To Rule is to Serve
"He who is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted." This teaching of Jesus is actually prefigured centuries earlier in the I Ching, "To rule truly is to serve." I hadn't thought much about a change in government until recently, apart from editing a new edition of the 1602 Anti-Machiavel, the most significant rebuttal to Machiavelli ever undertaken. Machiavelli is often called the father of modernity, in terms of mankind freed from external authority, i.e., God. 

​This is an immensely important book, for a number of reasons, for one, it shows that Christianity is not incompatible with government. All kinds of stories from Shakespeare are in here, everything from The Rape of Lucrece and the Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Antony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus), to Richard III and the English history plays. In 3 Henry VI , Richard of Gloucester (Richard III, Shakespeare's most Machiavellian character) says
​I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
​Anti-Machiavel states: “as soon as the prince shall clothe himself with Proteus’ garments, and has no hold nor certitude of his word, nor in his actions, men may well say that his malady is incurable, and that in all vices he has taken the nature of the chameleon.” So this is an extremely important book, but it has been completely buried in the academy, and Machiavelli has been made canon. In effect, ​Antonio D’Andrea and Pamela Stewart, who collated several early editions to produce an authoritative French text in 1974, declared the matter closed:
It would be anachronistic indeed to imagine even for a moment that the Discours could still be read, quoted, and discussed, as in the past, in connection with the interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought. Nor is it possible to expect of today’s readers, even of scholars, the impassioned curiosity for erudite puzzles, that also contributed much for about two centuries to the success of a book, published anonymously by an author completely unknown beyond the restricted provincial horizon of the Dauphiné and the confines of Calvinist Geneva. These reasons for interest in the book have long since ceased to exist. From the nineteenth century on the only conceivable reason for studying the Discours has been the role they played in the origins and development of anti-Machiavellism.
anti_machiavel.pdf
File Size: 3095 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
Recently I started thinking about it more, and hit upon the idea of setting up a school of philosophy that could serve as a college of advisors. The idea here would be that they could work on getting over self-interest, and help govern for the greater good. They need not embrace voluntary poverty in a monastic sense, but should withdraw if they elect to have children, for as Bacon wrote in his essay On Marriage and Single Life, "A single life doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool."
His constant fight is with the Nafs (self-interest), the root of all disharmony and the only enemy of man. By crushing this enemy, man gains mastery over himself; this wins for him mastery over the whole universe, because the wall standing between the self and the Almighty has been broken down. Gentleness, mildness, respect, humility, modesty, self-denial, conscientiousness, tolerance and forgiveness are considered by the Sufi as the attributes which produce harmony within one's own soul as well as within that of another.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
​
“Your worst enemy is hiding within yourself, and that enemy is your nafs or false ego.”
 — Rumi