a person who is regarded as someone else’s property and forced to do any kind of labor.
“Language” is a bunch of sounds and signs that might represent everything.
The guy whom Quentin Skinner calls “the greatest English philosopher”, Thomas Hobbes, defines a “person” as “he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction.” He further says that “when they are considered as his own, then he is called a natural person; and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a feigned or artificial person.” Here is his definition of the commonwealth: “One person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves everyone the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defense. And he that carryeth this person is called sovereign, and said to have sovereign power; and everyone besides, his subjects.”
John Locke, another “greatest English philosopher”, distinguishes slaves from servants. Slaves “not capable of any property, cannot […] be considered as any part of civil society; the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.” Notice this “chief end” that an artificial person should strive for. For Locke, slaves are mere tools.
But what does it have to do with science? Shouldn’t we talk about causes and effects as well as empirical evidence and falsifiable hypotheses rather than the speculations of the 17th century philosophers who borrowed a large portion of their vocabulary from fairy tales? There is no evidence to talk about artificial persons created out of the language of these philosophers. We’re all free to master any language we wish. But why are we still thinking in English?

October 13, 2024 (14226)
Talking about artificial persons, we can see them as composed primarily of two parts. Their flesh and blood are the people and wealth. Their brain and bones are social institutions made out of language. As long as a skeleton preserves its structural integrity, “the heart ache and the thousand natural shocks” do not seriously affect the person’s behavior.
Machiavelli was born in 1469, the year when Lorenzo the Magnificent came to power in Florence. Following the policies of his grandfather, Cosimo, who managed to establish the Italic League, signing a peace treaty in 1454 between the warrying Italian states, Lorenzo put a strong emphasis on the development of arts, sciences and commerce, neglecting military affairs. Machiavelli was going up in the times of great cultural abundance and flourishing, though there still was political rivalry manifested in the Pazzi conspiracy and other lesser-known incidents. However, in 1494, two years after Lorenzo’s death, France invaded Italy, marking the beginning of the period known as the Italian Wars. Medici were expelled from Florence, and the structure of its social institutions underwent a significant transformation. During Savonarola’s theocratic and Soderini’s republican regimes, war became the dominant motive of the Italian thinking. The fact that Machiavelli wrote a comedy staged numerous times suggests that he wasn’t obsessed with war all his life. Perhaps without the French invasion, he could have turned into an Italian Shakespeare or whatever. Yet Machiavelli became an expert in military affairs. When, in 1512, Spane invaded Italy and Medici were restored to power in Florence, he was kicked out of office and became a political thinker and historian. He probably grasped the situation in Italy better than his peers and mastered the Italian language to the utmost superiority to preserve his knowledge in psychopolitics.
As the age of military conquest was equlipsed by the age of economic conquest and politics was downplayed by political economy, Machiavelli quietly slept in the shadow of Locke and Marx. The recent transition from the preoccupation with economic warfare to that of cognitive warfare – and from political economy to psychopolitics – promises to end this dogmatic slumber and bring a new awakening.

October 14, 2024 (14227)
It’s hard to figure out what Machiavelli is doing if we don’t understand the historical and political context he belongs to. In his time, the origin of Florence was a highly debatable issue. Dante argued that Florence emerged in the times of the Roman Empire. Republicans argued that Florence was established under the Roman Republic. Some said it had Etruscan roots and existed even before Rome.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Florence – as well as the other post-Roman cities – came under the rule of bishops. Its population decreased, and it was regularly attacked by foreign powers.
In the 11th century, the population of Europe and Italy began to grow. In the 12th century, Florence became a center of textile production. New political institutions came into being. Oligarchs challenged the authority of bishops, and “popolo”, small business owners, challenged the authority of oligarchs. The fight for the status of the boss of Europe between the pope and the holy Roman emperor split politically active Italians into guelphs and ghibellines. Guelphs supported the pope; ghibellines, the emperor. Florence’s guelphs expelled ghibellines in 1266, but then they were divided into two fractions, the white and black guelphs, largely over the issue of Florence’s independence from the papal authority. The black guelphs, backed by the pope, drove out the white guelphes in 1301. Among the latter was Dante, who spent the rest of his life in exile, writing his Divine Comedy and struggling for power over the Italian language. In 1347, the Black Death arrived and, in less than a hundred years, reduced the population of Florence from 130,000 to 30,000. Meanwhile, between 1378 and 1382, the Ciompi revolt shed the blood of oligarchs and popolo. Oligarchs won, and fifty years later Cosimo de’ Medici became the master of Florence. The Medici bank was the most powerful financial institution in Europe at the time, so Cosimo carelessly wasted money on arts and sciences. His peace treaty in 1454 created the balance of power between Naples, the Papal States, Florence, Venice and Milan. However, it didn’t make Italy great again, and the wealth of the Italian city-states caused a lot of troubles, making French, Spanish, Germans, Ottomans and other neighbors extremely envious.

October 15, 2024 (14228)
Today, I’ll be giving a lecture on Machiavelli. Its subtitle might be The Great Florentine Thinker and the Death of Latin. Although Latin, in fact, is still alive, it’s no longer omniscient – since a very few great thinkers use it to write down their meditations and practice rhetoric – and its psychopolitical omnipotence hardly moves anyone except Nicia, the Machiavellian judge.
A month ago, I wrote that I was going to dedicate at least 20 hours to prepare for the lecture. It turned out that I spent twice as much time just writing about it. A hundred hours were probably consumed by thinking, and for another hundred hours, I was doing research. This is my first lecture of the series of lectures on psychopolitics. I don’t expect a lot of people showing up because I neglected almost everything that involves its advertisement. I asked the administration of the place where I’m going to deliver the lecture to make an announcement on their webpage, but nothing came out of it; yet I’m still grateful just for free access to the place. I talked about the lecture at an English-speaking club, but, frankly, I doubt anyone was persuaded. All I can rely on are the posts I lined up on various platforms on the internet. I have to confess that writing these posts is so fascinating that I would continue doing it even if nobody attended the lecture. After all, my main purpose is improving my language and developing an interest in psychopolitics, thereby drawing attention to my book. If nobody pays attention to it, as almost nobody has paid attention to my philosophy club for the three years since its inception in October 2021, I have no reason to be disappointed. I’m doing my job, and I’m doing it as best as I can. Anyone who can read might see it for themselves.
The next lecture is going to take place on December 13, and it’s going to be dedicated to Cicero, Machiavelli’s great teacher and rival.
Now, let’s close these meditations on Machiavelli with his own words.
“If you think by criticizing him
you’ll seize him by the scruff
and scare him first then drag him to the side,
then let me warn you all and tell you this:
that he can do it too,
the rhetoric of blame was his first art,
and nowhere does he stand
in awe of any man
who speaks his mother tongue,
although he might be forced to bend the knee
to one who wears a better cloak than he.”