On Falseness of Many Grand Designs: Niccolo Machiavelli: Discoursi i, 53

In the 53rd chapter of his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli [M] asserts a kind of truism. He then spends some time illustrating different sides of this idea through telling other historical examples of it as phenomenon, as he understood them. The idea is that people, big masses of people that he calls the populace, essentially like to believe things if presented well. Even if these may not be true. A story, he says, told while highlighting the projected outcomes of some action, one that can be painted both boldly and aggressively and that also matches what people can be convinced that they desire - like honor and prestige, propety or treasure - is too compelling for people. If told well enough, M says, the populace will be for it. And crucially, this story seemed to stay true for them, regardless of available facts or even previous understanding. But it has to agree with what they think they want.

Machiavelli [M] begins this chapter with reference to the discussion about what to do with Veii. An early rival for early Rome, the nearby kingship of Veii was a chief antagonist for Livy in his History of Rome until their city was taken. The discussion afterwards, as M tells it, foundered on whether half of Rome should go there and settle away from Rome. There was so much rich soil there, but also there would remain fewer people in Rome "... to interfere with its civic proceedings."

"The project seemed to the senate and to wiser folk in Rome to be so futile and so likely to do harm that they openly declared that it would be better to suffer death than to agree to such a plan. The result was that, when the matter came up for discussion, the plebs became so incensed against the senate that there would have been armed conflict and bloodshed, had not the senate been shielded by some citizens of mature age and high repute, and had not the plebs been deterred by the respect it had for them from proceeding further with this impertinence."

It took certain old and respected men that the people had confidence in, to come forward and explain a way or a process or means to get out of certain disasters. But not every era or instance of upheaval gets those sorts of leaders. There are just as often other sorts of men with more selfish ends who know how to tell about happy outcomes.

"...[T]he populace, misled by the false appearance of good, often seeks its own ruin, and, unless it be brought to realize what is bad and what is good for it by someone in whom it has confidence, brings on republics endless dangers and disasters. Again, when by ill chance the populace has no confidence in anyone at all, as soometimes happens owing to its having been deceived in the past either by events or by men, it spells ruin, and necessarily so."

Machiavelli says this was the case for Venice at the beginning of what we call the War of the League of Cambrai against Venice. They didn't know what to do when it seemed everyone was against them.

Machiavelli cites this same dischord between the people and its leaders occurring during the famous Punic Wars against Hannibal and the Carthaginians. The patient but unpopular delaying tactics of the Roman general Fabius Maximus, drained the Carthaginian army and its general Hannibal of much of their formidable strength, as they were ranging up and down the Italian peninsula in the third century BCE. But the populace back in Rome could wait only so long. They sent another general out to engage with Hannibal and were utterly defeated at the battle of Cannae.

In Florence, Machiavelli tells us again, the populace agreed to the bold plan of Ercole Bentivoglio, captain of the Florentimne forces, when he said he could take Pisa. But when that failed, these captains lost all favor despite all they had done before.
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pp 238-42 in Niccolo Machiavelli The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy Edited by Bernard Crick, translated by Leslie J Walker, thrird revision by Brian Richardson, Penguin Books, London, 1970, 2003