Machiavelli Freewrite/Questions
Posted by jhquay on March 18, 2008
1. Can a person be respected without being cruel?
2. Can a passive person be a leader if they enact cruel punishments for uprisings in the society?
When we did a free write at the beginning of this section, I wrote about what a government should have, and mainly what qualities a leader should posses. And one of the main qualities I thought that a leader of anything should have is that they have to be respectable. If there is no quality about them that the society can respect, and then their reign is going to be fruitless, similar to Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill for all of eternity, always fighting against the forces of gravity. Anyways, when it comes to Machiavelli, I think that his description of a leader being cruel to be effective in his ways is in a ways the same as respect. If a leader is cruel, the population will have respect for him, but that respect isn’t a good kind of respect; it is basically fear. This kind of leader will either be revolted against or assassinated, in a government in this era. In a utopia, which will happen when pigs fly, a leader will gain the respect of his citizens by acting the way a respectable leader acts, unbiased, confident (but accepts criticism), approachable, aggressive (but not overly), intelligent, thinks through situations in a timely manner, and thinks about what will happen when different acts are put into effect. I am sorry to say, but this reminds me of the King of Rohan in Lord of the Rings. He had most of these qualities, but the most important one was that he was human, not a god of some sort. His people could relate to him and his life, and this in turn made him respectable. Now that I have ranted, I am going to finish this before I can rant even more.
