The nature of change

It is exceedingly difficult to read Machiavellian literature and disagree with it.  Although he writes about princes, an obsolete and outdated leadership position, every single measly point that arises in his work is valid and can be applied to the contemporary world. The prince, whom he uses as a figure of leadership in this piece, is nothing more than an interchangeable symbol: it can be attributed to any single person or organisation in a position of authority.  In his quote, “rivers and men can be controlled, but cannot be trusted”, he is showing the reader how timeless his ideals really are. By comparing men to rivers, he is contrasting a gargantuan force of nature, a torrent of rushing water that has been present for millennia upon millennia, to a simple, common human being, who will live only a few decades.

Upon looking at said quote, this is what I initially thought. After thorough reflection however, I realised that the meaning of his quote was much deeper, much more profound than that. When he mentions the river, he does not mean the flowing water within it, and when he pontificates about man, he is not referencing a specific person or humanity in general; he is referring to the driving force between the two, something so mysterious and divine that no one can truly understand the workings of it. One can divert or dam a river for power or agriculture, just as one can bribe or deceive another for wealth or power, but no single man, no single species even, can ever dream of understanding the true driving force of either. As stated by the butterfly effect, the flutter by the wing of such a seemingly insignificant insect could possibly lead to the next category 5 hurricane, destroying every individual dam in its path that were so ingeniously constructed to survive them.  A form of this effect can be applied to humans, by having such an insignificant event so far away cause something as devastating as the death of a loved one, or the mental breakdown of another. None of these occurrences can ever be predicted, for that would require an intricate understanding of how ever single atom in the known universe interacts with each other, which would breach the limits of what is physically possible. All in all, Machiavelli postulates that we can control rivers and men, but we cannot trust them, because they are prone to change, and we have no idea how they really work.