- Joined
- Dec 17, 2021
To be fair, A Modest Proposal was intended as a troll and Machiavelli wasn't writing for random people, he was writing for nobles, officials, and statesmen. That's not to say Machiavelli was targeting an intelligent audience, but he was targeting a powerful one, so it wouldn't be a leap to think that he may have wanted to find a politician to serve that was unstable and could be better controlled or to find someone who understood his work better. There's also the question if he was trying to put across anchoring before it was a thing, in that you propose an extreme but then dial it back, so that someone employing him could feel like a more just ruler by taking his thoughts and scaling them back.Maybe people need to stop writing satire for documents that will be read by a public with an average IQ of 100.
There's always going to be an issue with historical texts in that fiction and reality exist in them, and the writer is often times in a state of duress in that if they say too much too openly they could be punished significantly. Just look at how we discuss things on mainstream platforms today, where language is coded to prevent bans and demonetization. Now imagine that, but you can't actively distribute your writing unless it's inflammatory enough to get attention but not controversial enough to have you put in a prison and all copies destroyed because there are only a few hundred copies total.