Machiavelli was an amazing writer and dedicated his life to both this and politics. He wrote out of Florence, Italy and taught leaders how to be leaders. One of his most famous and first writings he did were The Price. He wrote this in 1513 in hopes of convincing the people around him that when violent acts were committed by leaders it was acceptable. He wrote in his book many morals and rules that leaders should follow but in the end there was no set of morals that a leader should follow.
“The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it”. What does this mean to you? This is a metaphor Machiavelli wrote in his book The Price. We all will interpret this is a different way buy no matter how we interpret it it still applies to today’s leaders. In our lives we learn best from our experiences. The more mistakes we make, the older we get the more we learn. You only do something bad once in your life before you learn not to do it. We should all keep this in mind when analyzing the intelligence of our leaders. Just because they did something bad in the past, they only did it once. If the leader had done it multiple times then we see a reoccurring problem. If they do it once and don’t do it again it means that they have learned better. Doing a bad act 2, 3 times shows a lack of adapting and learning skills.
The advice that Machiavelli gave years ago was aimed solely at those times. Some of this advice can overlap to today; others can’t. In The Price Machiavelli wrote, “before all else, be alarmed”. In today’s times you can not resort to guns and violence first. This is something that we have learned over years. When we first resort to accusations and assumptions we end in war. A famous example of this is Iraq. The US government immediately resorted to guns and violence to solve their problems. The accusations we made and our choice to use guns led us to a horrible war the generations following will still have to deal with.
If Machiavelli and Pizarro were ever to cross paths I believe these would be the words out of Machiavelli’s mouth, “the wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather then condemned”. This applies to Pizzaro and his men because at the time Pizarro had the need to conquer and gain control. Machiavelli would be reassuring Pizarro that he was normal. The second half of this famous quote, “But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes”, warns Pizarro that the costs for losing is not worth the risk. Machiavelli wants to praise but also warn Pizarro of the cost and risk he is taking.
