In the course of your life you will come upon people who have very emphatic traits that set them apart and seem to be the source of their strength—unusual confidence, exceptional niceness and affability, great moral rectitude and a saintly aura, toughness and rugged masculinity, an intimidating intellect. If you look closely at them, you may notice a slight exaggeration to these traits, as if they were performing or laying it on just a little too thick. As a student of human nature, you must understand the reality: the emphatic trait generally rests on top of the opposite trait, distracting and concealing it from public view. We can see two forms of this: Early on in life some people sense a softness, vulnerability, or insecurity that might prove embarrassing or uncomfortable. They unconsciously develop the opposite trait, a resilience or toughness that lies on the outside like a protective shell. The other scenario is that a person has a quality that they feel might be antisocial—for instance, too much ambition or an inclination to be selfish. They develop the opposite quality, something very prosocial. In both cases, over the years they hone and perfect this public image. The underlying weakness or antisocial trait is a key component of their Shadow—something denied and repressed. But as the laws of human nature dictate, the deeper the repression, the greater the volatility of the Shadow.
Daily Law: Be extra wary around people who display emphatic traits. It is very easy to get caught up in the appearance and first impression. Watch for the signs and emergence of the opposite over time.
The Laws of Human Nature, 9: Confront Your Dark Side—The Law of Repression
Power is a social game. To learn and master it, you must develop the ability to study and understand people. As the great seventeenth-century thinker and courtier Baltasar Gracián wrote: “Many people spend time studying the properties of animals or herbs; how much more important it would be to study those of people, with whom we must live or die!” To be a master player you must also be a master psychologist. You must recognize motivations and see through the cloud of dust with which people surround their actions. Some people, for instance, believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people, for while they express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power. They are what I call “supposed nonplayers.”
They utilize strategies that cleverly disguise the nature of the manipulation involved. The month of May will teach you how to recognize the supposed nonplayers and other toxic types you’ll want try to keep your distance from.
I once counted that I had some sixty different jobs before I wrote The 48 Laws of Power.
I tried a lot of different things and in those experiences I saw every kind of power-hungry person you could imagine. Every kind of manipulator that is out there. I saw them. I saw their maneuvers. I saw how they thought.
And then I began working in Hollywood as an assistant to various directors. That’s where I started to see some particularly hardcore Machiavellian tactics used on actors and producers, and I’d think, “Wow, that reminds me of Cesare Borgia in the Renaissance. That reminds me of what Napoleon did. That reminds me of that line from Gracián.”
I was building up this catalog of experiences. I didn’t know what would come of it.
Then when I was thirty-six, I was working yet another new job in Italy, and one day one of my colleagues on this job, a book packager and designer named Joost Elffers, asked me out of the blue if I had any ideas for a book.
Interested in the prospect, I improvised several ideas, one of which would turn into The 48 Laws of Power.
I told Joost that, in my experience, power has not changed. We live in a very politically correct world where film directors and producers project the image of being the nicest, most liberal, most progressive people on the planet.
But behind closed doors, they turn into raging manipulators who will do anything to get exactly what they want.
Power is timeless. People may not be beheaded for making mistakes; instead they’ll be summarily fired. Law 1 in The 48 Laws of Power, for instance, is “Never Outshine the Master”—in the old days, Nicolas Fouquet outshone Louis XIV, and he was thrown in prison for the rest of his life.
Now, you’re simply let go without knowing why. It’s just a different form of punishment. The game is the same.
There are three types of people in this world in dealing with this game.
There are, what I call, the deniers, the people who deny this reality exists.
They almost want to pretend that we are descended from angels and not from primates. They imagine that what I am talking about here is just cynical.
These laws don’t really exist. These hardcore tactics may be used, but only by the nastiest and least moral people out there.
Among these deniers, you will find two types. You will find people who are genuinely disturbed by the politicking aspect of human nature. They don’t want any kind of job in which they have to do that. Because they refuse to understand the game, they find themselves slowly marginalized. They are fine with such a fate. They are never going to assume a position of great responsibility anyway because it involves all this game-playing, and that’s okay.
The other branch of the deniers are the people that are the passiveaggressors— those who consciously don’t want to admit that they ever engage in manipulation, but unconsciously are playing all kinds of games. In several of my books, I describe the many different varieties of these passiveaggressive warriors. These types, the supposed nonplayers, are often the most slippery and dangerous of all.
The second type of person besides the deniers are those who love this Machiavellian part of our nature and revel in it. They are master manipulators, con artists, and outright aggressors. They have no problem handling this part of the game. In fact, they love it. This type of person, which usually you will find one or two in any office or group, can get pretty far, but eventually they are tripped up in life because they are too Machiavellian. They don’t understand that there is a whole other side to the game, which requires empathy, cooperation, and seducing people into working with you. They are too tied to their egos to see the limits of the games they are playing and so they inevitably go too far and experience a fall from power. There is a wall they can never get past.
The third type is what I call the radical realist. This is what I’m promulgating in my books, and it goes as follows.
The desire for power is part of our nature. It is a part of how we evolved over millions of years. There is no point in denying our nature. It is who we are. And not only are we not going to deny it, but we are going to accept that this is the human being that we are, the product of evolution.
There is nothing wrong with the fact that in this world people are playing political games. There is nothing wrong with the fact that there are seducers and con artists. It is the Human Comedy since the beginning of recorded history. It is just reality, the world as it is. Let’s stop fighting it.
With such acceptance, it is not that we love it and want to go out in the world and play all these nasty games. It is that we understand they exist. If, occasionally, we have to use the laws in playing offense or defense, we’re okay with that, within reason. Most often it is the case that other people are practicing them on us, and it is better to understand what they’re up to than to live in the dream world of our angelic nature.
And so we understand the laws of power. We understand what people are up to, so they can’t easily hurt us. We learn how to recognize in advance the truly toxic narcissists, aggressors, and passive aggressors, the nonplayers, before getting too emotionally enmeshed in their dramas. And armed with such an attitude and with such knowledge we are prepared to go to battle in the game of life. Instead of being blindsided by the manipulators, we have calmness, power, and the freedom that comes with awareness of the laws.