timelets

"Pivoting requires gyroscopes,...

Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion. Such princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”

---- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

This relates to the idea of a pivot space.

...one realizes that one must have broken completely with traditional morality and traditional beliefs in order even to consider that counsel. But the judicious reader cannot be satisfied with raising the question of how that particular counsel could be put into practice and thereafter whether it can be put into practice under the given circumstances.

--- Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli.

This is one of the fundamental issues in socials sciences: how do you transition from what is to what ought to be?

the lion cannot defend himself
against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves.
Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a
lion to terrify the wolves.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1232/pg1232.txt

cf Odysseus.

when foreseen, it is
easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine
is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it
happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever,
that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to
detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or
treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to
cure. Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise
have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they
can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen,
they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them,
there is no longer a remedy.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1232/pg1232.txt

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