Keeping the simple spectrum approach of “Left” and “Right”, I’d divide the world into the fundamentally incompatible camps of “Theory” people and “Reality” people. We all know all about the Theory People, so just one quick example: J.B.S. Haldane. Indisputably a great scientist, and not just a great scientist, a great evolutionary biologist. If there’s anyone on this earth who should’ve been convinced, right down to the very marrow of his bones, that human beings are NOT blank slates, it was J.B.S. Haldane. And yet, he was a Marxist — and not just a Marxist, a really loopy one, even by the standards of the early 20th century.

It was guys like Haldane who caused Stove to write a great essay about “The Ishmael Effect”. He said something like (from memory) it’s a striking fact about powerful minds, that even though they know better than everyone else some fact about the physical world — the conservation of energy, say — their powerful minds cause them to get caught up in all the fascinating implications of their pet theory, such that they fail to see their pet theory requires energy not to be conserved. Thus (said Stove), a guy like Kant: After telling us that no human mind can access the Thing-in-Itself, he gives us four hundred pages of extremely detailed information about the Thing-in-Itself. Or Karl Marx, who was able to soar so far above his own economic class situation as to tell us, with oracular certainty, that no one is able to transcend the cognitive limits of his economic class situation. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that “the Ishmael Effect” pretty much IS 19th century philosophy … and thanks to entropy, 20th century politics, and now 21st century culture.

Such are the Theory People who, however many raw IQ points they have, will really see five lights if The Party tells them to, because The Party controls the Theory and the Theory is never wrong, facts be damned. Call them Rubashovs if you like (and are feeling literary), but let’s move on to the Reality People. If Rubashov is the ultimate Theory Person — marching willingly off to his destiny in the dreaded Lubyanka, because The Party requires it and The Party is never wrong — so the ultimate Reality Person is Niccolo Machiavelli.

Much hooey has been written about The Prince, that it’s ACK-shully a biting satire (you could call the Rubashovs’ junior varsity the ACK-shully kids), but Ol’ Nick meant every fucking word. Politics was a contact sport in his day — he picked the wrong side of a political dispute, and got the strappado for it. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and had the disjointed shoulders to prove it.

Machiavelli is often called a cynic, but just as everything in Clown World always turns out faker and gayer than the most jaded can imagine, so even the hardest-bitten cynic can’t touch Ol’ Nick. The Prince is beautifully written, but it’s one of the toughest reads you’ll ever have, because surely he can’t mean what he just wrote … he just can’t. But he does, and it’s true — that for example a man will more quickly get over the murder of his father than the loss of his patrimony. And you know it’s true, if only in the darkest watches of the night when you toss and turn in the coldest of cold sweats. There aren’t more than a handful of sentences in The Prince that won’t give you insomnia, if you really start thinking them through …

But just as (one hopes) even Rubashov would balk at shooting his children on The Party’s orders, so even Machiavelli marvels at the truth that no one is thoroughly, consciously evil, even when it’s in his obvious best interest to be. A man will always convince himself he’s doing good, even when he’s obviously, objectively doing the most heinous evil, and that — Nick implies — is the way to manage a tyrant. Even when doing X is the obviously advantageous thing to do, and doing Y is obviously disadvantageous, you can convince someone to do Y by changing the moral frame.

There’s obviously a spectrum here, which like all human behavior bends in on itself at the extremes. One imagines Rubashov, for instance, going through an “if only Comrade Stalin knew!” type thought process if The Party ordered him to shoot his infant children. Yes, The Party is never wrong … but even though Comrade Stalin IS The Party, The Party is, finally, the historical manifestation of a metaphysical necessity, and therefore, in the light of the Highest Truth, Comrade Stalin — though never wrong!! — is perhaps misinformed in this case … Just as Francesco Sforza or whomever balks at murdering those infants in their cribs, though it’s clearly the very best course of action, politically.

Rubashov vs. Machiavelli. That’s the best I can do.

Severian, “Mail / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-10.