The Universal Brotherhood was like The Sixth Sense of Shadowrun... it was powerful because it was the first big, dark twist.
Bull. Crap.
The Universal Brotherhood came out in 1990. Shadowrun might have been a year old at that point. Even in-game storywise, and most certainly among players, most people have been around long enough that they knew, or only knew, a world where the UB was evil.
Anyway, I'd pick Aztechnology, just like I always do when these things have come up since ... a long time.
"Nonetheless, he should be slow to believe and to move, nor should he make himself feared, and he should proceed in a temperate mode with prudence and humanity so that too much confidence does not make him incautious and to much diffidence does not render him intolerable.
From this a dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The response is that one would want to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two. For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders, and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood, property, lives and children, as I said above, when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince (Mansfield, 2nd ed.), p.66.
"The prince should nonetheless make himself feared in such a mode that if he does not acquire love, he escapes hatred, because being feared and not being hated can go together very well. This he will always do if he abstains from the property of his citizens and his subjects, and from their women... But above all, he must abstain from the property of others, because men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince (Mansfield, 2nd ed.), p.67.
"I conclude, then, returning to being feared and loved, that since men love at their convenience and fear at the convenience of the prince, a wise prince should found himself on what is his, not on what is someone else's; he should only contrive to avoid hatred, as was said."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince (Mansfield, 2nd ed.), p.68.
Being a company man I have long held has meant having a higher than average rate of having to deal with civilians and not just the shadows. In the shadows, you're feared; in the real world Aztechnology PR is so g-d good you're loved; and generally if you are good enough to rate being a company man you know how to blend those sentiments together in both worlds so that you are both loved and feared.
And no one lives long enough to hate you much.
