"The purpose justifies the means" it is the sentence that has remained of Machiavelli, even though this sentence is not found in his work "The Principe", published in 1531. The permanence in the imaginary collective almost during five centuries indicates us that it is certain, since immoral. Machiavelli, however, did not want not to make a treaty of morality, but a descriptive handbook of the behavior of the politician and, in general, of everybody that being able has or wants to arrive at it.
The Catalan translation from "Machiavelli in democracy" has just turned up, work from Édouard Balladur, who was a French prime minister from 93 to 95. The democracy is a factor that Machiavelli did not have to face, but that according to Balladur it does not change the amoral essence of the methods of fight to arrive at the power and to keep it. He asks in the prolog for himself: "If the methods of the political combat have nothing despicable, is it necessary to keep us aside? For what a useless purity that is not useful to anything and to anybody?”.
The only difference with the times of Machiavelli is that in democracy the amorality has to spread from the politicians to the journalists, to the intellectuals and, especially, ˇ to the voters! For this path, it increases the number of cynics constantly and, since we do not believe in anything, it’s better being cunning and courageous when justifying oneself. We have gone from the necessary secularism of Machiavelli to the fragmentation of the only and shared morality in as many moralities as autonomous individuals perform in our pluralistic society. And this moral relativism of each one is the last step before the generalized cynicism. The decadence Occident is seen everywhere like an omen.
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