Dwarkesh Patel
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
We read about wise choices and we imitate those choices.
This is one of the reasons Machiavelli is described by his contemporaries as a historian.
And he says we need to use history and use the classics differently.
He proposes that.
He isn't very popular in his own day.
It takes a long time for that to catch on.
Many people for decades after him are still trying to use it sort of the absorb it osmotically way.
But he's writing that in the early 1500s.
So it's been
a little over a century since this started.
We have to remember how long this process is.
From Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin's space flight back to Napoleon.
the childhood of Napoleon to the space race.
That's Petrarch to Machiavelli.
We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed in that they had a plan.
They tried the plan.
They brought the plan to its maximum.
They raised all the princes in this new way.
The wars happened.
It clearly failed.