My soccer coach used to say, “soccer is a results oriented game”. It doesn’t matter how you score goals or how pretty they are, as long as you score more than your opponents (ask Diego Maradona about his “Hand of God”). And he was correct. I’ve seen Rees curve a free kick from the 18-yard box around a wall of five guys into the upper corner of the goal. I’ve also seen my own goalie accidentally (I hope) throw a soccer ball into our goal. Ironically both goals were worth the same amount of points.

Machiavelli has a similar view on politics. He argues that morals mean nothing- only the end result matters. Do whatever is necessary to achieve your goals, and crush everyone who stands in your way. Sounds like a cliche sports metaphor, and it kind of is. What I mean to say is virtù is the only thing that matters, not virtue. This idea can be applied to a myriad of topics, including soccer and that dazzling, elegant Governor of Alaska.

Sarah Palin was virtùous enough to adapt a pro life,pro abstinence, anti gay-marriage, pro NRA, pro capital punishment, anti embryonic stem cell research, pro oil exploration and pro Iraq war platform. Does this platform sound like the ultra-conservative stereotype that is becoming more and more common today? Interesting. If someone adapted it she could go far in a very conservative state like Alaska. Enter Sarah Palin. She uses this platform for virtùous purposes rather than the virtuous ones she would like to have America believe.

Her virtue came into question when the American public discovered her 18 year old unmarried daughter Bristol was pregnant. Overnight her “return to traditional American values” was questioned. How can someone who believes in abstinence be credible when she could not teach her own daughter the “virtuous” thing to do. This idea led me to some conjectures:

1. If Sarah Palin is twice as hot as a normal woman, and her daughter is 1/2 her age, does that mean Bristol is 1/2x=2, x=4 times as hot as the average female? Perhaps my math is wrong. But her prego eggo doesn’t lie.

2. In high school Sarah Palin was called “Sarah Barracuda” for her aggression on the basketball court. I wondered if she was also aggressive in other aspects of her life. Maybe she’s a nymphomaniac. And if she is maybe she passed on her nymphomania to her daughter, and since her daughter is 4 times as hot as the average female, it’s no surprise Bristol’s eggo was prego. Sarah Palin has five kids, four more than her daughter. Perhaps that relates to the hotness factor too. Her boyfriend (I would hope he was) was probably dating her to get to her mom anyway.

3. I wonder if Bristol is into role-playing? If she is I can dress up as the American public and she can be her mom. In the scene I will choose not to vote for her, and instead support someone with a more realistic view of the world. After all, politicians are like diapers: they’re full of crap and should be changed often. Our previous administration wasn’t changed fast enough, and that rash called Operation Iraqi Freedom developed on the butt cheeks of America.

My logic may be over-reaching, but numbers don’t lie; people do.

The point I’m trying to make is virtue is really a disguise for virtù. Palin (the mom) would like to say she believes in abstinence, but her family (and the new addition) tells a different story. Her political beliefs are just a ploy to advance in politics, not ones she truly believes in. The mother-daughter relationship between the two is a great way to explain hypocrisy. My logic is obviously over-reaching. It functions to reveal how illogical people can be, and how easily it is to manipulate reasoning to benefit oneself. This strategy is one people usually despise, yet ironically it is one that results in great success. Sadly the most efficient way to become successful is to abandon virtue for virtù. Consider the things Sarah Palin has said in the past year (remember how she couldn’t name two newspapers), then ask yourself how someone like that could govern a state.

The truth is this pattern applies to every human being. Evolution has naturally selected those who are the most successful, and that means hypocrisy, betrayal and virtù have been bred into each successive generation of human beings. Maybe Machiavelli was right after all- there are no such things as morals.

When reading a book published in a foreign language first there is always meaning lost in the translation process. Some words represent an idea, and therefore an appropriate English equivalent is difficult to find; especially when the word represents an idea that is uniquely integrated into a foreign country’s culture or history. In The Prince that is the case with the word virtù. I first read about it in Robert Adams’ Translator’s note. He wrote: “A last, long-standing problem in translating Machiavelli is posed by the word virtù, which can mean anything from ’strength’, ‘ability’, ‘courage’, ‘manliness’ or ‘ingenuity’ to ‘character’, ‘wisdom’ or even (last resort) ‘virtue’”.

This word defined the mentality of a Prince during Machiavelli’s time. Virtù, like my definition of a Prince, is broad on purpose. In context it means any strategy that yields positive results. This relates to Machiavelli’s idea of the ends justifying the means. Virtù is anything that brings success. The result is the only thing that matters, not the trait that virtù refers to. That’s why Adams attributes so many adjectives to the word. It represents an idea, something that is not definable by mere adjectives alone. It needs a well written analysis (like the one here in my blog) to fully explain its meaning.

First and foremost virtù is the driving force behind Machiavelli’s political treatise. During his life the Italian city-states had no definable advantages over one another. The only difference between each of them was political. The interactions between leaders defined the city-states. This created a politically charged atmosphere where alliances were created and broken constantly and consistently. There were many city-states and many alliances; and with those alliances came an enormous incentive to cheat. It was to a city-state’s advantage if they made friends, then betrayed them. It was a way to neutralize a threat and to focus one’s efforts on other enemies. It was in this world that Machiavelli become a foreign ambassador. He was on the front lines witnessing this attrition every day and from his experiences he concluded that virtue is not important. Virtù, or good politics, is the only thing that matters.

A good example of this idea is the title of Part VI of The Prince. Adams translated it as: “About new Princedoms acquired with ones’ own arms and energy [virtù]” (Adams tries to match adjectives to virtù, but since there is no English equivalent he leaves the original word in brackets for clarification purposes). Put into context, it might read: “About new Princedoms acquired by any means you choose”. The Prince sees no distinction between moral and immoral behavior, it only sees the results one’s behavior produces. This is why Adams’ definition of virtù is ambiguous. It means anything a Prince does to successfully gain political power.

Ironically virtù sounds and is spelled like the English word virtue. Virtue has a moral subtext, while the Italian word has none. Machiavelli argues that are no morals in politics and therefore virtue does not exist; only virtù matters because people measure politicians by what they do, not how they do it. Take President John F. Kennedy for example. He was married with children, but still found time in between his presidential duties and spending time with his family to have extramarital affairs. The public didn’t care back then, and doesn’t care now-he is still remembered as one of our greatest presidents. One of his accomplishments was his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russians never backed down like many Americans may think. JFK made a deal with Khrushchev, promising to leave Cuba alone and withdrawing troops from various parts of the world for Khrushchev to remove missiles from Cuba. It may look like JFK was virtuous for standing up to the Communists, when really he was virtùous. What he did was use good politics to resolve an issue. His actions weren’t motivated by morality- if they he would have never made concessions with Khrushchev. He would have stood up for Democratic ideals no matter what. But we know the moral always perish first. And JFK didn’t rise to the presidency through morality. He was a great politician who would beg, borrow and deal to achieve his goals. Today we remember him for this ability; not for any morals he may have had.

The truth is morals and virtue have a subjective meaning-it depends if the factions benefits or suffers as a results of the virtuous action. So technically there is no one, true, universal virtuous action because a gain for one faction always results in a loss of another. In a strange way virtue and virtù can mean the same thing. They both describe an action but have an ambiguous meaning. They are good for those who benefit and bad for everyone else. The English counterpart attempts to give a positive subtext to the word in order to justify that trade off that any action ultimately creates. The Italian word doesn’t bother with morals. It, like Machiavelli’s book, is cruel, heartless and to the point. It doesn’t bother trying to embellish the idea. One could say the sack of Rome in 1527 was a very virtuous act, but the Romans would disagree. However, both factions , if unbiased, would agree the sacking was virtùous. It expanded Charles V’s empire while severely injuring a powerful enemy. Charles used good politics regardless if one agrees with his motives or not.

Perhaps the words do mean the same thing after all.