Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Ian Leslie starts of his article with something everyone experiences: “Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. ” A balance is needed. Easier said than done: “Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy. ”   But do we have the term “influence” all backwards? Consider this long (but totally worth reading) passage by Michael Baxandall: “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from,...

I used to think of Machiavelli as a manipulator, a man without scruples, a guy who did whatever it took to get ahead. I certainly never thought of him as the man who took apart “ one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition ”! I got that only after reading this very interesting analysis of Machiavelli by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin says Machiavelli called the bluff on “ the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values ”. Machiavelli realized “ that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration ”. (Take 2 such ideals: always speak the truth; and defend the wrongly oppressed. Now imagine the mob of 1984 hunting down Sikhs to kill. You see this terror stricken Sikh run down a lane. The mob asks if you saw where the Sikh ran? Do you tell them where he is (speak the truth) and sign his death sentence? Or do you lie?). If that was all there was to it, you could just shrug and dismiss the scenario as a ...