Peter d’Errico, who writes here on Substack, sent me much deeper into the psychological field of this symbol than I expected to go. What began as a weird little patriotic silhouette slowly opened into questions about identity, propaganda, symbolic belonging, collective morality, and the unstable boundary between individuality and the surrounding social field. His essay helped me look past the cartoon version of Machiavelli and toward something far more psychologically interesting: a man who understood how power actually operates beneath the comforting public story societies tell about themselves.