And Then Good Deeds Are Your Enemies
On Machiavelli’s “The Prince”
“Weakness, laziness and stupidity are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else—in the absence of the aforementioned—is undoubtedly virtue. … If a person is strong (in spirit), active and smart (or capable)—then he is good, irrespective of any other ‘vices.’” Thus wrote Stalin in one of his margin notes.1 Echoing pragmatist philosophy, the tyrant asserts that the good is what works, not what one wishes it were.
This, in a nutshell, is the premise of Machiavelli’s The Prince, or rather, one side of it. The other side is that the things one wishes were good, that is, general notions of morality, are downright dangerous to a prince (the ruler of a state). A prince who tries to conform to a version of the world as it ought to be but not as it really is, to act morally, puts himself at a disadvantage by competing with others who won’t reciprocate. Consequently, the only way for a prince to deal with immoral actors is to respond in kind. This is why virtue is incompatible with statecraft. You can act virtuously in private, bearing the injuries done to you with dignity, but the injuries done to a prince will cost him his state. When others are trying to usurp you, “good deeds are your enemies.”2
The ideas in the The Prince can be read as a precursor of the prisoner’s dilemma. In a situation where rewards are skewed towards betrayal instead of cooperation, the short-term winning strategy for a selfish actor is to always betray. While cooperation lets everyone win, it only works when everyone cooperates, which is never the case in the real world. The prince may or may not betray others, but there are sure to be others who will betray the prince. Consequently, to stay in power he must do things that keep him in power, irrespective of whether or not they are deemed moral. A prince can be a good man, but he will soon cease being a prince.
Moreover, Machiavelli explains how actions that agree with conventional morality often result in outcomes that are disastrous both for the prince and for the state. By trying to do good, or to look good, a prince can ruin both himself and his country.
Take generosity. “There is nothing so self-defeating as generosity,” writes Machiavelli, for “in the act of practicing it, you lose the ability to do so, and you become either poor and despised or, seeking to escape poverty, rapacious and hated.” Instead of squandering his money for the sake of popularity or compassion, and thereby achieving the opposite of his goals, a prince should rather “not mind being called a miser.” In fact, by being thrifty, a prince “proves himself generous to all those from whom he takes nothing.” The only time a prince should give away money is when he has looted it from an enemy in war, as Caesar, Cyrus and Alexander had done, in which case he “should indulge his generosity to the full.”
Or take cruelty. Commenting on how Cesare Borgia restored order in Pistoia by violently suppressing a faction war, Machiavelli writes that “there was more compassion in Cesare than in the Florentine people, who, to escape being called cruel, allowed Pistoia to be devastated.” Machiavelli’s point is that misguided compassion sometimes results in more suffering. Napoleon, who had read The Prince, followed the advice by making “appropriately severe examples.”3 When a village called Binasco rebelled and attacked his troops during his invasion of Italy, Napoleon killed a hundred peasants and burned the village. “Remember Binasco,” he would later write, “it brought me tranquility in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands.”
Or how about truthfulness. As Baltasar Gracián writes, “there’s nothing easier than deceiving a good person,” because “the person who never lies is more ready to believe.”4 Therefore, do not let your goodness “create opportunities for someone else to be bad.” Machiavelli paints the metaphor of the lion and the fox. A prince must possess both, the force of the lion to fight off wolves, and the cunning of the fox, to avoid traps. For a prince “there is no court of appeal,” he is judged only by results. Consequently, a prince should not “honor his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer exist.” “If all men were good, this precept would not be good,” Machiavelli writes, “but because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them.”
What does a modern prince look like? A Machiavellian prince seems like a cunning, immoral tyrant skilled in laying traps for his enemies and evading theirs. But, as Machiavelli himself says, vicious actions can win “power but not glory.” To be a great prince, one must actually build a great state. Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore, has built a great state. In about three decades (from 1960 to 1990), Lee transformed a tiny third-world city-state into one of the most prosperous nations in Southeast Asia, with a higher per capita GDP than the US. In Lee we see a combination of pragmatic ruthlessness and constructive sympathy, the strength of will to do what’s necessary to succeed guided by a genuine desire to do what’s best for his people. And yes, Lee Kuan Yew had read The Prince (and even made his successor read it).
Machiavelli says that when a new prince seizes power, he should deliver all the injuries in a single blow. “He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men’s minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers benefits.” The withdrawal of the British from Singapore at the end of the 1960s was an existential crisis: not only were they providing military protection, but the military bases alone made up a fifth of the country’s GDP. And yet the crisis was also a rare opportunity for Lee to push through major labor union reforms that clamped down on strikes (strikes were banned outright for essential services). “Between July 1961 and September 1962, we had 153 strikes,” writes Lee Kuan Yew. “In 1969, for the first time since before the war, we had no strikes or work stoppages.”5 Though painful at first, these changes, together with investment in infrastructure and removal of red tape, made Singapore very attractive for overseas manufacturers, who flocked to the country and, in time, benefited the workers by creating jobs and growing the country’s wealth.
And this growing wealth was something that Lee Kuan Yew was loath to squander. Following Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better to be thought a miser than to go broke, Lee rejected a British style welfare state, which he called “a debilitating system” that “undermined self-reliance,” in favor of “the Confucian tradition,” in which “a man is responsible for his family—his parents, wife, and children.” He deemed the British National Health Service “a failure” founded on “idealistic but impractical” assumptions, whose only result is “ballooning costs.” Instead, Singapore went with a kind of personal savings fund that acts not only as a pension pot, but as a reservoir of money from which certain services, like healthcare and housing, are deducted. If you don’t have enough, you can ask your family for help. The result is a hybrid system where the state provides a basic safety net beyond which costs are covered by individuals and their relatives.
“By making an example or two,” writes Machiavelli, “he will prove more compassionate than those who, being too compassionate, allow disorders which lead to murder and rapine.” Singapore employs severe deterrents to discourage crime. Caning is used as punishment for all types of crimes, from murder and theft down to drug trafficking and vandalism. Littering is punished by heavy fines. Singapore also practices capital punishment—by hanging. The result is a clean city with one of the lowest crime rates in the world. In reply to critics who link crime to poverty rather than deterrent, Lee Kuan Yew explains that during Japanese occupation, the punishments were so severe that even in a state of utter destitution “there were no burglaries and people could leave their front doors unlocked, day or night. The deterrent was effective.”
Singapore is what one might call an “illiberal democracy”—a state in which free elections take place, but which is governed by a single party with practically no opposition. “[M]en must be either pampered or crushed,” writes Machiavelli, and “any injury a prince does a man should be of such a kind that there is no fear of revenge.” The one real threat to Lee’s reign came from the communist party, which he crushed by arresting its leaders under charges of foreign subversion. Lee’s own party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), would consequently dominate every election, sometimes winning all of the contested seats, like it did in 1972, 1976 and 1980. While the PAP was very proactive in organizing educational and recreational centers in local communities, it also had no qualms about employing questionable stratagems like promising housing upgrades to constituencies with highest PAP support.
“I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development,” Lee Kuan Yew explained, “I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.” Lee saw Western notions of how a democracy ought to function as a kind of distraction that gets in the way of progress and prosperity. Or, perhaps more accurately, he saw them as a consequence of prosperity rather than its cause. If you want freedom, you must first create the conditions for prosperity.
Lee’s views on democratic ideals are strikingly similar to Machiavelli’s views on conventional morality. Unlike the Renaissance prince, the modern politician does not care so much about morality, since today the very word “politician” carries a negative connotation. What he cares about is popularity, or, more accurately, public support, which he tries to win by promising to deliver policies that voters want. But this presents a similar problem to the modern politician as Machiavelli’s morality does to his Renaissance prince, namely: by making policies that directly address what people want, a politician deals with the world as the people wish it to be, not as it really is. Everyone wants something different, and short-term solutions are seldom the best. Thus misguided generosity turns into crippling debt and compassion into unchecked crime. By appealing to people’s emotions, the politician operates in a world of appearances at the cost of neglecting reality.
There is, however, a key difference between Machiavelli’s prince and the democratic statesman. Rewards for the democratic statesman are skewed towards appearances rather than reality. For the Renaissance prince, success and failure is the difference between life and death. In a wealthy democracy, failure is contained. A politician’s time in office is limited, and the nation’s growing troubles can be prolonged indefinitely through the magic of debt. Having climbed to the top of the hierarchy, a statesman has no need to fear disgrace,6 deprivation or death. Even if his term in office is disastrous, he can simply retire, letting someone else pretend to sort out the mess. As Lee Kuan Yew observed, “only a wealthy and solidly established nation like America can roll with such a system.”
Boris Ilizarov, The Secret Life of Stalin.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. George Bull translation.
Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great.
Baltasar Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence. Jeremy Robbins translation.
Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First.
In a polarized society, half the country is already dead set against you from the start, with scant prospect of changing their minds. Moreover, becoming more popular with one half is going to make the statesman proportionally less popular with the other. Margaret Thatcher is as hated by the left as she is loved by the right.