The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli was a senior official of the Florentine Republic before he was ousted when the Medici family returned to power. He was tortured and exiled, and it was in a small farmhouse on the outskirts of Florence that he wrote The Prince. In other words, this is a book written by someone who had witnessed the mechanics of power more closely than almost anyone — written after that same power had cast him out. Knowing this changes how the book feels. The tension running through its pages becomes something colder, more unsettling. This is not the arrogance of a man who holds power. It is the lucid reckoning of a man who has lost it. The world tends to read The Prince as a cynical manual for those who believe the ends justify the means. But having read it closely, I found it to be something that resists such a simple definition.

Machiavelli tells us that human beings are fickle and self-interested. People judge their leaders not by intention but by outcome, and when circumstances shift, so does their loyalty. Between a prince who is loved and a prince who is feared, he argues, fear is the safer ground. Love, sustained by a sense of obligation, dissolves easily in the face of self-interest. Fear endures. And yet he draws a firm line. Fear and hatred are not the same thing. The moment a leader becomes an object of contempt and hatred — from his army, from the people — everything he fought to hold slips away. The Roman emperors bear this out. Marcus Aurelius maintained the balance between military loyalty and popular support, and ruled for a long time. Septimius Severus secured firm command of his armies. But Commodus and Maximinus Thrax earned the hatred of the people, while Pertinax and Severus Alexander were destroyed by their own troops. Contempt, whatever direction it comes from, is fatal to a leader.

The heart of the book comes down to two words: Fortuna and Virtù. Fortuna is luck — or more precisely, the forces beyond human control that shape our circumstances. Virtù is what we bring to bear against those forces: capability, agency, the will to act and judge without flinching in the face of uncertainty. Machiavelli compares fortune to a river. You cannot stop a flood. But you can build embankments before it comes. No matter how fierce fortune may be, a person of true virtù will not be entirely swept away. This tension — between what we cannot control and what we can — runs through the entire book. And it was these two words that pulled me back into my own past.

I was a child with congenital heart disease. When PE class came, my friends ran out to the playground. I stayed at the edge, crouched alone, drawing letters in the dirt with a stick. Whether I felt cheated, I honestly can’t say anymore. That was simply where I belonged. Looking back at that boy now, I can see it clearly: that was his Fortuna. A set of conditions given to him before he had any say in the matter. And yet — the fact that he sat alone in the corner of a playground, writing something into the ground, looks different to me now. Perhaps that was where Virtù began.

Time passed. I entered medical school, and after graduating, went on to a master’s program. I trusted my advisor deeply — so deeply that I gradually stopped thinking for myself. I simply assumed he would guide me well, that he knew best. At the very time I should have been building Virtù, I was neglecting it. The cost of that neglect was severe. It did not take long to understand that the bright future my advisor had promised could be revoked at any moment, and that I had no power to prevent it. What followed was a quieter but more lasting lesson: blind trust cannot substitute for judgment.

I kept reading. Then I came to the passage about mercenaries. “A prince who relies on mercenaries will never be secure.” My hand stopped. I picked up my pencil and drew a line beneath the words. Machiavelli explains: mercenaries serve well enough in peacetime, but when crisis comes, they scatter. To them, the prince’s kingdom is simply where the paycheck comes from. A ruler without his own army has handed his fate to someone else. I stared at those underlined words for a long time. They brought back my early thirties.

I had founded a smartphone-based platform connecting patients and physicians. Part of me, I think, wanted to prove something — to recover from the wounds of graduate school by succeeding in a way that couldn’t be ignored. I was optimistic without cause. I believed things would work out, and that belief clouded my judgment. I leased an office, hired developers and marketers. They were good people, full of energy, and I felt no fear. But the business model I had imagined didn’t make money in the real world. The salaries still had to be paid, so I chased whatever revenue I could find. What I had originally set out to build was quietly pushed aside. I was a CEO who couldn’t deliver a vision — who was struggling just to make payroll. It came out later that some of my employees had been working for other companies while drawing their salaries from mine.

Then a contract arrived. Someone I barely knew — a referral through two or three intermediaries — brought it to me with an air of earnest pleading. I failed to read the warning signs I should have caught. Somewhere between the hope of incoming revenue and the desperation of making payroll, I signed. The contract later proved deeply unfair in multiple ways, and eventually I was pressured into paying out a large sum of money. I closed the company under the weight of significant debt.

Was I a leader who deserved contempt? Perhaps. But I was certainly not one who inspired fear. I had placed relationships above principles, avoided discomfort whenever I could, and in doing so, left myself in the most vulnerable position possible. I had tried to hold people together with salaries rather than vision. From the beginning, I had built my army out of mercenaries — exactly as Machiavelli had warned.

The day I shut everything down, my father came. He had spent half his life working in a bank. Without a word, he opened the ledgers and began untangling the accounting knots I hadn’t even known were there. He had watched quietly while I built the company, trusting me to find my own way. But when it collapsed, he became the net that kept me from falling too far. In a strange way, my father was both Fortuna and Virtù to me. He was a given — a presence I had not chosen. And yet at my lowest point, he chose to come, and to stay, and to untangle what I could not. There is something in him that Machiavelli’s language cannot quite hold.

The Prince was written for rulers. But it kept asking questions I had to answer for myself. What does power mean for an ordinary person today? I work now as a public health official in South Korea — a director of a district health center, the kind of place where people come when they have nowhere else to turn. Every day I face people standing in difficult places. What I can offer is not an army, and not a territory. It is something smaller: to be of some use to those who are desperate for help, to refuse to bend under illegitimate pressure, to hold steady in front of colleagues who are losing their footing. The boy who crouched in the corner of a playground drawing in the dirt. The man who watched his father quietly untangle a failed company with something close to reverence. That person now stands before the crises of others. What he has to give — he is still learning.

Machiavelli wrote this book from a farmhouse, after he had been stripped of everything. Perhaps Virtù is sharpest at the lowest point. As my father once was for me, I hope to become that for someone else. I closed the last page of The Prince, and the question has not left me yet.