Machiavelli & Me.

Here is a piece I wrote for a fanzine called ALASICANNOTSWIM.

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Machiavelli & Me.

There is no necessary or predictable relationship between what happens to us and what we deserve.

Sitting here in this dingy, damp, cellar; a blunt pencil and few scraps of paper are the only things staving off complete insanity. My captor, a lanky 15 year old with a flick knife and an unfathomably disproportionate grudge, switched off the light before he locked me in here. Thankfully, there is enough moonlight seeping through the ventilation cover to allow me to commit my story to paper.

It was a Friday morning much like any other. I dragged myself out of bed, showered and made my way across town to my first lecture. I was all but sleepwalking, until a guy nearly got hit by a bus about 3 feet ahead of me. That woke me up a little; seeing someone come within inches of their death tends to do that. I made sure that he was OK. He seemed shaken up but appreciative.

I arrived at my lecture to find that it had been postponed until 2 O’clock that afternoon. This was most annoying as I had nothing to do for the next four hours. I reversed 180 degrees and set off to walk home; I needed to make the best possible use of my time, so I thought I’d go home and work on a philosophy essay.

I got back to my flat and switched on my laptop. My housemates weren’t in, but my essay was already a week late so the fewer distractions the better. I’d decided that to make up for the lateness of the submission, I’d spice it up a bit, with an elaborate analogy. Machiavelli & Human Psychology understood through the nuclear family.

Here is a segment of the essay:

In this paragraph we will consider an analogy in order to elucidate our understanding of Machiavelli’s theory of Human Psychology.

Jane’s parents are flying to Florence for a short break; they tell her that she is in charge for the weekend. She has the unenviable task of forcing her mischievous twin brothers to behave. Jane is 18, her brothers are 15.

How can she get them to behave? Unlike her parents she does not have the protection of tradition or custom? She is playing the power-game under the most naked and unfavourable conditions. Therefore she must be ruthless. She decides that fear is that best means with which to rule. After bidding farewell to her parents, she informs her brothers that she has acquired an x-rated magazine from the local corner shop.

“If you take one step out of line”, she tells them calmly, “I will hand this to mum and dad and tell them I caught you reading it together!”

The boys are horrified. They each react differently. One screams at her, tells her that it is unfair. He is deeply distressed by the situation he finds himself in. She banishes him to his bedroom for the night.

The other, more astute brother immediately becomes sycophantic, promising to be on his best behaviour. She rewards him by letting him play on his Xbox and they share a tub of ice cream.

This analogy highlights the four emotions identified by Machiavelli as being central to humanity. Machiavelli identifies the ease with which feelings of hate, love, fear and contempt can be activated as the reason humans are easy to control. The first brother feels fear, hatred and contempt; he is harder to control and will eventually become uncontrollable. The second brother feels fear and love; the ideal combination of emotions with which one can rule according to Machiavelli. In the following section we will discuss Machiavelli’s view on the relationship between morality and politics…

What with working for a few hours, it was almost time to go to my rescheduled lecture. My housemate returned, he’d decided to come home and watch a DVD. We chatted for a while and I left.

Knowing that time was not on my side I decided to take a shortcut, past the old swimming baths. The path was narrow and secluded, but it took 10 minutes off the journey. As I progressed up the hill, I noticed a tall figure making their way towards me from up ahead. As I got nearer I could make out more of the character, but still not enough.

“It’s you” he said, accusingly.

“Er, yes. It is me…” I laughed nervously and tried to brush aside his assertion, but deep down I could tell that this guy was pretty angry.

“You’re the one who wrote the story. You’re the bastard who ruined my weekend”. He could have only been about 15.

“Which story do you mean?”

“The story. The bloody story with the porno-mag! Who do you think you are trying to embarrass me like that? You didn’t even give me a name! You left me in that bedroom to rot, now I’m going to do the same to you”

I didn’t know what was happening but I knew I wanted to leave. I tried to push my way past him and muttered “leave me alone”. It was dawning on me who this person was and I didn’t like it.

“Oh, no you don’t mate” He said, and brandished a small but intimidating knife that he had been concealing up his sleeve. I made a run for it, but didn’t get far before feeling a blunt thump on the back of my head and blacking out.

When I awoke I was in this cellar and he was standing there in front of me. I pleaded my innocence. He was unrelenting in his anger.

“What? So you think you can just go around writing stories without fully fleshing out the characters.” I tried to explain to him that it was just a little metaphor in a silly formative essay. He told me that it didn’t matter, I needed to learn. He was teaching me a lesson.

“You can’t put people through that sort of thing if you aren’t even going to put a few posters on their bedroom walls. You failed to include the smallest amount of character development before putting my brother and I through that embarrassing ordeal. You didn’t even give us names, for Christ’s sake.”

He switched the light off and it was a few minutes before my eyes adjusted to the darkness. It must have been late. I could see Gilesgate roundabout through a small hole in the ventilation cover, and there were barely any cars on it.

I had the eerie sense that he was still silently standing outside the door, so I pleaded with him and told him I was sorry, but he did didn’t reply. I knew that he was giving me time to think about things. I had no time for thoughts, only feelings.

Hatred. Fear. Contempt.

In the end I will be rescued by Joseph David Webster. Born in Rotherham on the 26^th of February 1984, Joseph considers mountain biking and non-mainstream indie-rock to be his two primary interests. He rarely wears the colour red as he thinks it makes him look pale. He has short brown hair and has a birthmark resembling a bird on his right thigh. Earlier today he was almost hit by a bus.

“There is no necessary or predictable relationship between what happens to us and what we deserve”.