Tyrion learns from Lancel that the queen intends to hide Tommen away at Rosby under the care of Lord Gyles. He is disturbed that Varys has not learned of this, or decided not to inform him.
Later, Tyrion has Bronn deliver word to Ser Jacelyn Bywater, commanding him to take fifty men and capture Lord Gyles' party, and to expel the garrison and keep Tommen safe at Rosby. He does not want Lord Rosby hurt, nor any killing done in front of Tommen. For this, Ser Jacelyn will earn a lordship. Bronn offers to do the job instead if there's a lordship in it for him, but Tyrion refuses, privately noting that Bywater's men will defend Tommen whereas Bronn's are more likely to sell Tommen to the crown's enemies if the coming battle goes against them.
Tyrion then sets out for Chataya's brothel, but then abandons his patience and rides directly to the manse near the Iron Gate. He finds Shae listening to a singer, and has the man expelled and sworn to silence. When one of the begging brothers appears, Shae recognizes him as Lord Varys. The Spider informs Tyrion that Storm's End has fallen and that Stannis will soon be marching on King's Landing. Tyrion bids Varys to wait at the stables while he talks to Shae.
Once alone, Shae asks Tyrion to make her his lady in court, and even suggests he kill Cersei, but Tyrion tells her, "The man who kills his own blood is cursed forever in the sight of gods and men." When Tyrion proposes to take her to the Red Keep and hide her in the kitchens, Shae balks, and mocks him for being afraid of his father. Tyrion slaps her in the face, telling her never to mock him again. Feeling remorseful, he tells her the story of Tysha and his father’s wrath. He departs to meet Varys at the stables, and the eunuch suggests that Shae be placed as a maidservant to Lady Tanda’s daughter Lollys. Shae would then be able to access the Tower of the Hand through a secret passage, which Tyrion is surprised to learn exists.
Varys then attempts to tell Tyrion how Ser Cortnay died, and when he suggests it was magic, Tyrion disbelieves him. Varys recounts the story of how he came to be a eunuch: that he was a member of a mummers troupe, and that one day in Myr a certain man bought Varys from his master. The sorcerer castrated Varys, and burned the parts, creating a blue flame from which a voice spoke in a language he didn’t comprehend. Varys claims he has hated magic since that day, and means to see Stannis dead if the man practiced magic.
Tyrion is somewhat skeptical, believing it more likely that Stannis has hired a skilled assassin from the Free Cities, musing on how he used to dream of being rich enough one day to hire a Faceless Man to kill his sister. Tyrion's greater concern is that Stannis is now bringing his army to bear against King's Landing, and he is the only one standing in the way of Stannis's victory. With the city's people's hatred for House Lannister and himself in particular at its highest, defeating Stannis seems unlikely.
Jon hears the call of a warhorn, one blast to signify brothers returning. Qhorin Halfhand has arrived, with 100 men from the Shadow Tower. Qhorin recognizes Jon, and tells him that he knew Lord Eddard and Jon’s grandfather Lord Rickard as well. The men from the Shadow Tower were delayed because they met Alfyn Crowkiller and his men who had been scouting along the Wall. They killed the wildling leader and took some captives, but lost four men in the process. Later, Jon overhears dissent in the ranks as Chett and Lark the Sisterman speak of not going into the Frostfangs, no matter what the Old Bear orders. Jon has given the warhorn he found to Sam, because it is cracked and he could get no sound from it, but Sam likes ancient items.
In Mormont's tent, Jon overhears Qhorin telling Mormont about a captive claiming that Mance Rayder had wargs and mammoths in his army. He also explains that the captive claims the wildlings plan to breach the Wall, not climb it or burrow beneath it. Qhorin tells them that Mance is seeking something in the high, cold places of the Frostfangs, some power or artifact. Qhorin advises the Old Bear to send scouts into the mountains, and Mormont agrees. Jarmen Buckwell will take four men to climb the Giant's Stair, Thoren Smallwood will lead a party to probe the Milkwater, while Qhorin himself will lead a third party into the Skirling Pass. Qhorin immediately chooses Jon Snow as one of his four men, stating, "The old gods are still strong beyond the Wall. The gods of the First Men…and the Starks."
this is a test for typing test 2
my name is raj
she will be traveling to europe next month they will be celebrating their anniversary on a cruise
she will be traveling to europe next month they will be celebrating their anniversary on a cruise we will be taking our son to college in september
A obey human except where existence. A obey human except where existence.
Vote Jood For Secretary NOW. WHY? Because she cares. As spiderman once said with great power comes great responsibility. The power is in your hands to choose the best.
So if Ventilador giving up an immunity token to DJ Pantspisser doesn't make it obvious that they're so obviously together, I don't know what will. Anyways, here we are. My well-foreshadowed elimination. Getting to the bottom two twice though, I mean I guess it was obvious my luck was running out. But I did still place higher than several others, Doughy included, by doing nothing besides a jigsaw puzzle. DJ, everyone will eventually realize Ventilador is a problem and you won't have him to fall back on later. Godot, you've made it very clear you only voted with me because you would be gone next if I got out (you absolutely would have). It's clear that extra vote token will be used by DJ or Ventilador soon and I wouldn't be surprised if there were others that they're close with as well. (Spoiler alert: I was right.) I mean all that matters is DJ has one less ally with Doughy now gone so you're all welcome for that. Shlodwall was a fucking mess and I'm glad it's dissolved. Too bad DJ is still here, and the fact that he targeted me over Godot despite him literally proving himself to be a potential competition threat is a joke, because I know damn well he's an artist and a (bad) writer. That doesn't matter for me anymore. If he wants to dig his own grave, that's on him.
So if Ventilador giving up an immunity token to DJ Pantspisser doesn't make it obvious that they're so obviously together, I don't know what will. Anyways, here we are. My well-foreshadowed elimination. Getting to the bottom two twice though, I mean I guess it was obvious my luck was running out. But I did still place higher than several others, Doughy included, by doing nothing besides a jigsaw puzzle. DJ, everyone will eventually realize Ventilador is a problem and you won't have him to fall back on later. Godot, you've made it very clear you only voted with me because you would be gone next if I got out (you absolutely would have). It's clear that extra vote token will be used by DJ or Ventilador soon and I wouldn't be surprised if there were others that they're close with as well. (Spoiler alert: I was right.) I mean all that matters is DJ has one less ally with Doughy now gone so you're all welcome for that Shlodwall was a fucking mess and I'm glad it's dissolved. Too bad DJ is still here, and the fact you chose me over Godot despite him literally proving himself to be a potential competition threat is a joke, because I know damn well he's an artist and a (bad) writer. That doesn't matter for me anymore.
So if Ventilador giving up an immunity token to DJ Pantspisser doesn't make it obvious that they're so obviously together, I don't know what will. Anyways, here we are. My well-foreshadowed elimination. Getting to the bottom two twice though, I mean I guess it was obvious my luck was running out. But I did still place higher than several others, Doughy included, by doing nothing besides a jigsaw puzzle. DJ, everyone will eventually realize Ventilador is a problem and you won't have him to fall back on later. Godot, you've made it very clear you only voted with me because you would be gone next if I got out (you absolutely would have). It's clear that extra vote token will be used by DJ or Ventilador soon and I wouldn't be surprised if there were others that they're close with as well. (Spoiler alert: I was right.) I mean all that matters is DJ has one less ally with Doughy now gone so you're all welcome for that Shlodwall was a fucking mess and I'm glad it's dissolved. Too bad DJ is still here, and the fact you chose me over Godot despite him literally proving himself to be a potential competition threat is a joke, because I know damn well he's an artist and a (bad) writer. That doesn't matter for me anymore.
Planning and design for the Pacific Hotel project was begun in January of this year. After three months, the final design was approved by the Executive Committee. Requests for Proposals were sent out to twelve contracting firms. Subsequently, eight proposals were received and were reviewed. The contract was awarded to Superior Carpenters, Inc.
The Project Coordinator, Robert Anderson, is responsible for scheduling and progress reports to the Executive Committee. All project contractors are required to submit monthly progress reports to the Project Coordinator who will compile all reports and an overall summary for the Executive Committee members to review. Legal representation is provided by the law firm of Johnston Morgan and Elliot. They will provide advice on permitting, environmental compliance and liability. JME will also review all contracts with project subcontractors. Cost analysts will review construction cost estimates provided by the project contractors. As this project is to be constructed on undeveloped land in the city's newly zoned commercial area known as Summit Park, the first phase of the project will involve the construction of infrastructure such as roads, electrical service sewage, and water lines It is anticipated that these components will be in place but early September
damned unlimited gilded rngod cursed minimum attainable nice chill downpath vanguard obtainable delusion subaqueous iridescent kanye bootleg nil label corndawg pi celestrix mystique hyper KJ luminous dopamine chestnut lhyper ethereal guardian cold void fantasia honored unobtainable lol
acquittal - Judgment that a criminal defendant has not been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
affidavit - A written statement of facts confirmed by the oath of the party making it. Affidavits must be notarized or administered by an officer of the court with such authority.
affirmed - Judgment by appellate courts where the decree or order is declared valid and will stand as decided in the lower court.
Alford plea - A defendant’s plea that allows him to assert his innocence but allows the court to sentence the defendant without conducting a trial. Essentially, the defendant is admitting that the evidence is sufficient to show guilt. Such a plea is often made for purposes of negotiating a deal with the prosecutor for lesser charges or a sentence.
allegation - Something that someone says happened.
answer - The formal written statement by a defendant responding to a civil complaint and setting forth the grounds for defense.
appeal - A request made after a trial, asking another court (usually the court of appeals) to decide whether the trial was conducted properly. To make such a request is "to appeal" or "to take an appeal." Both the plaintiff and the defendant can appeal, and the party doing so is called the appellant. Appeals can be made for a variety of reasons including improper procedure and asking the court to change its interpretation of the law.
appellate - About appeals; an appellate court has the power to review the judgment of another lower court or tribunal.
arraignment - A proceeding in which an individual who is accused of committing a crime is brought into court, told of the charges, and asked to plead guilty or not guilty.
arrest warrant - A written order directing the arrest of a party. Arrest warrants are issued by a judge after a showing of probable cause.
B
bail - Security given for the release of a criminal defendant or witness from legal custody (usually in the form of money) to secure his/her appearance on the day and time appointed.
bankruptcy - Refers to statutes and judicial proceedings involving persons or businesses that cannot pay their debts and seek the assistance of the court in getting a fresh start. Under the protection of the bankruptcy court, debtors may discharge their debts, perhaps by paying a portion of each debt. Bankruptcy judges preside over these proceedings.
bench trial - Trial without a jury in which a judge decides the facts. In a jury trial, the jury decides the facts. Defendants will occasionally waive the right to a jury trial and choose to have a bench trial.
beyond a reasonable doubt - Standard required to convict a criminal defendant of a crime. The prosecution must prove the guilt so that there is no reasonable doubt to the jury that the defendant is guilty.
binding precedent - A prior decision by a court that must be followed without a compelling reason or significantly different facts or issues. Courts are often bound by the decisions of appellate courts with authority to review their decisions. For example, district courts are bound by the decisions of the court of appeals that can review their cases, and all courts – both state and federal – are bound by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States.
brief - A written statement submitted by the lawyer for each side in a case that explains to the judge(s) why they should decide the case (or a particular part of a case) in favor of that lawyer's client.
C
capital offense - A crime punishable by death. In the federal system, it applies to crimes such as first degree murder, genocide, and treason.
case law - The use of court decisions to determine how other law (such as statutes) should apply in a given situation. For example, a trial court may use a prior decision from the Supreme Court that has similar issues.
chambers - A judge's office.
charge - The law that the police believe the defendant has broken.
charge to the jury - The judge's instructions to the jury concerning the law that applies to the facts of the case on trial.
chief judge - The judge who has primary responsibility for the administration of a court. The chief judge also decides cases, and the choice of chief judges is determined by seniority.
circumstantial evidence - All evidence that is not direct evidence (such as eyewitness testimony).
clerk of court - An officer appointed by the court to work with the chief judge in overseeing the court's administration, especially to assist in managing the flow of cases through the court and to maintain court records.
common law - The legal system that originated in England and is now in use in the United States. It is based on court decisions rather than statutes passed by the legislature.
complaint - A written statement by the plaintiff stating the wrongs allegedly committed by the defendant.
continuance - Decision by a judge to postpone trial until a later date.
contract - An agreement between two or more persons that creates an obligation to do or not to do a particular thing.
conviction - A judgment of guilt against a criminal defendant.
counsel - Legal advice; a term used to refer to lawyers in a case.
counterclaim - A claim that a defendant makes against a plaintiff. Counterclaims can often be brought within the same proceedings as the plaintiff’s claims.
court - Government entity authorized to resolve legal disputes. Judges sometimes use "court" to refer to themselves in the third person, as in "the court has read the briefs."
court reporter - A person who makes a word-for-word record of what is said in court and produces a transcript of the proceedings upon request.
cross-examine - Questioning of a witness by the attorney for the other side.
D
damages - Money paid by defendants to successful plaintiffs in civil cases to compensate the plaintiffs for their injuries.
default judgment - A judgment rendered because of the defendant's failure to answer or appear.
defendant - In a civil suit, the person complained against; in a criminal case, the person accused of the crime.
defense table - The table where the defense lawyer sits with the defendant in the courtroom.
deposition - An oral statement made before an officer authorized by law to administer oaths. Such statements are often taken to examine potential witnesses, to obtain discovery, or to be used later in trial.
direct evidence - Evidence that supports a fact without an inference.
discovery - Lawyers' examination, before trial, of facts and documents in possession of the opponents to help the lawyers prepare for trial.
docket - A log containing brief entries of court proceedings.
E
en banc - "In the bench" or "full bench." Refers to court sessions with the entire membership of a court participating, rather than the usual quorum. U.S. courts of appeals usually sit in panels of three judges, but may expand to a larger number in certain cases they deem important enough to be decided by the entire court. They are then said to be sitting en banc.
evidence - Information presented in testimony or in documents that is used to persuade the fact finder (judge or jury) to decide the case for one side or the other.
exculpatory evidence - Evidence which tends to show the defendant’s innocence.
exhibit - Physical evidence or documents that are presented in a court proceeding. Common exhibits include contracts, weapons, and photographs.
F
federal question - Jurisdiction given to federal courts in cases involving the interpretation and application of the U.S. Constitution, acts of Congress, and treaties. In some cases, state courts can decide these issues, too, but the cases can always be brought in federal courts.
felony - A crime carrying a penalty of more than a year in prison.
file - To place a paper in the official custody of the clerk of court to enter into the files or records of a case. Lawyers must file a variety of documents throughout the life of a case.
G
grand jury - A body of citizens who listen to evidence of criminal allegations, which are presented by the government, and determines whether there is probable cause to believe the offense was committed. As it is used in federal criminal cases, "the government" refers to the lawyers of the U.S. Attorney's office who are prosecuting the case. Grand jury proceedings are closed to the public, and the person suspected of having committed the crime is not entitled to be present or have an attorney present. States are not required to use grand juries, but the federal government must do so under the Constitution.
H
habeas corpus - A writ that is often used to bring a prisoner before the court to determine the legality of his imprisonment. A prisoner wanting to argue that there is not sufficient cause to be imprisoned would file a writ of habeas corpus. It may also be used to bring a person in custody before the court to give testimony, or to be prosecuted.
hearsay - Statements by a witness who did not see or hear the incident in question but learned about it through secondhand information such as another’s statement, a newspaper, or a document. Hearsay is usually not admissible as evidence in court, but there are many exceptions to that rule.
I
impeachment - (1) The process of calling something into question, as in "impeaching the testimony of a witness." (2) The constitutional process whereby the House of Representatives may "impeach" (accuse of misconduct) high officers of the federal government for trial in the Senate.
inculpatory evidence - Evidence which tends to show the defendant’s guilt.
indictment - The formal charge issued by a grand jury stating that there is enough evidence that the defendant committed the crime to justify having a trial; it is used primarily for felonies.
in forma pauperis - In the manner of a pauper. Permission given to a person to sue without payment of court fees on claim of indigence or poverty.
information - A formal accusation by a government attorney that the defendant committed a misdemeanor.
initial hearing - Court proceeding in which the defendant learns of his rights and the charges against him and the judge decides bail.
injunction - An order of the court prohibiting (or compelling) the performance of a specific act to prevent irreparable damage or injury.
interrogatories - Written questions asked to one party by an opposing party, who must answer them in writing under oath. Interrogatories are a part of discovery in a lawsuit.
interview - A meeting with the police or prosecutor.
issue - (1) The disputed point in a disagreement between parties in a lawsuit. (2) To send out officially, as in to issue an order.
J
judge - Government official with authority to decide lawsuits brought before courts. Judicial officers of the Supreme Court and the highest court in each state are called justices.
judgment - The official decision of a court finally determining the respective rights and claims of the parties to a suit.
jurisdiction - (1) The legal authority of a court to hear and decide a case. Concurrent jurisdiction exists when two courts have simultaneous responsibility for the same case. Some issues can be heard in both state and federal courts. The plaintiff initially decides where to bring the suit, but in some cases, the defendant can seek to change the court. (2) The geographic area over which the court has authority to decide cases. A federal court in one state, for example, can usually only decide a case that arose from actions in that state.
juror - A person who is on the jury.
jury - Persons selected according to law and sworn to inquire into and declare a verdict on matters of fact. State court juries can be as small as six jurors in some cases. Federal juries for civil suits must have six jurors criminal suits must have twelve.
jury instructions - A judge's explanation to the jury before it begins deliberations of the questions it must answer and the law governing the case. Each party suggests jury instructions to the judge, but the judge chooses the final wording.
jury pool - The group of people from which the actual jury is chosen. The jury pool is randomly selected from a source such as voter registration banks. Lawyers in the case choose the actual jurors from the jury pool through a process called voir dire.
jurisprudence - The study of law and the structure of the legal system.
L
lawsuit - A legal action started by a plaintiff against a defendant based on a complaint that the defendant failed to perform a legal duty, resulting in harm to the plaintiff.
law clerk (or staff attorney) - Assist judges with research and drafting of opinions.
librarian - Meets the informational needs of the judges and lawyers.
litigation - A case, controversy, or lawsuit. Participants (plaintiffs and defendants) in lawsuits are called litigants.
M
magistrate judges - Judicial officers who assist U.S. district court judges in getting cases ready for trial. They may decide some criminal and civil trials when both parties agree to have the case heard by a magistrate judge instead of a district court judge.
misdemeanor - Usually a petty offense, a less serious crime than a felony, punishable by less than a year of confinement.
mistrial - An invalid trial caused by fundamental error. When a mistrial is declared, the trial must start again, beginning with the selection of a new jury.
motion - Attempt to have a limited issue heard by the court. Motions can be filed before, during, and after trial.
N
nolo contendere - No contest. Has the same effect as a plea of guilty as far as the criminal sentence is concerned, but the plea may not be considered an admission of guilt for any other purpose. Sometimes, a guilty plea could later be used to show fault in a lawsuit, but the plea of nolo contendere forces the plaintiff in the lawsuit to prove that the defendant committed the crime.
O
oath - A promise to tell the truth.
objection - A protest by an attorney, challenging a statement or question made at trial. Common objections include an attorney “leading the witness” or a witness making a statement that is hearsay. Once an objection is made, the judge must decide whether to allow the question or statement.
opinion - A judge's written explanation of a decision of the court. In an appeal, multiple opinions may be written. The court’s ruling comes from a majority of judges and forms the majority opinion. A dissenting opinion disagrees with the majority because of the reasoning and/or the principles of law on which the decision is based. A concurring opinion agrees with the end result of the court but offers further comment possibly because they disagree with how the court reached its conclusion.
oral argument - An opportunity for lawyers to summarize their position before the court in an appeal and also to answer the judges' questions.
P
panel - (1) In appellate cases, a group of judges (usually three) assigned to decide the case; (2) In the jury selection process, the group of potential jurors.
parties - Plaintiffs and defendants (petitioners and respondents) to lawsuits, also known as appellants and appellees in appeals, and their lawyers.
petit jury (or trial jury) - A group of citizens who hear the evidence presented by both sides at trial and determine the facts in dispute. Federal criminal juries consist of 12 persons. Federal civil juries consist of six persons.
plaintiff - The person who files the complaint in a civil lawsuit.
plea - In a criminal case, the defendant's statement pleading "guilty" or "not guilty" in answer to the charges in open court. A plea of nolo contendere or an Alford plea may also be made. A guilty plea allows the defendant to forego a trial.
plea deal (or plea bargain or agreement) - Agreement between the defendant and prosecutor where the defendant pleads guilty in exchange for a concession by the prosecutor. It may include lesser charges, a dismissal of charges, or the prosecutor’s recommendation to the judge of a more lenient sentence.
pleadings - Written statements of the parties in a civil case of their positions. In federal courts, the principal pleadings are the complaint and the answer.
precedent - A court decision in an earlier case with facts and law similar to a dispute currently before a court. Precedent will ordinarily govern the decision of a later similar case, unless a party can show that it was wrongly decided or that it differed in some significant way. Some precedent is binding, meaning that it must be followed. Other precedents need not be followed by the court but can be considered influential.
procedure - The rules for the conduct of a lawsuit; there are rules of civil, criminal, evidence, bankruptcy, and appellate procedure.
preliminary hearing - A hearing where the judge decides whether there is enough evidence to require the defendant to go to trial. Preliminary hearings do not require the same rules as trials. For example, hearsay is often admissible during the preliminary hearing but not at trial.
pretrial conference - A meeting of the judge and lawyers to discuss which matters should be presented to the jury, to review evidence and witnesses, to set a timetable, and to discuss the settlement of the case.
probable cause - An amount of suspicion leading one to believe certain facts are probably true. The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause for the issuance of an arrest or search warrant.
probation - A sentencing alternative to imprisonment in which the court releases convicted defendants under supervision as long as certain conditions are observed.
probation officers (or pretrial services officers) - Screen applicants for pretrial release and monitor convicted offenders released under court supervision.
pro se - A Latin term meaning "on one's own behalf"; in courts, it refers to persons who present their own cases without lawyers.
prosecute - To charge someone with a crime. A prosecutor tries a criminal case on behalf of the government.
public defenders - Represent defendants who can't afford an attorney in criminal matters.
R
record - A written account of all the acts and proceedings in a lawsuit.
remand - When an appellate court sends a case back to a lower court for further proceedings. The lower court is often required to do something differently, but that does not always mean the court’s final decision will change
reporter - Makes a record of court proceedings, prepares a transcript, and publishes the court's opinions or decisions.
reverse - When an appellate court sets aside the decision of a lower court because of an error. A reversal is often followed by a remand. For example, if the defendant argued on appeal that certain evidence should not have been used at trial, and the appeals court agrees, the case will be remanded in order for the trial court to reconsider the case without that evidence.
S
search warrant - Orders that a specific location be searched for items, which if found, can be used in court as evidence. Search warrants require probable cause in order to be issued.
sentence - The punishment ordered by a court for a defendant convicted of a crime. Federal courts look to the United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines when deciding the proper punishment for a given crime.
service of process - The service of writs or summonses to the appropriate party.
settlement - Parties to a lawsuit resolve their difference without having a trial. Settlements often involve the payment of compensation by one party in satisfaction of the other party's claims.
sequester - To separate. Sometimes juries are sequestered from outside influences during their deliberations.
sidebar - A conference between the judge and lawyers held out of earshot of the jury and spectators.
statement - A description that a witness gives to the police and that the police write down.
statute - A law passed by a legislature.
statute of limitations - A law that sets the time within which parties must take action to enforce their rights.
stay - A temporary pause or suspension of a judicial proceeding. Stays are usually designed to terminate upon the completion of specified event (e.g., a judicial decision in a separate case or the end of a government shutdown) or after a specific period of time.
subpoena - A command to a witness to appear and give testimony.
subpoena duces tecum - A command to a witness to produce documents.
summary judgment - A decision made on the basis of statements and evidence presented for the record without a trial. It is used when there is no dispute as to the facts of the case, and one party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.
T
temporary restraining order - Prohibits a person from an action that is likely to cause irreparable harm. This differs from an injunction in that it may be granted immediately, without notice to the opposing party, and without a hearing. It is intended to last only until a hearing can be held.
testify - Answer questions in court.
testimony - Evidence presented orally by witnesses during trials or before grand juries.
tort - A civil wrong or breach of a duty to another person as outlined by law. A very common tort is negligent operation of a motor vehicle that results in property damage and personal injury in an automobile accident.
transcript - A written, word-for-word record of what was said, either in a proceeding such as a trial or during some other conversation.
trial - A hearing that takes place when the defendant pleads "not guilty,” and the parties are required to come to court to present evidence.
U
uphold - The decision of an appellate court not to reverse a lower court decision. Also called “affirm.”
U.S. Attorney (or federal prosecutor) - A lawyer appointed by the President in each judicial district to prosecute and defend cases for the federal government.
U.S. Marshal (or bailiff) - enforce the rules of behavior in courtrooms.
V
venue - The geographical location in which a case is tried.
verdict - The decision of a petit jury or a judge.
victim advocate - work with prosecutors and assist the victims of a crime.
voir dire - The process by which judges and lawyers select a petit jury from among those eligible to serve by questioning them to determine knowledge of the facts of the case and a willingness to decide the case only on the evidence presented in court. "Voir dire" is a phrase meaning "to speak the truth."
W
warrant - An arrest warrant is a written order directing the arrest of a party. A search warrant orders that a specific location be searched for items, which if found, can be used in court as evidence. Search warrants require probable cause in order to be issued.
witness - A person called upon by either side in a lawsuit to give testimony before the court or jury.
writ - A formal written command, issued from the court, requiring the performance of a specific act.
writ of certiorari - An order issued by the Supreme Court directing the lower court to transmit records for a case for which it will hear on appeal. The Supreme Court is usually not required to hear appeals of cases. A denial of “cert” by the Supreme Court allows the previous ruling to stand.
LAW 48
ASSUME FORMLESSNESS
JUDGMENT
By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack. Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes. In martial arts, it is important that strategy be unfathomable, that form be concealed, and that movements be unexpected, so that preparedness against them be impossible. What enables a good general to win without fail is
always having unfathomable wisdom and a modus operandi that leaves no tracks. Only the formless cannot be affected. Sages hide in unfathomability, so their feelings cannot be observed; they operate in formlessness, so their lines cannot be crossed.
THE BOOK OF THE HUAINAN MASTERS, CHINA, SECOND
CENTURY B.C.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
By the eighth century B.C., the city-states of Greece had grown so large and prosperous that they had run out of land to support their expanding populations. So they turned to the sea, establishing colonies in Asia Minor, Sicily, the Italian peninsula, even Africa. The city-state of Sparta, however, was landlocked and surrounded by mountains. Lacking access to the Mediterranean, the Spartans never became a seafaring people; instead they
turned on the cities around them, and, in a series of brutal, violent conflicts lasting more than a hundred years, managed to conquer an immense area that would provide enough land for their citizens. This solution to their problem, however, brought a new, more formidable one: How could they maintain and police their conquered territories? The subordinate peoples they ruled now outnumbered them ten to one. Surely this horde would take
a horrible revenge on them.
Sparta’s solution was to create a society dedicated to the art of war. Spartans would be tougher, stronger, and fiercer than their neighbors. This was the only way they could ensure their stability and survival. When a Spartan boy reached the age of seven, he was taken from his mother and placed in a military club where he was trained to fight and underwent the strictest discipline. The boys slept on beds of reeds; they
were allotted only one outer garment to wear for an entire year. They studied none of the arts; indeed, the Spartans banned music, and permitted only slaves to practice the crafts that were necessary to sustain them. The only skills the Spartans taught were those of warfare. Children seen as weaklings were left to die in a cavern in the mountains. No system of money or trading was allowed in Sparta; acquired wealth, they believed, would sow selfishness and dissension, weakening their warrior discipline.
The only way a Spartan could earn a living was through agriculture, mostly on state-owned lands, which slaves, called helots, would work for him.
The Spartans’ single-mindedness allowed them to forge the most powerful infantry in the world. They marched in perfect order and fought with incomparable bravery.
Their tight-knit phalanxes could vanquish an army ten times their size, as they proved in defeating the Persians at Thermopylae.
A Spartan column on the march would strike terror in the enemy; it seemed to have no weaknesses. Yet although the Spartans proved themselves mighty warriors, they had no interest in creating an empire. They only wanted to keep what they had already conquered and to defend it against invaders. Decades would pass without a single change in the system that had succeeded so well in preserving Sparta’s status quo.
THE DOC WITH THE CROPPED EARS
“What crime have I committed that I should be thus mutilated by my own master?” pensively exclaimed Jowler, a young mastiff. “Here’s a pretty condition for a dog of my pretentions! How can I show my face among my friends? Oh! king of beasts, or rather their tyrant, who would dare to treat you thus?” His complaints were not unfounded, for that very morning his master, despite the piercing shrieks of our young friend, had barbarously cut off his long pendent ears.
Jowler expected nothing less than to give up the ghost. As he advanced in years, he perceived that he gained more than he had lost by his mutilation; for, being naturally inclined to fight with
others, he would often have returned home with this part disfigured in a hundred places.
A quarrelsome dog always has his ears lacerated. The less we leave others to lay hold of the better. When one has but one point to defend, it should be protected for fear of accident.
Take for example Master Jowler, who, being armed with a spiked collar, and having about as much ear as a bird, a wolf would be puzzled to know where to tackle him.
FABLES, JEAN DE LA FOMTAINE, 1621-1695
At the same time that the Spartans were evolving their warlike culture, another city-state was rising to equal prominence: Athens. Unlike Sparta, Athens had taken to the sea, not so much to create colonies as for purposes of trade. The Athenians became great merchants; their currency, the famous “owl coins,” spread throughout the Mediterranean. Unlike the rigid Spartans, the Athenians responded to every problem with consummate
creativity, adapting to the occasion and creating new social forms and new arts at an incredible pace. Their society was in constant flux. And as their power grew, they came to pose a threat to the defense-minded Spartans.
In 431 B.C., the war that had been brewing between Athens and Sparta for so long finally erupted. It lasted twenty-seven years, but after many twists of fortune, the Spartan war machine finally emerged victorious. The Spartans now commanded an empire, and this time they could not stay in their shell. If they gave up what they had gained, the beaten Athenians would regroup and rise against them, and the long war would have been fought for naught.
After the war, Athenian money poured into Sparta. The Spartans had been trained in warfare, not politics or economics; because they were so unaccustomed to it, wealth and its accompanying ways of life seduced and overwhelmed them. Spartan governors were sent to rule what had been Athenian lands; far from home, they succumbed to the worst forms of corruption. Sparta had defeated Athens, but the fluid Athenian way of life was slowly breaking down its discipline and loosening its rigid order. And
Athens, meanwhile, was adapting to losing its empire, managing to thrive as a cultural and economic center. Confused by a change in its status quo, Sparta grew weaker and weaker. Some thirty years after defeating Athens, it lost an important battle with the
city-state of Thebes. Almost overnight, this once mighty nation collapsed, never to recover.
Interpretation
In the evolution of species, protective armor has almost always spelled disaster. Although there are a few exceptions, the shell most often becomes a dead end for the animal encased in it; it slows the creature down, making it hard for it to forage for food and making it a target for fast-moving predators. Animals that take to the sea or sky, and that move swiftly and unpredictably, are infinitely more powerful and secure.
In facing a serious problem—controlling superior numbers—Sparta reacted like an animal that develops a shell to protect itself from the environment. But like a turtle, the Spartans sacrificed mobility for safety. They managed to preserve stability for three hundred years, but at what cost? They had no culture beyond warfare, no arts to relieve the tension, a constant anxiety about the status quo. While their neighbors took to the sea,
learning to adapt to a world of constant motion, the Spartans entombed themselves in their own system.
Victory would mean new lands to govern, which they did not want; defeat would mean the end of their military machine, which they did not want, either. Only stasis allowed them to survive.
But nothing in the world can remain stable forever, and the shell or system you evolve for your protection will someday prove your undoing.
In the case of Sparta, it was not the armies of Athens that defeated it, but the Athenian money. Money flows everywhere it has the opportunity to go; it cannot be controlled, or made to fit a prescribed pattern. It is inherently chaotic. And in the long run, money made Athens the conqueror,
by infiltrating the Spartan system and corroding its protective armor. In the battle between the two systems, Athens was fluid and creative enough to take new forms, while Sparta could grow only more rigid until it cracked.
This is the way the world works, whether for animals, cultures, or
individuals. In the face of the world’s harshness and danger, organisms of any kind develop protection—a coat of armor, a rigid system, a comforting ritual. For the short term it may work, but for the long term it spells disaster.
People weighed down by a system and inflexible ways of doing things cannot move fast, cannot sense or adapt to change. They lumber around more and more slowly until they go the way of the brontosaurus. Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten.
The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
When World War II ended and the Japanese, who had invaded China in 1937, had finally been thrown out, the Chinese Nationalists, lead by Chiang Kai-shek, decided the time had come to annihilate the Chinese Communists, their hated rivals, once and for all. They had almost succeeded in 1935, forcing the Communists into the Long March, the grueling retreat that had
greatly diminished their numbers. Although the Communists had recovered somewhat during the war against Japan, it would not be difficult to defeat them now. They controlled only isolated areas in the countryside, had unsophisticated weaponry, lacked any military experience or training beyond mountain fighting, and controlled no important parts of China, except areas of Manchuria, which they had managed to take after the Japanese retreat. Chiang decided to commit his best forces in Manchuria.
He would take over its major cities and from those bases would spread through this northern industrial region, sweeping the Communists away.
Once Manchuria had fallen the Communists would collapse. In 1945 and ’46 the plan worked perfectly: The Nationalists easily took the major Manchurian cities. Puzzlingly, though, in the face of this critical campaign, the Communist strategy made no sense. When the Nationalists began their push, the Communists dispersed to Manchuria’s most out-ofthe-way corners. Their small units harassed the Nationalist armies, ambushing them here, retreating unexpectedly there, but these dispersed units never linked up, making them hard to attack. They would seize a town
only to give it up a few weeks later. Forming neither rear guards nor vanguards, they moved like mercury, never staying in one place, elusive and formless.
One seductive and ultimately always fatal path has been the development of protective armor. An organism can protect itself by concealment, by swiftness in flight, by effective counterattack, by uniting for attack and defense with other individuals of its species and also by encasing itself within bony plates and spines.... Almost always the experiment of armor failed. Creatures adopiing it tended to become unwieldy. They had to move relatively slowly.
Hence they were forced to live mainly on vegetable food; and thus in general they were at a disadvantage as compared with foes living on more rapidly “profitable” animal food: The repeated failure of protective armor shows that, even at a somewhat low evolutionary level, mind triumphed over mere matter. It is this sort of triumph which has been supremely exemplified in Man.
SCIENTIFIC THEORY AND RELIGION, E. W. BARNES, 1933
The Nationalists ascribed this to two things: cowardice in the face of superior forces and inexperience in strategy.
Mao Tse-tung, the Communist leader, was more a poet and philosopher than a general, whereas Chiang had studied warfare in the West and was a follower of the German military writer Carl von Clausewitz, among others. Yet a pattern did eventually emerge in Mao’s attacks. After the Nationalists had taken the cities, leaving the Communists to occupy what was generally considered Manchuria’s useless space, the Communists started using that large space to surround the cities. If Chiang sent an army from one city to reinforce another, the Communists would encircle the rescuing army. Chiang’s forces were slowly broken into smaller and smaller units, isolated from one another, their lines of supply and communication cut. The Nationalists still had superior firepower, but if they could not move, what good was it?
A kind of terror overcame the Nationalist soldiers. Commanders
comfortably remote from the front lines might laugh at Mao, but the soldiers had fought the Communists in the mountains, and had come to fear their elusiveness. Now these soldiers sat in their cities and watched as their fast-moving enemies, as fluid as water, poured in on them from all sides.
There seemed to be millions of them. The Communists also encircled the soldiers’ spirits, bombarding them with propaganda to lower their morale and pressure them to desert.
The Nationalists began to surrender in their minds. Their encircled and isolated cities started collapsing even before being directly attacked; one after another fell in quick succession.
In November of 1948, the Nationalists surrendered Manchuria to the Communists—a humiliating blow to the technically superior Nationalist army, and one that proved decisive in the war. By the following year the Communists controlled all of China.
Interpretation
The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle. It rarely pays to withdraw, or to sacrifice your pieces, which must be concentrated at key areas. Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections—nearly six times as many positions as in chess. Black and white stones (one color for each side) are placed on the board’s
intersections, one at a time, wherever you like. Once all your stones (52 for each side) are on the board, the object is to isolate the stones of your opponent by encircling them.
THE HARE AND THE TREE
The sage neither seeks to follow the ways of the ancients nor establishes any fixed standard for all times but examines the things of his age and then prepares to deal with them. There was in Sung a man, who tilled a field in which there stood the trunk of a tree. Once a hare, while running fast, rushed against the trunk, broke its neck, and died. Thereupon the man cast his plough aside and watched that tree, hoping that he would get another hare. Yet he never caught another hare and was himself ridiculed by the people of Sung. Now supposing somebody wanted to govern the people of the present age with the policies of the early kings, he would be doing exactly the same thing as that man who watched the tree.
HAN-FEI-TZU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHFR, THIRD CENTURY B.C.
A game of go—called wei-chi in China—can last up to three hundred moves.
The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy.
Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble:
You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate the opponent in small areas and then encircle them.
The aim is not to kill off the opponent’s pieces directly, as in chess, but to induce a kind of paralysis and collapse. Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponent’s stones at an accelerated pace.
Chinese military strategists have been influenced by go for centuries. Its proverbs have been applied to war time and again; Mao Tse-tung was an addict of wei-chi, and its precepts were ingrained in his strategies. A key wei-chi concept, for example, is to use the size of the board to your advantage, spreading out in every direction so that your opponent cannot fathom your movements in a simple linear way.
“Every Chinese,” Mao once wrote,
“should consciously throw himself into this war of a jigsaw pattern” against the Nationalists. Place your men in a jigsaw pattern in go, and your opponent loses himself trying to figure out
what you are up to. Either he wastes time pursuing you or, like Chiang Kaishek, he assumes you are incompetent and fails to protect himself. And if he concentrates on single areas, as Western strategy advises, he becomes a sitting duck for encirclement.
In the wei-chi way of war, you encircle the enemy’s brain, using mind games, propaganda, and irritation tactics to confuse and dishearten. This was the strategy of the Communists—an apparent formlessness that disoriented and terrified their enemy.
Where chess is linear and direct, the ancient game of go is closer to the kind of strategy that will prove relevant in a world where battles are fought indirectly, in vast, loosely connected areas. Its strategies are abstract and multidimensional, inhabiting a plane beyond time and space: the strategist’s mind.
In this fluid form of warfare, you value movement over position. Your speed and mobility make it impossible to predict your moves; unable to understand you, your enemy can form no strategy to defeat you. Instead of fixing on particular spots, this indirect form of warfare spreads out, just as you can use the large and disconnected nature of the real world to your advantage.
Be like a vapor. Do not give your opponents anything solid to
attack; watch as they exhaust themselves pursuing you, trying to cope with your elusiveness. Only formlessness allows you to truly surprise your enemies—by the time they figure out where you are and what you are up to, it is too late. When you want to fight us, we don’t let you and you can’t find us. But when we want to fight you, we make sure that you can’t get away and we hit you
squarely ... and wipe you out.... The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.
Mao Tse-tung, 1893-1976
General Rommel surpassed Patton as a creative intellect.... Rommel shunned military formalism. He made no fixed plans beyond those intended for the initial clash; thereafter, he tailored his tactics to meet specific situations as they arose. He was a lightning-fast decision-maker, physically maintaining a pace that matched his active mentality. In a forbidding sea of sand, he operated in a free environment. Once Rommel ruptured the British lines in Africa, he had the whole northern part of the continent opened to him. Comparatively free from the hamstringing authority of Berlin, disregarding orders even from Hitler himself on occasion, Rommel implemented one successful operation after another until he had most of North Africa under his control and Cairo trembling at his feet.
THE ART OF WINNING WARS, JAMES MRAZEK, 1968
KEYS TO POWER
The human animal is distinguished by its constant creation of forms. Rarely expressing its emotions directly, it gives them form through language, or through socially acceptable rituals. We cannot communicate our emotions without a form.
The forms that we create, however, change constantly—in fashion, in style, in all those human phenomena representing the mood of the moment. We are constantly altering the forms we have inherited from previous generations, and these changes are signs of life and vitality. Indeed, the things that don’t change, the forms that rigidify, come to look to us like death, and we destroy them.
The young show this most clearly: Uncomfortable with the forms that society imposes upon them, having no set identity, they play with their own characters, trying on a variety of masks and poses to express themselves. This is the vitality that drives the motor of form, creating constant changes in style.
The powerful are often people who in their youth have shown immense creativity in expressing something new through a new form. Society grants them power because it hungers for and rewards this sort of newness. The problem comes later, when they often grow conservative and possessive.
They no longer dream of creating new forms; their identities are set, their habits congeal, and their rigidity makes them easy targets. Everyone knows their next move.
Instead of demanding respect they elicit boredom: Get off the stage! we say, let someone else, someone younger, entertain us. When locked in the past, the powerful look comical—they are overripe fruit, waiting to fall from the tree. Power can only thrive if it is flexible in its forms.
To be formless is not to be amorphous; everything has a form—it is impossible to avoid. The formlessness of power is more like that of water, or mercury, taking the form of whatever is around it.
Changing constantly, it is never predictable. The powerful are constantly creating form, and their power comes from the rapidity with which they can change.
Their formlessness is in the eye of the enemy who cannot see what they are up to and so has nothing solid to attack. This is the premier pose of power: ungraspable, as elusive and swift as the god Mercury, who could take any form he pleased and used this
ability to wreak havoc on Mount Olympus.
Human creations evolve toward abstraction, toward being more mental and less material. This evolution is clear in art, which, in this century, made the great discovery of abstraction and conceptualism; it can also be seen in politics, which over time have become less overtly violent, more complicated, indirect and cerebral. Warfare and strategy too have followed this pattern. Strategy began in the manipulation of armies on land, positioning them in ordered formations; on land, strategy is relatively two
dimensional, and controlled by topography. But all the great powers have eventually taken to the sea, for commerce and colonization. And to protect their trading lanes they have had to learn how to fight at sea. Maritime warfare requires tremendous creativity and abstract thinking, since the lines are constantly shifting. Naval captains distinguish themselves by their ability to adapt to the literal fluidity of the terrain and to confuse the enemy with an abstract, hard-to-anticipate form. They are operating in a third dimension: the mind.
CHARACTER ARMOR
To carry out the instinctual inhibition demanded by the modern world and to be able to cope with the energy stasis which results from this inhibition, the ego has to undergo a change. The ego, i.e., that part of the person that is exposed to danger, becomes rigid, as we say, when it is continually subjected to the same or similar conflicts between need and a fear-inducing outer world. It acquires in this process a chronic, automatically functioning mode of reaction, i.e., its “character.” It is as if the affective personality
armored itself, as if the hard shell it develops were intended to deflect and weaken the blows of the outer world as well as the clamoring of the inner needs. This armoring makes the person less sensitive to unpleasure, but also restricts his libidinal and aggressive motility and thus reduces his capacity for achievement and pleasure. We say the ego has become less flexible and more rigid, and that the abiliry to regulate the energy economy depends on the extent of the armoring.
WILHELM REICH, 1897-1957
Back on land, guerrilla warfare too demonstrates this evolution toward abstraction. T. E. Lawrence was perhaps the first modern strategist to develop the theory behind this kind of warfare, and to put it into practice.
His ideas influenced Mao, who found in his writings an uncanny Western equivalent to wei-chi. Lawrence was working with Arabs fighting for their territory against the Turks. His idea was to make the Arabs blend into the vast desert, never providing a target, never collecting together in one place.
As the Turks scrambled to fight this vaporous army, they spread themselves thin, wasting energy in moving from place to place. They had the superior firepower but the Arabs kept the initiative by playing cat and mouse, giving the Turks nothing to hold on to, destroying their morale.
“Most wars were wars of contact.... Ours should be a war of detachment,” Lawrence wrote.
“We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked.”
This is the ultimate form of strategy. The war of engagement has become far too dangerous and costly; indirection and elusiveness yield far better results at a much lower cost. The main cost, in fact, is mental—the thinking it takes to align your forces in scattered patterns, and to undermine the minds and psychology of your opponents. And nothing will infuriate and disorient them more than formlessness. In a world where wars of detachment are the order of the day, formlessness is crucial.
The first psychological requirement of formlessness is to train yourself to take nothing personally.
Never show any defensiveness. When you act defensive, you show your emotions, revealing a clear form. Your opponents
will realize they have hit a nerve, an Achilles’ heel. And they will hit it again and again. So train yourself to take nothing personally. Never let anyone get your back up.
Be like a slippery ball that cannot be held: Let no one know what gets to you, or where your weaknesses lie. Make your face a
formless mask and you will infuriate and disorient your scheming
colleagues and opponents.
One man who used this technique was Baron James Rothschild. A
German Jew in Paris, in a culture decidedly unfriendly to foreigners, Rothschild never took any attack on him personally or showed he had been hurt in any way. He furthermore adapted himself to the political climate, whatever it was—the stiffly formal Restoration monarchy of Louis XVIII, the bourgeois reign of Louis-Philippe, the democratic revolution of 1848, the upstart Louis-Napoleon crowned emperor in 1852. Rothschild accepted
them one and all, and blended in. He could afford to appear hypocritical or opportunistic because he was valued for his money, not his politics; his money was the currency of power. While he adapted and thrived, outwardly never showing a form, all the other great families that had begun the century immensely wealthy were ruined in the period’s complicated shifts
and turns of fortune.
Attaching themselves to the past, they revealed their embrace of a form.
Throughout history, the formless style of ruling has been most adeptly practiced by the queen who reigns alone. A queen is in a radically different position from a king; because she is a woman, her subjects and courtiers are likely to doubt her ability to rule, her strength of character. If she favors one side in some ideological struggle, she is said to be acting out of emotional
attachment.
Yet if she represses her emotions and plays the authoritarian, in the male fashion, she arouses worse criticism still. Either by nature or by experience, then, queens tend to adopt a flexible style of governing that in the end often proves more powerful than the more direct, male form.
Two female leaders exemplifying the formless style of rule are Queen Elizabeth of England and Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. In the violent wars between Catholics and Protestants, Elizabeth steered a middle course. She avoided alliances that would commit her to one side, and that over time would harm the country. She managed to keep her country at peace until it was strong enough for war. Her reign was one of the most glorious in history because of her incredible capacity to adapt and her
flexible ideology.
Catherine the Great too evolved an improvisatory style of governing. After she deposed her husband, Emperor Peter II, taking sole control of Russia in 1762, no one thought she would survive. But she had no preconceived ideas, no philosophy or theory to dictate her policies.
Although a foreigner (she came from Germany), she understood Russia’s moods, and how it was changing over the years.
“One must govern in such a way that one’s people think they themselves want to do what one commands them to do,” she said,
and to do this she had to be always a step ahead of their desires and to adapt to their resistance. By never forcing the issue, she reformed Russia in a strikingly short period of time.
This feminine, formless style of ruling may have emerged as a way of prospering under difficult circumstances, but it has proved immensely seductive to those who have served under it.
Being fluid, it is relatively easy for its subjects to obey, for they feel less coerced, less bent to their ruler’s ideology. It also opens up options where an adherence to a doctrine closes them off. Without committing to one side, it allows the ruler to play one
enemy off another. Rigid rulers may seem strong, but with time their inflexibility wears on the nerves, and their subjects find ways to push them from the stage. Flexible, formless rulers will be much criticized, but they will endure, and people will eventually come to identify with them, since they are as their subjects are—changing with the wind, open to circumstance.
Despite upsets and delays, the permeable style of power generally triumphs in the end, just as Athens eventually won victory over Sparta through its money and its culture. When you find yourself in conflict with someone stronger and more rigid, allow them a momentary victory.
Seem to bow to their superiority. Then, by being formless and adaptable, slowly insinuate yourself into their soul. This way you will catch them off guard, for rigid people are always ready to ward off direct blows but are helpless against the subtle and insinuating.
To succeed at such a strategy you must play the chameleon—conform on the surface, while breaking down your enemy from the inside.
For centuries the Japanese would accept foreigners graciously, and appeared susceptible to foreign cultures and influences. Joao Rodriguez, a Portuguese priest who arrived in Japan in 1577 and lived there for many years, wrote, “I am flabbergasted by the Japanese willingness to try and accept everything Portuguese.” He saw Japanese in the streets wearing Portuguese clothing, with rosary beads at their necks and crosses at their hips. This might seem like a weak, mutable culture, but Japan’s adaptability
actually protected the country from having an alien culture imposed by military invasion. It seduced the Portuguese and other Westerners into believing the Japanese were yielding to a superior culture when actually the foreign culture’s ways were merely a fashion to be donned and doffed.
Under the surface, Japanese culture thrived. Had the Japanese been rigid about foreign influences and tried to fight them off, they might have suffered the injuries that the West inflicted on China.
That is the power of formlessness—it gives the aggressor nothing to react against, nothing to hit.
In evolution, largeness is often the first step toward extinction. What is immense and bloated has no mobility, but must constantly feed itself. The unintelligent are often seduced into believing that size connotes power, the bigger the better.
In 483 B.C., King Xerxes of Persia invaded Greece, believing he could conquer the country in one easy campaign. After all, he had the largest army ever assembled for one invasion—the historian Herodotus estimated it at over more than five million. The Persians planned to build a bridge across the Hellespont to overrun Greece from the land, while their equally immense navy would pin the Greek ships in harbor, preventing their forces from escaping to sea. The plan seemed sure, yet as Xerxes prepared the invasion, his adviser Artabanus warned his master of grave misgivings:
“The two mightiest powers in the world are against you,” he said. Xerxes laughed—what powers could match his gigantic army?
“I will tell you what they are,” answered Artabanus.
“The land and the sea.” There were no safe harbors large enough to receive Xerxes’ fleet. And the more land the Persians conquered, and the longer their supply lines stretched, the more
ruinous the cost of feeding this immense army would prove.
Thinking his adviser a coward, Xerxes proceeded with the invasion. Yet as Artabanus predicted, bad weather at sea decimated the Persian fleet, which was too large to take shelter in any harbor.
On land, meanwhile, the Persian army destroyed everything in its path, which only made it impossible to feed, since the destruction included crops and stores of food. It was also an easy and slow-moving target. The Greeks practiced all kinds of deceptive maneuvers to disorient the Persians. Xerxes’ eventual defeat at
the hands of the Greek allies was an immense disaster.
The story is emblematic of all those who sacrifice mobility for size: The flexible and fleet of foot will almost always win, for they have more strategic options. The more gigantic the enemy, the easier it is to induce collapse. The need for formlessness becomes greater the older we get, as we grow more likely to become set in our ways and assume too rigid a form. We become predictable, always the first sign of decrepitude. And predictability makes us appear comical. Although ridicule and disdain might seem mild
forms of attack, they are actually potent weapons, and will eventually erode a foundation of power.
An enemy who does not respect you will grow bold, and boldness makes even the smallest animal dangerous. The late-eighteenth-century court of France, as exemplified by MarieAntoinette, had become so hopelessly tied to a rigid formality that the average Frenchman thought it a silly relic. This depreciation of a centuriesold institution was the first sign of a terminal disease, for it represented a symbolic loosening of the people’s ties to monarchy.
As the situation worsened, Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI grew only more rigid in their adherence to the past—and quickened their path to the guillotine.
King Charles I of England reacted similarly to the tide of democratic change brewing in England in the 1630s: He disbanded Parliament, and his court rituals grew increasingly formal and distant. He wanted to return to an older style of ruling, with adherence to all kinds of petty protocol. His rigidity
only heightened the desire for change. Soon, of course, he was swept up in a devastating civil war, and eventually he lost his head to the executioner’s axe.
As you get older, you must rely even less on the past. Be vigilant lest the form your character has taken makes you seem a relic. It is not a matter of mimicking the fashions of youth—that is equally worthy of laughter. Rather your mind must constantly adapt to each circumstance, even the inevitable change that the time has come to move over and let those of younger age
prepare for their ascendancy. Rigidity will only make you look uncannily like a cadaver.
Never forget, though, that formlessness is a strategic pose. It gives you room to create tactical surprises; as your enemies struggle to guess your next move, they reveal their own strategy, putting them at a decided disadvantage. It keeps the initiative on your side, putting your enemies in the position of never acting, constantly reacting. It foils their spying and intelligence. Remember: Formlessness is a tool. Never confuse it with a gowith-the-flow style, or with a religious resignation to the twists of fortune. You use formlessness, not because it creates inner harmony and peace, but because it will increase your power.
Finally, learning to adapt to each new circumstance means seeing events through your own eyes, and often ignoring the advice that people constantly peddle your way. It means that ultimately you must throw out the laws that others preach, and the books they write to tell you what to do, and the sage advice of the elder. “The laws that govern circumstances are abolished by new circumstances,” Napoleon wrote, which means that it is up to you to gauge each new situation. Rely too much on other people’s ideas and you end up taking a form not of your own making. Too much respect for other people’s wisdom will make you depreciate your own. Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.
Image: Mercury. The winged messenger, god of commerce, patron saint of thieves, gamblers, and all those who deceive through swiftness. The day Mercury was born he invented
the lyre; by that evening he had stolen the cattle of Apollo. He would scour the world, assuming whatever form he desired. Like the liquid metal named after him, he embodies the elusive,
the ungraspable—the power of formlessness.
Authority: Therefore the consummation of forming an army is to arrive at formlessness. Victory in war is not repetitious, but adapts its form endlessly....
A military force has no constant formation, water has no constant shape: The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting
according to the opponent is called genius.
(Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.)
REVERSAL
Using space to disperse and create an abstract pattern should not mean forsaking the concentration of your power when it is valuable to you. Formlessness makes your enemies hunt all over for you, scattering their own forces, mental as well as physical. When you finally engage them, though, hit them with a powerful, concentrated blow. That is how Mao succeeded against the Nationalists: He broke their forces into small, isolated units, which he then could easily overwhelm with a strong attack.
The law of concentration prevailed. When you play with formlessness, keep on top of the process, and keep your long-term strategy in mind. When you assume a form and go on the
attack, use concentration, speed, and power.
As Mao said, “When we fight you, we make sure you can’t get away.”
LAW 47
DO NOT GO PAST THE MARK YOU AIMED FOR; IN VICTORY, LEARN WHEN TO STOP
JUDGMENT
The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
In 559 B.C., a young man named Cyrus gathered an immense army from the scattered tribes of Persia and marched against his grandfather Astyages, king of the Medes. He defeated Astyages with ease, had himself crowned king of Medea and Persia, and began to forge the Persian Empire. Victory followed victory in quick succession. Cyrus defeated Croesus, ruler of Lydia, then conquered the Ionian islands and other smaller kingdoms; he
marched on Babylon and crushed it. Now he was known as Cyrus the Great, King of the World. After capturing the riches of Babylon, Cyrus set his sights on the east, on the half-barbaric tribes of the Massagetai, a vast realm on the Caspian Sea. A fierce warrior race led by Queen Tomyris, the Massagetai lacked the
riches of Babylon, but Cyrus decided to attack them anyway, believing himself superhuman and incapable of defeat. The Massagetai would fall easily to his vast armies, making his empire immense. In 529 B.C., then, Cyrus marched to the wide river Araxes, gateway to the kingdom of the Massagetai. As he set up camp on the western bank, he received a message from Queen Tomyris: “King of the Medes,”
she told him, “I advise you to abandon this enterprise, for you cannot know if in the end it will do you any good. Rule your own people, and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine. But of course you will refuse my advice, as the last thing you wish for is to live in peace.”
Tomyris, confident of her army’s strength and not wishing to delay the inevitable battle, offered to withdraw the troops on her side of the river, allowing Cyrus to cross its waters safely and
fight her army on the eastern side, if that was his desire. Cyrus agreed, but instead of engaging the enemy directly he decided to
play a trick. The Massagetai knew few luxuries. Once Cyrus had crossed the river and made his camp on the eastern side, he set the table for an elaborate banquet, full of meat, delicacies, and strong wine. Then he left his weakest troops in the camp and withdrew the rest of the army to the river. A large Massagetai detachment soon attacked the camp and killed all of the Persian soldiers in a fierce battle. Then, overwhelmed by the fabulous feast that had been left behind, they ate and drank to their hearts’ content. Later, inevitably, they fell asleep. The Persian army returned to the camp that night, killing many of the sleeping soldiers and capturing the rest. Among the prisoners was their general, a youth named Spargapises, son of Queen
Tomyris. When the queen learned what had happened, she sent a message to Cyrus, chiding him for using tricks to defeat her army. “Now listen to me,” she wrote,
“and I will advise you for your own good: Give me back my son
and leave my country with your forces intact, and be content with your triumph over a third part of the Massagetai. If you refuse, I swear by the sun our master to give you more blood than you can drink, for all your gluttony.”
Cyrus scoffed at her: He would not release her son. He would
crush these barbarians.
THE VAINGLORIOUS COCKEREL
Two cockerels fought on a dungheap. One cockerel was the stronger: he vanquished the other and drove him from the dungheap. All the hens gathered around the cockerel, and began to laud him. The cockerel wanted his strength and glory to be known in the next yard. He flew on top of the barn, flapped his wings, and crowed in a load voice:
“Look at me, all of you. I am a victorious cockerel. No other cockerel in the world has such strength as I. ” The cockerel had not finished, when an eagle killed him, seized him in his claws, and carried him to his nest.
FABLES, LEO TOLSTOY, 1828-1910
The queen’s son, seeing he would not be released, could not stand the humiliation, and so he killed himself. The news of her son’s death overwhelmed Tomyris. She gathered all the forces that she could muster in her kingdom, and whipping them into a vengeful frenzy, engaged Cyrus’s troops in a violent and bloody battle. Finally, the Massagetai prevailed. In their anger they decimated the Persian army, killing Cyrus himself.
After the battle, Tomyris and her soldiers searched the battlefield for Cyrus’s corpse. When she found it she cut off his head and shoved it into a wineskin full of human blood, crying out,
“Though I have conquered you and live, yet you have ruined me by treacherously taking my son.
See now —I fulfill my threat: You have your fill of blood.”
After Cyrus’s death, the Persian Empire quickly unraveled. One act of arrogance undid all of Cyrus’s good work.
Interpretation
There is nothing more intoxicating than victory, and nothing more
dangerous. Cyrus had built his great empire on the ruins of a previous one. A hundred years earlier, the powerful Assyrian Empire had been totally destroyed, its once splendid capital of Nineveh but ruins in the sand. The Assyrians had suffered this fate because they had pushed too far, destroying one city-state after another until they lost sight of the purposes of their
victories, and also of the costs. They overextended themselves and made many enemies who were finally able to band together and destroy them. Cyrus ignored the lesson of Assyria. He paid no heed to the warnings of oracles and advisers. He did not worry about offending a queen. His many victories had gone to his head, clouding his reason. Instead of consolidating his already vast empire, he pushed forward. Instead of recognizing each situation as different, he thought each new war would bring the same result as the one before as long as he used the methods he knew: ruthless force and cunning.
Understand: In the realm of power, you must be guided by reason. To let a momentary thrill or an emotional victory influence or guide your moves will prove fatal.
When you attain success, step back. Be cautious.
When you gain victory, understand the part played by the particular circumstances of a situation, and never simply repeat the same actions again and again.
History is littered with the ruins of victorious empires and the corpses of leaders who could not learn to stop and consolidate their gains.
THE SEQUENCE OF CROSS-EXAMINATION
In all your cross-examinations..., most important of all, let me repeat the injunction to be ever on the alert for a good place to stop. Nothing can be more important than to close your examination with a triumph. So many lawyers succeed in catching a witness in a serious contradiction; but, not satisfied with this, go on asking questions, and taper off their examination until the effect upon the jury of their former advantage is lost altogether.
THE ART OF CROSS-EXAMINATION, FRANCIS L. WELLMAN, 1913
THE OVERREACHING GENERAL
We read of many instances of this kind; for the general who by his valor has conquered a state for his master, and won great glory for himself by his victory over the enemy, and has loaded his soldiers with rich booty, acquires necessarily with his own soldiers, as well as with those of the enemy and with the subjects of the prince, so high a reputation, that his very victory may become distasteful, and a cause for apprehension to his prince.
For as the nature of men is ambitious as well as suspicious, and puts no limits to one’s good fortune, it is not impossible that the suspicion that may suddenly be aroused in the mind of the prince by the victory of the general may have been aggravated by some haughty expressions or insolent acts on his part; so that the prince will naturally be made to think of securing himself against the ambition of his general.
And to do this, the means that suggest themselves to him are either to have the general killed, or to deprive him of that reputation which he has acquired with the prince’s army and the people,
by using every means to prove that the general’s victory was not due to his skill and courage, but to chance and the cowardice of the enemy, or to the sagacity of the other captains who were with him in that action.
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, 1469-1527
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
No single person in history has occupied a more delicate and precarious position than the king’s mistress.
She had no real or legitimate power base to fall back on in times of trouble; she was surrounded by packs of envious courtiers eagerly anticipating her fall from grace; and finally, since the
source of her power was usually her physical beauty, for most royal mistresses that fall was inevitable and unpleasant.
King Louis XV of France began to keep official mistresses in the early days of his reign, each woman’s good fortune rarely lasting more than a few years. But then came Madame de Pompadour, who, when she was a middleclass child of nine named Jeanne Poisson, had been told by a fortune-teller that she would someday be the king’s favorite. This seemed an absurd dream, since the royal mistress almost always came from the aristocracy.
Jeanne nevertheless believed herself destined to seduce the king, and doing so became her obsession. She applied herself to the talents the king’s favorite had to have—music, dancing, acting, horseback riding—and she excelled in every one of them. As a young woman, she married a man of the lower nobility, which gave her an entrée to the best salons in Paris. Word quickly spread of her beauty, talent, charm, and intelligence. Jeanne Poisson became close friends with Voltaire, Montesquieu, and
other great minds of the time, but she never lost sight of the goal she had set herself as a girl: to capture the heart of the king. Her husband had a chateau in a forest where the king would often go hunting, and she began to spend a lot of time there. Studying his movements like a hawk, she would make sure he would “happen” to come upon her while she was out walking in her most alluring dress, or riding in her splendid coach. The king began to take
note of her, making her gifts of the game he caught in the hunt.
In 1744 Louis’s current mistress, the Duchesse de Chateauroux, died.
Jeanne went on the offensive. She placed herself everywhere he would be: at masked balls at Versailles, at the opera, wherever their paths would cross, and wherever she could display her many talents: dancing, singing, riding, coquetry. The king finally succumbed to her charms, and in a ceremony at Versailles in September of 1745, this twenty-four-year-old daughter of a
middle-class banking agent was officially inaugurated as the king’s mistress. She was given her own room in the palace, a room the king could enter at any time via a hidden stairway and back door. And because some of the courtiers were angry that he had chosen a woman of low origins, he made her a marquise. From now on she would be known as Madame de Pompadour.
The king was a man whom the slightest feeling of boredom would
oppress out of proportion. Madame de Pompadour knew that keeping him under her spell meant keeping him amused. To that end she put on constant theatrical productions at Versailles, in which she starred. She organized elaborate hunting parties, masked balls, and whatever else it would take to keep him diverted outside the bedroom. She became a patroness of the arts, and the arbiter of taste and fashion for all of France. Her enemies at the court only grew in number with each new success, but Madame de Pompadour thwarted them in a totally novel way for a king’s mistress: with extreme politeness. Snobs who resented her for her low birth she won over with charm and grace. Most unusual of all, she befriended the queen, and insisted that Louis XV pay more attention to his wife, and treat her more
kindly. Even the royal family begrudgingly gave her their support. To crown her glory, the king made her a duchess. Her sway was felt even in politics: Indeed she became the untitled minister of foreign affairs. In 1751, when Madame de Pompadour was at the height of her power, she experienced her worst crisis. Physically weakened by the responsibilities of her position, she found it increasingly difficult to meet the king’s demands in bed. This was usually the point at which the mistress would meet her end, struggling to maintain her position as her beauty faded.
But Madame de Pompadour had a strategy: She encouraged the king to set up a kind of brothel, Pare aux Cerfs, on the grounds of Versailles. There the middle-aged king could have liaisons with the most beautiful young girls in the realm.
Madame de Pompadour knew that her charm and her political acumen had made her indispensable to the king.
What did she have to fear from a sixteen-year-old who had none of her power and presence?
What did it matter if she lost her position in the bedroom, as long as she remained the most powerful woman in France?
To secure that position she became still closer friends with the queen, with whom she started attending church. Although her enemies at the court conspired to have her toppled from her
official position as king’s mistress, the king kept her on, for he needed her calming effect. It was only when her part in the disastrous Seven Years’ War drew much criticism on her that she slowly withdrew from public affairs.
Madame de Pompadour’s health had always been delicate, and she died at the age of forty-three, in 1764. Her reign as mistress had lasted an unprecedented twenty years. “She was regretted by all,” wrote the Duc de Croy, “for she was kindly and helpful to everyone who approached her.”
Interpretation
Aware of the temporariness of her power, the king’s mistress would often go into a kind of frenzy after capturing the king: She would try to accumulate as much money as possible to protect her after her inevitable fall.
And to extend her reign as long as possible, she would be ruthless with her enemies in the court. Her situation, in other words, seemed to demand from her a greed and vindictiveness that would often be her undoing. Madame de Pompadour succeeded where all others had failed because she never pressed her good fortune. Instead of bullying the courtiers from her powerful
position as the king’s mistress, she tried to win their support. She never revealed the slightest hint of greed or arrogance. When she could no longer perform her physical duties as mistress, she did not fret at the thought of someone replacing her in bed. She simply applied some strategy—she encouraged the king to take young lovers, knowing that the younger and prettier they were, the less of a threat they posed, since they could not compare to her in charm and sophistication and would soon bore the
monarch.
A man who was famous as a tree climber was guiding someone in climbing a tall tree. He ordered the man to cut the top branches, and, during this time, when the man seemed to be in great danger, the expert said nothing.
Only when the man was coming down and had reached the height of the eaves did the expert call out, “Be careful! Watch your step coming down!”
I asked him, “Why did you say that? At that height he could jump the rest of the way if he chose.”
“That’s the point, ”said the expert.
“As long as the man was up at a dizzy height and the branches were threatening to break, he himself was so afraid I said nothing. Mistakes are always made when people get to the easy places.”
This man belonged to the lowest class, but his words were in perfect accord with the precepts of the sages.
In football too, they say that after you have kicked out of a difficult place and you think the next one will be easier you are sure to miss the ball.
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, KENKO, JAPAN, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Success plays strange tricks on the mind. It makes you feel invulnerable, while also making you more hostile and emotional when people challenge your power. It makes you less able to adapt to circumstance.
You come to believe your character is more responsible for your success than your strategizing and planning. Like Madame de Pompadour, you need to realize that your moment of triumph is also a moment when you have to rely on cunning and strategy all the more, consolidating your power base, recognizing the role of luck and circumstance in your success, and remaining vigilant against changes in your good fortune. It is the moment of victory when you need to play the courtier’s game and pay more attention than ever to the laws of power. The greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory.
Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821
KEYS TO POWER
Power has its own rhythms and patterns. Those who succeed at the game are the ones who control the patterns and vary them at will, keeping people off balance while they set the tempo.
The essence of strategy is controlling what comes next, and the elation of victory can upset your ability to control what comes next in two ways.
First, you owe your success to a pattern that you are apt to try to repeat. You will try to keep moving in the same direction without stopping to see whether this is still the direction that is best for you.
Second, success tends to go to your head and make you emotional.
Feeling invulnerable, you make aggressive moves that ultimately undo the victory you have gained.
The lesson is simple: The powerful vary their rhythms and patterns, change course, adapt to circumstance, and learn to improvise.
Rather than letting their dancing feet impel them forward, they step back and look where they are going. It is as if their bloodstream bore a kind of antidote to the intoxication of victory, letting them control their emotions and come to a kind of mental halt when they have attained success. They steady themselves, give themselves the space to reflect on what has happened,
examine the role of circumstance and luck in their success.
As they say in riding school, you have to be able to control yourself before you can control the horse.
Luck and circumstance always play a role in power. This is inevitable, and actually makes the game more interesting.
But despite what you may think, good luck is more dangerous than bad luck.
Bad luck teaches valuable lessons about patience, timing, and the need to be prepared for the worst;
good luck deludes you into the opposite lesson, making you think
your brilliance will carry you through. Your fortune will inevitably turn, and when it does you will be completely unprepared.
According to Machiavelli, this is what undid Cesare Borgia. He had
many triumphs, was actually a clever strategist, but had the bad luck to have good luck: He had a pope for a father. Then, when he had bad luck for real —his father’s death—he was unprepared for it, and the many enemies he had made devoured him.
The good luck that elevates you or seals your success brings the moment for you to open your eyes: The wheel of fortune will hurtle you down as easily as up. If you prepare for the fall, it is less likely to ruin you when it happens.
People who have a run of success can catch a kind of fever, and even when they themselves try to stay calm, the people below them often pressure them to go past their mark and into dangerous waters. You have to have a strategy for dealing with these people.
Simply preaching moderation will make you look weak and small-minded; seeming to fail to follow up on a victory can lessen your power.
When the Athenian general and statesman Pericles led a series of naval campaigns around the Black Sea in 436 B.C.,
his easy triumphs enflamed the Athenians’ desire for more. They dreamed of conquering Egypt, overrunning Persia, sailing for Sicily. On the one hand Pericles reined in these dangerous emotions by warning of the perils of hubris. On the other hand he fed them by fighting small battles that he knew he could win,
creating the appearance that he was preserving the momentum of success.
The skill with which Pericles played this game is revealed by what
happened when he died: The demagogues took over, pushed Athens into invading Sicily, and in one rash move destroyed an empire.
The rhythm of power often requires an alternation of force and cunning. Too much force creates a counterreaction; too much cunning, no matter how cunning it is, becomes predictable. Working on behalf of his master, the shogun Oda Nobunaga, the great sixteenth-century Japanese general (and future emperor) Hideyoshi once engineered a stunning victory over the army of the formidable General Yoshimoto. The shogun wanted to go
further, to take on and crush yet another powerful enemy, but Hideyoshi reminded him of the old Japanese saying: “When you have won a victory, tighten the strings of your helmet.”
For Hideyoshi this was the moment for the shogun to switch from force to cunning and indirection, setting his enemies against one another through a series of deceptive alliances. In this way he would avoid stirring up needless opposition by appearing overly
aggressive. When you are victorious, then, lie low, and lull the enemy into inaction. These changes of rhythm are immensely powerful. People who go past the mark are often motivated by a desire to please a master by proving their dedication.
But an excess of effort exposes you to the risk of making the master suspicious of you.
On several occasions, generals under Philip of Macedon were disgraced and demoted immediately after leading their troops to a great victory;
one more such victory, Philip thought, and the man might become a rival instead of an underling.
When you serve a master, it is often wise to measure your victories carefully, letting him get the glory and never making him uneasy. It is also wise to establish a pattern of strict obedience to earn his trust.
In the fourth century B.C., a captain under the notoriously severe Chinese general Wu Ch‘i charged ahead before a battle had begun and came back with several enemy heads. He thought he had shown his fiery enthusiasm, but Wu Ch’i was unimpressed.
“A talented officer,” the general said with a sigh as he ordered
the man beheaded, “but a disobedient one.”
Another moment when a small success can spoil the chances for a larger one may come if a master or superior grants you a favor: It is a dangerous mistake to ask for more. You will seem insecure—perhaps you feel you did not deserve this favor, and have to grab as much as you can when you have the chance, which may not come again. The proper response is to accept the favor graciously and withdraw. Any subsequent favors you should earn without having to ask for them.
Finally, the moment when you stop has great dramatic import. What comes last sticks in the mind as a kind of exclamation point. There is no better time to stop and walk away than after a victory. Keep going and you risk lessening the effect, even ending up defeated. As lawyers say of crossexamination, “Always stop with a victory.”
Image: Icarus Falling from the Sky. His father Daedalus fashions wings of wax that allow the two men to fly out of the labyrinth and escape the Minotaur. Elated by the triumphant escape and the feeling of flight, Icarus soars higher and higher, until the sun
melts the wings and he hurtles to his death.
Authority: Princes and republics should content themselves with victory, for when they aim at more, they generally lose. The use of insulting language toward an enemy arises from the insolence of victory, or from the false hope of victory, which latter misleads men as often in their actions as in their words; for when this false hope takes possession of the mind, it makes men go beyond the mark, and causes them to sacrifice a certain good for an uncertain better.
(Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527)
REVERSAL
As Machiavelli says, either destroy a man or leave him alone entirely. Inflicting half punishment or mild injury will only create an enemy whose bitterness will grow with time, and who will take revenge. When you beat an enemy, then, make your victory complete. Crush him into nonexistence.
In the moment of victory, you do not restrain yourself from crushing the enemy you have defeated, but rather from needlessly advancing against others. Be merciless with your enemy, but do not create new enemies by overreaching.
There are some who become more cautious than ever after a victory, which they see as just giving them more possessions to worry about and protect. Your caution after victory should never make you hesitate, or lose momentum, but rather act as a safeguard against rash action.
On the other hand, momentum as a phenomenon is greatly overrated. You create your own successes, and if they follow one upon the other, it is your own doing.
Belief in momentum will only make you emotional, less prone to act strategically, and more apt to repeat the same methods. Leave momentum for those who have nothing better to rely upon.
LAW 46
NEVER APPEAR TOO PERFECT
JUDGMENT
Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Joe Orton met Kenneth Halliwell at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London, in 1953, where both had enrolled as acting students. They soon became lovers and moved in together. Halliwell, twenty-five at the time, was seven years older than Orton, and seemed the more confident of the two; but neither had much talent as actors, and after graduating, having settled down together in a dank London apartment, they decided to give up acting and collaborate as writers instead. Halliwell’s inheritance was enough to keep them from having to find work for a few years, and in the beginning, he was also the driving force behind the stories and novels they wrote; he would dictate to Orton, who would type the manuscripts, occasionally interjecting his own lines and ideas. Their first efforts attracted
some interest from literary agents, but it sputtered. The promise they had shown was leading nowhere. Eventually the inheritance money ran out, and the pair had to look for work. Their collaborations were less enthusiastic and less frequent. The future looked bleak. In 1957 Orton began to write on his own, but it wasn’t until five years later, when the lovers were jailed for six months for defacing dozens of library books, that he began to find his voice (perhaps not by chance: This was the first time he and Halliwell had been separated in nine years). He came out of prison determined to express his contempt for English society
in the form of theatrical farces. He and Halliwell moved back in together,
but now the roles were reversed: Orton did the writing while Halliwell put in comments and ideas.
In 1964 Joe Orton completed his first full-length play, Entertaining Mr.Sloane . The play made it to London’s West End, where it received brilliant reviews: A great new writer had emerged from nowhere. Now success followed success, at a dizzying pace. In 1966 Orton had a hit with his play Loot, and his popularity soared. Soon commissions came in from all sides, including from the Beatles, who paid Orton handsomely to write
them a film script. Everything was pointing upwards, everything except Orton’s relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. The pair still lived together, but as Orton grew successful, Halliwell began to deteriorate. Watching his lover become the center of attention, he suffered the humiliation of becoming a kind of personal assistant to the playwright, his role in what had once been a
collaboration growing smaller and smaller.
In the 1950s he had supported Orton with his inheritance; now Orton supported him. At a party or among friends, people would naturally gravitate towards Orton—he was charming, and his mood was almost always buoyant. Unlike the handsome Orton,
Halliwell was bald and awkward; his defensiveness made people want to avoid him.
THE PARABLE OF THE GREEDY MAN AND THE ENVIOUS
MAN
A greedy man and an envious man met a king.
The king said to them, “One of you may ask something of me and I will give it to him, provided I give twice as much to the other. ” The envious person did not want to ask first for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much, and the greedy man did not want to ask first since he wanted everything that was to be had. Finally the greedy one pressed the envious one to be the first to make the request. So the envious person asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes.
JEWISH PARABLE, THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS, SOLOMON
SCHIMMEL, 1992
An admirer who feels that he cannot be happy by surrendering himself elects to become envious of that which he admires. So he speaks another language—the thing which he really admires is called a stupid, insipid and queer sort of thing. Admiration is happy self-surrender; envy is unhappy self-assertion.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD, 1813-1855
With Orton’s success the couple’s problems only worsened. Halliwell’s moods made their life together impossible. Orton claimed to want to leave him, and had numerous affairs, but would always end up returning to his old friend and lover. He tried to help Halliwell launch a career as an artist, even arranging for a gallery to show his work, but the show was a flop, and this
only heightened Halliwell’s sense of inferiority. In May of 1967, the pair went on a brief holiday together in Tangier, Morocco. During the trip, Orton wrote in his diary, “We sat talking of how happy we felt. And how it couldn’t, surely, last. We’d have to pay for it. Or we’d be struck down from afar by disaster because we were, perhaps, too happy. To be young, goodlooking, healthy, famous, comparatively rich and happy is surely going against nature.”
Halliwell outwardly seemed as happy as Orton. Inwardly, though, he was seething. And two months later, in the early morning of August 10, 1967, just days after helping Orton put the finishing touches to the wicked farce
What the Butler Saw (undoubtedly his masterpiece), Kenneth Halliwell bludgeoned Joe Orton to death with repeated blows of a hammer to the head. He then took twenty-one sleeping pills and died himself, leaving behind a note that read, “If you read Orton’s diary all will be explained.”
Interpretation
Kenneth Halliwell had tried to cast his deterioration as mental illness, but what Joe Orton’s diaries revealed to him was the truth: It was envy, pure and simple, that lay at the heart of his sickness. The diaries, which Halliwell read on the sly, recounted the couple’s days as equals and their struggle for recognition. After Orton found success, the diaries began to describe
Halliwell’s brooding, his rude comments at parties, his growing sense of inferiority. All of this Orton narrated with a distance that bordered on contempt. The diaries made clear Halliwell’s bitterness over Orton’s success. Eventually the only thing that would have satisfied him would have been for Orton to have a failure of his own, an unsuccessful play perhaps, so that they could have commiserated in their failure, as they had done years
before. When the opposite happened—as Orton grew only more successful and popular—Halliwell did the only thing that would make them equals again: He made them equals in death. With Orton’s murder, he became almost as famous as his friend—posthumously. Joe Orton only partly understood his lover’s deterioration. His attempt to help Halliwell launch a career in art registered for what it was: charity and guilt. Orton basically had two possible solutions to the problem. He could have downplayed his own success, displaying some faults, deflecting Halliwell’s envy; or, once he realized the nature of the problem, he could
have fled as if Halliwell were a viper, as in fact he was—a viper of envy. Once envy eats away at someone, everything you do only makes it grow, and day by day it festers inside him. Eventually he will attack. It takes great talent and skill to conceal one’s talent and skill
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, 1613-1680
ENVY TORMENTS AGLAUROS
The goddess Minerva made her way to the house of Envy, a house filthy with dark and noisome slime. It is hidden away in the depths of the valleys, where the sun never penetrates, where no wind blows through; a gloomy dwelling, permeated by numbing chill, ever fireless, ever shrouded in thick darkness. When Minerva reached this spot she stopped in front of the house ... and struck the doors with the tip of her spear, and at the blow they flew open and revealed Envy within, busy at a meal of snake’s flesh, the food on which she nourished her wickedness. At the sight, Minerva turned her eyes away. But the other rose heavily from the ground, leaving the half-eaten corpses, and came out with dragging steps. When she saw the goddess in all the brilliance of her beauty, in her flashing armor, she groaned.... Envy’s face was sickly pale, her whole body lean and wasted, and she squinted
horribly; her teeth were discolored and decayed, her poisonous breast of a greenish hue, and her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but was kept constantly awake by care and anxiety, looked with dismay on men’s good fortune, and grew thin at the sight. Gnawing at others, and being gnawed, she was herself her own torment.
Minerva, in spite of her loathing, yet addressed her briefly: “Instill your poison into one of Cecrop’s daughters—her name is Aglauros. This is what I require of you. ”
Without another word she pushed against the ground with her spear, left the earth, and soared upwards.
From the corner of her eye the other watched the goddess out of sight, muttering and angry that Minerva’s plan should be successful. Then she took her staff, all encircled with thorny briars, wrapped herself in dark clouds, and set forth. Wherever she went she trampled down the flowery fields, withered up the grass, seared the treetops, and with her breath tainted the peoples, their cities and their homes, until at length she came to
Athens, the home of wit and wealth, peaceful and prosperous. She could scarcely refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears. Then entering the chamber of Cecrop’s daughter, she carried out Minerva’s orders. She touched the girl’s breast with a hand dipped in malice, filled her heart with spiky thorns, and breathing in a black and evil poison dispersed it through her very bones, instilling the venom deep in her heart. That the reason for her distress might not be far to seek, she set before Aglauros’
eyes a vision of her sister, of that sister’s fortunate marriage [with the god Mercury], and of the god in all his handsomeness; and she exaggerated the glory of it all. So Aglauros was tormented by such thoughts, and the jealous anger she concealed ate into her heart. Day and night she sighed, unceasingly wretched, and in her utter misery wasted away in a slow decline, as when ice is melted by the fitful sun. The fire that was kindled within her at the thought of her sister’s luck and good fortune was like the
burning of weeds which do not burst into flames, but are none the less consumed by smoldering fire.
METAMORPHOSES, OVID, 43 B.C.-C. A.D. 18
Only a minority can succeed at the game of life, and that minority
inevitably arouses the envy of those around them. Once success happens your way, however, the people to fear the most are those in your own circle, the friends and acquaintances you have left behind.
Feelings of inferiority gnaw at them; the thought of your success only heightens their feelings of stagnation. Envy, which the philosopher Kierkegaard calls “unhappy admiration,” takes hold. You may not see it but you will feel it someday— unless, that is, you learn strategies of deflection, little sacrifices to the gods
of success.
Either dampen your brilliance occasionally, purposefully revealing a defect, weakness, or anxiety, or attributing your success to luck;
or simply find yourself new friends. Never underestimate the power of envy.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
The merchant class and the craft guilds to which medieval Florence owed its prosperity had created a republic that protected them from oppression by the nobility. Since high office could only be held for a few months, no one could gain lasting dominance, and although this meant that the political factions struggled constantly for control, the system kept out tyrants and
petty dictators. The Medici family lived for several centuries under this system without making much of a mark. They had modest origins as apothecaries, and were typical middle-class citizens. Not until the late fourteenth century, when Giovanni de’ Medici made a modest fortune in banking, did they emerge as a force to be reckoned with. Upon Giovanni’s death, his son Cosimo took over the family business, and quickly demonstrated his talent for it. The business prospered under his control and the Medicis emerged as one of the preeminent banking families of Europe. But they had a rival in Florence: Despite the city’s republican system, one family, the Albizzis, had managed over the years to monopolize control of the government, forging alliances that allowed them to constantly fill important offices with their own men. Cosimo did not fight this, and in fact gave the Albizzis his tacit support. At the same time, while the Albizzis were beginning to flaunt their power, Cosimo made a point of staying in the background. Eventually, however, the Medici wealth could not be ignored, and in 1433, feeling threatened by the family, the Albizzis used their government muscle to have Cosimo arrested on charges of conspiring to overthrow the republic. Some in the Albizzi faction wanted Cosimo executed, others feared this would spark a civil war. In the end they exiled him from Florence. Cosimo did not fight the sentence; he left quietly. Sometimes, he knew, it is wiser to bide one’s time and keep a low profile. Over the next year, the Albizzis began to stir up fears that they were setting up a dictatorship. Meanwhile, Cosimo, using his wealth to advantage, continued to exert influence on Florentine affairs, even from
exile. A civil war broke out in the city, and in September of 1434 the Albizzis were toppled from power and sent into exile. Cosimo immediately returned to Florence, his position restored.
But he saw that he now faced a delicate situation: If he seemed ambitious, as the Albizzis had, he would stir up opposition and envy that would ultimately threaten his business. If he stayed on the sidelines, on the other hand, he would leave an opening for
another faction to rise up as the Albizzis had, and to punish the Medicis for their success.
Cosimo solved the problem in two ways: He secretly used his wealth to buy influence among key citizens, and he placed his own allies, all cleverly enlisted from the middle classes to disguise their allegiance to him, in top government positions. Those who complained of his growing political clout were taxed into submission, or their properties were bought out from under
them by Cosimo’s banker allies. The republic survived in name only. Cosimo held the strings. While he worked behind the scenes to gain control, however, publicly Cosimo presented another picture. When he walked through the streets of Florence, he dressed modestly, was attended by no more than one servant,
and bowed deferentially to magistrates and elder citizens. He rode a mule instead of a horse. He never spoke out on matters of public import, even though he controlled Florence’s foreign affairs for over thirty years. He gave money to charities and maintained his ties to Florence’s merchant class. He financed all kinds of public buildings that fed the Florentines’ pride in their city. When he built a palace for himself and his family in nearby Fiesole, he turned down the ornate designs that Brunelleschi had
drawn up for him and instead chose a modest structure designed by Michelozzo, a man of humble Florentine origins. The palace was a symbol of Cosimo’s strategy—all simplicity on the outside, all elegance and opulence within. Cosimo finally died in 1464, after ruling for thirty years. The citizens of Florence wanted to build him a great tomb, and to celebrate his memory with elaborate funeral ceremonies, but on his deathbed he had asked to be buried without “any pomp or demonstration.” Some sixty years later, Machiavelli hailed Cosimo as the wisest of all princes, “for he knew how extraordinary things that are seen and appear every hour make men much more envied than those that are done in deed and are covered over with decency.”
Interpretation
A close friend of Cosimo’s, the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, once wrote of him, “And whenever he wished to achieve something, he saw to it, in order to escape envy as much as possible, that the initiative appeared to come from others, and not from him.”
One of Cosimo’s favorite expressions was, “Envy is a weed that should not be watered.”
Understanding the power envy has in a democratic environment, Cosimo avoided the appearance of greatness. This does not mean that greatness should be suffocated, or that only the mediocre should survive; only that a game of appearances must be played. The insidious envy of the masses can actually be deflected quite
easily: Appear as one of them in style and values. Make alliances with those below you, and elevate them to positions of power to secure their support in times of need. Never flaunt your wealth, and carefully conceal the degree to which it has bought influence. Make a display of deferring to others, as if they were more powerful than you. Cosimo de’ Medici perfected this game;
he was a consummate con artist of appearances. No one could gauge the extent of his power—his modest exterior hid the truth.
Never be so foolish as to believe that you are stirring up admiration by flaunting the qualities that raise you above others. By making others aware of their inferior position, you are only stirring up “unhappy admiration,” or envy, which will gnaw away at them until they undermine you in ways you cannot foresee. The fool dares the gods of envy by flaunting his victories.
The master of power understands that the appearance of superiority over others is inconsequential next to the reality of it.
Of all the disorders of the soul, envy is the only one no one confesses to.
Plutarch, c. A.D 46-120
The envious hides as carefully as the secret, lustful sinner and becomes the endless inventor of tricks and stratagems to hide and mask himself. Thus he is able to pretend to ignore the superiority of others which eats up his heart, as if he did not see them, nor hear them, nor were aware of them, nor had ever heard of them. He is a master simulator. On the other hand he tries with all his power to connive and thus prevent any form of superiority from appearing in any situation. And if they do, he casts on them obscurity, hypercriticism, sarcasm and calumny like the toad that spits poison from its hole. On the other hand he will raise endlessly insignificant men, mediocre people, and even the inferior in the same type of activities.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
For not many men, the proverb says, can love a friend who fortune prospers without feeling envy; and about the envious brain, cold poison clings and doubles all the pain life brings him. His own woundings he must nurse, and feels another’s gladness like a curse.
AESCHYLUS, c. 525-456 B.C.
KEYS TO POWER
The human animal has a hard time dealing with feelings of inferiority. In the face of superior skill, talent, or power, we are often disturbed and ill at ease; this is because most of us have an inflated sense of ourselves, and when we meet people who surpass us they make it clear to us that we are in fact mediocre, or at least not as brilliant as we had thought. This disturbance
in our self-image cannot last long without stirring up ugly emotions.
At first we feel envy: If only we had the quality or skill of the superior person, we would be happy. But envy brings us neither comfort nor any closer to equality. Nor can we admit to feeling it, for it is frowned upon socially—
to show envy is to admit to feeling inferior. To close friends, we may confess our secret unrealized desires, but we will never confess to feeling envy. So it goes underground. We disguise it in many ways, like finding grounds to criticize the person who makes us feel it: He may be smarter than I am, we say, but he has no morals or conscience. Or he may have more power, but that’s because he cheats. If we do not slander him, perhaps we praise him excessively—another of envy’s disguises.
There are several strategies for dealing with the insidious, destructive emotion of envy.
First, accept the fact that there will be people who will surpass you in some way, and also the fact that you may envy them. But
make that feeling a way of pushing yourself to equal or surpass them someday.
Let envy turn inward and it poisons the soul; expel it outward and
it can move you to greater heights.
Second, understand that as you gain power, those below you will feel envious of you. They may not show it but it is inevitable. Do not naively accept the facade they show you—read between the lines of their criticisms, their little sarcastic remarks, the signs of backstabbing, the excessive praise that is preparing you for a fall, the resentful look in the eye. Half the problem with envy comes when we do not recognize it until it is too late.
Finally, expect that when people envy you they will work against you insidiously. They will put obstacles in your path that you will not foresee, or that you cannot trace to their source. It is hard to defend yourself against this kind of attack. And by the time you realize that envy is at the root of a person’s feelings about you, it is often too late: Your excuses, your false humility, your defensive actions, only exacerbate the problem. Since it is far easier to avoid creating envy in the first place than to get rid of it once it is
there, you should strategize to forestall it before it grows. It is often your own actions that stir up envy, your own unawareness. By becoming conscious of those actions and qualities that create envy, you can take the teeth out of it before it nibbles you to death.
Kierkegaard believed that there are types of people who create envy, and are as guilty when it arises as those who feel it. The most obvious type we all know: The moment something good happens to them, whether by luck or design, they crow about it. In fact they get pleasure out of making people feel inferior. This type is obvious and beyond hope. There are others, however, who stir up envy in more subtle and unconscious ways, and are partly to blame for their troubles. Envy is often a problem, for example, for people with great natural talent.
Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the most brilliant men at the court of Queen Elizabeth of England. He had skills as a scientist, wrote poetry still recognized as among the most beautiful writing of the time, was a proven leader of men, an enterprising entrepreneur, a great sea captain, and on top of all this was a handsome, dashing courtier who charmed his way into becoming one of the queen’s favorites. Wherever he went, however, people
blocked his path. Eventually he suffered a terrific fall from grace, leading even to prison and finally the executioner’s axe.
Raleigh could not understand the stubborn opposition he faced from the other courtiers. He did not see that he had not only made no attempt to disguise the degree of his skills and qualities, he had imposed them on one and all, making a show of his versatility, thinking it impressed people and won him friends. In fact it made him silent enemies, people who felt inferior to him and did all they could to ruin him the moment he tripped up
or made the slightest mistake. In the end, the reason he was executed was treason, but envy will use any cover it finds to mask its destructiveness.
The envy elicited by Sir Walter Raleigh is the worst kind: It was inspired by his natural talent and grace, which he felt was best displayed in its full flower. Money others can attain; power as well. But superior intelligence, good looks, charm—these are qualities no one can acquire. The naturally perfect have to work the most to disguise their brilliance, displaying a defect or two to deflect envy before it takes root. It is a common and naive mistake to think you are charming people with your natural talents when in fact they are coming to hate you.
JOSEPH AND HIS COAT
Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a coat of many colors.... And his brothers envied him.... And when they saw him afar off, they conspired against him to slay him.
And now they said to one another, “Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we shall say, some evil beast hath devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams”
OLD TESTAMENT, GENESIS 37:3—20
THE TRAGEDY OF THE TOMB
[When Pope Julius first saw Michelangelo’s design for his tomb] it pleased him so much that he at once sent him to Carrara to quarry the necessary marbles, instructing Alamanno Salviati, of Florence, to pay him a thousand ducats for this purpose. Michelangelo stayed in these mountains more than eight months with two workmen and his horse, and without any other provision except food.... Enough marbles quarried and chosen, he took them to the sea-coast, and left one of his men to have them embarked. He himself returned to Rome. ... The quantity of marbles was immense, so that, spread over the piazza, they were the admiration of all and a joy to the pope, who heaped
immeasurable favors upon Michelangelo: and when he began to work upon them again and again went to see him at his house, and talked to him about the tomb and other things as with his own brother. And in order that he might more easily go to him, the pope ordered that a drawbridge should be thrown across from the Corridore to the rooms of Michelangelo, by which
he might visit him in private. These many and frequent favors were the cause (as often is the case at court) of much envy, and, after the envy, of endless persecution, since Bramante, the architect, who was loved by the pope, made him change his mind as to the monument by telling him, as is said by the vulgar, that it is unlucky to build one’s tomb in one’s lifetime, and other tales. Fear as well as envy stimulated Bramante, for the judgment of Michelangelo had exposed many of his errors.... Now because he had no doubt that Michelangelo knew these errors of his, he always sought to remove him from Rome, or, at least, to deprive him of the favor of the pope, and of the glory and usefulness that he might have acquired by his industry. He succeeded in the matter of the tomb. There is no doubt that if Michelangelo had been allowed to finish it, according to his first design, having so large a field in which to show his worth, no other artist, however celebrated (be it said without envy) could have wrested from him the high place he would have held.
VITA DI MICHELANGELO, ASCANIO CONDIVI, 1553
A great danger in the realm of power is the sudden improvement in fortune—an unexpected promotion, a victory or success that seems to come out of nowhere. This is sure to stir up envy among your former peers.
When Archbishop de Retz was promoted to the rank of cardinal, in 1651, he knew full well that many of his former colleagues envied him.
Understanding the foolishness of alienating those below him, de Retz did everything he could to downplay his merit and emphasize the role of luck in his success. To put people at ease, he acted humbly and deferentially, as if nothing had changed. (In reality, of course, he now had much more power than before.) He wrote that these wise policies “produced a good effect, by
lessening the envy which was conceived against me, which is the greatest of all secrets.
” Follow de Retz’s example. Subtly emphasize how lucky you
have been, to make your happiness seem more attainable to other people, and the need for envy less acute. But be careful not to affect a false modesty that people can easily see through. This will only make them more envious. The act has to be good; your humility, and your openness to those you have left behind, have to seem genuine. Any hint of insincerity will only make your new status more oppressive. Remember: Despite your elevated
position, it will do you no good to alienate your former peers. Power requires a wide and solid support base, which envy can silently destroy. Political power of any kind creates envy, and one of the best ways to deflect it before it takes root is to seem unambitious.
When Ivan the Terrible died, Boris Godunov knew he was the only one on the scene who could lead Russia. But if he sought the position eagerly, he would stir up envy and suspicion among the boyars, so he refused the crown, not once but several times. He made people insist that he take the throne. George Washington
used the same strategy to great effect, first in refusing to keep the position of Commander in Chief of the American army, second in resisting the presidency. In both cases he made himself more popular than ever. People cannot envy the power that they themselves have given a person who does not seem to desire it.
According to the Elizabethan statesman and writer Sir Francis Bacon, the wisest policy of the powerful is to create a kind of pity for themselves, as if their responsibilities were a burden and a sacrifice. How can one envy a man who has taken on a heavy load for the public interest?
Disguise your power as a kind of self-sacrifice rather than a source of happiness and you make it seem less enviable. Emphasize your troubles and you turn a potential danger (envy) into a source of moral support (pity).
A similar ploy is to hint that your good fortune will benefit those around you.
To do this you may need to open your purse strings, like Cimon, a wealthy general in ancient Athens who gave lavishly in all kinds of ways to prevent people from resenting the influence he had bought in Athenian politics.
He paid a high price to deflect their envy, but in the end it saved him from ostracism and banishment from the city.
The painter J. M. W. Turner devised another way of giving to deflect the envy of his fellow artists, which he recognized as his greatest obstacle to his success. Noticing that his incomparable color skills made them afraid to hang their paintings next to his in exhibitions, he realized that their fear would turn to envy, and would eventually make it harder for him to find galleries to show in.
On occasion, then, Turner is known to have temporarily dampened the colors in his paintings with soot to earn him the
goodwill of his colleagues.
To deflect envy, Gracián recommends that the powerful display a
weakness, a minor social indiscretion, a harmless vice.
Give those who envy you something to feed on, distracting them from your more important sins.
Remember: It is the reality that matters. You may have to play games with appearances, but in the end you will have what counts: true power.
In some Arab countries, a man will avoid arousing envy by doing as Cosimo de Medici did by showing his wealth only on the inside of his house.
Apply this wisdom to your own character. Beware of some of envy’s disguises. Excessive praise is an almost sure sign that the person praising you envies you; they are either setting you up
for a fall—it will be impossible for you to live up to their praise—or they are sharpening their blades behind your back. At the same time, those who are hypercritical of you, or who slander you publicly, probably envy you as well. Recognize their behavior as disguised envy and you keep out of the trap of mutual mud-slinging, or of taking their criticisms to heart. Win your revenge by ignoring their measly presence.
Do not try to help or do favors for those who envy you; they will think you are condescending to them. Joe Orton’s attempt to help Halliwell find a gallery for his work only intensified his lover’s feelings of inferiority and envy. Once envy reveals itself for what it is, the only solution is often to flee the presence of the enviers, leaving them to stew in a hell of their own creation.
Finally, be aware that some environments are more conducive to envy than others. The effects of envy are more serious among colleagues and peers, where there is a veneer of equality.
Envy is also destructive in democratic environments where overt displays of power are looked down upon. Be extrasensitive in such environments.
The filmmaker Ingmar Bergman was hounded by Swedish tax authorities because he stood out in a country where standing out from the crowd is frowned on. It is almost impossible to avoid envy in such cases, and there is little you can do but accept it graciously and take none of it personally. As Thoreau once said,
“Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.”
Did ever anybody seriously confess to envy?
Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since lodgment is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against
it.
BILLY BUDD, HERMAN MELVILLE, 1819-1891
Image: A Garden of Weeds. You may not feed them but they spread as you water the garden. You may not see how, but they take over, tall and ugly, preventing anything beautiful from
flourishing.
Before it is too late, do not water indiscriminately. Destroy the weeds of envy by giving them nothing to feed on.
Authority:
Upon occasion, reveal a harmless defect in your character.
For the envious accuse the most perfect of sinning by having no sins.
They become an Argus, all eyes for finding fault with excellence—it is their only consolation. Do not let envy burst with its own venom—affect some lapse in valor or intellect, so as to disarm it beforehand. You thus wave your red cape before the Horns of Envy, in order to save your immortality.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
Know how to triumph over envy and malice. Here contempt, although prudent, counts, indeed, for little; magnanimity is better.
A good word concerning one who speaks evil of you cannot be praised too highly: there is no revenge more heroic than that brought about by those merits and attainments which frustrate and torment the envious.
Every stroke of good fortune is a further twist of the rope round the neck of the ill-disposed and the heaven of the envied is hell for the envious.
To convert your good fortune into poison for your enemies is held to be the most severe punishment you can inflict on them. The envious man dies not only once but as many times as the person he envies lives to hear the voice of praise; the eternity of the latter’s fame is the measure of the former’s punishment: the
one is immortal in his glory, the latter in his misery. The trumpet of fame which sounds immortality for the one heralds death for the other, who is sentenced to be choked to death on his own envy.
BALTASAR GRACIÁN, 1601-1658
REVERSAL
The reason for being careful with the envious is that they are so indirect, and will find innumerable ways to undermine you. But treading carefully around them will often only make their envy worse. They sense that you are being cautious, and it registers as yet another sign of your superiority. That is why you must act before envy takes root.
Once envy is there, however, whether through your fault or not, it is sometimes best to affect the opposite approach: Display the utmost disdain for those who envy you. Instead of hiding your perfection, make it obvious. Make every new triumph an opportunity to make the envious squirm. Your good fortune and power become their living hell. If you attain a position of
unimpeachable power, their envy will have no effect on you, and you will have the best revenge of all: They are trapped in envy while you are free in your power.
This is how Michelangelo triumphed over the venomous architect
Bramante, who turned Pope Julius against Michelangelo’s design for his tomb. Bramante envied Michelangelo’s godlike skills, and to this one triumph—the aborted tomb project—he thought to add another, by pushing the pope to commission Michelangelo to paint the murals in the Sistine Chapel. The project would take years, during which Michelangelo would accomplish no more of his brilliant sculptures. Furthermore, Bramante considered Michelangelo not nearly as skilled in painting as in sculpture.
The chapel would spoil his image as the perfect artist.
Michelangelo saw the trap and wanted to turn down the commission, but he could not refuse the pope, so he accepted it without complaint. Then, however, he used Bramante’s envy to spur him to greater heights, making the Sistine Chapel his most perfect work of all. Every time Bramante heard of it or saw it, he felt more oppressed by his own envy—the sweetest and most lasting revenge you can exact on the envious.
LAW 45
PREACH THE NEED FOR CHANGE, BUT NEVER REFORM TOO MUCH AT ONCE
JUDGMENT
Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the dayto-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Sometime in the early 1520s, King Henry VIII of England decided to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, because she had failed to bear him a son, and because he had fallen in love with the young and comely Anne Boleyn. The pope, Clement VII, opposed the divorce, and threatened the king with excommunication. The king’s most powerful minister, Cardinal Wolsey, also saw no need for divorce—and his halfhearted support of the king cost him his position and soon his life.
One man in Henry’s cabinet, Thomas Cromwell, not only supported him in his desire for a divorce but had an idea for realizing it: a complete break with the past. He convinced the king that by severing ties with Rome and making himself the head of a newly formed English church, he could divorce Catherine and marry Anne. By 1531 Henry saw this as the only solution. To reward Cromwell for his simple but brilliant idea, he elevated this son of a blacksmith to the post of royal councillor. By 1534 Cromwell had been named the king’s secretary, and as the power behind the throne he had become the most powerful man in England. But for him the break with Rome went beyond the satisfaction of the king’s carnal desires: He envisioned a new Protestant order in England, with the power of the Catholic Church smashed and its vast wealth in the hands of the king and the government. In that same year he initiated a complete survey of the churches and monasteries of England. And as it turned out,
the treasures and moneys that the churches had accumulated over the centuries were far more than he had imagined; his spies and agents came back with astonishing figures.
To justify his schemes, Cromwell circulated stories about the corruption in the English monasteries, their abuse of power, their exploitation of the people they supposedly served. Having won Parliament’s support for breaking up the monasteries, he began to seize their holdings and to put them out of existence one by one. At the same time, he began to impose Protestantism, introducing reforms in religious ritual and punishing those who stuck to Catholicism, and who now were called heretics. Virtually
overnight, England was converted to a new official religion. A terror fell on the country. Some people had suffered under the Catholic Church, which before the reforms had been immensely powerful, but most Britons had strong ties to Catholicism and to its comforting rituals. They watched in horror as churches were demolished, images of the Madonna and saints were broken in pieces, stained-glass windows were smashed, and the churches’ treasures were confiscated. With monasteries that had succored the poor suddenly gone, the poor now flooded the streets. The
growing ranks of the beggar class were further swelled by former monks. On top of all this, Cromwell levied high taxes to pay for his ecclesiastical reforms.
WHERE CHRISTMAS CAME FROM
Celebrating the turn of the year is an ancient custom. The Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, the festival of Saturn, god of the harvest, between December 17 and 23. It was the most cheerful festival of the year.
All work and commerce stopped, and the streets were filled with crowds and a carnival atmosphere. Slaves were temporarily freed, and the houses were decorated with laurel branches. People visited one another, bringing gifts of wax candles and little clay figurines.
Long before the birth of Christ, the Jews celebrated an eight-day Festival of Lights [at the same season], and it is believed that the Germanic peoples held a great festival not only at midsummer but also at the winter solstice,
when they celebrated the rebirth of the sun and honored the great fertility gods Wotan and Freyja, Donar (Thor) and Freyr. Even after the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-337) declared Christianity to be Rome’s official imperial religion, the evocation of light and fertility as an important component of pre-Christian midwinter celebrations could nor be entirely suppressed.
In the year 274 the Roman Emperor Aurelian (A.D. 214-275) had established an official cult of the sun-god Mithras, declaring his
birthday, December 25, a national holiday.
The cult of Mithras, the Aryan god of light, had spread from Persia through Asia Minor to Greece, Rome, and as far as the Germanic lands and Britain. Numerous ruins of his shrines still testify to the high regard in which this god was held, especially
by the Roman legions, as a bringer of fertility, peace, and victory. So it was a clever move when, in the year A.D. 354, the Christian church under Pope Liberius (352-366) co-opted the birthday of Mithras and declared December 25 to be the birthday of Jesus Christ.
NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG, ANNE-SUSANNE RISCHKE,
DECEMBER 25, 1983
In 1535 powerful revolts in the North of England threatened to topple Henry from his throne.
By the following year he had suppressed the rebellions, but he had also begun to see the costs of Cromwell’s reforms. The king himself had never wanted to go this far—he had only wanted a divorce.
It was now Cromwell’s turn to watch uneasily as the king began slowly to undo his reforms, reinstating Catholic sacraments and other rituals that Cromwell had outlawed.
Sensing his fall from grace, in 1540 Cromwell decided to regain Henry’s favor with one throw of the dice: He would find the king a new wife.
Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, had died a few years before, and he had been pining for a new young queen. It was Cromwell who found him one: Anne of Cleves, a German princess and, most important to Cromwell, a Protestant. On Cromwell’s commission, the painter Holbein produced a flattering portrait of Anne; when Henry saw it, he fell in love, and agreed to marry her. Cromwell seemed back in favor.
Unfortunately, however, Holbein’s painting was highly idealized, and when the king finally met the princess she did not please him in the least. His anger against Cromwell—first for the ill conceived reforms, now for saddling him with an unattractive and Protestant wife—could no longer be contained.
In June of that year, Cromwell was arrested, charged as a Protestant extremist and a heretic, and sent to the Tower.
Six weeks later, before a large and enthusiastic crowd, the public executioner cut off his head.
Interpretation
Thomas Cromwell had a simple idea: He would break up the power and wealth of the Church and lay the foundation for Protestantism in England. And he would do this in a mercilessly short time. He knew his speedy reforms would cause pain and resentment, but he thought these feelings would fade in a few years. More important, by identifying himself with change, he would become the leader of the new order, making the king
dependent on him.
But there was a problem in his strategy: Like a billiard ball hit too hard against the cushion, his reforms had reactions and caroms
he did not envision and could not control.
The man who initiates strong reforms often becomes the scapegoat for any kind of dissatisfaction. And eventually the reaction to his reforms may consume him, for change is upsetting to the human animal, even when it is for the good. Because the world is and always has been full of insecurity and threat, we latch on to familiar faces and create habits and rituals to make the world more comfortable. Change can be pleasant and even
sometimes desirable in the abstract, but too much of it creates an anxiety that will stir and boil beneath the surface and then eventually erupt.
Never underestimate the hidden conservatism of those around you. It is powerful and entrenched.
Never let the seductive charm of an idea cloud your reason: Just as you cannot make people see the world your way, you cannot wrench them into the future with painful changes. They will rebel. If reform is necessary, anticipate the reaction against it and find ways to disguise the change and sweeten the poison.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
As a young Communist in the 1920s, Mao Tse-tung understood better than any of his colleagues the incredible odds against a Communist victory in China. With their small numbers, limited funds, lack of military experience, and small arsenal of weapons, the Party had no hope of success unless it won over China’s immense peasant population.
But who in the world was more conservative, more rooted in tradition, than the Chinese peasantry?
The oldest civilization on the planet had a history that would never loosen its power, no matter how violent the revolution.
The ideas of Confucius remained as alive in the 1920s as they had been in the sixth century B.C.,
when the philosopher was alive. Despite the oppressions of the current system, would the peasantry ever give up the deep-rooted values of the past for the great unknown of Communism?
The solution, as Mao saw it, involved a simple deception: Cloak the revolution in the clothing of the past, making it comforting and legitimate in people’s eyes.
One of Mao’s favorite books was the very popular medieval
Chinese novel The Water Margin, which recounts the exploits of a Chinese Robin Hood and his robber band as they struggle against a corrupt and evil monarch.
In China in Mao’s time, family ties dominated over any other kind, for the Confucian hierarchy of father and oldest son remained firmly in place; but The Water Margin preached a superior value—the fraternal ties of the band of robbers, the nobility of the cause that unites people beyond blood.
The novel had great emotional resonance for Chinese people, who love to root for the underdog. Time and again, then, Mao would present his revolutionary army as an extension of the robber band in The Water Margin, likening his struggle to the timeless conflict between the oppressed peasantry and an evil emperor. He made the past seem to envelop and legitimize the Communist cause; the peasantry could feel comfortable with
and even support a group with such roots in the past.
Even once the Party came to power, Mao continued to associate it with the past. He presented himself to the masses not as a Chinese Lenin but as a modern Chuko Liang, the real-life third-century strategist who figures prominently in the popular historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Liang was more than a great general—he was a poet, a philosopher, and a figure of stern moral rectitude. So Mao represented himself as a poet-warrior like Liang, a man who mixed strategy with philosophy and preached a new ethics. He made himself appear like a hero from the great Chinese tradition of warrior statesmen.
Soon, everything in Mao’s speeches and writings had a reference to an earlier period in Chinese history. He recalled, for example, the great Emperor Ch‘in, who had unified the country in the third century B.C. Ch’in had burned the works of Confucius, consolidated and completed the building of the Great Wall, and given his name to China.
Like Ch‘in, Mao also had brought the country together, and had sought bold reforms against an oppressive past. Ch’in had traditionally been seen as a violent dictator whose reign was short; the brilliance of Mao’s strategy was to turn this around, simultaneously reinterpreting Ch’in, justifying his rule in the eyes
of present-day Chinese, and using him to justify the violence of the new order that Mao himself was creating.
After the failed Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, a power struggle emerged in the Communist Party in which Mao’s main foe was Lin Piao, once a close friend of his. To make clear to the masses the difference between his philosophy and Lin’s, Mao once again exploited the past: He cast his opponent as representing Confucius, a philosopher Lin in fact would constantly quote. And Confucius signified the conservatism of the past.
Mao associated himself, on the other hand, with the ancient
philosophical movement known as Legalism, exemplified by the writings of Han-fei-tzu.
The Legalists disdained Confucian ethics; they believed in the
need for violence to create a new order. They worshiped power. To give himself weight in the struggle, Mao unleashed a nationwide propaganda campaign against Confucius, using the issues of Confucianism versus Legalism to whip the young into a kind of frenzied revolt against the older generation.
This grand context enveloped a rather banal power struggle, and
Mao once again won over the masses and triumphed over his enemies.
Interpretation
No people had a more profound attachment to the past than the Chinese. In the face of this enormous obstacle to reform,
Mao’s strategy was simple: Instead of struggling against the past, he turned it to his advantage, associating his radical Communists with the romantic figures of Chinese history. Weaving the story of the War of the Three Kingdoms into the struggle between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, he cast himself as Chuko Liang. As the emperors had, he welcomed the cultlike
adoration of the masses, understanding that the Chinese could not function without some kind of father figure to admire. And after he made a terrible blunder with the Great Leap Forward, trying to force modernization on the country and failing miserably, he never repeated his mistake: From then on, radical change had to be cloaked in the comfortable clothes of the past.
The lesson is simple: The past is powerful. What has happened before seems greater; habit and history give any act weight. Use this to your advantage. When you destroy the familiar you create a void or vacuum; people fear the chaos that will flood in to fill it. You must avoid stirring up such fears at all cost. Borrow the weight and legitimacy from the past, however remote, to create a comforting and familiar presence. This will give your actions romantic associations, add to your presence, and cloak the nature of the changes you are attempting.
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle,
than to initiate a new order of things.
Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527
KEYS TO POWER
Human psychology contains many dualities, one of them being that even while people understand the need for change, knowing how important it is for institutions and individuals to be occasionally renewed, they are also irritated and upset by changes that affect them personally. They know that change is necessary, and that novelty provides relief from boredom, but
deep inside they cling to the past. Change in the abstract, or superficial change, they desire, but a change that upsets core habits and routines is deeply disturbing to them.
No revolution has gone without a powerful later reaction against it, for in the long run the void it creates proves too unsettling to the human animal, who unconsciously associates such voids with death and chaos. The opportunity for change and renewal seduces people to the side of the revolution, but once their enthusiasm fades, which it will, they are left with a certain emptiness.
Yearning for the past, they create an opening for it to creep back in.
For Machiavelli, the prophet who preaches and brings change can only survive by taking up arms: When the masses inevitably yearn for the past, he must be ready to use force. But the armed prophet cannot last long unless he quickly creates a new set of values and rituals to replace the old ones, and to soothe the anxieties of those who dread change. It is far easier, and less bloody, to play a kind of con game. Preach change as much as you like, and even enact your reforms, but give them the comforting appearance of older events and traditions.
Reigning from A.D. 8 to A.D. 23, the Chinese emperor Wang Mang
emerged from a period of great historical turbulence in which the people yearned for order, an order represented for them by Confucius.
Some two hundred years earlier, however, Emperor Ch’in had ordered the writings of Confucius burned.
A few years later, word had spread that certain texts had
miraculously survived, hidden under the scholar’s house.
These texts may not have been genuine, but they gave Wang his opportunity: He first confiscated them, then had his scribes insert passages into them that seemed to support the changes he had been imposing on the country. When he released the texts, it seemed that Confucius sanctioned Wang’s reforms, and the people felt comforted and accepted them more easily.
Understand: The fact that the past is dead and buried gives you the freedom to reinterpret it. To support your cause, tinker with the facts. The past is a text in which you can safely insert your own lines. A simple gesture like using an old title, or keeping the same number for a group, will tie you to the past and support you with the authority of history.
As Machiavelli himself observed, the Romans used this device when they transformed their monarchy into a republic. They may have installed two consuls in place of the king, but since the king had been served by twelve lictors, they retained the same number to serve under the consuls.
The king had personally performed an annual sacrifice, in a great spectacle that stirred the public; the republic retained this practice, only transferring it to a special “chief of the ceremony, whom they called the King of the sacrifice.”
These and similar gestures satisfied the people and kept them from clamoring for the monarchy’s return.
Another strategy to disguise change is to make a loud and public display of support for the values of the past. Seem to be a zealot for tradition and few will notice how unconventional you really are. Renaissance Florence had a centuries-old republic, and was suspicious of anyone who flouted its traditions.
Cosimo de’ Medici made a show of enthusiastic support for the
republic, while in reality he worked to bring the city under the control of his wealthy family. In form, the Medicis retained the appearance of a republic; in substance, they rendered it powerless. They quietly enacted a radical change, while appearing to safeguard tradition. Science claims a search for truth that would seem to protect it from conservatism and the irrationality of habit: It is a culture of innovation.
Yet when Charles Darwin published his ideas of evolution, he faced fiercer opposition from his fellow scientists than from religious authorities. His theories challenged too many fixed ideas. Jonas Salk ran into the same wall with his radical innovations in immunology, as did Max Planck with his
revolutionizing of physics.
Planck later wrote of the scientific opposition he faced,
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The answer to this innate conservatism is to play the courtier’s game. Galileo did this at the beginning of his scientific career; he later became more confrontational, and paid for it. So pay lip service to tradition. Identify the elements in your revolution that can be made to seem to build on the past. Say the right things, make a show of conformity, and meanwhile let your theories do their radical work. Play with appearances and respect past protocol. This is true in every arena—science being no exception.
Finally, powerful people pay attention to the zeitgeist. If their reform is too far ahead of its time, few will understand it, and it will stir up anxiety and be hopelessly misinterpreted. The changes you make must seem less innovative than they are.
England did eventually become a Protestant nation, as Cromwell wished, but it took over a century of gradual evolution. Watch the zeitgeist. If you work in a tumultuous time, there is power to be gained by preaching a return to the past, to comfort, tradition, and ritual.
During a period of stagnation, on the other hand, play the card of reform and revolution—but beware of what you stir up. Those who finish a revolution are rarely those who start it. You will not succeed at this dangerous game unless you are willing to forestall the inevitable reaction against it by playing with appearances and building on the past.
Authority: He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.
(Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527)
Image: The Cat. Creature of habit, it loves the warmth of the familiar. Upset its routines, disrupt its space, and it will grow unmanageable and psychotic. Placate it by supporting its rituals. If change is necessary, deceive the cat by keeping the smell of the past alive; place objects familiar to it in strategic locations.
REVERSAL
The past is a corpse to be used as you see fit. If what happened in the recent past was painful and harsh, it is self-destructive to associate yourself with it.
When Napoleon came to power, the French Revolution was fresh in everyone’s minds. If the court that he established had borne any resemblance to the lavish court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, his courtiers would have spent all their time worrying about their own necks.
Instead, Napoleon established a court remarkable for its sobriety and lack of ostentation. It was the court of a man who valued work and military virtues.
This new form seemed appropriate and reassuring. In other words, pay attention to the times.
But understand: If you make a bold change from the past, you must avoid at all costs the appearance of a void or vacuum, or you will create terror. Even an ugly recent history will seem preferable to an empty space. Fill that space immediately with new rituals and forms. Soothing and growing familiar, these will secure your
position among the masses.
Finally, the arts, fashion, and technology would seem to be areas in which power would come from creating a radical rupture with the past and appearing cutting edge. Indeed, such a strategy can bring great power, but it has many dangers. It is inevitable that your innovations will be outdone by someone else.
You have little control—someone younger and fresher moves
in a sudden new direction, making your bold innovation of yesterday seem tiresome and tame today.
You are forever playing catch-up; your power is tenuous and short-lived. You want a power built on something more solid.
Using the past, tinkering with tradition, playing with convention to subvert it will give your creations something more than a momentary appeal.
Periods of dizzying change disguise the fact that a yearning for the past will inevitably creep back in. In the end, using the past for your own purposes will bring you more power than trying to cut it out completely—a futile and self-destructive endeavor
Before he left, however, Rikyu invited him to take tea with him the following morning. Sho-o happily accepted.
When Sho-o opened the garden gate the next day, he was horrified to see that not a single flower remained. More than anything else, he had come to see the rose of Sharon blossoms that he had not had the time to appreciate the day before; now, disappointed, he started to leave, but at the gate he stopped himself, and decided to enter Sen no Rikyu’s tea room. Immediately inside, he stopped in his tracks and gazed in astonishment: Before him a vase hung from the ceiling, and in the vase stood a single rose of Sharon blossom, the most beautiful in the garden. Somehow Sen no Rikyu had read his guest’s thoughts, and, with this one eloquent gesture, had demonstrated that this day guest and host would be in perfect harmony.
Sen no Rikyu went on to become the most famous tea master of all, and his trademark was this uncanny ability to harmonize himself with his guests’ thoughts and to think one step ahead, enchanting them by adapting to their taste.
One day Rikyu was invited to tea by Yamashina Hechigwan, an admirer of the tea ceremony but also a man with a vivid sense of humor. When Rikyu arrived at Hechigwan’s home, he found the garden gate shut, so he opened it to look for the host. On the other side of the gate he saw that someone had first dug a ditch, then carefully covered it over with canvas and earth. Realizing that Hechigwan had planned a practical joke, he obligingly walked right into the ditch, muddying his clothes in the process. Apparently horrified, Hechigwan came running out, and hurried Rikyu to a bath that for some inexplicable reason stood already prepared. After bathing, Rikyu joined Hechigwan in the tea ceremony, which both enjoyed immensely, sharing a laugh about the accident. Later Sen no Rikyu explained to a friend that he had heard about Hechigwan’s practical joke beforehand,
“But since it should always be one’s aim to conform to the
wishes of one’s host, I fell into the hole knowingly and thus assured the success of the meeting. Tea is by no means mere obsequiousness, but there is no tea where the host and guest are not in harmony with one another.”
Hechigwan’s vision of the dignified Sen no Rikyu at the bottom of a ditch had pleased him endlessly, but Rikyu had gained a pleasure of his own in complying with his host’s wish and watching him amuse himself in this way.
Interpretation
Sen no Rikyu was no magician or seer—he watched those around him acutely, plumbing the subtle gestures that revealed a hidden desire, then producing that desire’s image. Although Sho-o never spoke of being enchanted by the rose of Sharon blossoms, Rikyu read it in his eyes. If mirroring a person’s desires meant falling into a ditch, so be it. Rikyu’s power resided in his skillful use of the Courtier’s Mirror, which gave him the appearance of an unusual ability to see into other people.
Learn to manipulate the Courtier’s Mirror, for it will bring you great power. Study people’s eyes, follow their gestures—surer barometers of pain and pleasure than any spoken word. Notice and remember the details—the clothing, the choice of friends, the daily habits, the tossed-out remarks— that reveal hidden and rarely indulged desires. Soak it all in, find out what lies under the surface, then make yourself the mirror of their unspoken selves. That is the key to this power: The other person has not asked for
your consideration, has not mentioned his pleasure in the rose of Sharon, and when you reflect it back to him his pleasure is heightened because it is unasked for.
Remember: The wordless communication, the indirect compliment, contains the most power. No one can resist the enchantment of the Courtier’s Mirror.
Observance VII
Yellow Kid Weil, con artist extraordinaire, used the Deceiver’s Mirror in his most brilliant cons. Most audacious of all was his re-creation of a bank in Muncie, Indiana. When Weil read one day that the Merchants Bank in Muncie had moved, he saw an opportunity he could not pass up. Weil rented out the original Merchants building, which still contained bank furniture, complete with teller windows. He bought money bags, stenciled a bank’s invented name on them, filled them with steel washers,
and arrayed them impressively behind the teller windows, along with bundles of boodle—real bills hiding newspaper cut to size. For his bank’s staff and customers Weil hired gamblers, bookies, girls from local bawdy houses, and other assorted confederates. He even had a local thug pose as a bank dick. Claiming to be the broker for a certificate investment the bank was offering, Weil would fish the waters and hook the proper wealthy sucker. He
would bring this man to the bank and ask to see the president. An “officer” of the bank would tell them that they had to wait, which only heightened the realism of the con—one always has to wait to see the bank president. And as they waited the bank would bustle with banklike activity, as call girls and bookies in disguise floated in and out, making deposits and withdrawals and tipping their hats to the phony bank dick. Lulled by this perfect copy of
reality, the sucker would deposit $50,000 into the fake bank without a worry in the world.
Over the years Weil did the same thing with a deserted yacht club, an abandoned brokerage office, a relocated real estate office, and a completely realistic gambling club.
Interpretation
The mirroring of reality offers immense deceptive powers. The right uniform, the perfect accent, the proper props—the deception cannot be deciphered because it is enmeshed in a simulation of reality. People have an intense desire and need to believe, and their first instinct is to trust a wellconstructed facade, to mistake it for reality. After all, we cannot go around
doubting the reality of everything we see—that would be too exhausting.
We habitually accept appearances, and this is a credulity you can use.
In this particular game it is the first moment that counts the most. If your suckers’ suspicions are not raised by their first glance at the mirror’s reflection, they will stay suppressed.
Once they enter your hall of mirrors, they will be unable to distinguish the real from the fake, and it will become easier and easier to deceive them. Remember: Study the world’s surfaces
and learn to mirror them in your habits, your manner, your clothes.
Like a carnivorous plant, to unsuspecting insects you will look like all the other plants in the field.
Authority: The task of a military operation is to accord deceptively with the intentions of the enemy ... get to what they want first, subtly anticipate them. Maintain discipline and adapt to the enemy....
Thus, at first you are like a maiden, so the enemy opens his door; then you are like a rabbit on the loose, so the enemy cannot keep you out.
(Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.)
Image: The Shield of Perseus. It is polished into a reflecting mirror. Medusa cannot see you, only her own hideousness reflected back at her. Behind such a mirror you can deceive, mock, and infuriate. With one blow you sever Medusa’s unsuspecting head.
A WARNING: BEWARE OF MIRRORED SITUATIONS
Mirrors contain great power but also dangerous reefs, including the mirrored situation—a situation that seems to reflect or closely resemble a previous one, mostly in style and surface appearance. You can often back into such a situation without fully understanding it, while those around you understand it quite well, and compare it and you to whatever happened before. Most often you suffer by the comparison, seeming either weaker than the previous occupant of your position or else tainted by any
unpleasant associations that person has left behind.
In 1864 the composer Richard Wagner moved to Munich at the behest of Ludwig II, known variously as the Swan King or the Mad King of Bavaria. Ludwig was Wagner’s biggest fan and most generous patron. The strength of his support turned Wagner’s head—once established in Munich under the king’s protection, he would be able to say and do whatever he wanted. Wagner moved into a lavish house, which the king eventually bought for him. This house was but a stone’s throw from the former home of Lola
Montez, the notorious courtesan who had plunged Ludwig II’s grandfather into a crisis that had forced him to abdicate. Warned that he could be infected by this association, Wagner only scoffed—“I am no Lola Montez,” he said.
Soon enough, however, the citizens of Munich began to resent the favors and money showered on Wagner, and dubbed him “the second Lola,” or “Lolotte.” He unconsciously began to tread in Lola’s footsteps— spending money extravagantly, meddling in matters beyond music, even dabbling in politics and advising the king on cabinet appointments.
Meanwhile Ludwig’s affection for Wagner seemed intense and undignified for a king—just like his grandfather’s love for Lola Montez.
Eventually Ludwig’s ministers wrote him a letter: “Your Majesty now stands at a fateful parting of the ways: you have to choose between the love and respect of your faithful people and the ‘friendship’ of Richard Wagner.”
In December of 1865, Ludwig politely asked his friend to leave and never return. Wagner had inadvertently placed himself in Lola Montez’s reflection. Once there, everything he did reminded the stolid Bavarians of that dread woman, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Avoid such association-effects like the plague. In a mirrored situation you have little or no control over the reflections and recollections that will be connected to you, and any situation beyond your control is dangerous. Even if the person or event has positive associations, you will suffer from not being able to live up to them, since the past generally appears greater than the present. If you ever notice people associating you with some past event or person, do everything you can to separate yourself from that memory and to shatter the reflection.
LAW 44
DISARM AND INFURIATE WITH THE MIRROR EFFECT
JUDGMENT
The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy. The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson. Few can resist the power of the Mirror Effect.
MIRROR EFFECTS: Preliminary Typology Mirrors have the power to disturb us. Gazing at our reflection in the mirror, we most often see what we want to see—the image of ourselves with which we are most comfortable. We tend not to look too closely, ignoring the wrinkles and blemishes. But if we do look hard at the reflected image, we sometimes feel that we are seeing ourselves as others see us, as a person among other people, an object rather than a subject. That feeling makes us shudder—we see ourselves, but from the outside, minus the thoughts, spirit,
and soul that fill our consciousness. We are a thing.
In using Mirror Effects we symbolically re-create this disturbing power by mirroring the actions of other people, mimicking their movements to unsettle and infuriate them. Made to feel mocked, cloned, objectlike, an image without a soul, they get angry.
Or do the same thing slightly differently and they might feel disarmed—you have perfectly reflected their wishes and desires. This is the narcissistic power of mirrors.
In either case, the Mirror Effect unsettles your targets, whether angering or entrancing them, and in that instant you have the power to manipulate or seduce them.
The Effect contains great power because it operates on the most primitive emotions.
There are four main Mirror Effects in the realm of power:
The Neutralizing Effect.
In ancient Greek mythology, the Gorgon Medusa had serpents for hair, protruding tongue, massive teeth, and a face so ugly that anyone who gazed at her was turned into stone, out of fright.
But the hero Perseus managed to slay Medusa by polishing his bronze shield into a mirror, then using the reflection in the mirror to guide him as he crept up and cut off her head without looking at her directly.
If the shield in this instance was a mirror, the mirror also was a kind of shield: Medusa could not see Perseus, she saw only her own reflected actions, and behind this screen the hero stole up and destroyed her.
This is the essence of the Neutralizing Effect: Do what your enemies do, following their actions as best you can, and they cannot see what you are up to—they are blinded by your mirror. Their strategy for dealing with you depends on your reacting to them in a way characteristic of you; neutralize it by playing a game of mimicry with them. The tactic has a mocking, even
infuriating effect.
Most of us remember the childhood experience of someone teasing us by repeating our words exactly—after a while, usually
not long, we wanted to punch them in the face.
Working more subtly as an adult, you can still unsettle your opponents this way; shielding your own strategy with the mirror, you lay invisible traps, or push your opponents into the trap they planned for you.
This powerful technique has been used in military strategy since the days of Sun-tzu; in our own time it often appears in political campaigning. It is also useful for disguising those situations in which you have no particular strategy yourself. This is the Warrior’s Mirror.
THE MERCHANT AND HIS FRIEND
A certain merchant once had a great desire to make a long journey. Now in regard that he was not very wealthy,
“It is requisite, ”said he to himself,
“that before my departure I should leave some part of my estate in the city, to the end that if I meet with ill luck in my travels, I may have wherewithal to keep me at my return.”
To this purpose he delivered a great number of bars of iron, which were a principal part of his wealth, in trust to one of his friends, desiring him to keep them during his absence; and then, taking his leave, away he went. Some time after, having had but ill luck in his travels, he returned home; and the first thing he did was to go to his friend, and demand his iron: but his friend, who owed several sums of money, having sold the iron to pay his own debts, made him this answer:
“Truly, friend,”said he,
“I put your iron into a room that was close locked, imagining it would have been there as secure as my own gold; but an accident has happened which no one could have suspected, for there was a
rat in the room which ate it all up.”
The merchant, pretending ignorance, replied, “It is a terrible misfortune to me indeed; but I know of old that rats love iron extremely; I have suffered by them many times before in the same manner, and therefore can the better bear my present affliction.”
This answer extremely pleased the friend, who was glad to hear the merchant so well inclined to believe that a rat had eaten his iron; and to remove all suspicions, desired him to dine with him the next day. The merchant promised he would, but in the meantime he met in the middle of the city one of his friend’s children; the child he carried home, and locked up in a room.
The next day he went to his friend, who seemed to be in great affliction, which he asked him the cause of, as if he had been perfectly ignorant of what had happened.
”O, my dear friend,” answered the other,
”I beg you to excuse me, if you do not see me so cheerful as otherwise I would be; I have lost one of my children; I have had him cried by sound of trumpet, but I know not what is become of him.”
“O!” replied the merchant,
”I am grieved to hear this; for yesterday in the evening, as I parted from hence, I saw an owl in the air with a child in his claws; but whether it were yours I cannot tell.”
“Why, you most foolish and absurd creature!” replied the friend, ”are you not ashamed to tell such an egregious lie? An owl, that weighs at most not above two or three pounds, can he carry a boy that weighs above fifty?”
”Why,” replied the merchant,
”do you make such a wonder at that?
As if in a country where one rat can eat a hundred tons’ weight of iron, it were such a wonder for an owl to carry a child that weighs
not over fifty pounds in all!” The friend, upon this, found that the merchant was no such fool as he took him to be, begged his pardon for the cheat which he designed to have put upon him, restored him the value of his iron, and so had his son again.
FABLES, PILPAY, INDIA, FOURTH CENTURY
A reverse version of the Neutralizing Effect is the Shadow: You shadow your opponents’ every move without their seeing you. Use the Shadow to gather information that will neutralize their strategy later on, when you will be able to thwart their every move. The Shadow is effective because to follow the movements of others is to gain valuable insights into their habits and routines.
The Shadow is the preeminent device for detectives and spies.
The Narcissus Effect. Gazing at an image in the waters of a pond, the Greek youth Narcissus fell in love with it. And when he found out that the image was his own reflection, and that he therefore could not consummate his love, he despaired and drowned himself.
All of us have a similar problem: We are profoundly in love with ourselves, but since this love excludes a love object outside ourselves, it remains continuously unsatisfied and unfulfilled.
The Narcissus Effect plays on this universal narcissism:
You look deep into the souls of other people; fathom their inmost desires, their values, their tastes, their spirit; and you reflect it back to them, making yourself into a kind of mirror image.
Your ability to reflect their psyche gives you great power over them; they may even feel a tinge of love. This is simply the ability to mimic another person not physically, but psychologically, and it is immensely powerful because it plays upon the unsatisfied self-love of a child. Normally, people bombard us with their experiences, their tastes. They hardly ever make the effort to see things through our eyes.
This is annoying, but it also creates great opportunity: If you can show you understand another person by reflecting their inmost
feelings, they will be entranced and disarmed, all the more so because it happens so rarely. No one can resist this feeling of being harmoniously reflected in the outside world, even though you might well be manufacturing it for their benefit, and for deceptive purposes of your own.
The Narcissus Effect works wonders in both social life and business; it gives us both the Seducer’s and the Courtier’s Mirror.
The Moral Effect The power of verbal argument is extremely limited, and often accomplishes the opposite of what is intended. As Gracián remarks, “The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.” The Moral Effect is a perfect way to demonstrate your ideas through action.
Quite simply, you teach others a lesson by giving them a taste of their own medicine.
In the Moral Effect, you mirror what other people have done to you, and do so in a way that makes them realize you are doing to them exactly what they did to you. You make them feel that their behavior has been unpleasant, as opposed to hearing you complain and whine about it, which only gets their defenses up. And as they feel the result of their actions mirrored back at them, they realize in the profoundest sense how they hurt or punish others with their unsocial behavior. You objectify the qualities
you want them to feel ashamed of and create a mirror in which they can gaze at their follies and learn a lesson about themselves. This technique is often used by educators, psychologists, and anyone who has to deal with unpleasant and unconscious behavior.
This is the Teacher’s Mirror. Whether or not there is actually anything wrong with the way people have treated
you, however, it can often be to your advantage to reflect it back to them in a way that makes them feel guilty about it.
The Hallucinatory Effect. Mirrors are tremendously deceptive, for they create a sense that you are looking at the real world. Actually, though, you are only staring at a piece of glass, which, as everyone knows, cannot show the world exactly as it is: Everything in a mirror is reversed. When Alice goes through the looking glass in Lewis Carroll’s book, she enters a world that is back-to-front, and more than just visually.
The Hallucinatory Effect comes from creating a perfect copy of an
object, a place, a person. This copy acts as a kind of dummy—people take it for the real thing, because it has the physical appearance of the real thing.
This is the preeminent technique of con artists, who strategically mimic the real world to deceive you. It also has applications in any arena that requires camouflage. This is the Deceiver’s Mirror.
OBSERVANCES OF MIRROR EFFECTS
Observance I
In February of 1815, the emperor Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba, where he had been imprisoned by the allied forces of Europe, and returned to Paris in a march that stirred the French nation, rallying troops and citizens of all classes to his side and chasing his successor, King Louis XVIII, off the throne.
By March, however, having reestablished himself in power, he had to face the fact that France’s situation had gravely changed.
The country was devastated, he had no allies among the other European nations, and his most loyal and important ministers had deserted him or left the country. Only one man remained from the old regime—Joseph Fouché, his former minister of police.
Napoleon had relied on Fouché to do his dirty work throughout his previous reign, but he had never been able to figure his minister out. He kept a corps of agents to spy on all of his ministers, so that he would always have an edge on them, but no one had gotten anything on Fouché. If suspected of some misdeed, the minister would not get angry or take the accusation personally—he would submit, nod, smile, and change colors
chameleonlike, adapting to the requirements of the moment.
At first this had seemed somewhat pleasant and charming, but after a while it frustrated Napoleon, who felt outdone by this slippery man. At one time or another he had fired all of his most important ministers, including Talleyrand, but he never touched Fouché. And so, in 1815, back in power and in need of help, he felt he had no choice but to reappoint Fouché as his minister of police.
When you have come to grips and are striving together with the enemy, and you realize that you cannot advance, you “soak in” and become one with the enemy. You can win by applying a suitable technique while you are mutually entangled. ... You can win often decisively with the advantage of knowing how to “soak” into the enemy, whereas, were you to draw apart, you would lose the chance to win.
A BOOK OF FIVE RINGS, MIYAMOTO MUSASHI, JAPAN,
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Several weeks into his new reign, Napoleon’s spies told him they
believed Fouché was in secret contact with ministers of foreign countries, including Metternich of Austria. Afraid that his most valuable minister was betraying him to his enemies, Napoleon had to find out the truth before it was too late. He could not confront Fouché directly—in person the man was as slippery as an eel. He needed hard proof. This seemed to come in April, when the emperor’s private police captured a Viennese gentleman who had come to Paris to pass information on to Fouché. Ordering the man brought before him, Napoleon threatened to shoot him then and there unless he confessed; the man broke down and admitted he had given Fouché a letter from Metternich, written in invisible ink, arranging for a secret meeting of special agents in Basel. Napoleon accordingly ordered one of his own agents to infiltrate this meeting. If Fouché was indeed planning to betray him, he would finally be caught redhanded and would hang.
Napoleon waited impatiently for the agent’s return, but to his
bewilderment the agent showed up days later reporting that he had heard nothing that would implicate Fouché in a conspiracy.
In fact it seemed that the other agents present suspected Fouché of double-crossing them, as if he were working for Napoleon all along. Napoleon did not believe this for an instant—Fouché had somehow outwitted him again.
The following morning Fouché visited Napoleon, and remarked, “By the way, sire, I never told you that I had a letter from Metternich a few days ago; my mind was so full of things of greater moment. Besides, his emissary omitted to give me the powder needed to make the writing legible.... Here at length is the letter.”
Sure that Fouché was toying with him,
Napoleon exploded, “You are a traitor, Fouché! I ought to have you hanged.”
He continued to harangue Fouché, but could not fire him without
proof. Fouché only expressed amazement at the emperor’s words, but inwardly he smiled, for all along he had been playing a mirroring game.
Interpretation
Fouché had known for years that Napoleon kept on top of those around him by spying on them day and night. The minister had survived this game by having his own spies spy on Napoleon’s spies, thus neutralizing any action Napoleon might take against him. In the case of the meeting in Basel, he even turned the tables: Knowing about Napoleon’s double agent, he set it up
so that it would appear as if Fouché were a loyal double agent too. Fouché gained power and flourished in a period of great tumult by mirroring those around him.
During the French Revolution he was a radical Jacobin; after the Terror he became a moderate republican; and under Napoleon he became a committed imperialist whom Napoleon ennobled and made the duke of Otranto. If Napoleon took up the weapon of digging up dirt on people, Fouché made sure he had the dirt on Napoleon, as well as on everyone else. This also allowed him to predict the emperor’s plans and desires, so that he could echo his boss’s sentiments before he had even uttered them. Shielding his actions with a mirror strategy, Fouché could also plot offensive moves without being caught in the act.
THE FOX AND THE STORK
One day Mr. Fox decided to fork out And invite old Mrs. Stork out. The dinner wasn’t elaborate—Being habitually mean, He didn’t go in for haute cuisine-In fact it consisted of a shallow plate of thin gruel. Within a minute our joker had lapped his plate clean; Meanwhile his guest, fishing away with her beak, got not a morsel in it. To pay him back for this cruel practical joke, the stork invited the fox to dinner the following week.
“I should be delighted,” He replied;
“When it comes to friends I never stand upon pride.”
Punctually on the day he ran to his hostess’s house and at once began praising everything: “What taste! What chic! And the food— done just to a turn!”
Then sat down with a hearty appetite (Foxes are always ready to eat) And savored the delicious smell of meat. It was minced
meat and served—to serve him right!-In a long-necked, narrow-mouthed urn. The stork, easily stooping, enjoyed her fill With her long bill; His snout, though, being the wrong shape and size, he had to return to his den empty-bellied, tail dragging, ears drooping, as red in the face as a fox who’s been caught by a hen.
SELECTED FABLES, JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, 1621-1695
This is the power of mirroring those around you.
First, you give people the feeling that you share their thoughts and goals.
Second, if they suspect you have ulterior motives, the mirror shields you from them, preventing them from figuring out your strategy. Eventually this will infuriate and unsettle them.
By playing the double, you steal their thunder, suck away their initiative, make them feel helpless. You also gain the ability to choose when and how to unsettle them—another avenue to power. And the mirror saves you mental energy: simply echoing the moves of others gives you the space you need to develop a strategy of your own.
Observance II
Early on in his career, the ambitious statesman and general Alcibiades of Athens (450-404 B.C.) fashioned a formidable weapon that became the source of his power. In every encounter with others, he would sense their moods and tastes, then carefully tailor his words and actions to mirror their inmost desires. He would seduce them with the idea that their values were superior to everyone else’s, and that his goal was to model himself on them or help them realize their dreams. Few could resist his charm.
The first man to fall under his spell was the philosopher Socrates.
Alcibiades represented the opposite of the Socratic ideal of simplicity and uprightness: He lived lavishly and was completely unprincipled. Whenever he met Socrates, however, he mirrored the older man’s sobriety, eating simply, accompanying Socrates on long walks, and talking only of philosophy and virtue. Socrates was not completely fooled—he was not unaware of Alcibiades’ other life.
But that only made him vulnerable to a logic that flattered him: Only in my presence, he felt, does this man submit to a virtuous influence; only I have such power over him. This feeling intoxicated Socrates, who became Alcibiades’ fervent admirer and supporter, one day even risking his own life to rescue the young man in battle.
The Athenians considered Alcibiades their greatest orator, for he had an uncanny ability to tune in to his audience’s aspirations, and mirror their desires. He made his greatest speeches in support of the invasion of Sicily, which he thought would bring great wealth to Athens and limitless glory to himself. The speeches gave expression to young Athenians’ thirst to conquer lands for themselves, rather than living off the victories of their ancestors. But he also tailored his words to reflect older men’s nostalgia for
the glory years when Athens led the Greeks against Persia, and then went on to create an empire. All Athens now dreamed of conquering Sicily; Alcibiades’ plan was approved, and he was made the expedition’s commander.
THE PURLOINED LETTER
When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.
EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1809-1849
While Alcibiades was leading the invasion of Sicily, however, certain Athenians fabricated charges against him of profaning sacred statues.
He knew his enemies would have him executed if he returned home, so at the last minute he deserted the Athenian fleet and defected to Athens’s bitter enemy, Sparta.
The Spartans welcomed this great man to their side, but they knew his reputation and were wary of him.
Alcibiades loved luxury; the Spartans were a warrior people who worshipped austerity, and they were afraid he would corrupt their youth. But much to their relief, the Alcibiades who arrived in Sparta was not at all what they expected: He wore his hair untrimmed (as they did), took cold baths, ate coarse bread and black broth, and wore simple clothes.
To the Spartans this signified that he had come to see their way of life as superior to the Athenian; greater than they were, he had chosen to be a Spartan rather than being born one, and should thus be honored above all others. They fell under his spell and gave him great powers.
Unfortunately Alcibiades rarely knew how to rein in his charm—he managed to seduce the king of Sparta’s wife and make her pregnant. When this became public he once more had to flee for his life.
This time Alcibiades defected to Persia, where he suddenly went from Spartan simplicity to embracing the lavish Persian lifestyle down to the last detail. It was of course immensely flattering to the Persians to see a Greek of Alcibiades’ stature prefer their culture over his own, and they showered him with honors, land, and power. Once seduced by the mirror, they failed to notice that behind this shield Alcibiades was playing a double game, secretly helping the Athenians in their war with Sparta and thus reingratiating himself with the city to which he desperately wanted to return, and which welcomed him back with open arms in 408 B.C.
Interpretation
Early in his political career, Alcibiades made a discovery that changed his whole approach to power: He had a colorful and forceful personality, but when he argued his ideas strongly with other people he would win over a few while at the same time alienating many more.
The secret to gaining ascendancy over large numbers, he came to believe, was not to impose his colors but to absorb the colors of those around him, like a chameleon. Once people fell for the trick, the deceptions he went on to practice would be invisible to them.
Understand: Everyone is wrapped up in their own narcissistic shell. When you try to impose your own ego on them, a wall goes up, resistance is increased.
By mirroring them, however, you seduce them into a kind of
narcissistic rapture: They are gazing at a double of their own soul. This double is actually manufactured in its entirety by you.
Once you have used the mirror to seduce them, you have great power over them.
It is worth noting, however, the dangers in the promiscuous use of the mirror.
In Alcibiades’ presence people felt larger, as if their egos had been doubled. But once he left, they felt empty and diminished, and when they saw him mirroring completely different people as totally as he had mirrored them, they felt not just diminished but betrayed. Alcibiades’ overuse of the Mirror Effect made whole peoples feel used, so that he constantly had to flee from one place to another. Indeed Alcibiades so angered the Spartans
that they finally had him murdered. He had gone too far. The Seducer’s Mirror must be used with caution and discrimination.
LORENZO DE’ MEDICI SEDUCES THE POPE
Lorenzo [de’ Medici] lost no opportunity of increasing the respect which Pope Innocent now felt for him and of gaining his friendship, if possible his affection. He took the trouble to discover the Pope’s tastes and indulged them accordingly. He sent him... casks of his favourite wine.... He sent him courteous, flattering letters in which he assured him, when the Pope was ill,
that he felt his sufferings as though they were his own, in which he encouraged him with such fortifying statements as
“a Pope is what he wills to be,”
and in which, as though incidentally, he included his views on the
proper course of papal policies. Innocent was gratified by Lorenzo’s attentions and convinced by his arguments.... So completely, indeed, did he come to share his opinions that, as the disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador put it, “the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo.”
THE HOUSE OF MEDICI: ITS RISE AND FALL, CHRISTOPHER
HIBBERT, 1980
Observance III
In 1652 the recently widowed Baroness Mancini moved her family from Rome to Paris, where she could count on the influence and protection of her brother Cardinal Mazarin, the French prime minister. Of the baroness’s five daughters, four dazzled the court with their beauty and high spirits. These infamously charming nieces of Cardinal Mazarin became known as the Mazarinettes, and soon found themselves invited to all the most important
court functions. One daughter, Marie Mancini, did not share this good fortune, for she lacked the beauty and grace of her sisters—who, along with her mother and even Cardinal Mazarin, eventually came to dislike her, for they felt she spoiled the family image. They tried to persuade her to enter a convent, where she would be less of an embarrassment, but she refused. Instead she
applied herself to her studies, learning Latin and Greek, perfecting her French, and practicing her musical skills. On the rare occasions when the family would let her attend court affairs, she trained herself to be an artful listener, sizing people up for their weaknesses and hidden desires. And when she finally met the future King Louis XIV, in 1657 (Louis was seventeen years old, Marie eighteen), she decided that to spite her family and uncle, she would find a way to make this young man fall in love with
her.
This was a seemingly impossible task for such a plain-looking girl, but Marie studied the future king closely. She noticed that her sisters’ frivolity did not please him, and she sensed that he loathed the scheming and petty politicking that went on all around him. She saw that he had a romantic nature—he read adventure novels, insisted on marching at the head of his armies, and had high ideals and a passion for glory. The court did not feed
these fantasies of his; it was a banal, superficial world that bored him.
The key to Louis’s heart, Marie saw, would be to construct a mirror reflecting his fantasies and his youthful yearnings for glory and romance.
To begin with she immersed herself in the romantic novels, poems, and plays that she knew the young king read voraciously. When Louis began to engage her in conversation, to his delight she would talk of the things that stirred his soul—not this fashion or that piece of gossip, but rather courtly love, the deeds of great knights, the nobility of past kings and heroes.
She fed his thirst for glory by creating an image of an august, superior king whom he could aspire to become. She stirred his imagination.
As the future Sun King spent more and more time in Marie’s presence, it eventually became clear that he had fallen in love with the least likely young woman of the court.
To the horror of her sisters and mother, he showered Marie Mancini with attention. He brought her along on his military campaigns, and made a show of stationing her where she could
watch as he marched into battle. He even promised Marie that he would marry her and make her queen.
Wittgenstein had an extraordinary gift for divining the thoughts of the person with whom he was engaged in discussion. While the other struggled to put his thought into words, Wittgenstein would perceive what it was and state it for him. This power of his, which sometimes seemed uncanny, was made possible, I am sure, by his own prolonged and continuous researches.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: A MEMOIR. NORMAN MALCOLM, 1958
The doctor should be opaque to his patients, and like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
SIGMUND FREUD, 1856-1939
Mazarin, however, would never allow the king to marry his niece, a woman who could bring France no diplomatic or royal alliances. Louis had to marry a princess of Spain or Austria. In 1658 Louis succumbed to the pressure and agreed to break off the first romantic involvement of his life. He did so with much regret, and at the end of his life he acknowledged that he never loved anyone as much as Marie Mancini.
Interpretation
Marie Mancini played the seducer’s game to perfection.
First, she took a step back, to study her prey.
Seduction often fails to get past the first step because it is too aggressive; the first move must always be a retreat.
By studying the king from a distance Marie saw what distinguished him from others—his high ideals, romantic nature, and snobbish disdain for petty politics.
Marie’s next step was to make a mirror for these hidden yearnings on Louis’s part, letting him glimpse what he himself could be—a godlike king!
This mirror had several functions: Satisfying Louis’s ego by giving him a double to look at, it also focused on him so exclusively as to give him the feeling that Marie existed for him alone. Surrounded by a pack of scheming courtiers who only had their own self-interest at heart, he could not fail to be touched by this devotional focus.
Finally Marie’s mirror set up an ideal for him to live up to:
the noble knight of the medieval court. To a soul both romantic and ambitious, nothing could be more intoxicating than to have
someone hold up an idealized reflection of him. In effect it was Marie Mancini who created the image of the Sun King—indeed Louis later admitted the enormous part she had played in fashioning his radiant selfimage.
This is the power of the Seducer’s Mirror: By doubling the tastes and ideals of the target, it shows your attention to his or her psychology, an attention more charming than any aggressive pursuit.
Find out what sets the other person apart, then hold up the mirror that will reflect it and bring it out of them. Feed their fantasies of power and greatness by reflecting their ideals, and they will succumb.
Observance IV
In 1538, with the death of his mother, Helena, the eight-year-old future czar Ivan IV (or Ivan the Terrible) of Russia became an orphan. For the next five years he watched as the princely class, the boyars, terrorized the country.
Now and then, to mock the young Ivan, they would make him wear a crown and scepter and place him on the throne. When the little boy’s feet dangled over the edge of the chair, they would laugh and lift him off it, handing him from man to man in the air, making him feel his helplessness compared to them.
When Ivan was thirteen, he boldly murdered the boyar leader and
ascended to the throne. For the next few decades he struggled to subdue the boyars’ power, but they continued to defy him. By 1575 his efforts to transform Russia and defeat its enemies had exhausted him.
Meanwhile, his subjects were complaining bitterly about his endless wars, his secret police, the unvanquished and oppressive boyars. His own ministers began to question his moves.
Finally he had had enough.
In 1564 he had temporarily abandoned the throne, forcing his subjects to call him back to power. Now he took the strategy a step further, and abdicated.
To take his place Ivan elevated a general of his, Simeon Bekbulatovich, to the throne. But although Simeon had recently converted to Christianity, he was by birth a Tartar, and his enthronement was an insult to Ivan’s subjects, since Russians looked down on the Tartars as inferiors and infidels.
Yet Ivan ordered that all Russians, including the boyars, pledge
obedience to their new ruler. And while Simeon moved into the Kremlin, Ivan lived in a humble house on Moscow’s outskirts, from which he would sometimes visit the palace, bow before the throne, sit among the other boyars, and humbly petition Simeon for favors.
Over time it became clear that Simeon was a kind of king’s double. He dressed like Ivan, and acted like Ivan, but he had no real power, since no one would really obey him. The boyars at the court who were old enough to remember taunting Ivan when he was a boy, by placing him on the throne, saw the connection:
They had made Ivan feel like a weak pretender, so now he mirrored them by placing a weak pretender of his own on the throne.
For two long years Ivan held the mirror of Simeon up to the Russian people.
The mirror said: Your whining and disobedience have made me a
czar with no real power, so I will reflect back to you a czar with no real power. You have treated me disrespectfully, so I will do the same to you, making Russia the laughingstock of the world.
In 1577, in the name of the Russian people, the chastised boyars once again begged Ivan to return to the throne, which he did. He lived as czar until his death, in 1584, and the conspiracies, complaining, and second-guessing disappeared along with Simeon.
Interpretation
In 1564, after threatening to abdicate, Ivan had been granted absolute powers. But these powers had slowly been chipped away as every sector of society—the boyars, the church, the government—vied for more control.
Foreign wars had exhausted the country, internal bickering had increased, and Ivan’s attempts to respond had been met with scorn. Russia had turned into a kind of boisterous classroom in which the pupils laughed openly at the teacher. If he raised his voice or complained, he only met more resistance. He had to teach them a lesson, give them a taste of their own medicine. Simeon Bekbulatovich was the mirror he used to do so.
After two years in which the throne had been an object of ridicule and disgust, the Russian people learned their lesson. They wanted their czar back, conceding to him all the dignity and respect that the position should always have commanded.
For the rest of his reign, Russia and Ivan got along fine.
Understand: People are locked in their own experiences. When you whine about some insensitivity on their part, they may seem to understand, but inwardly they are untouched and even more resistant.
The goal of power is always to lower people’s resistance to you. For this you need tricks, and one trick is to teach them a lesson.
Instead of haranguing people verbally, then, create a kind of mirror of their behavior. In doing so you leave them two choices: They can ignore you, or they can start to think about themselves. And even if they ignore you, you will have planted a seed in their unconscious that will eventually take root.
When you mirror their behavior, incidentally, do not be afraid to add a touch of caricature and exaggeration, as Ivan did by enthroning a Tartar—it is the little spice in the soup that will open their eyes and make them see the ridiculousness in their own actions.
Observance V
Dr. Milton H. Erickson, a pioneer in strategic psychotherapy, would often educate his patients powerfully but indirectly by creating a kind of mirror effect.
Constructing an analogy to make patients see the truth on their own, he would bypass their resistance to change. When Dr. Erickson treated married couples complaining of sexual problems, for instance, he often found that psychotherapy’s tradition of direct confrontation and problemairing only heightened the spouses’ resistance and sharpened their differences.
Instead, he would draw a husband and wife out on other topics,
often banal ones, trying to find an analogy for the sexual conflict.
In one couple’s first session, the pair were discussing their eating habits, especially at dinner. The wife preferred the leisurely approach—a drink before the meal, some appetizers, and then a small main course, all at a slow, civilized pace. This frustrated the husband—he wanted to get dinner over quickly and to dig right into the main course, the bigger the better.
As the conversation continued, the couple began to catch glimpses of an analogy to their problems in bed.
The moment they made this connection, however, Dr. Erickson would change the subject, carefully avoiding a discussion of the real problem.
The couple thought Erickson was just getting to know them and would deal with the problem directly the next time he saw them. But at the end of this first session, Dr. Erickson directed them to arrange a dinner a few nights away that would combine each person’s desire: The wife would get the slow meal, including time spent bonding, and the husband would get the big dishes he wanted to eat. Without realizing they were acting under the
doctor’s gentle guidance, the couple would walk into a mirror of their problem, and in the mirror they would solve their problems themselves, ending the evening just as the doctor had hoped—by mirroring the improved dinner dynamics in bed.
In dealing with more severe problems, such as the schizophrenic’s mirror fantasy world of his or her own construction, Dr. Erickson would always try to enter the mirror and work within it. He once treated a hospital inmate who believed he was Jesus Christ—draping sheets around his body, talking in vague parables, and bombarding staff and patients with endless Christian proselytizing.
No therapy or drugs seemed to work, until one day Dr. Erickson went up to the young man and said, “I understand you have had
experience as a carpenter.” Being Christ, the patient had to say that he had had such experience, and Erickson immediately put him to work building bookcases and other useful items, allowing him to wear his Jesus garb.
Over the next weeks, as the patient worked on these projects, his mind became less occupied with Jesus fantasies and more focused on his labor.
As the carpentry work took precedence, a psychic shift took effect: The religious fantasies remained, but faded comfortably into the background, allowing the man to function in society.
Interpretation
Communication depends on metaphors and symbols, which are the basis of language itself. A metaphor is a kind of mirror to the concrete and real, which it often expresses more clearly and deeply than a literal description does. When you are dealing with the intractable willpower of other people, direct communication often only heightens their resistance.
This happens most clearly when you complain about people’s behavior, particularly in sensitive areas such as their lovemaking. You will effect a far more lasting change if, like Dr. Erickson, you construct an analogy, a symbolic mirror of the situation, and guide the other through it. As Christ himself understood, talking in parables is often the best way to teach a lesson, for it allows people to realize the truth on their own.
When dealing with people who are lost in the reflections of fantasy worlds (including a host of people who do not live in mental hospitals), never try to push them into reality by shattering their mirrors. Instead, enter their world and operate inside it, under their rules, gently guiding them out of the hall of mirrors they have entered.
Observance VI
The great sixteenth-century Japanese tea master Takeno Sho-o once passed by a house and noticed a young man watering flowers near his front gate.
Two things caught Sho-o’s attention—
first, the graceful way the man performed his task; and,
second, the stunningly beautiful rose of Sharon blossoms that bloomed in the garden. He stopped and introduced himself to
the man, whose name was Sen no Rikyu. Sho-o wanted to stay, but he had a prior engagement and had to hurry off.
