A lot of people in life have terrible problems dealing with politics, with disassociating their emotions from the work world or the realm of power.
They take everything personally. I myself had a terrible problem working in offices, working in Hollywood, working in journalism, and so on. I’m a bit naive, and a lot of other people are too. And basically what happens in these situations is, because nobody trains you for these things, you get emotional— you take what people say and do personally. The moment you get wrapped up in the emotions of it, you’re done. You have to be able to look at life as if it were moves on a chessboard. Marcus Aurelius has this great quote that I’ll paraphrase: if you’re in a boxing ring and the boxer punches you in the face, you don’t whine about the unfairness or the cruelty. No, that’s just part of the game. I want you to see life like this: If someone does something to you that is nasty, get control of your emotions. Don’t react. Don’t get upset. Look at it as moves on a chessboard. They are moving you. Don’t listen to their words, because people will say anything. Look at their moves. Look at their maneuvers. Look at their past actions. Actions tell you who they are, not what they say. That kind of self-control is immensely liberating and empowering.
Daily Law: Judging people by their actions and not taking them personally will free you up, help you keep your emotional balance.
“Robert Greene: Mastery and Research,” Finding Mastery: Conversations with Michael Gervais, January 25, 2017
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.