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Notes -
The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
As a former boy, I happen to be an expert on this topic. So here's a good reading list that skips the trivialities and gets you directly to the true knowledge of that awful beast.
These on their own should, if you internalize their lessons, dispel idealisms and make you a dangerous politician.
I expect a lot of this thread to worry about the moral question, about what to do about and with power. But for that question to be relevant, one must acquire and wield it first, and understand how it really works.
Most people don't read classical literature (including nonfiction) except for a specific reason, usually school. The size of the population, let alone the size of the young male population, who'd 1) consider reading such things to not be boring drudgework and 2) actually get anything out of them is tiny. Reading such things is no longer considered high status in our society anyway. It doesn't matter whether you personally read them as a boy and found them useful; typical-minding is a thing.
What they should read, or watch, is a variety of things that they mostly read or watch for other reasons, but which have the occasional bit about using power properly because the idea is in the zeitgeist so writers naturally put it in their works every so often. And the only way you're going to get that to happen is to restructure society first. (Although there's an interesting conversation in Fate/Zero.)
Your list is useless unless a boy actually comes up to you and says "I'd like to read some classical literature about exercising power, what do you recommend?" In which case, recommend away, but that won't happen much. It's the political science equivalent of "how do I get my child interested in programming computers?" To which the answer is "You don't, most people are not interested in that."
If there were a fictional series that compiled all this forbidden knowledge in a compelling narrative, I'd recommend that. But that does not exist. The best you get is dramatic tidbits of Machiavelli and maybe eternal truths carried through collective unconscious and archetypes, in say, Tolkien or Death Note.
If there are any artists looking for ideas, here's a under exploited gold mine of narrative tension though.
Tis true, not many have the stomach to learn how to succeed at politics. But I would actually dispute boys can't be made to read this stuff not because I did it, nor because they did the equivalent for decades but because PewDiePie had an ongoing book club with similar tomes and I know for a fact a decent amount of people followed along.
A "decent number of people" out of the size of the Internet is a tiny number of people.
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