Machiavellian Musings - A Revisit
I spoke of hard powers and soft powers in a previous blog post while not aware that they were also terms in sociology coined in the late 1980s by the prestigious American political scientist Joseph Nye. Though I defined the terms more on an individual micro scale with different categorization and discussed powers pertaining to emotional influence such as the power of humor, charisma, music (don't think I discussed that one though) and so on, many of which intertwine. I was a bit hesitant to share those thoughts as they seemed a bit Machiavellian, cold and sobering, and I always fear that I'm just another uninformed idiot when writing about such things since my only formal education was long ago and very little but glad to find out I'm not alone in how I see human power transactions. Just when I think I'm original, I find that if I spend long enough time researching, I'm usually not so in my thoughts or potential mad scientist endeavors. But as much as I despise tribalized religion and politics, I find myself thinking about it a lot as well as how those tribes tend to effect powers to affect others. I was going to divert into defining the powers these tribes may use but after some thought, I realize it's much too complex to label the tribes according to these power applications but despite what I said, I did glance it below on a more cursory level.
The preceding was going to be a topic for a blog post I had planned earlier but I'm going to revisit the topic today since I realized that not everyone's intuitively aware of these things. Case in point, a recent news headline about a young man who was found guilty of premeditated and long-lasting torture of a kitten. It's something most of us, given the horrific context, likely wouldn't think to question his punishment of a few years in prison but eventually, when a comment page is long enough, you'll find someone who may argue to the contrary of any headline. I can entertain many arguments, regardless if it's initially shocking as long as it's well reasoned and so I entertained this guy. The topic of debate was the question of unowned animal rights. If no one owns an animal, kitten in this case, and no one is around to be affected by its torture, should the torturer be punished. I responded to someone who had issue with the given punishment and so I argued most of the obvious, that such a person almost assuredly would have psychological issues and for the good of themselves, society and other innocents, should be distinguished from that society for a period of time to get help. Secondly I argued that even if no human is physically harmed, it can cause emotional distress to most of us who are compassionate enough towards the animal's welfare and that, even if I hesitate to admit that emotional offense has legitimate merit for recompension, there are already legal grounds by which emotional damage can be sought in court and many times successfully rewarded. Emotional distress is a legally, and by extension, socially valid excuse to seek justice for emotional offense given proper legal pursuit. Another argument is that should such actions legally be allowed, it could psychologically damage witnesses, especially children and could induce and perpetuate a callous mindset whereby the sanctity of life and the pursuit of, if not happiness, then freedom from pain is distilled in their mindset and on the whole, societal morale is decreased. And so you could argue, why not just toughen up and society will adjust? I could go into a whole topic on this but it's my observation that in violent, impulsive and less nurturing societies, ones that glorify more of the harder powers, that a creative and intelligent mindset is afforded less opportunity and time to seek formal education as a distracted and violent society is less receptive of academic pursuits. Basically that overwhelming hard powers create a high-entropy environment but I also think the same can be said in societies that practice soft powers too much, that there's little force to change and grow without a competitive driver. But that topic is much too complex and there's so much interchangeability and complexities involved that you can't really generalize too much on that scale.
But back to the headline. Don't get me wrong, I fully support hunting and even animal testing to some extent but the reckless, not just disregard in this case, but intent to cause long-lasting emotional and physical pain to an animal, is something I and of course most of us would find distressing. But let's try to be fair here and drop our emotional bias to take a more Machiavellian approach. The animal in question isn't an agent of much power and so it succumbs to the mightier malicious power of the inflictor. To us, this is an anomaly but in nature, especially when you look at other primates and even dolphins or whales, this cruelty isn't as uncommon. So by what grounds shall we say to another human that that aspect of nature shouldn't be imitated upon nature lest the inflictor be punished? If by that point you don't get your point across to the debater that implicit animal torture isn't right for society, you then draw your ace in the hole as they perhaps drew the same, the argument that might makes right. The torturer professed his might to perform a right. And before you profess a semantic argument, forget the moral meaning of "right", which I'd argue has a secular conception, so bear with me here. In turn of his might, society was thoroughly disgusted enough by said event that it professed its might to make the torturer feel the full effect of societal disappointment. You see, animal rights is not so much the point I intend to make as the vast majority would agree that torturing a kitten is wrong. My major point is that soft powers of compassion can be used to affect the harder powers of physical force and therefore effect right. When people use the term "might" in the phrase "might makes right", it's not necessarily physical might, it can also be the might of softer powers. So if anyone thinks the Machiavellian, or Nye, approach to life is by nature cold, then I'd argue that they haven't thoroughly investigated the concepts well enough. You can implement this emotionally colder approach at life to effect emotional warmness or "right".
Inherently, hard powers are nothing without the soft powers to affect them and soft powers are nothing without the hard powers to effect them. If you're confused, take note of the spelling. Maybe you can argue semantically with that phrase but I like it. But if I may, I'm going to divert back into politics and defer to the subject of what this post was initially going to be about. Frankly, what disappoints me most about American politics is, and I mean this very generally is that you have one tribe that likes to demerit the soft powers of education and the arts and another tribe that likes to demerit the hard powers such as the martial and monetary. For example, I see many liberals who want to speak out against the sometimes necessary nature of warfare, which is derived of our natural lust for conflict and challenge and against capitalism, which at its root is a system whereby goods are traded for supposedly equal goods, and not inherently an unfair system. And of course you will find certain members and sub-tribes where such generalizations aren't true but lately, I find that our two major political parties have more confined themselves to such almost sacred ideals and seem afraid to stray from those ideals very far lest they horseshoe into the ideals of the other tribe. I'm also just as much disappointed in certain religions or religious where they stress soft powers such as love, forgiveness, mercy, etc and equate hard powers of force as something "evil" or conversely, certain religions and people that stress hard powers of terrorism, war, intolerance, etc, and denigrate the merits of the soft and ironically running contrary to their own holy texts, which can be said in both cases. It makes me come back to a view I've had for many years, which is that I can admit life and all thereof, religion, politics, law, etc is hypocritical and contradictory in nature. It's inevitable that we'll always find ourselves on different sides of the same coin at different times because this coin is always flipping, it's entropy doing its thing, it's the ever-changing nature of the universe. Very low entropy, or no entropy, is death. High entropy is death. We live in this proper medium that's conducive to life so there will always be this fight to change (high entropy) and fight to conserve (low entropy). Pardon me if I use the term "entropy" too much but I find a thermodynamic outlook on life as so much more elegant and explanatory of a system as complex as our universe. I know I can be kind of everywhere when I argue a point and delve in many topics, hence why some of my posts can be a bit long, but I try to work the arguments in a more universal package because so much of life you can argue ties into other areas that it's hard to ignore and it can augment a point.
But this dualistic outlook on life is sort of analogous to Taoist principles and it's what initially drew me to it or what little I know and frankly, care to know since I like to discover things on my own accord as best I can. I think it makes life more exciting to do so and later as a self-check mechanism, to formally read about the topic later and see if my intellectual travels progress toward the intellectual roads of others and compare them. This theme of duality you can also find, as mentioned previously, in politics and religion such as our dueling tribalistic political parties and what some call the powers of light and dark in the Abrahamic religions. But why is that? Why do we see so much duality in our micro and macroscopic world? Is it some sort of underlying mechanic of the universe? Something obvious such as the action/reaction nature of the universe or the opposing vibrational tell-tale motion of particles? Or is it simply a reflection of the human mind to want to reduce complexity? I have my own views on that but, even if I'm being philosophical here, I try to stray away from crackpottery. Until I have a full picture in my head, I try not to paint too much of it or else the truth you seek can soon become lies and lead you astray if you don't constantly assess your path.
To end here and break the 4th wall a bit, I'm kind of disappointed in the grammatical structure of this post. The subjects don't transition as smoothly as I'd prefer and I'm just not in the mood to edit much at this juncture because my mind is just a piece of (insert Jack Rebney quote - NSFW) but I'm more satisfied in covering a topic that's concerned me a bit lately. Namely religion and politics as well as our written, spoken and unspoken social contracts which I've been meaning to try to encompass in a brief sociological framework of hard and soft powers. I don't quite get as much out of writing it out but understanding it as such, I feel more at peace with life and I realize that underneath it all, there's potentially a method to the madness. Well, until we get into quantum theory which would challenge that notion but then, as a determinist, I'd still challenge it though it may not mean much with my layman credentials. But you could argue order, or determinism, exists at our scale while quantum randomness, disorder or high entropy, exists at other scales not compatible with life and so for all intents and purposes, the universe as we commonly observe it is deterministic. Anyway, I've not had enough coffee to continue on such a mind trip or maybe too much, I don't know anymore, my mind isgarbage high entropy either way.
On an unrelated not, above is the grumpy, though endearing Jack Rebney. He has a way with words, a victor of vernacular, of both vulgar and virtuous. He was made somewhat (in)famous in the 80s, at least in the VHS trading underground, through passed around copies of VHS tapes of his four-letter infused Winnebago RV commercial outtakes at a time when underground, TV-unfriendly videos like this were a rare comedic treasure. Contrarily, Mr. Rebney lived a life in front of the camera only to later hide away, alone with his dog, in a cabin in the woods upon retirement. Very few knew his whereabouts and only after a documentary creator, a fan of his Winnebago outtakes, hired a private investigator to track down the elusive hermit, was his foul mouth able to violate the ears of the public once again. The documentary, titled Winnebago Man, started as an interview of the man and the context surrounding his Winnebago outtakes but much of it transgressed into an argumentative interrogation as Rebney, puzzled and feeling contempt of the fanfare and appalled at his later youtube fame, would much rather discuss more pressing political topics. We later get a more private look at Rebney's life as he slowly opens up to the director over the course of a few years after many private phone calls. His softer but vulnerable side later begins to show, especially after greeting and understanding his fans and fanfare. Towards the end of the documentary, from when we first saw him years ago in better health, his age-related illness leaves him blind and at one point lost in the woods, with no one at his lone California cabin other than his faithful dog. You soon realize that he is a man torn and imprisoned by his convictions, yet affable in his own way, a personality much too familiar in my family line. A classic tortured soul with a personality you just can't help but find amusing and lovable. Today, Mr. Rebney is still alive and kicking, thank the gods, and last I heard still keeps in touch with the director and a few close people. Much to my surprise, after watching the documentary in 2010, only recently did I find out he authored a book. And what was it about? A topic near and dear to me, religion. After being halfway through his book, I have to say he's a very well-read and intelligent man, something which I vaguely picked up from the documentary. Frankly, his book is a bit too harsh on religion but if you can overcome that, it's still a good read if you're into such topics as religious mythos.
You know, some might say it's kind of odd that outtakes from a short commercial for a recreational vehicle were passed around so much and gained the small popularity it did at a time when America was already satiated with intentionally comedic performances on TV and tape in the 80s. But I think there's a bit of Jack Rebney in all of us and I think that's why his unintentionally comedic rants resounded with a small part of the underground, and later, small overground American public in such a way, an observation that the documentary also eludes to. Keep in mind, this was way before youtube, before America's Funniest Home Videos and a time when you didn't really see real people on TV, you saw an avatar, a family-friendly persona of what people should say in a scripted moment. Winnebago Man, the persona most of us saw, was a real person, warts and all. A real person back when real people were a rarity on TV, especially standard ubiquitous cable TV. I admittedly didn't see the video in its heyday, only later on youtube, but I got it right when I watched it. Because I was alive and old enough then, I got why people would've found him so funny and endearing. Now with endless comedic online videos, it's not such a treasure but videos like this during those times, they were an oasis from the manufactured, pasteurized, homogenized TV comedy of the day. If you're into this sort of thing, I'd recommend a visit to the Found Footage Festival.
Wow, this is far more than I intended to write. I didn't initially even intend to write about Mr. Rebney at all but since I linked to Winnebago man above, I thought I'd link the video and so I began to write from there. And as I said before, once I begin to write, sometimes there ain't no stoppin' this train. I'm now in danger of over-crediting this man's influence by devoting too many words to him but dang it, just let me keep typing about things because that's what I like to do. I'm also kind of hesitant to cover the subject since inevitably, cursing will be used and invariably, I use curse words as sparingly as I do smiles; they mean more when used less. Anyway, I see a bit of Jack in myself as well as my father so maybe that's what initially drew me to watch an hour and a half long documentary about a man who starred in an un-aired RV commercial some thirty some-odd years ago. Jack speaks to us. There's a part of us that's afraid to speak our minds lest we offend someone. Winnebago Man is catharsis. I'd make the argument that this cathartic release also compares to the stupidic genius of Beavis and Butthead, especially back when it aired in contrast to other shows in its time slot that took themselves way too seriously as well as movies like Borat, another favorite of mine. We get too caught up in trying to play the serious and mentally competent person, or classic nice guy, that sometimes you want to be real, that truth should be told. So, truth be told and to paraphrase my verbally voracious vindicator of vernacular, sometimes it may be very well be hot as hell, sometimes those flies can be a son of a bitch and your mind, in that moment of frustration, may very well be a piece of shit.
The preceding was going to be a topic for a blog post I had planned earlier but I'm going to revisit the topic today since I realized that not everyone's intuitively aware of these things. Case in point, a recent news headline about a young man who was found guilty of premeditated and long-lasting torture of a kitten. It's something most of us, given the horrific context, likely wouldn't think to question his punishment of a few years in prison but eventually, when a comment page is long enough, you'll find someone who may argue to the contrary of any headline. I can entertain many arguments, regardless if it's initially shocking as long as it's well reasoned and so I entertained this guy. The topic of debate was the question of unowned animal rights. If no one owns an animal, kitten in this case, and no one is around to be affected by its torture, should the torturer be punished. I responded to someone who had issue with the given punishment and so I argued most of the obvious, that such a person almost assuredly would have psychological issues and for the good of themselves, society and other innocents, should be distinguished from that society for a period of time to get help. Secondly I argued that even if no human is physically harmed, it can cause emotional distress to most of us who are compassionate enough towards the animal's welfare and that, even if I hesitate to admit that emotional offense has legitimate merit for recompension, there are already legal grounds by which emotional damage can be sought in court and many times successfully rewarded. Emotional distress is a legally, and by extension, socially valid excuse to seek justice for emotional offense given proper legal pursuit. Another argument is that should such actions legally be allowed, it could psychologically damage witnesses, especially children and could induce and perpetuate a callous mindset whereby the sanctity of life and the pursuit of, if not happiness, then freedom from pain is distilled in their mindset and on the whole, societal morale is decreased. And so you could argue, why not just toughen up and society will adjust? I could go into a whole topic on this but it's my observation that in violent, impulsive and less nurturing societies, ones that glorify more of the harder powers, that a creative and intelligent mindset is afforded less opportunity and time to seek formal education as a distracted and violent society is less receptive of academic pursuits. Basically that overwhelming hard powers create a high-entropy environment but I also think the same can be said in societies that practice soft powers too much, that there's little force to change and grow without a competitive driver. But that topic is much too complex and there's so much interchangeability and complexities involved that you can't really generalize too much on that scale.
But back to the headline. Don't get me wrong, I fully support hunting and even animal testing to some extent but the reckless, not just disregard in this case, but intent to cause long-lasting emotional and physical pain to an animal, is something I and of course most of us would find distressing. But let's try to be fair here and drop our emotional bias to take a more Machiavellian approach. The animal in question isn't an agent of much power and so it succumbs to the mightier malicious power of the inflictor. To us, this is an anomaly but in nature, especially when you look at other primates and even dolphins or whales, this cruelty isn't as uncommon. So by what grounds shall we say to another human that that aspect of nature shouldn't be imitated upon nature lest the inflictor be punished? If by that point you don't get your point across to the debater that implicit animal torture isn't right for society, you then draw your ace in the hole as they perhaps drew the same, the argument that might makes right. The torturer professed his might to perform a right. And before you profess a semantic argument, forget the moral meaning of "right", which I'd argue has a secular conception, so bear with me here. In turn of his might, society was thoroughly disgusted enough by said event that it professed its might to make the torturer feel the full effect of societal disappointment. You see, animal rights is not so much the point I intend to make as the vast majority would agree that torturing a kitten is wrong. My major point is that soft powers of compassion can be used to affect the harder powers of physical force and therefore effect right. When people use the term "might" in the phrase "might makes right", it's not necessarily physical might, it can also be the might of softer powers. So if anyone thinks the Machiavellian, or Nye, approach to life is by nature cold, then I'd argue that they haven't thoroughly investigated the concepts well enough. You can implement this emotionally colder approach at life to effect emotional warmness or "right".
Inherently, hard powers are nothing without the soft powers to affect them and soft powers are nothing without the hard powers to effect them. If you're confused, take note of the spelling. Maybe you can argue semantically with that phrase but I like it. But if I may, I'm going to divert back into politics and defer to the subject of what this post was initially going to be about. Frankly, what disappoints me most about American politics is, and I mean this very generally is that you have one tribe that likes to demerit the soft powers of education and the arts and another tribe that likes to demerit the hard powers such as the martial and monetary. For example, I see many liberals who want to speak out against the sometimes necessary nature of warfare, which is derived of our natural lust for conflict and challenge and against capitalism, which at its root is a system whereby goods are traded for supposedly equal goods, and not inherently an unfair system. And of course you will find certain members and sub-tribes where such generalizations aren't true but lately, I find that our two major political parties have more confined themselves to such almost sacred ideals and seem afraid to stray from those ideals very far lest they horseshoe into the ideals of the other tribe. I'm also just as much disappointed in certain religions or religious where they stress soft powers such as love, forgiveness, mercy, etc and equate hard powers of force as something "evil" or conversely, certain religions and people that stress hard powers of terrorism, war, intolerance, etc, and denigrate the merits of the soft and ironically running contrary to their own holy texts, which can be said in both cases. It makes me come back to a view I've had for many years, which is that I can admit life and all thereof, religion, politics, law, etc is hypocritical and contradictory in nature. It's inevitable that we'll always find ourselves on different sides of the same coin at different times because this coin is always flipping, it's entropy doing its thing, it's the ever-changing nature of the universe. Very low entropy, or no entropy, is death. High entropy is death. We live in this proper medium that's conducive to life so there will always be this fight to change (high entropy) and fight to conserve (low entropy). Pardon me if I use the term "entropy" too much but I find a thermodynamic outlook on life as so much more elegant and explanatory of a system as complex as our universe. I know I can be kind of everywhere when I argue a point and delve in many topics, hence why some of my posts can be a bit long, but I try to work the arguments in a more universal package because so much of life you can argue ties into other areas that it's hard to ignore and it can augment a point.
But this dualistic outlook on life is sort of analogous to Taoist principles and it's what initially drew me to it or what little I know and frankly, care to know since I like to discover things on my own accord as best I can. I think it makes life more exciting to do so and later as a self-check mechanism, to formally read about the topic later and see if my intellectual travels progress toward the intellectual roads of others and compare them. This theme of duality you can also find, as mentioned previously, in politics and religion such as our dueling tribalistic political parties and what some call the powers of light and dark in the Abrahamic religions. But why is that? Why do we see so much duality in our micro and macroscopic world? Is it some sort of underlying mechanic of the universe? Something obvious such as the action/reaction nature of the universe or the opposing vibrational tell-tale motion of particles? Or is it simply a reflection of the human mind to want to reduce complexity? I have my own views on that but, even if I'm being philosophical here, I try to stray away from crackpottery. Until I have a full picture in my head, I try not to paint too much of it or else the truth you seek can soon become lies and lead you astray if you don't constantly assess your path.
To end here and break the 4th wall a bit, I'm kind of disappointed in the grammatical structure of this post. The subjects don't transition as smoothly as I'd prefer and I'm just not in the mood to edit much at this juncture because my mind is just a piece of (insert Jack Rebney quote - NSFW) but I'm more satisfied in covering a topic that's concerned me a bit lately. Namely religion and politics as well as our written, spoken and unspoken social contracts which I've been meaning to try to encompass in a brief sociological framework of hard and soft powers. I don't quite get as much out of writing it out but understanding it as such, I feel more at peace with life and I realize that underneath it all, there's potentially a method to the madness. Well, until we get into quantum theory which would challenge that notion but then, as a determinist, I'd still challenge it though it may not mean much with my layman credentials. But you could argue order, or determinism, exists at our scale while quantum randomness, disorder or high entropy, exists at other scales not compatible with life and so for all intents and purposes, the universe as we commonly observe it is deterministic. Anyway, I've not had enough coffee to continue on such a mind trip or maybe too much, I don't know anymore, my mind is
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| The Definitive Winnebago Man (NSFW) |
You know, some might say it's kind of odd that outtakes from a short commercial for a recreational vehicle were passed around so much and gained the small popularity it did at a time when America was already satiated with intentionally comedic performances on TV and tape in the 80s. But I think there's a bit of Jack Rebney in all of us and I think that's why his unintentionally comedic rants resounded with a small part of the underground, and later, small overground American public in such a way, an observation that the documentary also eludes to. Keep in mind, this was way before youtube, before America's Funniest Home Videos and a time when you didn't really see real people on TV, you saw an avatar, a family-friendly persona of what people should say in a scripted moment. Winnebago Man, the persona most of us saw, was a real person, warts and all. A real person back when real people were a rarity on TV, especially standard ubiquitous cable TV. I admittedly didn't see the video in its heyday, only later on youtube, but I got it right when I watched it. Because I was alive and old enough then, I got why people would've found him so funny and endearing. Now with endless comedic online videos, it's not such a treasure but videos like this during those times, they were an oasis from the manufactured, pasteurized, homogenized TV comedy of the day. If you're into this sort of thing, I'd recommend a visit to the Found Footage Festival.
Wow, this is far more than I intended to write. I didn't initially even intend to write about Mr. Rebney at all but since I linked to Winnebago man above, I thought I'd link the video and so I began to write from there. And as I said before, once I begin to write, sometimes there ain't no stoppin' this train. I'm now in danger of over-crediting this man's influence by devoting too many words to him but dang it, just let me keep typing about things because that's what I like to do. I'm also kind of hesitant to cover the subject since inevitably, cursing will be used and invariably, I use curse words as sparingly as I do smiles; they mean more when used less. Anyway, I see a bit of Jack in myself as well as my father so maybe that's what initially drew me to watch an hour and a half long documentary about a man who starred in an un-aired RV commercial some thirty some-odd years ago. Jack speaks to us. There's a part of us that's afraid to speak our minds lest we offend someone. Winnebago Man is catharsis. I'd make the argument that this cathartic release also compares to the stupidic genius of Beavis and Butthead, especially back when it aired in contrast to other shows in its time slot that took themselves way too seriously as well as movies like Borat, another favorite of mine. We get too caught up in trying to play the serious and mentally competent person, or classic nice guy, that sometimes you want to be real, that truth should be told. So, truth be told and to paraphrase my verbally voracious vindicator of vernacular, sometimes it may be very well be hot as hell, sometimes those flies can be a son of a bitch and your mind, in that moment of frustration, may very well be a piece of shit.
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