...how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that the Prince who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.

Name	Niccoloò Machiavelli
Life	1469 - 1527
Country	Italy
Category	Realism
Wikipedia	>>

Forget about Mirandola's God and use your intelligence as ruthlessly as you can to deceive, betray and murder your rival! Split his body, as Caesar Borgia once did, from the legs to the throat and let the carcass rest in the public square! This is necessary if you really want to get or hold on to power. That is, essentially, the cruel message of the most famous book of all in the literature of politics, Machiavelli's Il Principe, The Prince. To give just one example: When Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815, a copy of that book was found in his carriage with many comments from the ambitious Corsican. Many were the modern commentators, one of them an Anacapresian. It is not that Machiavelli is against God, for he does appreciate Christian virtues. But he comes close to realizing the ugly truth of de Maistre and Darwin: that evolution is a game of power in which an ambitious Prince often has no choice between ruthlessness and defeat. The beautiful ideals of Aeschylus and Sophocles are out. That is, if he wants to be successful and win. What is analytically true here also becomes normatively worthy of praise. It is a horrible teaching. But is it wrong? Even today? Consider one example: Under much media criticism, the United States Senate in 1999 killed something

called "The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty", an international agreement to end all types of explosive testing of atomic weapons. Almost all the rest of the world wanted this treaty. But not the hawks in the U.S.Senate. Why? Having three times in the past century, in one cold and two hot world wars, saved Europe from itself, the United States is at the present time the world's only real superpower. It has an enormous lead over all other nations in high-tech weapons of mass destruction. Knowing that a number of other nations are working hard to get hold of these terrible weapons, how should it act? Can it trust the United Nations, or some new international treaty like the Test Ban one, to become an efficient world policeman, preventing potential black-mail from atomic criminals? Or should it say: "I am the policeman! You obey me or I obliterate you!"? The first alternative would be in accordance with idealistic dreams of all "good" people - especially with those who also dislike U.S. power. To judge from much history, (in which solemn treaties have often been seen as "scraps of paper" ending up in the toilet) the second alternative seems to many to be the more realistic one. Possibly thinking that this would be best for the survival of God-forgetting, bestial mankind, the United States Senate chose to follow the cynical council of Machiavelli and kill the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Only the future can tell us if that was right or wrong.