Vivarium: Philosophy Discussions On Any Subject

http://www.e-ir.info/2008/04/29/discuss-machiavelli’s-attitude-to-‘the-people’-and-his-view-on-the-degree-to-which-they-participate-in-republican-governance/

Machiavelli believed in the competition between Princely Aristocrats and the Common People as the only reasonable method to for a long lived state to preserve it's liberties. The competition would dash the status quo,  but mutual rivalries coupler with shared civic identity would push the public to overcome their common jealousies and develop new laws that the people could check,  reason,  and live with in peace,  resulting in stability and mutual prosperity. His idea was culled from the class conflict of the Roman Republic,  and was a forerunner of the concept of the division of powers,  used by the united states,  dividing monarchial executive powers from elected representatives and aristocratic senators.

During the American and French Revolutions,  emphasis was placed on the media in providing a Fourth Representative Estate. For a long time,  the media was given broad freedoms in return for scientific analysis of current events,  presenting problems and scandels as the occurred.

Today,  as the Trump Administration,  which has been in office for only a week has announced,  the media IS the opposition party. In Trump and most Americans views,  according to polls, trust  the media is now at a all time low,  seen merely as party synchophants and propaganda arms,  no longer trying to be objective in doing their work.

It certainly appears so to me,  a avid reader of the news. I check the news hourly,  daily,  up towards 30 new sites a week, studying every conflict in depth. When I touch on something remotely related on politics in the US, it is always on a topic heavily skewed left,  opposite of national voting trends,  where we have seen the let's elected seats dramatically drop over the years.

The media has become a platform of social change,  a power in Machiavellian terms would most closely resemble that of the elites,  making promises of pleasures and sweetness,  and not paying up on it,  or outright fear mongering,  encouraging hysteria on issues in recent generations would of been handled more balanced and competently. Today,  the media is acting like it is a Prince,  desiring to found a new order for society to live by,  at competition and expense to the people. We live in a highly regulated society,  where our established business owners can't reach out and oppress like Machiavelli recognized was their natural intention. Occasionally one is busted for fraud,  such as Ponzi Schemes,  or radically overpricing medicines they hold monopolies on well past reasonably occurred research and development costs, or that of production,  but increasingly it is fewer and fewer. Those with malicious, manipulative designs now seek out less politics,  than media control to manipulate and dictate. For the very best,  they are well paid,  receiving millions per televised event,  daily. For most,  the payoffs are far less.

Machiavelli lived in a era when he was developing one of the first modern ideologies,  culled from the antiquity before him,  but was unable to see how new ideology after ideology would grow,  compounded after him. Today,  oppression comes from ideology,  and the sole bastion of the influence of ideology is increasingly less found in politics,  as it was in the 19th and 20th centuries,  but in the media,  and politics must play by it's themes. We live in a era of little dictators of opinions,  people nobody knows,  poorly trained in philosophy much less ethics save that inherited from party lines,  and they twist a idea that the "other side" has, swearing a apocalypse will occur if we follow suit. Statitions deliver the number,  and they always fail to convince when placed under a critical eye,  they only are convincing when presented as autjorative and exhaustive,  and little explored.

At the end of a day,  we have a class of people,  the Fourth Estate,  intentionally all too often,  misleading people into ideologies,  with fewer and fewer returns to either the elite or the common people,  and to most in the media,  even less to them,  collecting meager pay for such efforts. They now are the engines of change, speak as if they are the voice of reason,  yet back the interests of very few. Everyone is increasingly alienated,  and nobody can quite place a finger on how to reform the mess we are all in,  because we are left only with the tools the media leaves us to voice the debate. It is ultimately a dead end road, no blogger can turn the tide of 24 hour news organizations pushing politics upon us,  so rarely a politics that are our sensibly our own,  based on immediate needs and real concerns stemming from clear and present threats,  not to our ideology but to our actual survival,  as in the Needs Pyramid:



If I lived in a Marxist Society,  Class Struggle and fear of Aristocrats would consistently be pushed as a physical security threat,  but that's merely a abstraction that dehumanizes people into boarder categories. Higher classes aren't the bullets, or famine,  or administrative insanity that befalls traumatic ends. Class struggle doesn't keep the knife at bay, the obvious priority of the media should be examining the actual means of killing and destruction first,  then assign probable cause in conjunction with reasoned alternatives,  stratified on the least bloody to bloodiest course of action first,  so we don't go around in hysterics killing everyone who seems threatening. Labeling classes,  contract one another,  preceding one group over another is self actualization....  We gotta solve the real issues well prior to that,  learn to get along,  and then,  and only then,  can we fight ideological wars. Shoving such priorities first,  as if they are life and death,  is absurd.