What strategic quality provides the overarching strength for a state, a society, or individuals in a world of complex, intertwined threats and eviscerated trust?
It’s a quality mentioned today that evokes awkward, embarrassed shuffling because its meaning has been lost, and what it galvanizes and produces is no longer understood. That quality is nobility, and what it creates is prestige, the tool that generates deterrence, influence, and victory without kinetic warfare when it’s deftly understood and wielded.
Nobility isn’t a quality that can be bought cheaply; neither can it be acquired merely with the coin of the realm or without soul-searching and toil and the humility that creates wisdom.
We have entered a world in which the great republics are exhausted, divided, and focused on short-term, material goals. The nominal rises we see in the gross domestic product of nations are largely the effect of inflation rather than actual increases in wealth, and wealth itself is, once again in history, distributed less evenly. This, in itself, transforms the polity of nations and the concept or application of “democracy.” And democracy, as Plato said, eventually transforms into ochlocracy: mob rule.
Which is to say, it either becomes “no rule” or is easily met by the creation of countervailing blunt autocracy. Both are short-term and tactical, awaiting the re-creation, if it’s ever to come, of considered noble values.
So it has become a world in which ignobility is pervasive and a character of so many societies bent on the derision and repudiation of their own ancient values. And these values haven’t been replaced by consciously evolved new values but rather by short-term material goals and the suppression of wisdom.
For short-term, material goals read greed. And in what world can greed for power or possessions inspire nobility of purpose and duty to a greater good?
As Shakespeare said in “Hamlet”: “This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Today, that might be interpreted as a license for selfishness, greed, and the repudiation of morality when, in fact, it’s the reverse. It was a call to introspection on values that protect individuals, and then societies, from wandering from the path of enduring values—for values that develop into wisdom.
Little wonder, then, that wisdom has become replaced by “knowledge” as the objective of societies bent on mere acquisition without the constraint of conscience.
Expediency, technology, and ego are insufficient to sustain a nation in historical relevance. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, writing in the early 16th century in “The Prince,” indicated that ruthlessness was a quality required of leaders. Still, he also indicated that much more was required to elevate a leader, and therefore the state, to greatness.
Machiavelli spoke of sprezzatura—the art of doing the difficult or impossible with grace and apparent ease—as a critical element of the charisma that supported the nobility and prestige of leaders. But even to take that at face value would be to miss what philosophers such as Machiavelli and Stefan Possony insisted was the essence of the greatness of a nation and its leaders.
It’s that actual nobility and wisdom in leaders are the essence and the creation of sprezzatura. Not the reverse.
We must then ask whether the world, in its overriding historical trends, has lost its nobility as it applies to the management and sustenance of nations. It was a quality that seemed—or we believed—evident in the epic challenges of the 20th century. And if nobility, and with it wisdom, has been lost within the broad societies and their leaderships, how far has it been suppressed in individuals because of the pervasiveness of group thinking?
Assuming this to have some resonance of validity, what can be done to revive the appeal of individual and group nobility and the re-acquisition of core social strengths? This is hardly the stuff that strategists are called upon to consider. And yet, without it, what we see is the continued reduction of all elements of the strategic equation to direct material tangibles.
This means that competition between societies is reduced to direct comparisons of military battle orders, militarily controlled trade linkages in which trust plays little or no role, and the brute strength of treasury stockpiles. And if trust and other psychological forms of prestige play little part, how long can we expect the value of currencies to persist? Currency has value only if our minds agree on that value.
In other words, if we persist in reducing all of our mechanisms of survival, wealth creation, harmony, and dominance over our lands to blunt instruments, then the cost of national security rises. Power, including the power of an individual to control his or her survival, is about the strength of one’s will over self and others.
We can use direct physical power to substitute for will, or we can use the strength of nobility—which is willpower—to achieve strategic dominance more durably.
