Machiavelli Had Another Book, OK?

An essay about the evolution
of leadership commits
historical and logical blunders

 

False Dichotomy, Oversimplification and … Natural Selection?

by Dr John D. Wise

When I was in grad school working on my PhD, I read Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It was an eye-opener for me, and I could never appreciate the term “Machiavellian” again.

It all felt so … dishonest.

From The Conversation: “Personal power v. socialized power: What Machiavelli and St. Francis can tell us about modern CEOs” (Sept 2, 2024). The thesis is tidy: there are two types of leaders—self-serving “Machiavellian” dominators and humble “St. Francis” types who serve the common good. Warren Buffett and James Goodnight are cast as saints; Kenneth Lay and John Rigas as sinners. It’s a neat story.

Too neat.

False Dichotomies and Philosophical Logic

The problem isn’t just with CEOs. It’s the human tendency to flatten messy realities into clean boxes. Leadership is reduced here to two types: Machiavelli or St. Francis. But lived human reality seldom obeys the simplistic either/or. Readers might be surprised to learn that I think Hegel’s logic superior here (though certainly not everywhere) to Aristotle’s. The dialectic presents a spectrum, allowing for shades of gray. When it comes to human beings in this fallen world, it is never all darkness or all light, but an interplay of flickering shadows.

Aristotle, too, warned that virtue lives in the “golden mean,” not at extremes: courage between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and waste. Likewise, good leaders mix toughness with humility, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, always balancing in context.

The Conversation article senses this—admitting leaders can be “humble but not weak”—but still clings to the binary. Reality is fuzzier, richer, harder to label.

Oversimplification: Machiavelli Was More Than The Prince

The caricature of “Machiavellian” only deepens the problem. True, The Prince advises rulers to survive by any means, even ruthless ones. But in his longer Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli praises republican liberty, citizen participation, and civic virtue. He saw freedom as strengthened by the tension between social classes—hardly the creed of a one-dimensional schemer. Machiavelli scholars emphasize reading the two works together: The Prince shows politics in the raw, while the Discourses reveal his deeper sympathies for republicanism. To reduce Machiavelli to “jungle law” is to miss half his mind, which is precisely my point for this article – missing half the mind.

Why We Crave Simplifications

So why do we love these simplified stories? Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s research suggests an answer. The brain’s left hemisphere likes categories and oppositions, rationalized stories and schematic maps; it feels secure when things line up in neat rows. The right hemisphere, by contrast, notices nuance, context, and uniqueness; it is designed to deal with the messiness of reality. [i] Both are needed, but when the left hemisphere dominates, as it does in our world today, we fall for binaries like oppressor vs. oppressed, good vs. evil, Machiavelli vs. St. Francis. The left hemisphere falls in love with its rationalizations, like Pygmalion with Galatea, or Narcissus with himself (see here), missing the nuances of reality in front of it. In effect, it ignores the evidence in front of it in favor of its rationalized schema.

Hegel systematized this tendency. His dialectic promised a way to capture complexity, but in practice it turned history into an abstract process, ironing out particularities in the name of “progress.”

That structure has echoed through Western thought ever since.

Darwinism: The Modern Heir

Which brings us to Darwin. Natural selection is often presented as a neutral mechanism: variations happen, environments sift for survival, and survivors survive. But look closely and you see the same sleight of hand. Traits don’t just “happen” to persist—they’re praised as “adaptive,” “better,” “more fit.” What is, survives, and what survives is good. It’s an Hegelian loop; He famously said (in Philosophy of Right): “all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real.” The tautological substitution is the same for natural selection.

Survival traits aren’t merely factual; they’re implicitly valorized as “better” or “superior,” rationalized as adaptive optimizations in a progressive narrative. This smuggles value and teleology into the system: what endures is not just real but rational in Hegel’s sense, a proxy for inherent worth, for teleological directionality. Nietzsche nailed the lineage: “without Hegel there would have been no Darwin.” (The Gay Science)

Here lies the naturalistic fallacy: smuggling values into descriptions. Evolutionary storytelling turns accidents of survival into just-so explanations, often laced with hidden judgments about what counts as success, progress, or even virtue, the ever-ascending ladder of Spirit … or evolution.

It’s tidy, but it’s not neutral.

The Lesson

Whether in leadership theory or evolutionary biology, oversimplifications comfort us but distort reality. Machiavelli was more than a villain. CEOs are more than saints or tyrants. Nature itself is more than a tautology dressed up as explanation. The world is complex, morally ambiguous, and resistant to neat binaries. Before we settle for tidy categories and just-so stories, we should pause and ask: what values are being smuggled in, and what lies are being told under the guise of explanatory clarity?

We will end with a particularly striking exemplar of smuggled-value and teleology in evolutionary thinking:

The gene pool of a species, including our own, is a gigantic colony of viruses, each hell-bent on travelling to the future. They cooperate with one another in the enterprise of building bodies because successive, temporary, reproduce-and-then-die bodies have proved to be the best vehicles in which to undertake their vertical Great Trek through time. You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-traveling cooperative of viruses. [Am I the only one who can see Hegel’s Spirit in this final line?] (Richard Dawkins, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, Head of Zeus Ltd., London, p. 297, 2024).

Thank you, Professor Dawkins, for making my case better than I could make it for myself. Evolutionary thinking is Hegelian Process Metaphysics, more philosophy than science.

Dishonest, indeed.

Endnote

[i] Readers may recall the claim from the 70’s and 80’s that people are either “left-brained” (logical, analytical) or “right-brained” (creative, intuitive). That notion, derived from early “split-brain” experiments and amplified by pop psychology, has been debunked by neuroscience. Both hemispheres are deeply interconnected and participate in virtually all cognitive tasks.

Iain McGilchrist’s work (The Master and His Emissary, 2009; The Matter with Things, 2021) is not a repetition of that myth. McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and researcher, argues instead that the hemispheres embody different modes of attention: the left tending toward narrow focus, categorization, and manipulation of parts; the right toward broad vigilance, context, and integration of wholes. Both are necessary, but he suggests that Western culture has become skewed toward the left-hemisphere style, privileging abstraction and control over depth and meaning. While controversial, McGilchrist’s thesis is grounded in mainstream neuroscience and has been widely discussed across disciplines. Others may disagree with his conclusions, but his science is acknowledged as sound. I would argue that most of the opposition is ideological, not scientific, in nature.

I would characterize Dr. McGilchrist himself as an Hegelian who resists the materialist reduction, but still clings to Hegel’s dialectical process. As such, his notion of god is more akin to pantheism than Christianity. This is unsurprising to me, and if I were given to prognostication, I would predict that as materialistic evolutionary theory collapses under the weight of evidence, what will replace it is something more like what Dr. McGilchrist believes, and what theistic evolutionists advocate. This position brings its own set of problems for Christians, as I’ve tried to indicate in all my work here at CEH and on our podcast.

We should remain cautious about unreservedly embracing any position that departs from the clear wording of Scripture. Like Dr. McGilchrist, Intelligent Design (which most of us think of as our ally in this battle) only takes us as far as theism. But theism is not Christianity. It is, however, the nearly universal position of humanity throughout history. Only Christ, not theism in general, will save us. ID, like Dr. McGilchrist, is missing the most important part of the picture.

The Canaanites, the Philistines, the Greeks, and the Romans were theists.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.