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.
Background "extras". paid $8-$12 an. paid $8-$12 an.
LAW 43
WORK ON THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF OTHERS
JUDGMENT
Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to
hate you.
CYRUS’S RUSE
Thinking of the means by which he could most effectively persuade the Persians to revolt, [Cyrus’s] deliberations led him to adopt the following plan, which he found best suited to his purpose. He wrote on a roll of parchment that Astyages had appointed him to command the Persian army; then he summoned an assembly of the Persians, opened the roll in their presence and read out what he had written.
“And now, he added, I have an order for you: every man is to appear on parade with a billhook....”
The order was obeyed. All the men assembled with their billhooks, and Cyrus’s next command was that before the day was out they should clear a certain piece of rough land full of thorn-bushes, about eighteen or twenty furlongs square. This too was done, whereupon Cyrus issued the further order that they should present themselves again on the following day, after having
taken a bath.
Meanwhile, Cyrus collected and slaughtered all his father’s goats, sheep, and oxen in preparation for entertaining the whole Persian
army at a banquet, together with the best wine and bread he could procure.
The next day the guests assembled, and were told to sit down on the grass and enjoy themselves. After the meal Cyrus asked them which they preferred —yesterday’s work or today’s amusement; and they replied that it was indeed a far cry from the previous day’s misery to their present pleasures.
This was the answer which Cyrus wanted; he seized upon it at once and proceeded to lay bare what he had in mind.
“Men of Persia,” he said,
“listen to me: obey my orders, and you will be able to enjoy a thousand pleasures as good as this without ever turning your hands to menial labor; but, if you disobey, yesterday’s task will be the pattern of innumerable others you will be forced to perform. Take my advice and win your freedom. I am the man destined to undertake your liberation, and it is my belief that you are a match for the Medes in war as in everything else. It is the truth I tell you. Do not delay, but fling off the yoke of Astyages at once.”
The Persians had long resented their subjection to the Medes. At last they had found a leader, and welcomed with enthusiasm the prospect of liberty....
On the present occasion the Persians under Cyrus rose against the Medes and from then onwards were masters of Asia.
THE HISTORIES, HERODOTUS, FIFTH CENTURY B.C..
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Near the end of the reign of Louis XV, all of France seemed desperate for change. When the king’s grandson and chosen successor, the future Louis XVI, married the fifteen-year-old daughter of the empress of Austria, the French caught a glimpse of the future that seemed hopeful. The young bride, Marie-Antoinette, was beautiful and full of life. She instantly changed the mood of the court, which was rank with Louis XV’s de
baucheries; even the common people, who had yet to see her, talked excitedly of Marie-Antoinette. The French had grown disgusted with the series of mistresses who had dominated Louis XV, and they looked forward to serving their new queen. In 1773, when Marie-Antoinette publicly rode through the streets of Paris for the first time, applauding crowds swarmed around her carriage.
“How fortunate,” she wrote her mother,
“to be in a position in which one can gain widespread affection at so little cost.”
In 1774 Louis XV died and Louis XVI took the throne. As soon as
Marie-Antoinette became queen she abandoned herself to the pleasures she loved the most—ordering and wearing the most expensive gowns and jewelry in the realm; sporting the most elaborate hair in history, her sculpted coiffures rising as much as three feet above her head; and throwing a constant succession of masked balls and fêtes. All of these whims she paid for on credit, never concerning herself with the cost or who paid the bills.
Marie-Antoinette’s greatest pleasure was the creation and designing of a private Garden of Eden at the Petit Trianon, a château on the grounds of Versailles with its own woods. The gardens at the Petit Trianon were to be as “natural” as possible, including moss applied by hand to the trees and rocks. To heighten the pastoral effect, the queen employed peasant
milkmaids to milk the finest-looking cows in the realm; launderers and cheese-makers in special peasant outfits she helped design; shepherds to tend sheep with silk ribbons around their necks. When she inspected the barns, she would watch her milkmaids squeezing milk into porcelain vases made at the royal ceramic works. To pass the time, Marie-Antoinette would gather flowers in the woods around the Petit Trianon, or watch her “good peasants” doing their “chores.” The place became a separate world, its community limited to her chosen favorites. With each new whim, the cost of maintaining the Petit Trianon soared.
Meanwhile, France itself was deteriorating: There was famine and
widespread discontent. Even socially insulated courtiers seethed with resentment—the queen treated them like children. Only her favorites mattered, and these were becoming fewer and fewer. But Marie-Antoinette did not concern herself with this. Not once throughout her reign did she read a minister’s report. Not once did she tour the provinces and rally the people to her side. Not once did she mingle among the Parisians, or receive a delegation from them. She did none of these things because as queen she
felt the people owed her their affection, and she was not required to love them in return.
In 1784 the queen became embroiled in a scandal. As part of an elaborate swindle, the most expensive diamond necklace in Europe had been purchased under her name,
and during the swindlers’ trial her lavish lifestyle became public: People heard about the money she spent on jewels and dresses and masked dances. They gave her the nickname “Madame
Deficit,” and from then on she became the focus of the people’s growing resentment. When she appeared in her box at the opera the audience greeted her with hisses. Even the court turned against her. For while she had been running up her huge expenditures, the country was headed for ruin
Five years later, in 1789, an unprecedented event took place:
the beginning of the French Revolution. The queen did not worry—let the people have their little rebellion, she seemed to think; it would soon quiet down and she would be able to resume her life of pleasure. That year the people marched on Versailles, forcing the royal family to quit the palace and take residence in Paris. This was a triumph for the rebels, but it offered the queen an opportunity to heal the wounds she had opened and establish
contact with the people. The queen, however, had not learned her lesson: Not once would she leave the palace during her stay in Paris. Her subjects could rot in hell for all she cared.
In 1792 the royal couple was moved from the palace to a prison, as the revolution officially declared the end of the monarchy. The following year Louis XVI was tried, found guilty, and guillotined. As Marie-Antoinette awaited the same fate, hardly a soul came to her defense—not one of her former friends in the court, not one of Europe’s other monarchs (who, as members of their own countries’ royal families, had all the reason in the world to show that revolution did not pay), not even her own family in Austria, including her brother, who now sat on the throne. She had become the world’s pariah.
In October of 1793, she finally knelt at the guillotine, unrepentant and defiant to the bitter end.
Interpretation
From early on, Marie-Antoinette acquired the most dangerous of attitudes: As a young princess in Austria she was endlessly flattered and cajoled. As the future queen of the French court she was the center of everyone’s attention. She never learned to charm or please other people, to become attuned to their individual psychologies. She never had to work to get her way, to use calculation or cunning or the arts of persuasion. And like
everyone who is indulged from an early age, she evolved into a monster of insensitivity.
Marie-Antoinette became the focus of an entire country’s dissatisfaction because it is so infuriating to meet with a person who makes no effort to seduce you or attempt to persuade you, even if only for the purpose of deception. And do not imagine that she represents a bygone era, or that she is even rare. Her type is today more common than ever. Such types live in their own bubble—they seem to feel they are born kings and queens, and that attention is owed them. They do not consider anyone else’s nature, but bulldoze over people with the self-righteous arrogance of a MarieAntoinette. Pampered and indulged as children, as adults they still believe that everything must come to them; convinced of their own charm, they make no effort to charm, seduce, or gently persuade.
In the realm of power, such attitudes are disastrous. At all times you must attend to those around you, gauging their particular psychology, tailoring your words to what you know will entice and seduce them. This requires energy and art. The higher your station, the greater the need to remain attuned to the hearts and minds of those below you, creating a base of support to maintain you at the pinnacle. Without that base, your power will teeter, and at the slightest change of fortune those below will gladly assist in your fall from grace.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
In A.D. 225, Chuko Liang, master strategist and chief minister to the ruler of Shu in ancient China, confronted a dangerous situation. The kingdom of Wei had mounted an all-out attack on Shu from the north. More dangerous still, Wei had formed an alliance with the barbarous states to the south of Shu, led by King Menghuo. Chuko Liang had to deal with this second menace from the south before he could hope to fend off Wei in the north.
As Chuko Liang prepared to march south against the barbarians, a wise man in his camp offered him advice. It would be impossible, this man said, to pacify the region by force. Liang would probably beat Menghuo, but as soon as he headed north again to deal with Wei, Menghuo would reinvade.
“It is better to win hearts,” said the wise man,
“than cities; better to battle with hearts than with weapons. I hope you will succeed in winning the hearts of these people.” “You read my thoughts,” responded Chuko Liang.
THE GENTLE ART OF PERSUASION
The north wind and the sun were disputing which was the stronger, and agreed to acknowledge as the victor whichever of them could strip a traveler of his clothing. The wind tried first. But its violent gusts only made the man hold his clothes tightly around him, and when it blew harder still the cold made him so uncomfortable that he put on an extra wrap.
Eventually the wind got tired of it and handed him over to the sun. The sun shone first with a moderate warmth, which made the man take off his topcoat. Then it blazed fiercely, till, unable to stand the heat, he stripped and went off to bathe in a nearby river. Persuasion is more effective than force.
FABLES, AESOP, SIXTH CENTURY B.C.
As Liang expected, Menghuo launched a powerful attack. But Liang laid a trap and managed to capture a large part of Menghuo’s army, including the king himself.
Instead of punishing or executing his prisoners, however, he separated the soldiers from their king, had their shackles removed, regaled them with food and wine, and then addressed them.
“You are all upright men,” he said.
“I believe you all have parents, wives, and children waiting for you at home. They are doubtless shedding bitter tears at your fate. I am going to release you, so that you can return home to your loved ones and comfort them.”
The men thanked Liang with tears in their eyes; then he sent for Menghuo.
“If I release you,” asked Liang, “what will you do?”
“I will pull my army together again,” answered the king,
“and lead it against you to a decisive battle. But if you capture me a second time, I will bow to your superiority.”
Not only did Liang order Menghuo released, he gave him a gift of a horse and saddle. When angry lieutenants wondered why he did this,
Liang told them, “I can capture that man as easily as I can take something out of my pocket. I am trying to win his heart. When I do, peace will come of itself here in the south.”
As Menghuo had said he would, he attacked again. But his own officers, whom Liang had treated so well, rebelled against him, captured him, and turned him over to Liang, who asked him again the same question as before.
Menghuo replied that he had not been beaten fairly, but merely betrayed by his own officers; he would fight again, but if captured a third time he would bow to Liang’s superiority.
Over the following months Liang outwitted Menghuo again and again, capturing him a third, a fourth, and a fifth time.
On each occasion Menghuo’s troops grew more dissatisfied. Liang had treated them with respect; they had lost their heart for fighting. But every time Chuko Liang asked Menghuo to yield,
the great king would come up with another excuse: You tricked me, I lost through bad luck, on and on. If you capture me again, he would promise, I swear I will not betray you.
And so Liang would let him go.
When he captured Menghuo for the sixth time, he asked the king the same question again.
“If you capture me a seventh time,” the king replied,
“I shall give you my loyalty and never rebel again.”
“Very well,” said Liang.
“But if I capture you again, I will not release you.”
Now Menghuo and his soldiers fled to a far corner of their kingdom, the region of Wuge. Defeated so many times, Menghuo had only one hope left: He would ask the help of King Wutugu of Wuge, who had an immense and ferocious army. Wutugu’s warriors wore an armor of tightly woven vines soaked in oil, then dried to an impenetrable hardness. With Menghuo at his side, Wutugu marched this mighty army against Liang, and this time the great strategist seemed frightened, leading his men in a hurried retreat. But he was merely leading Wutugu into a trap: He cornered the king’s men in a narrow valley, then lit fires set all around them. When the fires reached the soldiers Wutugu’s whole army burst into flame—the oil in their armor, of course, being highly flammable. All of them perished. Liang had managed to separate Menghuo and his entourage from the carnage in the valley, and the king found himself a captive for the seventh time. After this slaughter Liang could not bear to face his prisoner again.
He sent a messenger to the captured king:
“He has commissioned me to release you. Mobilize another army against him, if you can, and try once more to defeat him.” Sobbing, the king fell to the ground, crawled to Liang on his
hands and knees, and prostrated himself at his feet.
“Oh great minister,” cried Menghuo,
“yours is the majesty of Heaven. We men of the south will
never again offer resistance to your rule.”
“Do you now yield?” asked Liang.
“I, my sons, and my grandsons are deeply moved by Your Honor’s
boundless, life-giving mercy. How could we not yield?” Liang honored Menghuo with a great banquet, reestablished him on the throne, restored his conquered lands to his rule, then returned north with his army, leaving no occupying force. Liang never came back—he had no need to: Menghuo had become his most devoted and unshakable ally.
The men who have changed the universe have never gotten there by working on leaders, but rather by moving the masses. Working on leaders is the method of intrigue and only leads to secondary results. Working on the masses, however, is the stroke of genius that changes the face of the world.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821
LIFE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
This long and painful pursuit of Darius—for in eleven days he marched 33 hundred furlongs—harassed his soldiers so that most of them were ready to give it up, chiefly for want of water. While they were in this distress, it happened that some Macedonians who had fetched water in skins upon their mules from a river they had found out came about noon to the place where Alexander was, and seeing him almost choked with thirst, presently filled a helmet and offered it him.... Then he took the helmet into his hands, and looking round about, when he saw all those who were near him stretching their heads out and looking earnestly after the drink, he returned it again with thanks without tasting a drop of it.
“For,” said he,
“if I alone should drink, the rest will be out of heart.”
The soldiers no sooner took notice of his temperance and magnanimity upon this occasion, but they one and all cried out to him to lead them forward boldly, and began whipping on their horses. For whilst they had such a king they said they defied both
weariness and thirst, and looked upon themselves to be little less than immortal.
THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT, PLUTARCH, C. A.D. 46-120
Interpretation
Chuko Liang had two options: Try to defeat the barbarians in the south with one crushing blow, or patiently and slowly win them to his side over time.
Most people more powerful than their enemy grab the first option and never consider the second, but the truly powerful think far ahead:
The first option may be quick and easy, but over time it brews ugly emotions in the hearts of the vanquished.
Their resentment turns to hatred; such animosity keeps you on edge—you spend your energy protecting what you have gained, growing paranoid and defensive.
The second option, though more difficult, not only brings you peace of mind, it converts a potential enemy into a pillar of support.
In all your encounters, take a step back—take the time to calculate and attune yourself to your targets’ emotional makeup and psychological weaknesses. Force will only strengthen their resistance.
With most people the heart is the key: They are like children, ruled by their emotions. To soften them up, alternate harshness with mercy. Play on their basic fears, and also their loves freedom, family, etc. Once you break them down, you will have a lifelong friend and fiercely loyal ally.
Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but individuals.... Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence, 1888-1935
KEYS TO POWER
In the game of power, you are surrounded by people who have absolutely no reason to help you unless it is in their interest to do so. And if you have nothing to offer their self-interest, you are likely to make them hostile,
for they will see in you just one more competitor, one more waster of their time. Those that overcome this prevailing coldness are the ones who find the key that unlocks the stranger’s heart and mind, seducing him into their corner, if necessary softening him up for a punch.
But most people never learn this side of the game. When they meet someone new, rather than stepping back and probing to see what makes this person unique, they talk about themselves, eager to impose their own willpower and prejudices.
They argue, boast, and make a show of their power. They may not know it but they are secretly creating an enemy, a resister, because there is no more infuriating feeling than having your individuality ignored, your own psychology unacknowledged. It makes you feel lifeless and resentful.
Remember: The key to persuasion is softening people up and breaking them down, gently. Seduce them with a two-pronged approach: Work on their emotions and play on their intellectual weaknesses. Be alert to both what separates them from everyone else (their individual psychology) and what they share with everyone else (their basic emotional responses).
Aim at the primary emotions—love, hate, jealousy. Once you move their emotions you have reduced their control, making them more vulnerable to persuasion.
When Chuko Liang wanted to dissuade an important general of a rival kingdom from entering into an alliance with Ts‘ao Ts’ao, Liang’s dreaded enemy, he did not detail Ts‘ao Ts’ao’s cruelty, or attack him on moral grounds. Instead Liang suggested that Ts‘ao Ts’ao was really after the general’s beautiful young wife. This hit the general in the gut, and won him over.
Mao Tse-tung similarly always appealed to popular emotions, and
spoke in the simplest terms. Educated and well-read himself, in his speeches he used visceral metaphors, voicing the public’s deepest anxieties and encouraging them to vent their frustrations in public meetings.
Rather than arguing the practical aspects of a particular program, he would describe how it would affect them on the most primitive, down-to-earth level.
Do not believe that this approach works only with the illiterate and unschooled—it works on one and all. All of us are mortal and face the same dreadful fate, and all of us share the desire for attachment and belonging.
Stir up these emotions and you captivate our hearts. The best way to do this is with a dramatic jolt, of the kind that Chuko
Liang created when he fed and released prisoners who expected only the worst from him. Shaking them to the core, he softened their hearts. Play on contrasts like this: Push people to despair, then give them relief. If they expect pain and you give them pleasure, you win their hearts.
Creating pleasure of any kind, in fact, will usually bring you success, as will allaying fears and providing or promising security.
Symbolic gestures are often enough to win sympathy and goodwill. A gesture of self-sacrifice, for example—a show that you suffer as those around you do—will make people identify with you, even if your suffering is symbolic or minor and theirs is real. When you enter a group, make a gesture of goodwill; soften the group up for the harsher actions that will follow later.
When T. E. Lawrence was fighting the Turks in the deserts of the Middle East during World War I, he had an epiphany: It seemed to him that conventional warfare had lost its value. The old fashioned soldier was lost in the enormous armies of the time, in which he was ordered about like a lifeless pawn. Lawrence wanted to turn this around. For him, every soldier’s mind was a kingdom he had to conquer. A committed, psychologically motivated soldier would fight harder and more creatively than a puppet. Lawrence’s perception is still more true in the world today, where so many of us feel alienated, anonymous, and suspicious of authority, all of which makes overt power plays and force even more counterproductive and dangerous.
Instead of manipulating lifeless pawns, make those on your side
convinced and excited by the cause you have enlisted them in; this will not only make your work easier but it will also give you more leeway to deceive them later on. And to accomplish this you need to deal with their individual psychologies.
Never clumsily assume that the tactic that worked on one person will necessarily work on another.
To find the key that will motivate them,
first get them to open up. The more they talk, the more they
reveal about their likes and dislikes—the handles and levers to move them with.
The quickest way to secure people’s minds is by demonstrating, as simply as possible, how an action will benefit them. Self interest is the strongest motive of all:
A great cause may capture minds, but once the first flush of excitement is over, interest will flag—unless there is something to be gained. Self-interest is the solider foundation. The causes that work best use a noble veneer to cover a blatant appeal to self-interest; the cause seduces but the self-interest secures the deal.
The people who are best at appealing to people’s minds are often artists, intellectuals, and those of a more poetic nature. This is because ideas are most easily communicated through metaphors and imagery. It is always good policy, then, to have in your pocket at least one artist or intellectual who can appeal concretely to people’s minds.
Kings have always kept a stable of writers in their barn:
Frederick the Great had his Voltaire (until they quarreled and separated), Napoleon won over Goethe. Conversely, Napoleon III’s alienation of writers such as Victor Hugo, whom he exiled
from France, contributed to his growing unpopularity and eventual downfall.
It is dangerous, then, to alienate those who have powers of
expression, and useful to pacify and exploit them.
Finally, learn to play the numbers game. The wider your support base the stronger your power. Understanding that one alienated, disaffected soul can spark a blaze of discontent, Louis XIV made sure to endear himself to the lowest members of his staff. You too must constantly win over more allies on all levels—a time will inevitably come when you will need them.
Image:
The Keyhole. People build walls to keep you out;
never force your way in—you will find only more walls within walls. There are doors in these walls, doors to the heart and mind, and they have tiny key holes.
Peer through the keyhole, find the key that opens the door,
and you have access to their will with no ugly signs of forced
entry.
Authority: The difficulties in the way of persuasion lie in my knowing the heart of the persuaded in order thereby to fit my wording into it.... For this reason, whoever attempts persuasion before the throne, must carefully observe the sovereign’s feelings of love and hate, his secret wishes and fears, before he can conquer his heart.
(Han-fei-tzu, Chinese philosopher, third century B.C.)
REVERSAL
There is no possible reversal to this Law.
LAW 42
STRIKE THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP WILL SCATTER
JUDGMENT
Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual —the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoner of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them—they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them.
Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I
Near the end of the sixth century B.C., the city-state of Athens overthrew the series of petty tyrants who had dominated its politics for decades. It established instead a democracy that was to last over a century, a democracy that became the source of its power and its proudest achievement. But as the democracy evolved, so did a problem the Athenians had never faced: How to deal with those who did not concern themselves with the cohesion of a small city surrounded by enemies, who did not work for its greater glory, but thought of only themselves and their own ambitions and petty intrigues? The Athenians understood that these people, if left alone, would sow dissension, divide the city into factions, and stir up anxieties, all of which could lead to the ruin of their democracy.
Violent punishment no longer suited the new, civilized order that Athens had created. Instead the citizens found another, more satisfying, and less brutal way to deal with the chronically selfish: Every year they would gather in the marketplace and write on a piece of earthenware, an ostrakon, the name of an individual they wanted to see banished from the city for ten years. If a particular name appeared on six thousand ballots, that person would instantly be exiled. If no one received six thousand votes, the person with the most ostraka recording his name would suffer the ten-year “ostracism.” This ritual expulsion became a kind of festival—what a joy to be able to banish those irritating, anxiety-inducing individuals who wanted to rise above the group they should have served.
In 490 B.C., Aristides, one of the great generals of Athenian history, helped defeat the Persians at the battle of Marathon. Meanwhile, off the battlefield, his fairness as a judge had earned him the nickname “The Just.” But as the years went by the Athenians came to dislike him. He made such a show of his righteousness, and this, they believed, disguised his feelings of
superiority and scorn for the common folk. His omnipresence in Athenian politics became obnoxious; the citizens grew tired of hearing him called “The Just.” They feared that this was just the type of man—judgmental, haughty—who would eventually stir up fierce divisions among them.
In 482 B.C., despite Aristides’ invaluable expertise in the continuing war with the Persians, they collected the ostraka and had him banished. After Aristides’ ostracism, the great general Themistocles emerged as the city’s premier leader. But his many honors and victories went to his head, and he too became arrogant and overbearing, constantly reminding the Athenians of his triumphs in battle, the temples he had built, the dangers he
had fended off. He seemed to be saying that without him the city would come to ruin. And so, in 472 B.C., Themistocles’ name was filled in on the ostraka and the city was rid of his poisonous presence.
THE CONQUEST OF PERU
The struggle now became fiercer than ever around the royal litter [of Atahualpa, king of the Incan empire]. It reeled more and more, and at length, several of the nobles who supported it having been slain, it was overturned, and the Indian prince would have come with violence to the ground, had not his fall been broken by the efforts of Pizarro and some other of the cavaliers, who caught him in their arms. The imperial borla was instantly snatched from his temples by a soldier. and the unhappy monarch, strongly secured, was removed to a neighboring building where he was carefully guarded. All attempt at resistance now ceased. The fate of the Inca [Atahualpa] soon spread over town and country. The charm that might have held the Peruvians together was dissolved. Every man thought only of his own safety. Even the [Incan] soldiery encamped on the adjacent fields took the alarm, and, learning the fatal tidings, were seen flying in every direction
before their pursuers, who in the heat of triumph showed no touch of mercy. At length night, more pitiful than man, threw her friendly mantle over the fugitives, and the scattered troops of Pizarro rallied once more at the sound of the trumpet in the bloody square of Cajamarca.... [Atahualpa] was reverenced as more than a human. He was not merely the head of the state,
but the point to which all its institutions converged as to a common center - the keystone of the political fabric which must fall to pieces by its own weight when that was withdrawn. So it fared on the [execution] of Atahualpa. His death not only left the throne vacant, without any certain successor, but the manner of it announced to the Peruvian people that a hand stronger than that of their Incas had now seized the scepter, and that the dynasty of the Children of the Sun had passed away forever.
THE CONQUEST OF PERU, WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, 1847
The greatest political figure in fifth-century Athens was undoubtedly Pericles. Although several times threatened with ostracism, he avoided that fate by maintaining close ties with the people. Perhaps he had learned a lesson as a child from his favorite tutor, the incomparable Damon, who excelled above all other Athenians in his intelligence, his musical skills, and his rhetorical abilities. It was Damon who had trained Pericles in the arts of ruling. But he, too, suffered ostracism, for his superior airs and his insulting manner toward the commoners stirred up too much resentment. Toward the end of the century there lived a man named Hyperbolus. Most writers of the time describe him as the city’s most worthless citizen: He did not care what anyone thought of him, and slandered whomever he disliked. He amused some, but irritated many more.
In 417 B.C., Hyperbolus saw an opportunity to stir up anger against the two leading politicians of the time, Alcibiades and Nicias. He hoped that one of the two would be ostracized and that he would rise in that man’s place. His campaign seemed likely to succeed: The Athenians disliked Alcibiades’ flamboyant and carefree lifestyle, and were wary of Nicias’ wealth and aloofness. They seemed certain to ostracize one or the other. But Alcibiades
and Nicias, although they were otherwise enemies, pooled their resources and managed to turn the ostracism on Hyperbolus instead. His obnoxiousness, they argued, could only be terminated by banishment. Earlier sufferers of ostracism had been formidable, powerful men.
Hyperbolus, however, was a low buffoon, and with his banishment the Athenians felt that ostracism had been degraded. And so they ended the practice that for nearly a hundred years had been one of the keys to keeping the peace within Athens.
Interpretation
The ancient Athenians had social instincts unknown today—the passage of centuries has blunted them. Citizens in the true sense of the word, the Athenians sensed the dangers posed by asocial behavior, and saw how such behavior often disguises itself in other forms: the holier-than-thou attitude that silently seeks to impose its standards on others; overweening ambition at the expense of the common good; the flaunting of superiority; quiet
scheming; terminal obnoxiousness.
Some of these behaviors would eat away at the city’s cohesion by creating factions and sowing dissension, others would ruin the democratic spirit by making the common citizen feel inferior and envious. The Athenians did not try to reeducate people who acted in these ways, or to absorb them somehow into the group, or to impose a violent punishment that would only create other problems.
The solution was quick and effective: Get rid of them.
Within any group, trouble can most often be traced to a single source, the unhappy, chronically dissatisfied one who will always stir up dissension and infect the group with his or her ill ease. Before you know what hit you the dissatisfaction spreads. Act before it becomes impossible to disentangle one strand of misery from another, or to see how the whole thing started.
First, recognize troublemakers by their overbearing presence, or by their complaining nature. Once you spot them do not try to reform them or appease them—that will only make things worse. Do not attack them, whether directly or indirectly, for they are poisonous in nature and will work underground to destroy you. Do as the Athenians did: Banish them before it is too late. Separate them from the group before they become the eye of a whirlpool.
Do not give them time to stir up anxieties and sow discontent;
do not give them room to move. Let one person suffer so that
the rest can live in peace. When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter.
Chinese saying
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II
In 1296 the cardinals of the Catholic Church met in Rome to select a new pope. They chose Cardinal Gaetani, for he was incomparably shrewd; such a man would make the Vatican a great power. Taking the name Boniface VIII, Gaetani soon proved he deserved the cardinals’high opinion of him: He plotted his moves carefully in advance, and stopped at nothing to get his way. Once in power, Boniface quickly crushed his rivals and unified the
Papal States. The European powers began to fear him, and sent delegates to negotiate with him. The German King Albrecht of Austria even yielded some territory to Boniface. All was proceeding according to the pope’s plan.
One piece did not fall into place, however, and that was Tuscany, the richest part of Italy. If Boniface could conquer Florence, Tuscany’s most powerful city, the region would be his. But Florence was a proud republic, and would be hard to defeat. The pope had to play his cards skillfully. Florence was divided by two rival factions, the Blacks and the Whites. The Whites were the merchant families that had recently and quickly risen to power and wealth; the Blacks were the older money. Because of their
popularity with the people, the Whites retained control of the city, to the Blacks’ increasing resentment. The feud between the two grew steadily more bitter.
THE WOLVES AND THE SHEEP
Once upon a time, the wolves sent an embassy to the sheep, desiring that there might be peace between them for the time to come.
“Why,” said they,
“should we be for ever waging this deadly strife? Those wicked dogs are the cause of all; they are incessantly barking at us, and provoking us. Send them away, and there will be no longer any obstacle to our eternal friendship and peace.”
The silly sheep listened, the dogs were dismissed, and the flock, thus deprived of their best protectors, became an easy prey to
their treacherous enemy.
FABLES, AESOP, SIXTH CENTURY B.C.
Here Boniface saw his chance: He would plot to help the Blacks take over the city, and Florence would be in his pocket. And as he studied the situation he began to focus on one man, Dante Alighieri, the celebrated writer, poet, and ardent supporter of the Whites. Dante had always been interested in politics. He believed passionately in the republic, and often chastised his fellow citizens for their lack of spine. He also happened to be the city’s most eloquent public speaker. In 1300, the year Boniface began
plotting to take over Tuscany, Dante’s fellow citizens had voted him in to Florence’s highest elected position, making him one of the city’s six priors.
During his six-month term in the post, he had stood firmly against the Blacks and against all of the pope’s attempts to sow disorder.
By 1301, however, Boniface had a new plan: He called in Charles de Valois, powerful brother of the king of France, to help bring order to Tuscany. As Charles marched through northern Italy, and Florence seethed with anxiety and fear, Dante quickly emerged as the man who could rally the people, arguing vehemently against appeasement and working desperately to arm the citizens and to organize resistance against the pope and his puppet French prince. By hook or by crook, Boniface had to neutralize Dante. And so, even as on the one hand he threatened Florence with Charles de Valois, on the other he held out the olive branch, the
possibility of negotiations, hoping Dante would take the bait. And indeed the Florentines decided to send a delegation to Rome and try to negotiate a peace. To head the mission, predictably, they chose Dante. Some warned the poet that the wily pope was setting up a trap to lure him away, but Dante went to Rome anyway, arriving as the French army stood before the gates of Florence. He felt sure that his eloquence and reason would win the pope over and save the city. Yet when the pope met the poet
and the Florentine delegates, he instantly intimidated them, as he did so many.
“Fall on your knees before me!” he bellowed at their first meeting.
“Submit to me! I tell you that in all truth I have nothing in my heart but to promote your peace.”
Succumbing to his powerful presence, the Florentines listened as the pope promised to look after their interests. He then advised
them to return home, leaving one of their members behind to continue the talks. Boniface signaled that the man to stay was to be Dante. He spoke with the utmost politeness, but in essence it was an order. And so Dante remained in Rome. And while he and the pope continued their dialogue, Florence fell apart. With no one to rally the Whites, and with Charles de Valois using the pope’s money to bribe and sow dissension, the Whites disintegrated, some arguing for negotiations, others switching sides.
Facing an enemy now divided and unsure of itself, the Blacks easily destroyed them within weeks, exacting violent revenge on them. And once the Blacks stood firmly in power, the pope finally dismissed Dante from Rome.
The Blacks ordered Dante to return home to face accusations and stand trial. When the poet refused, the Blacks condemned him to be burned to death if he ever set foot in Florence again. And so Dante began a miserable life of exile, wandering through Italy, disgraced in the city that he loved, never to return to Florence, even after his death.
THE LIFE OF THEMISTOCLES
[Themistocles‘s] fellow citizens reached the point at which their jealousy made them listen to any slander at his expense, and so [he] was forced to remind the assembly of his achievements until they could bear this no longer.
He once said to those who were complaining of him:
“Why are you tired of receiving benefits so often from the same men?”
Besides this he gave offense to the people when he built the temple of Artemis, for not only did he style the goddess Artemis Aristoboule, or Artemis wisest in counsel —with the hint that it was he who had given the best counsel to the Athenians and the Greeks-but he chose a site for it near his own house at Melite... So at last the Athenians banished him. They made use of the ostracism to humble his great reputation and his authority, as indeed was their habit with any whose power they regarded as oppressive, or who had risen to an eminence which they considered out of keeping with the equality of a democracy.
THE LIFE OF THEMISTOCLES, PLUTARCH, C. A.D. 46-120
Interpretation
Boniface knew that if he only had a pretext to lure Dante away, Florence would crumble. He played the oldest card in the book—threatening with one hand while holding out the olive branch with the other—and Dante fell for it. Once the poet was in Rome, the pope kept him there for as long as it took. For Boniface understood one of the principal precepts in the game of power: One resolute person, one disobedient spirit, can turn a flock of sheep into a den of lions. So he isolated the troublemaker. Without the backbone of the city to keep them together, the sheep quickly scattered.
Learn the lesson: Do not waste your time lashing out in all directions at what seems to be a many-headed enemy. Find the one head that matters— the person with willpower, or smarts, or, most important of all, charisma.
Whatever it costs you, lure this person away, for once he is absent his powers will lose their effect. His isolation can be physical (banishment or absence from the court), political (narrowing his base of support), or psychological (alienating him from the group through slander and insinuation). Cancer begins with a single cell; excise it before it spreads beyond cure.
KEYS TO POWER
In the past, an entire nation would be ruled by a king and his handful of ministers. Only the elite had any power to play with. Over the centuries, power has gradually become more and more diffused and democratized.
This has created, however, a common misperception that groups no longer have centers of power—that power is spread out and scattered among many people.
Actually, however, power has changed in its numbers but not in its essence. There may be fewer mighty tyrants commanding the power of life and death over millions, but there remain thousands of petty tyrants ruling smaller realms, and enforcing their will through indirect power games, charisma, and so on.
In every group, power is concentrated in the hands of one or two people,
for this is one area in which human nature will never change: People will congregate around a single strong personality like
planets orbiting a sun.
To labor under the illusion that this kind of power center no longer exists is to make endless mistakes, waste energy and time, and never hit the target.
Powerful people never waste time. Outwardly they may play along with the game—pretending that power is shared among many—but inwardly they keep their eyes on the inevitable few in the group who hold the cards.
These are the ones they work on. When troubles arise, they look for the underlying cause, the single strong character who started the stirring and whose isolation or banishment will settle the waters again.
In his family-therapy practice, Dr. Milton H. Erickson found that if the family dynamic was unsettled and dysfunctional there was inevitably one person who was the stirrer, the troublemaker.
In his sessions he would symbolically isolate this rotten apple by seating him or her apart from the others, if only by a few feet. Slowly the other family members would see the physically separate person as the source of their difficulty.
Once you recognize who the stirrer is, pointing it out to other people will accomplish a great deal.
Understanding who controls the group dynamic is a critical
realization.
Remember: Stirrers thrive by hiding in the group, disguising
their actions among the reactions of others. Render their actions visible and they lose their power to upset.
A key element in games of strategy is isolating the enemy’s power.
In chess you try to corner the king. In the Chinese game of go you try to isolate the enemy’s forces in small pockets, rendering them immobile and ineffectual. It is often better to isolate your enemies than to destroy them— you seem less brutal. The result, though, is the same, for in the game of power, isolation spells death.
The most effective form of isolation is somehow to separate your victims from their power base.
When Mao Tse-tung wanted to eliminate an enemy in the ruling elite, he did not confront the person directly; he silently and
stealthily worked to isolate the man, divide his allies and turn them away from him, shrink his support. Soon the man would vanish on his own.
Presence and appearance have great import in the game of power.
To seduce, particularly in the beginning stages, you need to be constantly present, or create the feeling that you are; if you are often out of sight, the charm will wear off.
Queen Elizabeth’s prime minister, Robert Cecil, had two main rivals: the queen’s favorite, the Earl of Essex, and her former
favorite, Sir Walter Raleigh.
He contrived to send them both on a mission against Spain; with them away from the court he managed to wrap his tentacles around the queen, secure his position as her top adviser and
weaken her affection for Raleigh and the earl.
The lesson here is twofold:
First, your absence from the court spells danger for you, and you should never leave the scene in a time of turmoil, for your absence can both symbolize and induce a loss of power;
second, and on the other hand, luring your enemies away from the court at critical moments is a great ploy.
Isolation has other strategic uses. When trying to seduce people, it is often wise to isolate them from their usual social context. Once isolated they are vulnerable to you, and your presence becomes magnified.
Similarly, con artists often look for ways to isolate their marks from their normal social milieux, steering them into new environments in which they are no longer comfortable.
Here they feel weak, and succumb to deception more easily. Isolation, then, can prove a powerful way of bringing people
under your spell to seduce or swindle them.
You will often find powerful people who have alienated themselves from the group.
Perhaps their power has gone to their heads, and they consider
themselves superior; perhaps they have lost the knack of communicating with ordinary folk.
Remember: This makes them vulnerable. Powerful though they be, people like this can be turned to use.
The monk Rasputin gained his power over Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra of Russia through their tremendous isolation from the people. Alexandra in particular was a foreigner, and especially alienated from everyday Russians; Rasputin used his peasant origins to insinuate himself into her good graces, for she desperately wanted to communicate with her subjects. Once in the court’s inner circle, Rasputin made himself indispensable and attained great power. Heading straight for the center, he aimed for the one figure in Russia who commanded power (the czarina
dominated her husband), and found he had no need to isolate her for the work was already done.
The Rasputin strategy can bring you great power:
Always search out people who hold high positions yet who find themselves isolated on the board. They are like apples falling into your lap, easily seduced, and able to catapult you into power yourself.
Finally, the reason you strike at the shepherd is because such an action will dishearten the sheep beyond any rational measure. When Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro led their tiny forces against the Aztec and Incan empires, they did not make the mistake of fighting on several fronts, nor were they intimidated by the numbers arrayed against them; they captured the kings, Moctezuma and Atahualpa. Vast empires fell into their hands. With the leader gone the center of gravity is gone;
there is nothing to revolve around and everything falls apart. Aim at the leaders, bring them down, and look for the endless opportunities in the confusion that will ensue.
Image: A Flock of Fatted Sheep. Do not waste precious time trying to steal a sheep or two; do not risk life and limb by setting upon the dogs that guard the flock. Aim at the shepherd. Lure him away and the dogs will follow. Strike him down and the flock will scatter—you can pick them off one by one.
Authority: If you draw a bow, draw the strongest. If you use an arrow, use the longest.
To shoot a rider, first shoot his horse. To catch a gang of bandits, first capture its leader. Just as a country has its border, so the killing of men has its limits.
If the enemy’s attack can be stopped [with a blow to the head], why have any more dead and wounded than necessary?
(Chinese poet Tu Fu, Tang dynasty, eighth century)
REVERSAL
“Any harm you do to a man should be done in such a way that you need not fear his revenge,” writes Machiavelli. If you act to isolate your enemy, make sure he lacks the means to repay the favor. If you apply this Law, in other words, apply it from a position of superiority, so that you have nothing to fear from his resentment.
Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s successor as U.S. president, saw Ulysses S. Grant as a troublesome member of his government. So he isolated Grant, as a prelude to forcing him out. This only enraged the great general, however, who responded by forming a support base in the Republican party and going on to become the next president. It would have been far wiser to keep a man like Grant in the fold, where he could do less
harm, than to make him revengeful. And so you may often find it better to keep people on your side, where you can watch them, than to risk creating an angry enemy. Keeping them close, you can secretly whittle away at their support base, so that when the time comes to cut them loose they will fall fast and hard without knowing what hit them.
LAW 41
AVOID STEPPING INTO A GREAT MAN’S SHOES
JUDGMENT
What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Do not get lost in their shadow, or stuck in a past not of your own making: Establish your own name and identity by changing course. Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way.
THE EXCELLENCE OF BEING FIRST
Many would have shone like the very phoenix in their occupations if others had not preceded them. Being first is a great advantage; with eminence, twice as good. Deal the first hand and you will win the upper ground.... Those who go first win fame by right of birth, and those who follow are like second sons, contenting themselves with meager portions.... Solomon opted wisely for pacifism, yielding warlike things to his father. By changing course he found it easier to become a hero.... And our great Philip II
governed the entire world from the throne of his prudence, astonishing the ages. If his unconquered father was a model of energy, Philip was a paradigm of prudence.... This sort of novelty has helped the well-advised win a place in the roll of the great. Without leaving their own art, the ingenious leave the common path and take, even in professions gray with age, new steps toward eminence. Horace yielded epic poetry to Virgil, and Martial the lyric to Horace. Terence opted for comedy, Persius for satire, each hoping to be first in his genre. Bold fancy never succumbed to facile imitation.
A POCKET MIRROR FOR HEROES, BALTASAR GRACIÁN,
TRANSLATED BY CHRISTOPHER MAURER, 1996
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
When Louis XIV died, in 1715, after a glorious fifty-five-year reign, all eyes focused on his great-grandson and chosen successor, the future Louis XV.
Would the boy, only five at the time, prove as great a leader as the Sun King?
Louis XIV had transformed a country on the verge of civil war into
the preeminent power in Europe. The last years of his reign had been difficult—he had been old and tired—but it was hoped that the child would develop into the kind of strong ruler who would reinvigorate the land and add to the firm foundation that Louis XIV had laid.
To this end the child was given the best minds of France as his tutors, men who would instruct him in the arts of statecraft, in the methods that the Sun King had perfected. Nothing was neglected in his education.
But when Louis XV came to the throne, in 1726, a sudden change came over him: He no longer had to study or please others or prove himself. He stood alone at the top of a great country, with wealth and power at his command. He could do as he wished.
In the first years of his reign, Louis gave himself over to pleasure,
leaving the government in the hands of a trusted minister, André-Hercule de Fleury. This caused little concern, for he was a young man who needed to sow his wild oats, and de Fleury was a good minister. But it slowly became clear that this was more than a passing phase. Louis had no interest in governing. His main worry was not France’s finances, or a possible war with Spain, but boredom. He could not stand being bored, and when he was not hunting deer, or chasing young girls, he whiled away his time at the gambling tables, losing huge sums in a single night.
The court, as usual, reflected the tastes of the ruler. Gambling and lavish parties became the obsession. The courtiers had no concern with the future of France—they poured their energies into charming the king, angling for titles that would bring them life pensions, and for cabinet positions demanding little work but paying huge salaries. Parasites flocked to the court, and the state’s debts swelled.
In 1745 Louis fell in love with Madame de Pompadour, a woman of middle-class origin who had managed to rise through her charms, her intelligence, and a good marriage. Madame de Pompadour became the official royal mistress; she also became France’s arbiter of taste and fashion.
But the Madame had political ambitions as well, and she eventually emerged as the country’s unofficial prime minister—it was she, not Louis, who wielded hiring-and-firing power over France’s most important ministers.
As he grew older Louis only needed more diversion. On the grounds of Versailles he built a brothel, Parc aux Cerfs, which housed some of the prettiest young girls of France. Underground passages and hidden staircases gave Louis access at all hours. After Madame de Pompadour died, in 1764, she was succeeded as royal mistress by Madame du Barry, who soon came to dominate the court, and who, like de Pompadour before her, began to meddle in affairs of state. If a minister did not please her he would find himself fired. All of Europe was aghast when du Barry, the daughter of a baker, managed to arrange the firing of Étienne de Choiseul, the foreign minister and France’s most able diplomat. He had shown her too little respect. As time went by, swindlers and charlatans made their nests in Versailles, and enticed Louis’s interest in astrology, the occult, and fraudulent business deals. The young and pampered teenager who had taken
over France years before had only grown worse with age.
The motto that became attached to Louis’s reign was “Après moi, le déluge”—“After me the flood,” or, Let France rot after I am gone. And indeed when Louis did go, in 1774, worn out by debauchery, his country and his own finances were in horrible disarray. His grandson Louis XVI inherited a realm in desperate need of reform and a strong leader. But Louis XVI was even weaker than his grandfather, and could only watch as the country descended into revolution. In 1792 the republic introduced by the
French Revolution declared the end of the monarchy, and gave the king a new name, “Louis the Last.” A few months later he kneeled on the guillotine, his about-to-be-severed head stripped of all the radiance and power that the Sun King had invested in the crown.
Interpretation
From a country that had descended into civil war in the late 1640s, Louis XIV forged the mightiest realm in Europe. Great generals would tremble in his presence. A cook once made a mistake in preparing a dish and committed suicide rather than face the king’s wrath. Louis XIV had many mistresses, but their power ended in the bedroom. He filled his court with the most brilliant minds of the age. The symbol of his power was Versailles:
Refusing to accept the palace of his forefathers, the Louvre, he built his own palace in what was then the middle of nowhere, symbolizing that this was a new order he had founded, one without precedent. He made Versailles the centerpiece of his reign, a place that all the powerful of Europe envied and visited with a sense of awe. In essence, Louis took a great void—the
decaying monarchy of France—and filled it with his own symbols and radiant power.
Louis XV, on the other hand, symbolizes the fate of all those who inherit something large or who follow in a great man’s footsteps. It would seem easy for a son or successor to build on the grand foundation left for them, but in the realm of power the opposite is true. The pampered, indulged son almost always squanders the inheritance, for he does not start with the father’s need to fill a void. As Machiavelli states, necessity is what impels men to take action, and once the necessity is gone, only rot and decay are
left. Having no need to increase his store of power, Louis XV inevitably succumbed to inertia. Under him, Versailles, the symbol of the Sun King’s authority, became a pleasure palace of incomparable banality, a kind of Las
Vegas of the Bourbon monarchy. It came to represent all that the oppressed peasantry of France hated about their king, and during the Revolution they looted it with glee.
LIFE OF PERICLES
As a young man Pericles was inclined to shrink from facing the people. One reason for this was that he was considered to bear a distinct resemblance to the tyrant Pisistratus, and when men who were well on in years remarked on the charm of Pericles’ voice and the smoothness and fluency of his speech, they were astonished at the resemblance between the two. The fact that he was rich and that he came of a distinguished family and possessed exceedingly powerful friends made the fear of ostracism very real to him, and at the beginning of his career he took no part in politics but devoted himself to soldiering, in which he showed great daring and enterprise.
However, the time came when Aristides was dead. Themistocles in exile, and Cimon frequently absent on distant campaigns. Then at last Pericles decided to attach himself to the people’s party and to take up the cause of the poor and the many instead of that of the rich and the few, in spite of the fact that this was quite contrary to his own temperament, which was thoroughly aristocratic. He was afraid, apparently, of being suspected of
aiming at a dictatorship: so that when he saw that Cimon’s sympathies were strongly with the nobles and that Cimon was the idol of the aristocratic party, Pericles began to ingratiate himself with the people, partly for selfpreservation and partly by way of securing power against his rival. He now entered upon a new mode of life. He was never to be seen walking in any street except the one which led to the market-place and the council
chamber.
THE LIFE OF PERICLES, PLUTARCH, c. A.D. 46-120
Louis XV had only one way out of the trap awaiting the son or successor of a man like the Sun King: to psychologically begin from nothing, to denigrate the past and his inheritance, and to move in a totally new direction, creating his own world. Assuming you have the choice, it would be better to avoid the situation altogether, to place yourself where there is a vacuum of power, where you can be the one to bring order out of chaos without having to compete with another star in the sky. Power depends on appearing larger than other people, and when you are lost in the shadow of the father, the king, the great predecessor, you cannot possibly project such a presence.
But when they began to make sovereignty hereditary, the children quickly degenerated from their fathers; and, so far from trying to equal their father’s virtues, they considered that a prince had nothing else to do than to excel all the rest in idleness, indulgence, and every other variety of pleasure.
Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527
THE LIFE OF PIETRO PERUGINO, PAINTER, c.1450-1523
How beneficial poverty may sometimes be to those with talent, and how it may serve as a powerful goad to make them perfect or excellent in whatever occupation they might choose, can be seen very clearly in the actions of Pietro Perugino. Wishing by means of his ability to attain some respectable rank, after leaving disastrous calamities behind in Perugia and coming to Florence, he remained there many months in poverty, sleeping in a chest,
since he had no other bed; he turned night into day, and with the greatest zeal continually applied himself to the study of his profession. After painting had become second nature to him, Pietro’s only pleasure was always to be working in his craft and constantly to be painting. And because he always had the dread of poverty before his eyes, he did things to make money which
he probably would not have bothered to do had he not been forced to support himself. Perhaps wealth would have closed to him and his talent the path to excellence just as poverty had opened it up to him, but need spurred him on since he desired to rise from such a miserable and lowly position-if not perhaps to the summit and supreme height of excellence, then at least to
a point where he could have enough to live on. For this reason, he took no notice of cold, hunger, discomfort, inconvenience, toil or shame if he could only live one day in ease and repose; and he would always say—and as if it were a proverb—that after bad weather, good weather must follow, and that during the good weather houses must be built for shelter in times of need.
LIVES OF THE ARTISTS, GIORGIO VASARI, 1511-1574
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Alexander the Great had a dominant passion as a young man—an intense dislike for his father, King Philip of Macedonia. He hated Philip’s cunning, cautious style of ruling, his bombastic speeches, his drinking and whoring, and his love of wrestling and of other wastes of time. Alexander knew he had to make himself the very opposite of his domineering father: He would force himself to be bold and reckless, he would control his tongue and be a man of few words, and he would not lose precious time in pursuit of
pleasures that brought no glory. Alexander also resented the fact that Philip had conquered most of Greece:
“My father will go on conquering till there is nothing extraordinary left for me to do,” he once complained.
While other sons of powerful men were content to inherit wealth and live a life of leisure, Alexander wanted only to outdo his father, to obliterate Philip’s name from history by surpassing his accomplishments.
Alexander itched to show others how superior he was to his father. A Thessalian horse-dealer once brought a prize horse named Bucephalus to sell to Philip. None of the king’s grooms could get near the horse—it was far too savage—and Philip berated the merchant for bringing him such a useless beast. Watching the whole affair, Alexander scowled and commented, “What a horse they are losing for want of skill and spirit to
manage him!”
When he had said this several times, Philip had finally had enough, and challenged him to take on the horse. He called the merchant back, secretly hoping his son would have a nasty fall and learn a bitter lesson.
But Alexander was the one to teach the lesson: Not only did he
mount Bucephalus, he managed to ride him at full gallop, taming the horse that would later carry him all the way to India. The courtiers applauded wildly, but Philip seethed inside, seeing not a son but a rival to his power.
Alexander’s defiance of his father grew bolder. One day the two men had a heated argument before the entire court, and Philip drew his sword as if to strike his son; having drunk too much wine, however, the king stumbled.
Alexander pointed at his father and jeered, “Men of Macedonia, see there the man who is preparing to pass from Europe to Asia. He cannot pass from one table to another without falling.”
When Alexander was eighteen, a disgruntled courtier murdered Philip. As word of the regicide spread through Greece, city after city rose up in rebellion against their Macedonian rulers. Philip’s advisers counseled Alexander, now the king, to proceed cautiously, to do as Philip had done and conquer through cunning. But Alexander would do things his way: He marched to the furthest reaches of the kingdom, suppressed the rebellious towns, and reunited the empire with brutal efficiency.
As a young rebel grows older, his struggle against the father often wanes, and he gradually comes to resemble the very man he had wanted to defy. But Alexander’s loathing of his father did not end with Philip’s death. Once he had consolidated Greece, he set his eyes on Persia, the prize that had eluded his father, who had dreamed of conquering Asia. If he defeated the Persians, Alexander would finally surpass Philip in glory and fame.
Alexander crossed into Asia with an army of 35,000 to face a Persian force numbering over a million. Before engaging the Persians in battle he passed through the town of Gordium. Here, in the town’s main temple, there stood an ancient chariot tied with cords made of the rind of the cornel tree.
Legend had it that any man who could undo these cords—the Gordian knot —would rule the world. Many had tried to untie the enormous and intricate knot, but none had succeeded. Alexander, seeing he could not possibly untie the knot with his bare hands, took out his sword and with one slash cut it in half. This symbolic gesture showed the world that he would not do as others, but would blaze his own path.
Against astounding odds, Alexander conquered the Persians. Most expected him to stop there—it was a great triumph, enough to secure his fame for eternity. But Alexander had the same relationship to his own deeds as he had to his father:
His conquest of Persia represented the past, and he wanted never to rest on past triumphs, or to allow the past to outshine the
present. He moved on to India, extending his empire beyond all known limits. Only his disgruntled and weary soldiers prevented him from going farther.
Interpretation
Alexander represents an extremely uncommon type in history: the son of a famous and successful man who manages to surpass the father in glory and power. The reason this type is uncommon is simple: The father most often manages to amass his fortune, his kingdom, because he begins with little or nothing. A desperate urge impels him to succeed—he has nothing to lose by
cunning and impetuousness, and has no famous father of his own to compete against. This kind of man has reason to believe in himself—to believe that his way of doing things is the best, because, after all, it worked for him.
When a man like this has a son, he becomes domineering and oppressive, imposing his lessons on the son, who is starting off life in circumstances totally different from those in which the father himself began.
Instead of allowing the son to go in a new direction, the father will try to put him in his own shoes, perhaps secretly wishing the boy will fail, as Philip half wanted to see Alexander thrown from Bucephalus. Fathers envy their sons’ youth and vigor, after all, and their desire is to control and dominate. The sons of such men tend to become cowed and cautious, terrified of losing what their fathers have gained.
The son will never step out of his father’s shadow unless he adopts the ruthless strategy of Alexander: disparage the past, create your own kingdom, put the father in the shadows instead of letting him do the same to you.
If you cannot materially start from ground zero—it would be foolish to renounce an inheritance—you can at least begin from ground zero psychologically, by throwing off the weight of the past and charting a new direction.
Alexander instinctively recognized that privileges of birth are impediments to power.
Be merciless with the past, then—not only with your father and his father but with your own earlier achievements. Only the weak
rest on their laurels and dote on past triumphs; in the game of power there is never time to rest.
THE PROBLEM OF PAUL MORPHY
The slightest acquaintance with chess shows one that it is a play-substitute for the art of war and indeed it has been a favorite recreation of some of the greatest military leaders, from William the Conqueror to Napoleon.
In the contest between the opposing armies the same principles of both strategy and tactics are displayed as in actual war, the same foresight and powers of calculation are necessary, the same capacity for divining the plans of the opponent, and the rigor with which decisions are followed by their consequences is, if anything, even more ruthless. More than that, it is plain that the unconscious motive actuating the players is not the mere love of
pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games, but the grimmer one of father-murder.
It is true that the original goal of capturing the king has been
given up, but from the point of view of motive there is, except in respect of crudity, not appreciable change in the present goal of sterilizing him in immobility....
“Checkmate” means literally “the king is dead.” ... Our knowledge of the unconscious motivation of chess-playing tells us that what
it represented could only have been the wish to overcome the father in an acceptable way.... It is no doubt significant that [nineteenth-century chess champion Paul] Morphy’s soaring odyssey into the higher realms of chess began just a year after the unexpectedly sudden death of his father, which had been a great shock to him, and we may surmise that his brilliant effort
of sublimation was, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams, a reaction to this critical event....
Something should now be said about the reception Morphy’s successes met with, for they were of such a kind as to raise the question whether his subsequent collapse may not have been influenced through his perhaps belonging to the type that Freud has described under the name of Die am Erfolge scheitern (“Those wrecked by success”).... Couched in more psychological language, was Morphy affrighted at his own presumptuousness when the light of publicity was thrown on [his great success?] Freud has pointed out that the people who break under the strain
of too great success do so because they can endure it only in imagination, not in reality.
To castrate the father in a dream is a very different matter from doing it in reality. The real situation provokes the unconscious guilt in its full force, and the penalty may be mental collapse.
THE PROBLEM OF PAUL MORPHY, ERNEST JONES, 1951
KEYS TO POWER
In many ancient kingdoms, for example Bengal and Sumatra, after the king had ruled for several years his subjects would execute him. This was done partly as a ritual of renewal, but also to prevent him from growing too powerful-for the king would generally try to establish a permanent order, at the expense of other families and of his own sons. Instead of protecting the
tribe and leading it in times of war, he would attempt to dominate it. And so he would be beaten to death, or executed in an elaborate ritual. Now that he was no longer around for his honors to go to his head, he could be worshipped as a god. Meanwhile the field had been cleared for a new and youthful order to establish itself. The ambivalent, hostile attitude towards the king or father figure also finds expression in legends of heroes who do not know their father.
Moses, the archetypal man of power, was found abandoned among the bulrushes and never knew his parents; without a father to compete with him or limit him, he could attain the heights of power.
Hercules had no earthly father-he was the son of the god Zeus. Later in his life Alexander the Great spread the story that the god Jupiter Ammon had sired him, not Philip of Macedon.
Legends and rituals like these eliminate the human father because he symbolizes the destructive power of the past.
The past prevents the young hero from creating his own world—he must do as his father did, even after that father is dead or powerless. The hero must bow and scrape before his predecessor and yield to tradition and precedent.
What had success in the past must be carried over to the present,
even though circumstances have greatly changed. The past also weighs the hero down with an inheritance that he is terrified of losing, making him timid and cautious.
Power depends on the ability to fill a void, to occupy a field that has been cleared of the dead weight of the past. Only after the father figure has been properly done away with will you have the necessary space to create and establish a new order. There are several strategies you can adopt to accomplish this—variations on the execution of the king that disguise the violence of the impulse by channeling it in socially acceptable forms.
Perhaps the simplest way to escape the shadow of the past is simply to belittle it, playing on the timeless antagonism between the generations, stirring up the young against the old. For this you need a convenient older figure to pillory. Mao Tse-tung, confronting a culture that fiercely resisted change, played on the suppressed resentment against the overbearing presence of the venerable Confucius in Chinese culture.
John F. Kennedy knew the dangers of getting lost in the past; he radically distinguished his presidency from that of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and also from the preceding decade, the 1950s, which Eisenhower personified.
Kennedy, for instance, would not play the dull and fatherly game of golf—a symbol of retirement and privilege, and Eisenhower’s passion. Instead he played football on the White House lawn. In every aspect his administration represented vigor and youth, as opposed to the stodgy Eisenhower. Kennedy had discovered an old truth: The young are easily set against the old, since they yearn to make their own place in the world and resent the shadow of their fathers.
The distance you establish from your predecessor often demands some symbolism, a way of advertising itself publicly. Louis XIV, for example, created such symbolism when he rejected the traditional palace of the French kings and built his own palace of Versailles.
King Philip II of Spain did the same when he created his center of power, the palace of El Escorial, in what was then the middle of nowhere. But Louis carried the game further: He would not be a king like his father or earlier ancestors, he would not wear a crown or carry a scepter or sit on a throne, he would establish a
new kind of imposing authority with symbols and rituals of its own. Louis made his ancestors’ rituals into laughable relics of the past.
Follow his example: Never let yourself be seen as following your predecessor’s path. If you do you will never surpass him. You must physically demonstrate your difference, by establishing a style and symbolism that sets you apart.
The Roman emperor Augustus, successor to Julius Caesar, understood this thoroughly. Caesar had been a great general, a theatrical figure whose spectacles kept the Romans entertained, an international emissary seduced by the charms of Cleopatra—a larger-than-life figure. So Augustus, despite his own theatrical tendencies, competed with Caesar not by trying to outdo him but by differentiating himself from him: He based his power on a return to Roman simplicity, an austerity of both style and substance. Against the memory of Caesar’s sweeping presence Augustus posed a quiet and manly dignity.
The problem with the overbearing predecessor is that he fills the vistas before you with symbols of the past. You have no room to create your own name.
To deal with this situation you need to hunt out the vacuums—those areas in culture that have been left vacant and in which you can become the first and principal figure to shine.
When Pericles of Athens was about to launch a career as a statesman, he looked for the one thing that was missing in Athenian politics. Most of the great politicians of his time had allied themselves with the aristocracy; indeed Pericles himself had aristocratic tendencies. Yet he decided to throw in his hat with the city’s democratic elements. The choice had nothing to do
with his personal beliefs, but it launched him on a brilliant career. Out of necessity he became a man of the people. Instead of competing in an arena filled with great leaders both past and present, he would make a name for himself where no shadows could obscure his presence.
When the painter Diego de Velázquez began his career, he knew he could not compete in refinement and technique with the great Renaissance painters who had come before him. Instead he chose to work in a style that by the standards of the time seemed coarse and rough, in a way that had never been seen before. And in this style he excelled. There were members of the Spanish court who wanted to demonstrate their own break with the past; the newness of Velázquez’s style thrilled them. Most people are afraid to break so boldly with tradition, but they secretly admire those who can break up the old forms and reinvigorate the culture. This is why there is so much power to be gained from entering vacuums and voids.
There is a kind of stubborn stupidity that recurs throughout history, and is a strong impediment to power: The superstitious belief that if the person before you succeeded by doing A, B, and C, you can re-create their success by doing the same thing. This cookie-cutter approach will seduce the uncreative, for it is easy, and appeals to their timidity and their laziness. But circumstances never repeat themselves exactly.
When General Douglas MacArthur assumed command of American forces in the Philippines during World War II, an assistant handed him a book containing the various precedents established by the commanders before him, the methods that had been successful for them.
MacArthur asked the assistant how many copies there were of this book.
Six, the assistant answered.
“Well,” the general replied,
“you get all those six copies together and burn them—every one of them. I’ll not be bound by precedents. Any time a problem comes up, I’ll make the decision at once— immediately.”
Adopt this ruthless strategy toward the past: Burn all the
books, and train yourself to react to circumstances as they happen.
You may believe that you have separated yourself from the predecessor or father figure, but as you grow older you must be eternally vigilant lest you become the father you had rebelled against.
As a young man, Mao Tsetung disliked his father and in the struggle against him found his own identity and a new set of values. But as he aged, his father’s ways crept back in. Mao’s father had valued manual work over intellect; Mao had scoffed at this as a young man, but as he grew older he unconsciously
returned to his father’s views and echoed such outdated ideas by forcing a whole generation of Chinese intellectuals into manual labor, a nightmarish mistake that cost his regime dearly. Remember: You are your own father. Do not let yourself spend years creating yourself only to let your guard down and allow the ghost of the past—father, habit, history—to sneak back in.
Finally, as noted in the story of Louis XV, plenitude and prosperity tend to make us lazy and inactive: When our power is secure we have no need to act. This is a serious danger, especially for those who achieve success and power at an early age. The playwright Tennessee Williams, for instance, found himself skyrocketed from obscurity to fame by the success of The Glass Menagerie.
“The sort of life which I had had previous to this popular success,” he later wrote,
“was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for
which the human organism is created. I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. This was security at last. I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed.”
Williams had a nervous breakdown, which may in fact have been necessary for him: Pushed to the psychological edge, he could start writing with the old vitality again, and he produced A Streetcar Named Desire.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, similarly, whenever he wrote a successful
novel, would feel that the financial security he had gained made the act of creation unnecessary. He would take his entire savings to the casino and would not leave until he had gambled away his last penny.
Once reduced to poverty he could write again. It is not necessary to go to such extremes, but you must be prepared to return to square one psychologically rather than growing fat and lazy with
prosperity. Pablo Picasso could deal with success, but only by constantly changing the style of his painting, often breaking completely with what had made him successful before. How often our early triumphs turn us into a kind of caricature of ourselves.
Powerful people recognize these traps; like Alexander the Great, they struggle constantly to re-create themselves. The father must not be allowed to return; he must be slain at every step of the
way.
Image: The Father. He casts a giant shadow over his children, keeping them in thrall long after he is gone by tying them to the past, squashing their youthful spirit, and forcing them down the same tired path he followed himself. His tricks are many. At every crossroads you must slay the father and step out of his shadow.
Authority: Beware of stepping into a great man’s shoes—you will have to accomplish twice as much to surpass him. Those who follow are taken for imitators. No matter how much they sweat, they will never shed that burden. It is an uncommon skill to find a new path for excellence, a modern route to celebrity. There are many roads to singularity, not all of them well traveled. The newest ones can be arduous, but they are often shortcuts to
greatness.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
The shadow of a great predecessor could be used to advantage if it is chosen as a trick, a tactic that can be discarded once it has brought you power.
Napoleon III used the name and legend of his illustrious grand-uncle Napoleon Bonaparte to help him become first president and then emperor of France.
Once on the throne, however, he did not stay tied to the past; he
quickly showed how different his reign would be, and was careful to keep the public from expecting him to attain the heights that Bonaparte had attained.
The past often has elements worth appropriating, qualities that would be foolish to reject out of a need to distinguish yourself. Even Alexander the Great recognized and was influenced by his father’s skill in organizing an army. Making a display of doing things differently from your predecessor can make you seem childish and in fact out of control, unless your actions have a logic of their own.
Joseph II, son of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, made a show of doing the exact opposite of his mother—dressing like an ordinary citizen, staying in inns instead of palaces, appearing as the “people’s emperor.”
Maria Theresa, on the other hand, had been regal and aristocratic. The problem was that she had also been beloved, an empress who ruled wisely after years of learning the hard way.
If you have the kind of intelligence and instinct that will point you in the right direction, playing the rebel will not be dangerous. But if you are mediocre, as Joseph II was in comparison to his mother, you are better off learning from your predecessor’s knowledge
and experience, which are based on something real.
Finally, it is often wise to keep an eye on the young, your future rivals in power. Just as you try to rid yourself of your father, they will soon play the same trick on you, denigrating everything you have accomplished. Just as you rise by rebelling against the past, keep an eye on those rising from below, and never give them the chance to do the same to you.
The great Baroque artist and architect Pietro Bernini was a master at sniffing out younger potential rivals and keeping them in his shadow.
One day a young stonemason named Francesco Borromini showed Bernini his architectural sketches. Recognizing his talent immediately, Bernini instantly hired Borromini as his assistant, which delighted the young man but was actually only a tactic to keep him close at hand, so that he could play psychological games on him and create in him a kind of inferiority complex. And indeed, despite Borromini’s brilliance, Bernini has the greater fame.
His strategy with Borromini he made a lifelong practice:
Fearing that the great sculptor Alessandro Algardi, for example, would eclipse him in fame, he arranged it so that Algardi could only find work as his assistant. And any assistant who rebelled against Bernini and tried to strike out on his own would find his career ruined.
Focus to packaged meals that promised sanitation, safe packaging, and convenience. As a result, pre packaged goods, such as ready to eat foods and frozen foods, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Millennials, Generation X, and Generation Z have carved out a niche for themselves in the country snack sector. Last year work from home phase was punctuated by frequent snacking. The tendency has continued, and as a result, demand for savoury snacks, particularly namkeen, as well as confectionary items such as biscuits and cookies, has increased. The manufacturing, processing, distribution, and marketing of Indian snack foods all increased as a result of the surge in demand. Indian snacks manufacturing industry on a growth trajectory In the 1990s, the snacks sector was dominated by a few regional companies and a few large competitors. However, in today market, both large and small competitors have a fair portion of the market and are focusing on introducing new products. They want to thrill and surprise their customers, therefore they add variety to their menus to provide the perfect balance of regional and westernized flavours. This is why the snacks in different sections of the country have such a varied and distinct flavour. For example, fafda, khakhra, and dhokla are popular in Western India, whereas murukku and banana chips are popular in the South, and potato chips are popular in Northern India. Another noteworthy trend that is gaining traction is the shift to healthy snacking. Consumers increasingly prefer to eat snacks that are flavourful, easy to obtain, and high in nutrition. Food production, particularly snack manufacturing, has grown more responsible and ethical as a result of changes in consumer behaviour. Consumers in today world are well informed and savvy. Before making a purchase, they inspect the packing and labeling extensively. Digitization of the industry The industry faces a number of issues, including a scarcity of raw materials, inadequate storage capacity, and food waste. As a result, the urgent need of the hour was to embrace technical breakthroughs in order to overcome these bottlenecks, ensure product quality, and enable industry players to compete in the global market. Digital adoption has emerged as a feasible strategy for meeting expanding customer demands while also increasing the sector output. Automation gained traction among the profusion of technologies to improve the operations of the food processing and snack manufacturing industries. This new age solution helps enhance productivity by taking care of mundane tasks and saving time and money. When machines take over manual tasks, food quality improves and safety regulations are strictly followed. The coronavirus has only accelerated the pace of digital disruption, and as a result, the food processing and snack manufacturing industries are becoming increasingly reliant on automation. Summing Up Although the snacking craze was influenced by the West, the
Observance V
The antique dealer Fushimiya, who lived in the city of Edo (former name for Tokyo) in the seventeenth century, once made a stop at a village teahouse. After enjoying a cup of tea, he spent several minutes scrutinizing the cup, which he eventually paid for and took away with him. A local artisan, watching this, waited until Fushimiya left the shop, then approached the old woman who owned the teahouse and asked her who this man was.
She told him it was Japan’s most famous connoisseur, antique dealer to the lord of Izumo. The artisan ran out of the shop, caught up with Fushimiya, and begged him to sell him the cup, which must clearly be valuable if Fushimiya judged it so. Fushimiya laughed heartily:
“It’s just an ordinary cup of Bizen ware,” he explained,
“and it is not valuable at all. The reason I was looking at it was that the steam seemed to hang about it strangely and I wondered if there wasn’t a leak somewhere.”
(Devotees of the Tea Ceremony were interested in any odd or accidental beauty in nature.)
Since the artisan still seemed so excited about it, Fushimiya gave him the cup for free. The artisan took the cup around, trying to find an expert who would appraise it at a high price, but since all of them recognized it as an ordinary teacup he got nowhere. Soon he was neglecting his own business, thinking only of the cup and the fortune it could bring. Finally he went to Edo to talk to Fushimiya at his shop. There the dealer, realizing that he had
inadvertently caused this man pain by making him believe the cup had great worth, paid him 100 ryo (gold pieces) for the cup as a kindness. The cup was indeed mediocre, but he wanted to rid the artisan of his obsession, while also allowing him to feel that his effort had not been wasted. The artisan thanked him and went on his way.
Money is never spent to so much advantage as when vou have been cheated out of it; for at one stroke you have purchased prudence.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
Soon word spread of Fushimiya’s purchase of the teacup. Every dealer in Japan clamored for him to sell it, since a cup he had bought for 100 ryo must be worth much more. He tried to explain the circumstances in which he had bought the cup, but the dealers could not be dissuaded. Fushimiya finally relented and put the cup up for sale. During the auction, two buyers simultaneously bid 200 ryo for the teacup, and then began to fight over who had bid first. Their fighting tipped over a table and the teacup fell to the ground and broke into several pieces. The auction was clearly over. Fushimiya glued and mended the cup, then stored it away, thinking the affair finished. Years later, however, the great tea master Matsudaira Fumai visited the store, and asked to see the cup, which by then had become legendary. Fumai examined it. “As a piece,” he said,
“it is not up to much, but a Tea Master prizes sentiment and
association more than intrinsic value.”
He bought the cup for a high sum. A glued-together work of less than ordinary craftsmanship had become one of the most famous objects in Japan.
Interpretation
The story shows, first, an essential aspect of money: That it is humans who have created it and humans who instill it with meaning and value.
Second, with objects as with money, what the courtier most values are the sentiments and emotions embedded in them—these are what make them worth having.
The lesson is simple: The more your gifts and your acts of generosity play with sentiment, the more powerful they are. The object or concept that plays with a charged emotion or hits a chord of sentiment has more power than the money you squander on an expensive yet lifeless present.
Observance VI
Akimoto Suzutomo, a wealthy adherent of the tea ceremony, once gave his page 100 ryo (gold pieces) and instructed him to purchase a tea bowl offered by a particular dealer. When the page saw the bowl, he doubted it was worth that much, and after much bargaining got the price reduced to 95 ryo.
Days later, after Suzutomo had put the bowl to use, the page proudly told him what he had done.
“What an ignoramus you are!” replied Suzutomo.
“A tea bowl that anyone asks 100 pieces of gold for can only be a family heirloom, and a thing like that is only sold when the family is pressed for money. And in that case they will be hoping to find someone who will give even 150 pieces for it. So what sort of fellow is it who does not consider their feelings?
Quite apart from that, a curio that you give 100 ryo for is something worth having, but one that has only cost 95 gives a mean impression. So never let me see that tea bowl again!”
And he had the bowl locked away, and never took it out.
Interpretation
When you insist on paying less, you may save your five ryo, but the insult you cause and the cheap impression you create will cost you in reputation, which is the thing the powerful prize above all. Learn to pay the full price— it will save you a lot in the end.
A GIFT OF FISH
Kung-yi Hsiu, premier of Lu, was fond of fish. Therefore, people in the whole country conscientiously bought fish, which they presented to him. However, Kung-yi would not accept the presents.
Against such a step his younger brother remonstrated with him and said: “You like fish, indeed. Why don’t you accept the present of fish?”
In reply, he said: “It is solely because I like fish that I would not accept the fish they gave me. Indeed, if I accept the fish, I will be placed under an obligation to them. Once placed under an obligation to them, I will some time have to bend the law. If I bend the law, I will be dismissed from the premiership. After being dismissed from the premiership, I might not be able to supply myself with fish. On the contrary, if I do not accept the fish from them and am not dismissed the premiership, however fond of fish, I can always supply myself with fish.”
HAN-FEI-TZU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER, THIRD CENTURY B.C.
Observance VII
Sometime near the beginning of the seventeenth century in Japan, a group of generals whiled away the time before a big battle by staging an incensesmelling competition. Each participant anted up a prize for the contest’s winners—bows, arrows, saddles, and other items a warrior would covet. The great Lord Date Masamune happened to pass by and was induced to
participate. For a prize, he offered the gourd that hung from his belt. Everyone laughed, for no one wanted to win this cheap item. A retainer of the host finally accepted the gourd.
When the party broke up, however, and the generals were chatting outside the tent, Masamune brought over his magnificent horse and gave it to the retainer.
“There,” he said,
“a horse has come out of the gourd.” The stunned generals suddenly regretted their scorn at Masamune’s gift.
Interpretation
Masamune understood the following: Money gives its possessor the ability to give pleasure to others. The more you can do this, the more you attract admiration. When you make a horse come out of a gourd, you give the ultimate demonstration of your power.
Image: The River. To protect yourself or to save the resource,
you dam it up. Soon, however, the waters become dank and
pestilent. Only the foulest forms of life can live in such stagnant waters; nothing travels on them, all commerce stops. Destroy the dam. When water flows and circulates, it generates abundance, wealth, and power in ever larger circles. The River must flood periodically for good things to flourish.
I took money only from those who could afford it and were willing to go in with me in schemes they fancied would fleece others. They wanted money for its own sake. I wanted it for the luxuries and pleasures it would afford me. They were seldom concerned with human nature. They knew little-and cared less-about their fellow men. If they had been keener students of
human nature, if they had given more time to companionship with their fellows and less to the chase of the almighty dollar, they wouldn’t have been such easy marks.
“YELLOW KID” WEIL. 1875-1976
Authority: The great man who is a miser is a great fool, and a man in high places can have no vice so harmful as avarice. A miserly man can conquer neither lands nor lordships, for he does not have a plentiful supply of friends with whom he may work his will. Whoever wants to have friends must not love his possessions but must acquire friends by means of fair gifts; for in the same way that the lodestone subtly draws iron to itself, so the gold and silver that a man gives attract the hearts of men.
(The Romance of the Rose, Guillaume de Lorris, c. 1200-1238)
REVERSAL
The powerful never forget that what is offered for free is inevitably a trick. Friends who offer favors without asking for payment will later want something far dearer than the money you would have paid them. The bargain has hidden problems, both material and psychological.
Learn to pay, then, and to pay well.
On the other hand, this Law offers great opportunities for swindling and deception if you apply it from the other side. Dangling the lure of a free lunch is the con artist’s stock in trade.
No man was better at this than the most successful con artist of our age, Joseph Weil, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid.”
The Yellow Kid learned early that what made his swindles possible was his fellow humans’ greed.
“This desire to get something for nothing,” he once wrote,
“has been very costly to many people who have dealt with me and with other con men.... When people learn—as I doubt they will—that they can’t get something for nothing, crime will diminish and we shall all live in greater harmony.”
Over the years Weil devised many ways to seduce people with the prospect of easy money.
He would hand out “free” real estate—who could resist such an offer?—and then the suckers would learn they had to pay $25 to register the sale. Since the land was free, it seemed worth the high fee, and the Yellow Kid would make thousands of dollars on the phony registration. In exchange he would give his suckers a phony deed. Other times, he would tell suckers about a fixed horse race, or a stock that would earn 200 percent in a few weeks. As he spun his stories he would watch the sucker’s eyes
open wide at the thought of a free lunch.
The lesson is simple: Bait your deceptions with the possibility of easy money. People are essentially lazy, and want wealth to fall in their lap rather than to work for it. For a small sum, sell them advice on how to make millions (P. T. Barnum did this later in life), and that small sum will become a fortune when multiplied by thousands of suckers. Lure people in with the prospect of easy money and you have the room to work still more deceptions on them, since greed is powerful enough to blind your victims to
anything. And as the Yellow Kid said, half the fun is teaching a moral
lesson: Greed does not pay.
LAW 40
DESPISE THE FREE LUNCH
JUDGMENT
What is offered for free is dangerous-it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price—there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.
BURIED TREASURE
Many weak-minded persons in cities hope to discover property under the surface of the earth and to make some profit from it. In the Maghrib there are many Berber “students” who are unable to make a living by natural ways and means. They approach well-to-do people with papers that have torn margins and contain either non-Arabic writing or what they claim to be the translation of a document written by the owner of buried treasures, giving the clue to the hiding place. In this way, they try to get their
sustenance by [persuading the well-to-do] to send them out to dig and hunt for treasure. Occasionally, one of these treasure hunters displays strange information or some remarkable trick of magic with which he fools people into believing his other claims, although, in fact, he knows nothing of magic and its procedures.... The things that have been said about [treasure hunting] have no scientific basis, nor are they based upon [factual] information. It should be realized that although treasures are found, this happens rarely and by chance, not by systematic search.... Those who are deluded or afflicted by these things must take refuge in God from their inability to make a living and their laziness in this respect. They should not occupy themselves with absurdities and untrue stories.
THE MUQADDIMAH, IBN KHALDUN, 1332-1406
MONEY AND POWER
In the realm of power, everything must be judged by its cost, and everything has a price. What is offered for free or at bargain rates often comes with a psychological price tag—complicated feelings of obligation, compromises with quality, the insecurity those compromises bring, on and on. The powerful learn early to protect their most valuable resources: independence and room to maneuver. By paying the full price, they keep themselves free
of dangerous entanglements and worries.
Being open and flexible with money also teaches the value of strategic generosity, a variation on the old trick of “giving when you are about to take.”
By giving the appropriate gift, you put the recipient under obligation. Generosity softens people up—to be deceived.
By gaining a reputation for liberality, you win people’s admiration while distracting them from your power plays.
By strategically spreading your wealth, you charm the other
courtiers, creating pleasure and making valuable allies.
Look at the masters of power—the Caesars, the Queen Elizabeths, the Michelangelos, the Medicis: Not a miser among them. Even the great con artists spend freely to swindle. Tight purse strings are unattractive—when engaged in seduction, Casanova would give completely not only of himself but of his wallet. The powerful understand that money is psychologically
charged, and that it is also a vessel of politeness and sociability. They make the human side of money a weapon in their armory.
For everyone able to play with money, thousands more are locked in a self-destructive refusal to use money creatively and strategically. These types represent the opposite pole to the powerful, and you must learn to recognize them—either to avoid their poisonous natures or to turn their inflexibility to your advantage:
The Greedy Fish. The greedy fish take the human side out of money. Cold and ruthless, they see only the lifeless balance sheet; viewing others solely as either pawns or obstructions in their pursuit of wealth, they trample on people’s sentiments and alienate valuable allies. No one wants to work with the greedy fish, and over the years they end up isolated, which often proves
their undoing.
Greedy fish are the con artist’s bread and butter: Lured by the bait of easy money, they swallow the ruse hook, line, and sinker. They are easy to deceive, for they spend so much time dealing with numbers (not with people) that they become blind to psychology, including their own.
Either avoid them before they exploit you or play on their greed to your gain. The Bargain Demon. Powerful people judge everything by what it costs, not just in money but in time, dignity, and peace of mind.
And this is exactly what Bargain Demons cannot do. Wasting valuable time digging for bargains, they worry endlessly about what they could have gotten elsewhere for a little less.
On top of that, the bargain item they do buy is often shabby;
perhaps it needs costly repairs, or will have to be replaced twice as fast as a high-quality item. The costs of these pursuits—not always in money (though the price of a bargain is often deceptive) but in time and peace of mind—discourage normal people from undertaking them, but for the Bargain Demon the bargain is an end in itself.
These types might seem to harm only themselves, but their attitudes are contagious: Unless you resist them they will infect you with the insecure feeling that you should have looked harder to find a cheaper price. Don’t argue with them or try to change them. Just mentally add up the cost, in time and inner peace if not in hidden financial expense, of the irrational pursuit of a bargain.
The Sadist. Financial sadists play vicious power games with money as a way of asserting their power. They might, for example, make you wait for money that is owed you, promising you that the check is in the mail. Or if they hire you to work for them, they meddle in every aspect of the job, haggling and giving you ulcers. Sadists seem to think that paying for something gives them the right to torture and abuse the seller. They have no sense of the courtier element in money. If you are unlucky enough to get
involved with this type, accepting a financial loss may be better in the long run than getting entangled in their destructive power games.
The Indiscriminate Giver. Generosity has a definite function in power: It attracts people, softens them up, makes allies out of them. But it has to be used strategically, with a definite end in mind. Indiscriminate Givers, on the other hand, are generous because they want to be loved and admired by all.
And their generosity is so indiscriminate and needy that it may not have the desired effect: If they give to one and all, why should the recipient feel special? Attractive as it may seem to make an Indiscriminate Giver your mark, in any involvement with this type you will often feel burdened by their insatiable emotional needs.
THE MISER
A miser, to make sure of his property, sold all that he had and converted it into a great lump of gold, which he hid in a hole in the ground, and went continually to visit and inspect it. This roused the curiosity of one of his workmen, who, suspecting that there was a treasure, when his master’s back was turned, went to the spot, and stole it away. When the miser returned and found the place empty, he wept and tore his hair. But a neighbor who
saw him in this extravagant grief, and learned the cause of it, said: “Fret thyself no longer, but take a stone and put it in the same place, and think that it is your lump of gold; for, as you never meant to use it. the one will do you as much good as the other.”
The worth of money is not in its possession, but in its use.
FABLES, AESOP, SIXTH CENTURY B.C.
TRANSGRESSIONS OF THE LAW
Transgression I
After Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru, in 1532, gold from the Incan Empire began to pour into Spain, and Spaniards of all classes started dreaming of the instant riches to be had in the New World. The story soon spread of an Indian chief to the east of Peru who once each year would ritually cover himself in gold dust and dive into a lake. Soon word of mouth transformed El Dorado, the “Golden Man,” into an empire called El Dorado, wealthier than the Incan, where the streets were paved and the
buildings inlaid with gold. This elaboration of the story did not seem implausible, for surely a chief who could afford to waste gold dust in a lake must rule a golden empire. Soon Spaniards were searching for El Dorado all over northern South America.
In February of 1541, the largest expedition yet in this venture, led by Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo, left Quito, in Ecuador. Resplendent in their armors and colorful silks, 340 Spaniards headed east, along with 4,000 Indians to carry supplies and serve as scouts, 4,000 swine, dozens of llamas, and close to 1,000 dogs. But the expedition was soon hit by torrential rain, which rotted its gear and spoiled its food. Meanwhile, as Gonzalo Pizarro questioned the Indians they met along the way, those who seemed to be
withholding information, or who had not even heard of the fabulous kingdom, he would torture and feed to the dogs. Word of the Spaniards’ murderousness spread quickly among the Indians, who realized that the only way to avoid Gonzalo’s wrath was to make up stories about El Dorado and send him as far away as possible. As Gonzalo and his men followed the leads the Indians gave them, then, they were only led farther into deep
jungle. The explorers’ spirits sagged. Their uniforms had long since shredded; their armor rusted and they threw it away; their shoes were torn to pieces, forcing them to walk barefoot; the Indian slaves they had set out with had either died or deserted them; they had eaten not only the swine but the hunting dogs and llamas. They lived on roots and fruit. Realizing that they could not continue this way, Pizarro decided to risk river travel, and a barge was built out of rotting wood. But the journey down the treacherous Napo River proved no easier. Setting up camp on the river’s edge, Gonzalo sent scouts ahead on the barge to find Indian settlements with food. He waited and waited for the scouts to return, only to find out they had decided to desert the expedition and continue down the river on their own.
The rain continued without end. Gonzalo’s men forgot about El Dorado; they wanted only to return to Quito. Finally, in August of 1542, a little over a hundred men, from an expedition originally numbering in the thousands, managed to find their way back. To the residents of Quito they seemed to have emerged from hell itself, wrapped in tatters and skins, their bodies covered in sores, and so emaciated as to be unrecognizable. For over a year and a half they had marched in an enormous circle, two thousand miles by foot. The vast sums of money invested in the expedition had yielded nothing—no sign of El Dorado and no sign of gold. Interpretation
Even after Gonzalo Pizarro’s disaster, the Spaniards launched expedition after expedition in search of El Dorado. And like Pizarro the conquistadors would burn and loot villages, torture Indians, endure unimaginable hardships, and get no closer to gold. The money they spent on such expeditions cannot be calculated; yet despite the futility of the search, the lure of the fantasy endured.
There is a popular saying in Japan that goes “Tada yori takai mono wa nai,” meaning: “Nothing is more costly than something given free of charge.”
THE UNSPOKEN WAY, MICHIHIRO MATSUMOTO, 1988
MONEY
Yusuf Ibn Jafar el-Amudi used to take sums of money, sometimes very large ones, from those who came to study with him.
A distinguished legalist visiting him once said: “I am enchanted and impressed by your teachings, and I am sure that you are directing your disciples in a proper manner. But it is not in accordance with tradition to take money for knowledge. Besides,
the action is open to misinterpretation.”
El-Amudi said: “I have never sold any knowledge. There is no money on earth sufficient to pay for it. As for misinterpretation, the abstaining from taking money will not prevent it, for it will find some other object. Rather should you know that a man who takes money may be greedy for money, or he may not. But a man who takes nothing at all is under the gravest suspicion of robbing the disciple of his soul. People who say, ‘I take nothing,’ may be found to take away the volition of their victim.”
THE DERMIS PROBE, IDRIES SHAH, 1970
Not only did the search for El Dorado cost millions of lives—both Indian and Spanish—it helped bring the ruin of the Spanish empire. Gold became Spain’s obsession. The gold that did find its way back to Spain-and a lot did —was reinvested in more expeditions, or in the purchase of luxuries, rather than in agriculture or any other productive endeavor. Whole Spanish towns were depopulated as their menfolk left to hunt gold. Farms fell into ruin, and the army had no recruits for its European wars. By the end of the seventeenth century, the entire country had shrunk by more than half of its population; the city of Madrid had gone from a population of 400,000 to 150,000. With diminishing returns from its efforts over so many years,
Spain fell into a decline from which it never recovered. Power requires self-discipline. The prospect of wealth, particularly easy, sudden wealth, plays havoc with the emotions. The suddenly rich believe that more is always possible.
The free lunch, the money that will fall into your lap, is just around the corner. In this delusion the greedy neglect everything power really depends on: self-control, the goodwill of others, and so on. Understand: With one exception—death—no lasting change in fortune comes quickly.
Sudden wealth rarely lasts, for it is built on nothing solid.
Never let lust for money lure you out of the protective and enduring fortress of real power. Make power your goal and money will find its way to you. Leave El Dorado for suckers and fools.
Transgression II
In the early eighteenth century, no one stood higher in English society than the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. The duke, having led successful campaigns against the French, was considered Europe’s premier general and strategist. And his wife, the duchess, after much maneuvering, had established herself as the favorite of Queen Anne, who became ruler of England in 1702. In 1704 the duke’s triumph at the Battle of Blenheim
made him the toast of England, and to honor him the queen awarded him a large plot of land in the town of Woodstock, and the funds to create a great palace there. Calling his planned home the Palace of Blenheim, the duke chose as his architect the young John Vanbrugh, a kind of Renaissance man who wrote plays as well as designed buildings. And so construction began, in the summer of 1705, with much fanfare and great hopes. Vanbrugh had a dramatist’s sense of architecture. His palace was to be a monument to Marlborough’s brilliance and power, and was to include artificial lakes, enormous bridges, elaborate gardens, and other fantastical touches. From day one, however, the duchess could not be pleased: She thought Vanbrugh was wasting money on yet another stand of trees; she wanted the palace finished as soon as possible. The duchess tortured Vanbrugh and his workmen on every detail. She was consumed with petty matters; although the government was paying for Blenheim, she counted
every penny. Eventually her grumbling, about Blenheim and other things too, created an irreparable rift between her and Queen Anne, who, in 1711, dismissed her from the court, ordering her to vacate her apartments at the royal palace. When the duchess left (fuming over the loss of her position, and also of her royal salary), she emptied the apartment of every fixture down to the brass doorknobs.
THE MAN WHO LOVED MONEY BETTER THAN LIFE
In ancient times there was an old woodcutter who went to the mountain almost every day to cut wood. It was said that this old man was a miser who hoarded his silver until it changed to gold, and that he cared more for gold than anything else in all the world. One day a wilderness tiger sprang at him and though he ran he could not escape, and the tiger carried him off in its mouth. The woodcutter’s son saw his father’s danger, and ran to save him if possible. He carried a long knife, and as he could run faster than the tiger, who had a man to carry, he soon overtook them. His father was not much hurt, for the tiger held him by his clothes. When the old woodcutter saw his son about to stab the tiger he called out in great alarm: “Do not spoil the tiger’s skin! Do not spoil the tiger’s skin! If you can kill him without cutting holes in his skin we can get many pieces of silver for it. Kill him, but do not cut his body.”
While the son was listening to his father’s instructions the tiger suddenly dashed off into the forest, carrying the old man where the son could not reach him, and he was soon killed.
“CHINESE FABLE,” VARIOUS FABLES FROM VARIOUS PLACES,
DIANE DI PRIMA, ED., 1960
Over the next ten years, work on Blenheim would stop and start, as the funds became harder to procure from the government. The duchess thought Vanbrugh was out to ruin her. She quibbled over every carload of stone and bushel of lime, counted every extra yard of iron railing or foot of wainscot, hurling abuse at the wasteful workmen, contractors, and surveyors. Marlborough, old and weary, wanted nothing more than to settle into the palace in his last years, but the project became bogged down in a swamp of
litigation, the workmen suing the duchess for wages, the duchess suing the architect right back. In the midst of this interminable wrangling, the duke died. He had never spent a night in his beloved Blenheim.
After Marlborough’s death, it became clear that he had a vast estate, worth over £2 million—more than enough to pay for finishing the palace.
But the duchess would not relent: She held back Vanbrugh’s wages as well as the workmen’s, and finally had the architect dismissed. The man who took his place finished Blenheim in a few years, following Vanbrugh’s designs to the letter. Vanbrugh died in 1726, locked out of the palace by the duchess, unable to set foot in his greatest creation. Foreshadowing the romantic movement, Blenheim had started a whole new trend in
architecture, but had given its creator a twenty-year nightmare.
Interpretation
For the Duchess of Marlborough, money was a way to play sadistic power games. She saw the loss of money as a symbolic loss of power. With Vanbrugh her contortions went deeper still: He was a great artist, and she envied his power to create, to attain a fame outside her reach. She may not have had his gifts, but she did have the money to torture and abuse him over the pettiest details—to ruin his life.
This kind of sadism, however, bears an awful price. It made construction that should have lasted ten years take twenty. It poisoned many a relationship, alienated the duchess from the court, deeply pained the duke (who wanted only to live peacefully in Blenheim), created endless lawsuits, and took years off Vanbrugh’s life. Finally, too, posterity had the last word:
Vanbrugh is recognized as a genius while the duchess is forever
remembered for her consummate cheapness.
The powerful must have grandeur of spirit—they can never reveal any pettiness. And money is the most visible arena in which to display either grandeur or pettiness. Best spend freely, then, and create a reputation for generosity, which in the end will pay great dividends.
Never let financial details blind you to the bigger picture of how people perceive you. Their resentment will cost you in the long run. And if you want to meddle in the work of creative people under your hire, at least pay them well. Your money will buy their submission better than your displays of power.
THE STORY OF MOSES AND PHARAOH
It is written in the histories of the prophets that Moses was sent to Pharaoh with many miracles, wonders and honors. Now the daily ration for Pharaoh’s table was 4,000 sheep, 400 cows, 200 camels, and a corresponding amount of chickens, fish, beverages, fried meats, sweets, and other things. All the people of Egypt and all his army used to eat at his table every day.
For 400 years he had claimed divinity and never ceased providing this food.
When Moses prayed, saying, “O Lord, destroy Pharaoh,”
God answered his prayer and said, “I shall destroy him in water,
and I shall bestow all his wealth and that of his soldiers on you and your peoples.”
Several years passed by after this promise, and Pharaoh, doomed
to ruin, continued to live in all his magnificence. Moses was impatient for God to destroy Pharaoh quickly, and he could not endure to wail any longer. So he fasted for forty days and went to Mount Sinai, and in his communing with God
he said, “O Lord. Thou didst promise that Thou wouldst destroy Pharaoh, and still he has forsaken none of his blasphemies
and pretensions. So when wilt Thou destroy him?”
A voice came from The Truth saying, “O Moses, you want Me to destroy Pharaoh as quickly as possible, but a thousand times a thousand of My servants want Me never to do so, because they partake of his bounty and enjoy tranquillity under his rule. By My power I swear that as long as he provides abundant food and comfort for My creatures, I shall not destroy him.”
Moses said, “Then when will Thy promise be fulfilled?”
God said, “My promise will be fulfilled when he withholds his provision from My creatures. If ever he begins to lessen his bounty, know that his hour is drawing near.”
It chanced that one day Pharaoh said to Haman, “Moses has gathered the Sons of Israel about him and is causing us disquiet. We know not what will be the issue of his affair with us. We must keep our stores full lest at any time we be without resources. So we must halve our daily rations and keep the saving in reserve.” He deducted 2, 000 sheep, 200 cows, and a 100 camels, and similarly every two or three days reduced the ration. Moses
then knew that the promise of The Truth was near to fulfillment, for excessive economy is a sign of decline and a bad omen. The masters of tradition say that on the day when Pharaoh was drowned only two ewes had been killed in his kitchen. Nothing is better than generosity.... If a man is rich and desires, without a royal charter, to act like a lord; if he wants men to humble themselves before him, to revere him and call him Lord and prince, then tell him every day to spread a table with victuals. All those who have acquired renown in the world, have gained it mainly through hospitality, while the miserly and avaricious are despised in both worlds.
THE BOOK OF GOVERNMENT OR RULES FOR KINGS, NIZAM ALMULK, ELEVENTH CENTURY
OBSERVANCES OF THE LAW
Observance I
Pietro Aretino, son of a lowly shoemaker, had catapulted himself into fame as a writer of biting satires. But like every Renaissance artist, he needed to find a patron who would give him a comfortable lifestyle while not interfering with his work. In 1528 Aretino decided to attempt a new strategy in the patronage game. Leaving Rome, he established himself in Venice, where few had heard of him. He had a fair amount of money he had managed to save, but little else. Soon after he moved into his new home, however, he threw open its doors to rich and poor, regaling them with banquets and amusements. He befriended each and every gondolier, tipping them royally. In the streets, he spread his money liberally, giving it away to beggars, orphans, washerwomen. Among the city’s commoners, word quickly spread that Aretino was more than just a great writer, he was a man of power—a kind of lord. Artists and men of influence soon began to frequent Aretino’s house. Within a few years he made himself a celebrity; no visiting dignitary would think of leaving Venice without paying him a call. His generosity had cost him most of his savings, but had bought him influence and a good name—a
cornerstone in the foundation of power. Since in Renaissance Italy as elsewhere the ability to spend freely was the privilege of the rich, the aristocracy thought Aretino had to be a man of influence, since he spent money like one. And since the influence of a man of influence is worth buying, Aretino became the recipient of all sorts of gifts and moneys. Dukes and duchesses, wealthy merchants, and popes and princes competed to gain
his favor, and showered him with all kinds of presents. Aretino’s spending habits, of course, were strategic, and the strategy worked like a charm. But for real money and comfort he needed a great patron’s bottomless pockets. Having surveyed the possibilities, he eventually set his sights on the extremely wealthy Marquis of Mantua, and wrote an epic poem that he dedicated to the marquis. This was a common practice of writers looking for patronage: In exchange for a dedication they would get a small stipend, enough to write yet another poem, so that they spent their lives in a kind of constant servility. Aretino, however, wanted power, not a measly wage. He might dedicate a poem to the marquis, but he would offer it to him as a gift, implying by doing so that he was not a hired hack looking for a stipend but that he and the marquis were equals. Aretino’s gift-giving did not stop there: As a close friend of two of Venice’s greatest artists, the sculptor Jacopo Sansovino and the painter
Titian, he convinced these men to participate in his gift-giving scheme. Aretino had studied the marquis before going to work on him, and knew his taste inside and out; he was able to advise Sansovino and Titian what subject matter would please the marquis most. When he then sent a Sansovino sculpture and a Titian painting to the marquis as gifts from all three of them, the man was beside himself with joy. Over the next few months, Aretino sent other gifts—swords, saddles, the glass that was a Venetian specialty, things he knew the marquis prized. Soon he, Titian, and Sansovino began to receive gifts from the marquis in return. And the strategy went further: When the son-in-law of a friend of Aretino’s found himself in jail in Mantua, Aretino was able to get the marquis to arrange his release. Aretino’s friend, a wealthy merchant, was a man of great influence in Venice; by turning the goodwill he had built up with the marquis to use, Aretino had now bought this man’s indebtedness, too, and he in turn would help Aretino when he could. The circle of influence was growing wider. Time and again, Aretino was able to cash in on the immense political power of the marquis, who also helped him in his many court romances. Eventually, however, the relationship became strained, as Aretino came to feel that the marquis should have requited his generosity better. But he would not lower himself to begging or whining: Since the exchange of gifts
between the two men had made them equals, it would not seem right to bring up money. He simply withdrew from the marquis’s circle and hunted for other wealthy prey, settling first on the French king Francis, then the Medicis, the Duke of Urbino, Emperor Charles V, and more. In the end, having many patrons meant he did not have to bow to any of them, and his power seemed comparable to that of a great lord. Interpretation
Aretino understood two fundamental properties of money:
First, that it has to circulate to bring power. What money should buy is not lifeless objects but power over people. By keeping money in constant circulation, Aretino bought an ever-expanding circle of influence that in the end more than compensated him for his expenses.
Second, Aretino understood the key property of the gift. To give a gift is to imply that you and the recipient are equals at the very least, or that you are the recipient’s superior. A gift also involves an indebtedness or obligation; when friends, for instance, offer you something for free, you can be sure they expect something in return, and that to get it they are making you feel indebted. (The mechanism may or may not be entirely conscious on their part, but this is how it works.)
Aretino avoided such encumbrances on his freedom. Instead of acting like a menial who expects the powerful to pay his way in life, he turned the whole dynamic around; instead of being indebted to the powerful, he made the powerful indebted to him. This was the point of his gift-giving, a ladder that carried him to the highest social levels. By the end of his life he had become the most famous writer in Europe.
Understand: Money may determine power relationships, but those relationships need not depend on the amount of money you have; they also depend on the way you use it. Powerful people give freely, buying influence rather than things. If you accept the inferior position because you have no fortune yet, you may find yourself in it forever. Play the trick that Aretino played on Italy’s aristocracy: Imagine yourself an equal. Play the lord, give freely, open your doors, circulate your money, and create the facade of power through an alchemy that transforms money into influence.
Observance II
Soon after Baron James Rothschild made his fortune in Paris in the early 1820s, he faced his most intractable problem:
How could a Jew and a German, a total outsider to French society, win the respect of the xenophobic French upper classes? Rothschild was a man who understood power—he knew that his fortune would bring him status, but that if he remained socially alienated neither his status nor his fortune would last. So he looked at the society of the time and asked what would win their hearts.
Charity?
The French couldn’t care less. Political influence?
He already had that, and if anything it only made people more suspicious of him. The one weak spot, he decided, was boredom. In the period of the restoration of the monarchy, the French upper classes were bored. So Rothschild began to spend astounding sums of money on entertaining them. He hired the best architects in France to design his gardens and ballroom; he hired MarieAntoine Carême, the most celebrated French chef, to prepare the most lavish parties Paris had ever witnessed; no Frenchman could resist, even if the parties were given by a German Jew. Rothschild’s weekly soirees began to attract bigger and bigger numbers. Over the next few years he won the only thing that would secure an outsider’s power: social acceptance.
Interpretation
Strategic generosity is always a great weapon in building a support base, particularly for the outsider. But the Baron de Rothschild was cleverer still: He knew it was his money that had created the barrier between him and the French, making him look ugly and untrustworthy. The best way to overcome this was literally to waste huge sums, a gesture to show he valued French culture and society over money. What Rothschild did resembled the famous potlatch feasts of the American Northwest:
By periodically destroying its wealth in a giant orgy of festivals and bonfires, an Indian tribe would symbolize its power over other tribes. The base of its power was not money but its ability to spend, and its confidence in a superiority that would restore to it all that the potlatch had destroyed.
In the end, the baron’s soirees reflected his desire to mingle not just in France’s business world but in its society. By wasting money on his potlatches, he hoped to demonstrate that his power went beyond money into the more precious realm of culture. Rothschild may have won social acceptance by spending money, but the support base he gained was one that money alone could not buy. To secure his fortune he had to “waste” it. That is strategic generosity in a nutshell—the ability to be flexible with your wealth, putting it to work, not to buy objects, but to win people’s hearts.
Observance III
The Medicis of Renaissance Florence had built their immense power on the fortune they had made in banking. But in Florence, centuries-old republic that it was, the idea that money bought power went against all the city’s proud democratic values. Cosimo de’ Medici, the first of the family to gain great fame, worked around this by keeping a low profile. He never flaunted
his wealth. But by the time his grandson Lorenzo came of age, in the 1470s, the family’s wealth was too large, and their influence too noticeable, to be disguised any longer.
THE FLAME-COLORED CLOAK
During the campaign of Carnbyses in Egypt, a great many Greeks visited that country for one reason or another: some, as was to be expected, for trade, some to serve in the army, others, no doubt, out of mere curiosity, to see what they could see. Amongst the sightseers was Aeaces’s son Syloson, the exiled brother of Polycrates of Samos. While he was in Egypt, Syloson had an extraordinary stroke of luck: he was hanging about the streets of
Memphis dressed in a flame-colored cloak, when Darius, who at that time was a member of Cambyses’s guard and not yet of any particular importance, happened to catch sight of him and, seized with a sudden longing to possess the cloak, came up to Syloson and made him an offer for it.
His extreme anxiety to get it was obvious enough to Syloson, who was inspired to say: “I am not selling this for any money, but if you must have it, I will give it to you for free.”
Darius thererepon thanked him warmly and took it. Syloson at the moment merely thought he had lost it by his foolish good nature; then came the death of Cambyses and the revolt of the seven
against the Magus, and Darius ascended the throne. Syloson now had the news that the man whose request for the flame-colored cloak he had formerly gratified in Egypt had become king of Persia. He hurried to Susa, sat down at the entrance of the royal palace, and claimed to be included in the official list of the king’s benefactors. The sentry on guard reported his claim to Darius, who asked in surprise who the man might be.
“For surely,” he said,
“as I have so recently come to the throne, there cannot be
any Greek to whom I am indebted for a service. Hardly any of them have been here yet, and I certainly cannot remember owing anything to a Greek. But bring him in all the same, that I may know what he means by this claim.”
The guard escorted Syloson into the royal presence, and when the interpreters asked him who he was and what he had done to justify the statement that he was the king’s benefactor, he reminded Darius of the story of the cloak, and said that he was the man who had given it him.
“Sir,” exclaimed Darius,
“you are the most generous of men; for while I was still a person of no power or consequence you gave me a present—small indeed, but deserving then as much gratitude from me as would the most splendid of gifts today. I will give you in return more silver and gold than you can count, that you may never regret that you once did a favor to Darius the son of Hystaspes. ”
“My lord, ” replied Syloson,
”do not give me gold or silver, but recover Samos for me, my native island, which now since Oroetes killed my brother Polycrates is in the hands of one of our servants. Let Samos be your gift to me—but let no man in the island be killed or enslaved.”
Darius consented to Syloson’s request, and dispatched a force under the command of Otanes, one of the seven, with orders to do everything that Syloson had asked.
THE HISTORIES. HERODOTUS. FIFTH CENTURY B.C.
Lorenzo solved the problem in his own way by developing the strategy of distraction that has served people of wealth ever since: He became the most illustrious patron of the arts that history has ever known. Not only did he spend lavishly on paintings, he created Italy’s finest apprentice schools for young artists. It was in one of these schools that the young Michelangelo first caught the attention of Lorenzo, who invited the artist to come and live in his house. He did the same with Leonardo da Vinci. Once under his wing, Michelangelo and Leonardo requited his generosity by becoming loyal artists in his stable.
Whenever Lorenzo faced an enemy, he would wield the weapon of patronage. When Pisa, Florence’s traditional enemy, threatened to rebel against it in 1472, Lorenzo placated its people by pouring money into its university, which had once been its pride and joy but had long ago lost its luster. The Pisans had no defense against this insidious maneuver, which simultaneously fed their love of culture and blunted their desire for battle.
Interpretation
Lorenzo undoubtedly loved the arts, but his patronage of artists had a practical function as well, of which he was keenly aware. In Florence at the time, banking was perhaps the least admired way of making money, and was certainly not a respected source of power. The arts were at the other pole, the pole of quasi-religious transcendence. By spending on the arts, Lorenzo diluted people’s opinions of the ugly source of his wealth, disguising himself in nobility. There is no better use of strategic generosity than that of distracting attention from an unsavory reality and wrapping
oneself in the mantle of art or religion.
Observance IV
Louis XIV had an eagle eye for the strategic power of money. When he came to the throne, the powerful nobility had recently proven a thorn in the monarchy’s side, and seethed with rebelliousness. So he impoverished these aristocrats by making them spend enormous sums on maintaining their position in the court. Making them dependent on royal largesse for their
livelihood, he had them in his claws. Next Louis brought the nobles to their knees with strategic generosity. It would work like this: Whenever he noticed a stubborn courtier whose influence he needed to gain, or whose troublemaking he needed to squelch,
he would use his vast wealth to soften the soil. First he would ignore his victim, making the man anxious. Then the man would suddenly find that his son had been given a well-paid post, or that funds had been spent liberally in his home region, or that he had been given a painting he had long coveted. Presents would flow from Louis’s hands. Finally, weeks or months later, Louis would ask for the favor he had needed all along. A man who had once vowed to do anything to stop the king would find he had lost the
desire to fight. A straightforward bribe would have made him rebellious;
this was far more insidious. Facing hardened earth in which nothing could take root, Louis loosened the soil before he planted his seeds.
Interpretation
Louis understood that there is a deep-rooted emotional element in our attitude to money, an element going back to childhood. When we are children, all kinds of complicated feelings about our parents center around gifts; we see the giving of a gift as a sign of love and approval. And that emotional element never goes away. The recipients of gifts, financial or otherwise, are suddenly as vulnerable as children, especially when the gift comes from someone in authority. They cannot help opening up; their will
is loosened, as Louis loosened the soil.
To succeed best, the gift should come out of the blue. It should be remarkable for the fact that a gift like it has never been given before, or for being preceded by a cold shoulder from the giver. The more often you give to particular people, the blunter this weapon becomes. If they don’t take your gifts for granted, becoming monsters of ingratitude, they will resent what appears to be charity. The sudden, unexpected, one-time gift will not
spoil your children; it will keep them under your thumb.
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LAW 38
THINK AS YOU LIKE BUT BEHAVE LIKE OTHERS
JUDGMENT
If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your
unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.
THINK WITH THE FEW AND SPEAK WITH THE MANY
It is easy to run into danger by trying to swim against the stream. Only a Socrates could attempt to do that.
Disagreement is regarded as offensive because it is a condemnation of the views of others; the numbers of the disgruntled grow, on account either of some matter that has been the object of censure or of some person who has praised it: Truth is for the few, error is as usual as it is vulgar. Nor is the wise man to be recognized by what he says in the marketplace, for he speaks there not with his own voice,
but with that of universal folly, however much his inmost thoughts may gainsay it: The wise man avoids being contradicted as sedulously as he avoids contradicting; the publicity of censure is withheld from that which readily provokes it.
Thought is free; it cannot and should not be coerced; retire into
the sanctuary of your silence and if you sometimes allow yourself to break it, do so under the aegis of a discreet few.
BALTASAR GRACIÁN, 1601-1658
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
Around the year 478 B.C., the city of Sparta sent an expedition to Persia led by the young Spartan nobleman Pausanias. The city-states of Greece had recently fought off a mighty invasion from Persia, and now Pausanias, along with allied ships from Athens, had orders to punish the invaders and win back the islands and coastal towns that the Persians had occupied. Both the Athenians and the Spartans had great respect for Pausanias-he had proven himself as a fearless warrior, with a flair for the dramatic.
With amazing speed, Pausanias and his troops took Cyprus, then moved on to the mainland of Asia Minor known as the Hellespont and captured Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul). Now master of part of the Persian empire, Pausanias began to show signs of behavior that went beyond his normal flamboyance. He appeared in public wearing pomades in his hair and flowing Persian robes, and accompanied by a bodyguard of Egyptians.
He held lavish banquets in which he sat in the Persian manner and
demanded to be entertained. He stopped seeing his old friends, entered into communication with the Persian King Xerxes, and all in all affected the style and manner of a Persian dictator.
Clearly power and success had gone to Pausanias’s head. His armyAthenians and Spartans alike-at first thought this a passing fancy: He had always been a bit exaggerated in his gestures. But when he flaunted his disdain for the Greeks’ simple way of life, and insulted the common Greek soldier, they began to feel he had gone too far. Although there was no concrete evidence for this, rumors spread that he had gone over to the other side, and that he dreamed of becoming a kind of Greek Xerxes. To quell the
possibility of mutiny, the Spartans relieved Pausanias of his command and called him home.
Pausanias, however, continued to dress in the Persian style, even in Sparta. After a few months he independently hired a trireme and returned to the Hellespont, telling his compatriots he was going to continue the fight against the Persians. Actually, however, he had different plans—to make himself ruler of all Greece, with the aid of Xerxes himself. The Spartans declared him a public enemy and sent a ship to capture him. Pausanias surrendered, certain that he could clear himself of the charges of treason. It did come out during the trial that during his reign as commander he had offended his fellow Greeks time and again, erecting monuments, for instance, in his own name, rather than in those of the cities whose troops had fought alongside him, as was the custom.
Yet Pausanias proved right: Despite the evidence of his numerous contacts with the enemy, the Spartans refused to imprison a man of such noble birth, and let him go.
Now thinking himself untouchable, Pausanias hired a messenger to take a letter to Xerxes, but the messenger instead took the letter to the Spartan authorities. These men wanted to find out more, so they had the messenger arrange to meet Pausanias in a temple where they could hide and listen behind a partition. What Pausanias said shocked them-they had never heard such contempt for their ways spoken so brazenly by one of their own—and they made arrangements for his immediate arrest.
On his way home from the temple, Pausanias got word of what had happened. He ran to another temple to hide, but the authorities followed him there and placed sentries all around. Pausanias refused to surrender.
Unwilling to forcibly remove him from the sacred temple, the authorities kept him trapped inside, until he eventually died of starvation.
Bene vixit, qui bene latuit—“He lives well who conceals himself well. ”
OVID, c. 43 B.C.-A.D. 18
Interpretation
At first glance it might seem that Pausanias simply fell in love with another culture, a phenomenon as old as time. Never comfortable with the asceticism of the Spartans, he found himself enthralled by the Persian love of luxury and sensual pleasure. He put on Persian robes and perfumes with a sense of deliverance from Greek discipline and simplicity.
This is how it appears when people adopt a culture in which they were not raised. Often, however, there is also something else at play: People who flaunt their infatuation with a different culture are expressing a disdain and contempt for their own. They are using the outward appearance of the exotic to separate themselves from the common folk who unquestioningly follow the local customs and laws, and to express their sense of superiority. Otherwise they would act with more dignity, showing respect for those who do not share their desires. Indeed their need to show their difference so dramatically often makes them disliked by the people whose beliefs they challenge, indirectly and subtly, perhaps, but offensively nonetheless.
As Thucydides wrote of Pausanias, “By his contempt for the laws and his imitation of foreign ways he had made himself very widely suspected of being unwilling to abide by normal standards.” Cultures have norms that reflect centuries of shared beliefs and ideals. Do not expect to scoff at such things with impunity. You will be punished somehow, even if just through isolation—a position of real powerlessness.
Many of us, like Pausanias, feel the siren call of the exotic, the foreign. Measure and moderate this desire. Flaunting your pleasure in alien ways of thinking and acting will reveal a different motive—to demonstrate your superiority over your fellows.
Wise men [should be] like coffers with double bottoms: Which when others look into, being opened, they see not all that they hold.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, 1554-1618
WHEN THE WATERS WERE CHANGED
Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad. Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character. On the
appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water. When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding. At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from everyone else. He drank the
new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.
TALES OF THE DERVISHES, IDRIES SHAH, 1967
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
During the late sixteenth century, a violent reaction against the Protestant Reformation erupted in Italy. The Counter Reformation, as it was called, included its own version of the Inquisition to root out all deviations from the Catholic Church. Among its victims was the scientist Galileo, but an important thinker who suffered even greater persecution was the Dominican monk and philosopher Tommaso Campanella. A follower of the materialist doctrine of the Roman philosopher
Epicurus, Campanella did not believe in miracles, or in heaven and hell. The Church had promoted such superstitions, he wrote, to control the common folk by keeping them in fear. Such ideas verged on atheism, and Campanella expressed them incautiously. In 1593 the Inquisition threw him into prison for his heretical beliefs. Six years later, as a form of partial release, he was confined to a monastery in Naples. Southern Italy was controlled by Spain at the time, and in Naples Campanella became involved in a plot to fight and throw out these invaders.
His hope was to establish an independent republic based on his own ideas of utopia. The leaders of the Italian Inquisition, working with their Spanish counterparts, had him imprisoned again. This time they also tortured him, to discover the true nature of his impious beliefs: He was subjected to the infamous la veglia, a torture in which he was suspended by his arms in a
squatting position a few inches above a seat studded with spikes. The posture was impossible to sustain, and in time the victim would end up sitting on the spikes, which would tear his flesh at the slightest contact.
During these years, however, Campanella learned something about power. Facing the prospect of execution for heresy, he changed his strategy: He would not renounce his beliefs, yet he knew he had to disguise their outward appearance.
To save his life, Campanella feigned madness. He let his inquisitors imagine that his beliefs stemmed from an incontrollable unsoundness of mind. For a while the tortures continued, to see if his insanity was faked,
but in 1603 his sentence was commuted to life in prison. The first four years of this he spent chained to a wall in an underground dungeon. Despite such conditions, he continued to write although no longer would he be so foolish as to express his ideas directly.
One book of Campanella’s, The Hispanic Monarchy, promoted the idea that Spain had a divine mission to expand its powers around the world, and offered the Spanish king practical, Machiavelli-type advice for achieving this. Despite his own interest in Machiavelli, the book in general presented ideas completely the opposite to his own. The Hispanic Monarchy was in fact a ploy, an attempt to show his conversion to orthodoxy in the boldest manner possible.
It worked: In 1626, six years after its publication, the pope finally let Campanella out of prison. Shortly after gaining his freedom, Campanella wrote Atheism Conquered, a book attacking free-thinkers, Machiavellians, Calvinists, and heretics of all stripes. The book is written in the form of debates in which heretics express their beliefs and are countered by arguments for the superiority of Catholicism. Campanella had obviously reformed—his book made that clear. Or did it?
The arguments in the mouths of the heretics had never before been expressed with such verve and freshness. Pretending to present their side only to knock it down, Campanella actually summarized the case against Catholicism with striking passion. When he argued the other side, supposedly his side, on the other hand, he resorted to stale clichés and convoluted rationales. Brief and eloquent, the heretics’ arguments seemed bold and sincere. The lengthy arguments for Catholicism seemed tiresome
and unconvincing. Catholics who read the book found it disturbing and ambiguous, but they could not claim it was heretical, or that Campanella should be returned to prison. His defense of Catholicism, after all, used arguments they had used
themselves. Yet in the years to come, Atheism Conquered became a bible for atheists, Machiavellians and libertines who used the arguments Campanella had put in their mouths to defend their dangerous ideas. Combining an outward display of conformity with an expression of his true beliefs in a way that his sympathizers would understand, Campanella showed that he had learned his lesson.
Interpretation
In the face of awesome persecution, Campanella devised three strategic moves that saved his hide, freed him from prison, and allowed him to continue to express his beliefs. First he feigned madness—the medieval equivalent of disavowing responsibility for one’s actions, like blaming one’s parents today. Next he wrote a book that expressed the exact opposite of his own beliefs. Finally, and most brilliantly of all, he disguised his ideas while
insinuating them at the same time. It is an old but powerful trick: You pretend to disagree with dangerous ideas, but in the course of your disagreement you give those ideas expression and exposure.
You seem to conform to the prevailing orthodoxy, but those who know will understand the irony involved. You are protected.
It is inevitable in society that certain values and customs lose contact with their original motives and become oppressive. And there will always be those who rebel against such oppression, harboring ideas far ahead of their time.
As Campanella was forced to realize, however, there is no point
in making a display of your dangerous ideas if they only bring you suffering and persecution.
Martyrdom serves no purpose—better to live on in an
oppressive world, even to thrive in it. Meanwhile find a way to express your ideas subtly for those who understand you.
Laying your pearls before swine will only bring you trouble.
Never combat any man's opinion; for though you reached the age of Methuselah, you would never have done setting him right upon all the absurd things that he believes. It is also well to avoid correcting people’s mistakes in conversation,
however good your intentions may be; for it is easy to offend people, and difficult, if not impossible to mend them.
If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to the dialogue of two fools in a comedy. Probatum est.
The man who comes into the world with the notion that he is really going to instruct it in matters of the highest importance, may thank his stars if he escapes with a whole skin.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed sometimes I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.
Niccolò Machiavelli, in a letter to Francesco Gnicciardini, May 17, 1521
KEYS TO POWER
We all tell lies and hide our true feelings, for complete free expression is a social impossibility. From an early age we learn to conceal our thoughts, telling the prickly and insecure what we know they want to hear, watching carefully lest we offend them. For most of us this is natural—there are ideas and values that most people accept, and it is pointless to argue. We believe
what we want to, then, but on the outside we wear a mask.
There are people, however, who see such restraints as an intolerable infringement on their freedom, and who have a need to prove the superiority of their values and beliefs. In the end, though, their arguments convince only a few and offend a great deal more. The reason arguments do not work is that most people hold their ideas and values without thinking about them. There is a strong emotional content in their beliefs: They really
do not want to have to rework their habits of thinking, and when you challenge them, whether directly through your arguments or indirectly through your behavior, they are hostile.
Wise and clever people learn early on that they can display conventional behavior and mouth conventional ideas without having to believe in them.
The power these people gain from blending in is that of being left alone to have the thoughts they want to have, and to express them to the people they want to express them to, without suffering isolation or ostracism.
Once they have established themselves in a position of power, they can try to convince a wider circle of the correctness of their ideas—perhaps working indirectly, using Campanella’s strategies of irony and insinuation.
In the late fourteenth century, the Spanish began a massive persecution of the Jews, murdering thousands and driving others out of the country. Those who remained in Spain were forced to convert.
Yet over the next three hundred years, the Spanish noticed a phenomenon that disturbed them: Many of the converts lived their outward lives as Catholics, yet somehow managed to retain their Jewish beliefs, practicing the religion in private.
Many of these so-called Marranos (originally a derogatory term, being the Spanish for “pig”) attained high levels of government office, married into the nobility, and gave every appearance of Christian piety, only to be discovered late in life as practicing Jews. (The Spanish Inquisition was specifically commissioned to ferret them out.) Over the years they mastered the art of dissimulation, displaying crucifixes liberally, giving generous
gifts to churches, even occasionally making anti-Semitic remarks—and all the while maintaining their inner freedom and beliefs.
In society, the Marranos knew, outward appearances are what matter.
This remains true today. The strategy is simple: As Campanella did in writing Atheism Conquered, make a show of blending in, even going so far as to be the most zealous advocate of the prevailing orthodoxy. If you stick to conventional appearances in public few will believe you think differently in private.
THE CITIZEN AND THE TRAVELLER
“Look around you,” said the citizen.
“This is the largest market in the world.”
“Oh surely not,” said the traveller.
“Well, perhaps not the largest,” said the citizen,
“but much the best.” “You are certainly wrong there,” said
the traveller.
“I can tell you....” They buried the stranger in the dusk.
FABLES, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1850-1894
If Machiavelli had had a prince for disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been to write a book against Machiavellism.
VOLTAIRE, 1694-1778
Do not be so foolish as to imagine that in our own time the old
orthodoxies are gone. Jonas Salk, for instance, thought science had gotten past politics and protocol. And so, in his search for a polio vaccine, he broke all the rules—going public with a discovery before showing it to the scientific community, taking credit for the vaccine without acknowledging the scientists who had paved the way, making himself a star. The public may have loved him but scientists shunned him. His disrespect for his
community’s orthodoxies left him isolated, and he wasted years trying to heal the breach, and struggling for funding and cooperation. Bertolt Brecht underwent a modern form of Inquisition—the House UnAmerican Activities Committee—and approached it with considerable canniness. Having worked off and on in the American film industry during World War II, in 1947 Brecht was summoned to appear before the committee to answer questions on his suspected Communist sympathies. Other writers called before the committee made a point of attacking its
members, and of acting as belligerently as possible in order to gain sympathy for themselves.
Brecht, on the other hand, who had actually worked steadfastly for the Communist cause, played the opposite game: He answered questions with ambiguous generalities that defied easy
interpretation. Call it the Campanella strategy. Brecht even wore a suit—a rare event for him-and made a point of smoking a cigar during the proceedings, knowing that a key committee member had a passion for cigars. In the end he charmed the committee members, who let him go scotfree. Brecht then moved to East Germany, where he encountered a different kind of Inquisition. Here the Communists were in power, and they criticized his plays as decadent and pessimistic. He did not argue with them, but made small changes in the performance scripts to shut them up. Meanwhile he managed to preserve the published texts as written. His outward conformity in both cases gave him the freedom to work unhindered, without having to change his thinking. In the end, he made his way safely through dangerous
times in different countries through the use of little dances of orthodoxy, and proved he was more powerful than the forces of repression.
Not only do people of power avoid the offenses of Pausanias and Salk, they also learn to play the clever fox and feign the common touch. This has been the ploy of con artists and politicians throughout the centuries.
Leaders like Julius Caesar and Franklin D. Roosevelt have overcome their natural aristocratic stance to cultivate a familiarity with the common man. They have expressed this familiarity in little gestures, often symbolic, to show the people that their leaders share popular values, despite their different status.
The logical extension of this practice is the invaluable ability to be all things to all people. When you go into society, leave behind your own ideas and values, and put on the mask that is most appropriate for the group in which you find yourself.
Bismarck played this game successfully for years —there were people who vaguely understood what he was up to, but not clearly enough that it mattered. People will swallow the bait because it flatters them to believe that you share their ideas. They will not take you as a hypocrite if you are careful—for how can they accuse you of hypocrisy if you do not let them know exactly what you stand for? Nor will they see you as lacking in values. Of course you have values—the values you share with
them, while in their company.
Authority: Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you.
(Jesus Christ, Matthew 7:6)
Image: The Black Sheep. The herd shuns the black sheep, uncertain whether or not it belongs with them. So it straggles behind, or wanders away from the herd, where it is cornered by wolves and promptly devoured. Stay with the herd—there is safety in numbers. Keep your differences in your thoughts and not in your fleece.
REVERSAL
The only time it is worth standing out is when you already stand out—when you have achieved an unshakable position of power, and can display your difference from others as a sign of the distance between you.
As president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson would sometimes hold meetings while he sat on the toilet. Since no one else either could or would claim such a “privilege,” Johnson was showing people that he did not have to observe the protocols and niceties of others.
The Roman emperor Caligula played the same game: He would wear a woman’s negligee, or a bathrobe, to receive important visitors. He even went so far as to have his horse elected consul. But it backfired, for the people hated Caligula, and his gestures eventually brought his overthrow.
The truth is that even those who attain the heights of power would be better off at least affecting the common touch, for at some point they may need popular support.
Finally, there is always a place for the gadfly, the person who
successfully defies custom and mocks what has grown lifeless in a culture.
Oscar Wilde, for example, achieved considerable social power on this foundation: He made it clear that he disdained the usual ways of doing things, and when he gave public readings his audiences not only expected him to insult them but welcomed it. We notice, however, that his eccentric role eventually destroyed him. Even had he come to a better end, remember that he possessed an unusual genius: Without his gift to amuse and delight, his barbs would simply have offended people.
LAW 39
STIR UP WATERS TO CATCH FISH
JUDGMENT
Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive. You must always stay calm and objective. But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage. Put your enemies offbalance: Find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle them and you hold the strings.
ITAKURA SHIGEMUNE GRINDS HIS OWN TEA
The Kyoto Shoshidai ltakura Suwo-no-kami Shigemune was very fond of Cha-no-yu (the tea ceremony), and used to grind his own tea while sitting in the court as judge. And the reason was this, He once asked a friend of his who was his companion in Cha-no-yu, a tea merchant named Eiki, to tell him frankly what was the public opinion about him.
“Well,” said Eiki,
“they say that you get irritated with those who don’t give their evidence very clearly and scold them, and so people are afraid to bring lawsuits before you and if they do, the truth does not come out.”
“Ah, I am glad you have told me that,” replied Shigemune,
“for now that I consider it, I have fallen into the habit of speaking sharply to people in this way, and no doubt humble folk and those who are not ready in speech get flurried and are unable to put their case in the best light. I will see to it that this does not
occur in the future.”
So after this he had a tea mill placed before him in court and in front of it the paper-covered shoji were drawn to, and Shigemune sat behind them and ground the tea and thus kept his mind calm
while he heard the cases. And he could easily see whether his composure was ruffied or not by looking at the tea, which would not fall evenly ground to the proper consistency if he got excited. And so justice was done impartially and people went away from his court satisfied.
CHA-NO-YU: THE JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY A. L. SADLER, 1962
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
In January of 1809, an agitated and anxious Napoleon hurried back to Paris from his Spanish wars. His spies and confidants had confirmed a rumor that his foreign minister Talleyrand had conspired against him with Fouché, the minister of police. Immediately on arriving in the capital the shocked emperor summoned his ministers to the palace. Following them into the
meeting right after their arrival, he began pacing up and down, and started rambling vaguely about plotters working against him, speculators bringing down the stock market, legislators delaying his policies—and his own ministers undermining him.
As Napoleon talked, Talleyrand leaned on the mantelpiece, looking completely indifferent. Facing Talleyrand directly, Napoleon announced, “For these ministers, treason has begun when they permit themselves to doubt.”
At the word “treason” the ruler expected his minister to be afraid.
But Talleyrand only smiled, calm and bored. The sight of a subordinate apparently serene in the face of charges that
could get him hanged pushed Napoleon to the edge. There were ministers, he said, who wanted him dead, and he took a step closer to Talleyrand— who stared back at him unfazed.
Finally Napoleon exploded. “You are a coward,”
he screamed in Talleyrand’s face, “a man of no faith. Nothing is
sacred to you. You would sell your own father. I have showered you with riches and yet there is nothing you would not do to hurt me.”
The other ministers looked at each other in disbelief—they had never seen this fearless general, the conqueror of most of Europe, so unhinged.
“You deserve to be broken like glass,” Napoleon continued, stamping.
“I have the power to do it, but I have too much contempt for you to bother. Why didn’t I have you hanged from the gates of the Tuileries? But there is still time for that.” Yelling, almost out of breath, his face red, his eyes bulging,
he went on, “You, by the way, are nothing but shit in a silk
stocking.... What about your wife? You never told me that San Carlos was your wife’s lover?”
“Indeed, sire, it did not occur to me that this information had any bearing on Your Majesty’s glory or my own,” said Talleyrand calmly, completely unflustered.
After a few more insults, Napoleon walked away. Talleyrand slowly crossed the room, moving with his characteristic limp.
As an attendant helped him with his cloak, he turned to his fellow ministers (all afraid they would never see him again), and said,
“What a pity, gentlemen, that so great a man should have such bad manners.”
Despite his anger, Napoleon did not arrest his foreign minister. He merely relieved him of his duties and banished him from the court, believing that for this man humiliation would be punishment enough. He did not realize that word had quickly spread of his tirade—of how the emperor had completely lost control of himself, and how Talleyrand had essentially humiliated him by maintaining his composure and dignity. A page had been
turned: For the first time people had seen the great emperor lose his cool under fire. A feeling spread that he was on the way down. As Talleyrand later said, “This is the beginning of the end.”
Interpretation
This was indeed the beginning of the end. Waterloo was still six years ahead, but Napoleon was on a slow descent to defeat, crystallizing in 1812 with his disastrous invasion of Russia. Talleyrand was the first to see the signs of his decline, especially in the irrational war with Spain. Sometime in 1808, the minister decided that for the future peace of Europe, Napoleon had to go. And so he conspired with Fouché. It is possible that the conspiracy was never anything more than a ploy—a device to push Napoleon over the edge. For it is hard to believe that two of
the most practical men in history would only go halfway in their plotting. They may have been only stirring the waters, trying to goad Napoleon into a misstep. And indeed, what they got was the tantrum that laid out his loss of control for all to see. In fact, Napoleon’s soon-famous blowup that afternoon had a profoundly negative effect on his public image.
This is the problem with the angry response. At first it may strike fear and terror, but only in some, and as the days pass and the storm clears, other responses emerge—embarrassment and uneasiness about the shouter’s capacity for going out of control, and resentment of what has been said.
Losing your temper, you always make unfair and exaggerated accusations. A few such tirades and people are counting the days until you are gone.
In the face of a conspiracy against him, a conspiracy between his two most important ministers, Napoleon certainly had a right to feel angry and anxious. But by responding so angrily, and so publicly, he only demonstrated his frustration. To show your frustration is to show that you have lost your power to shape events; it is the helpless action of the child who resorts to a hysterical fit to get his way. The powerful never reveal this
kind of weakness.
There were a number of things Napoleon could have done in this
situation. He could have thought about the fact that two eminently sensible men had had reason to turn against him, and could have listened and learned from them. He could have tried to win them back to him. He could even have gotten rid of them, making their imprisonment or death an ominous display of his power. No tirades, no childish fits, no embarrassing aftereffects—just a quiet and definitive severing of ties.
Remember: Tantrums neither intimidate nor inspire loyalty. They only create doubts and uneasiness about your power.
Exposing your weakness, these stormy eruptions often herald a fall.
If possible, no animosity should be felt for anyone.... To speak angrily to a person, to show your hatred by what you say or by the way you look, is an unnecessary proceeding-dangerous, foolish, ridiculous, and vulgar.
Anger or hatred should never be shown otherwise than in what you do; and feelings will be all the more effective in action in so far as you avoid the exhibition of them in any other way. It is only the cold-blooded animals whose bite is poisonous.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. 1788-1860
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
By the late 1920s, Haile Selassie had nearly achieved his goal of assuming total control over Ethiopia, a country he felt needed strong and unified leadership. As regent to the empress Zauditu (stepdaughter of the late queen) and heir to the throne, Selassie had spent several years weakening the power of Ethiopia’s various warlords. Now only one real obstacle stood in his way: the empress and her husband, Ras Gugsa. Selassie knew the royal couple hated him and wanted to get rid of him, so to cut short their plotting he made Gugsa the governor of the northern province of Begemeder, forcing him to leave the capital, where the empress lived.
For several years Gugsa played the loyal administrator. But Selassie did not trust him: He knew that Gugsa and the empress were plotting revenge. As time passed and Gugsa made no move, the chances of a plot only increased. Selassie knew what he had to do: draw Gugsa out, get under his skin, and push him into action before he was ready.
For several years, a northern tribe, the Azebu Gallas, had been in virtual rebellion against the throne, robbing and pillaging local villages and refusing to pay taxes. Selassie had done nothing to stop them, letting them grow stronger. Finally, in 1929, he ordered Ras Gugsa to lead an army against these disobedient tribesmen. Gugsa agreed, but inwardly he seethed —he had no grudge against the Azebu Gallas, and the demand that he fight
them hurt his pride. He could not disobey the order, but as he worked to put together an army, he began to spread an ugly rumor—that Selassie was in cahoots with the pope, and planned to convert the country to Roman Catholicism and make it a colony of Italy. Gugsa’s army swelled, and some of the tribes from which its soldiers came secretly agreed to fight Selassie.
In March of 1930 an enormous force of 35,000 men began to march, not on the Azebu Gallas but south, toward the capital of Addis Ababa. Made confident by his growing strength, Gugsa now openly led a holy war to depose Selassie and put the country back in the hands of true Christians. He did not see the trap that had been laid for him. Before Selassie had ordered Gugsa to fight the Azebu Gallas, he had secured the support of the Ethiopian church. And before the revolt got underway, he had bribed several of Gugsa’s key allies not to show up for battle. As the rebel army
marched south, airplanes flew overhead dropping leaflets announcing that the highest church officials had recognized Selassie as the true Christian leader of Ethiopia, and that they had excommunicated Gugsa for fomenting a civil war. These leaflets severely blunted the emotions behind the holy crusade. And as battle loomed and the support that Gugsa’s allies had promised him failed to show up, soldiers began to flee or defect.
When the battle came, the rebel army quicky collapsed. Refusing to surrender, Ras Gugsa was killed in the fighting. The empress, distraught over her husband’s death, died a few days later. On April 30, Selassie issued a formal proclamation announcing his new title: Emperor of Ethiopia.
THE MONKEY AND THE WASP
A monkey, whilst munching a ripe pear, was pestered by the bare-faced importunities of a wasp, who, nolens volens, would have a part. After threatening the monkey with his anger if he further hesitated to submit to his demand, he settled on the fruit; but was as soon knocked off by the monkey. The irritable wasp now had recourse to invective —and, after using the most insulting language, which the other calmly listened to, he so worked himself up into violent passion that, losing all consideration of the penalty, he flew to the face of the monkey, and stung him with such rage that he was unable to extricate his weapon, and was compelled to tear himself away, leaving it in the wound—thus entailing on himself a lingering death, accompanied by pains much greater than those he had inflicted.
FABLES, JONATHAN BIRCH, 1783-1847
Interpretation
Haile Selassie always saw several moves ahead. He knew that if he let Ras Gugsa decide the time and place of the revolt, the danger would be much greater than if he forced Gugsa to act on Selassie’s terms. So he goaded him into rebellion by offending his manly pride, asking him to fight people he had no quarrel with on behalf of a man he hated. Thinking everything out ahead, Selassie made sure that Gugsa’s rebellion would come to nothing, and that he could use it to do away with his last two enemies.
This is the essence of the Law: When the waters are still, your opponents have the time and space to plot actions that they will initiate and control.
So stir the waters, force the fish to the surface, get them to act before they are ready, steal the initiative. The best way to do this is to play on uncontrollable emotions—pride, vanity, love, hate. Once the water is stirred up, the little fish cannot help but rise to the bait. The angrier they become, the less control they have, and finally they are caught in the whirlpool you have made, and they drown.
DITCH HIGH PRIEST
Kin ’yo, an officer of the second rank, had a brother called the High Priest Ryogaku, an extremely bad-tempered man. Next to his monastery grew a large nettle-tree which occasioned the nickname people gave him, the Nettle-tree High Priest.
“That name is outrageous,”said the high priest,
and cut down the tree. The stump still being left, people referred to him now as the Stump High Priest. More furious than ever, Ryogaku had the stump dug up and thrown away, but this left a big ditch. People now called him the Ditch High Priest.
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, KENKO, JAPAN, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
A sovereign should never launch an army out of anger,
a leader should never start a war out of wrath.
Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.
KEYS TO POWER
Angry people usually end up looking ridiculous, for their response seems out of proportion to what occasioned it. They have taken things too seriously, exaggerating the hurt or insult that has been done to them. They are so sensitive to slight that it becomes comical how much they take personally. More comical still is their belief that their outbursts signify power.
The truth is the opposite: Petulance is not power, it is a sign of
helplessness. People may temporarily be cowed by your tantrums, but in the end they lose respect for you. They also realize they can easily undermine a person with so little self-control.
The answer, however, is not to repress our angry or emotional responses. For repression drains us of energy and pushes us into strange behavior. Instead we have to change our perspective: We have to realize that nothing in the social realm, and in the game of power, is personal.
Everyone is caught up in a chain of events that long predates the present moment. Our anger often stems from problems in our childhood, from the problems of our parents which stem from their own childhood, on and on.
Our anger also has roots in the many interactions with others, the
accumulated disappointments and heartaches that we have suffered. An individual will often appear as the instigator of our anger but it is much more complicated, goes far beyond what that individual did to us. If a person explodes with anger at you (and it seems out of proportion to what you did to them), you must remind yourself that it is not exclusively directed at you—do not be so vain. The cause is much larger, goes way back in time, involves dozens of prior hurts, and is actually not worth the
bother to understand. Instead of seeing it as a personal grudge, look at the emotional outburst as a disguised power move, an attempt to control or punish you cloaked in the form of hurt feelings and anger.
This shift of perspective will let you play the game of power with more clarity and energy. Instead of overreacting, and becoming ensnared in people’s emotions, you will turn their loss of control to your advantage: You keep your head while they are losing theirs.
During an important battle in the War of the Three Kingdoms, in the third century A.D., advisers to the commander Ts‘ao Ts’ao discovered documents showing that certain of his generals had conspired with the enemy, and urged him to arrest and execute them. Instead he ordered the documents burned and the matter forgotten. At this critical moment in the battle, to get upset or demand justice would have reverberated against him: An angry
action would have called attention to the generals’ disloyalty, which would have harmed the troops’ morale. Justice could wait—he would deal with the generals in time. Ts‘ao Ts’ao kept his head and made the right decision.
Compare this to Napoleon’s response to Talleyrand: Instead of taking the conspiracy personally, the emperor should have played the game like Ts‘ao Ts’ao, carefully weighing the consequences of any action he took. The more powerful response in the end would have been to ignore Talleyrand, or to bring the minister gradually back to his side and punish him later.
Anger only cuts off our options, and the powerful cannot thrive without options. Once you train yourself not to take matters personally, and to control your emotional responses,
you will have placed yourself in a position of tremendous power: Now you can play with the emotional responses of other people. Stir the insecure into action by impugning their manhood, and by dangling the prospect of an easy victory before their faces.
Do as Houdini did when challenged by the less successful escape
artist Kleppini: Reveal an apparent weakness (Houdini let Kleppini steal the combination for a pair of cuffs) to lure your opponent into action. Then you can beat him with ease. With the arrogant too you can appear weaker than you are, taunting them into a rash action.
Sun Pin, commander of the armies of Ch‘i and loyal disciple of Sun-tzu, once led his troops against the armies of Wei, which outnumbered him two to one.
“Let us light a hundred thousand fires when our army enters Wei,” suggested Sun Pin,
“fifty thousand on the next day, and only thirty thousand
on the third.”
On the third day the Wei general exclaimed, “I knew the men
of Ch’i were cowards, and after only three days more than half of them have deserted!”
So, leaving behind his slow-moving heavy infantry, the general decided to seize the moment and move swiftly on the Ch’I camp
with a lightly armed force. Sun Pin’s troops retreated, luring Wei’s army into a narrow pass, where they ambushed and destroyed them. With the Wei general dead and his forces decimated, Sun Pin now easily defeated the rest of his army. In the face of a hot-headed enemy, finally, an excellent response is no response. Follow the Talleyrand tactic: Nothing is as infuriating as a man
who keeps his cool while others are losing theirs. If it will work to your advantage to unsettle people, affect the aristocratic, bored pose, neither mocking nor triumphant but simply indifferent. This will light their fuse.
When they embarrass themselves with a temper tantrum, you will have gained several victories, one of these being that in the face of their childishness you have maintained your dignity and composure.
Image: The Pond of Fish. The waters are clear and calm, and the fish are well below the surface. Stir the waters and they emerge. Stir it some more and they get angry, rising to the surface, biting whatever comes near— including a freshly baited hook.
Authority: If your opponent is of a hot temper, try to irritate him. If he is arrogant, try to encourage his egotism.... One who is skilled at making the enemy move does so by creating a situation according to which the enemy will act; he entices the enemy with something he is certain to take. He keeps the enemy on the move by holding out bait and then attacks him with picked troops. (Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.)
REVERSAL
When playing with people’s emotions you have to be careful. Study the enemy beforehand: Some fish are best left at the bottom of the pond. The leaders of the city of Tyre, capital of ancient Phoenicia, felt confident they could withstand Alexander the Great, who had conquered the Orient but had not attacked their city, which stood well protected on the water. They sent ambassadors to Alexander saying that although they would
recognize him as emperor they would not allow him or his forces to enter Tyre. This of course enraged him, and he immediately mounted a siege. For four months the city withstood him, and finally he decided that the struggle was not worth it, and that he would come to terms with the Tyrians. But they, feeling that they had already baited Alexander and gotten away with it, and confident that they could withstand him, refused to negotiate—in fact they killed his messengers. This pushed Alexander over the edge. Now it did not matter to him how long the siege lasted or how large an army it needed; he had the resources, and would do whatever it took. He remounted his assault so strenuously that
he captured Tyre within days, burned it to the ground, and sold its people into slavery.
You can bait the powerful and get them to commit and divide their forces as Sun Pin did, but test the waters first. Find the gap in their strength. If there is no gap—if they are impossibly strong—you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by provoking them.
Choose carefully whom you bait, and never stir up the sharks.
Finally there are times when a well-timed burst of anger can do you good, but your anger must be manufactured and under your control. Then you can determine exactly how and on whom it will fall. Never stir up reactions that will work against you in the long run. And use your thunderbolts rarely, to make them the more intimidating and meaningful.
Whether purposefully staged or not, if your outbursts come too often, they will lose their power
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LAW 37
CREATE COMPELLING SPECTACLES
JUDGMENT
Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power— everyone responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then, full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATHA
She relied above all upon her physical presence and the spell and
enchantment which it could create.... She came sailing up the river Cydnus in a barge with a poop of gold, its purple sails billowing in the wind, while her rowers caressed the water with oars of silver which dipped in time to the music of the flute, accompanied by pipes and lutes. Cleopatra herself reclined beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed in the character of Aphrodite, as we see her in paintings, while on either side to complete the picture stood boys costumed as Cupids who cooled her with their fans.
Instead of a crew the barge was lined with the most beautiful of her waitingwomen attired as Nereids and Graces, some at the rudders, others at the tackle of the sails, and all the while an indescribably rich perfume, exhaled from innumerable censers, was wafted from the vessel to the riverbanks.
Great multitudes accompanied this royal progress, some of them following the queen on both sides of the river from its very mouth, while others hurried down from the city of Tarsus to gaze at the sight.
Gradually the crowds drifted away from the marketplace, where Antony awaited the queen enthroned on his tribunal, until at last he was left sitting quite alone. And the word spread on every side that Aphrodite had come to revel with Dionysus for the happiness of Asia. Antony then sent a message inviting Cleopatra to dine with him. But she thought it more appropriate that he should come to her, and so, as he wished to show his courtesy and goodwill, he accepted and went. He found the preparations made to receive him magnificent bevond words, but what astonished him most of all was the extraordinary number of lights. So many of these, it is said, were let down from the roof and displayed on all sides at once, and they were arranged and grouped in suchingenious patterns in relation to each other, some in squares and some in circles, that they created as brilliant a spectacle as can ever have been devised to delight the eve.
LIFE OF ANTONY, PLUTARCH, c. A.D. 46-120
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I
In the early 1780s, word spread through Berlin of the strange and
spectacular medical practice of a Dr. Weisleder. He performed his miracles in an enormous converted beer hall, outside which Berliners began to notice ever longer lines of people—the blind, the lame, anyone with an illness incurable by normal medicine. When it leaked out that the doctor worked by exposing the patient to the rays of the moon, he soon became dubbed The Moon Doctor of Berlin.
Sometime in 1783, it was reported that Dr. Weisleder had cured a well-todo woman of a terrible ailment. He suddenly became a celebrity. Previously only the poorest Berliners had been seen waiting outside the beer hall in their rags; now magnificent carriages were parked outside, and gentlemen in frock coats, and ladies with enormous coiffures, lined the street as sunset drew near. Even folk with the mildest of ailments came, out of sheer
curiosity. As they waited in line, the poorer clients would explain to the gentlemen and ladies that the doctor only practiced when the moon was in its increscent phase. Many would add that they themselves had already been exposed to the healing powers he called forth from the rays of the moon. Even those who felt cured kept coming back, drawn by this powerful experience.
Inside the beer hall, a strange and stirring spectacle greeted the visitor: Packed into the entrance hall was a crowd of all classes and ethnic backgrounds, a veritable Tower of Babel. Through tall windows on the northern side of the hall, silvery moonlight poured in at odd angles. The doctor and his wife, who, it seemed, was also able to effect the cure, practiced on the second floor, which was reached by a stairway, at the end of the hall. As the line edged closer to the stairs, the sick would hear shouts and cries from above, and word would spread of, perhaps, a blind
gentleman suddenly able to see.
Once upstairs, the line would fork in two directions, toward a northern room for the doctor, a southern one for his wife, who worked only on the ladies.
Finally, after hours of anticipation and waiting in line, the gentlemen patients would be led before the amazing doctor himself, an elderly man with a few stalks of wild gray hair and an air of nervous energy. He would take the patient (let us say a young boy, brought in by his father), uncover the afflicted body part, and lift the boy up to the window, which faced the light of the moon. He would rub the site of the injury or illness, mumble
something unintelligible, look knowingly at the moon, and then, after collecting his fee, send the boy and his father on their way. Meanwhile, in the south-facing room, his wife would be doing the same with the ladies— which was odd, really, since the moon cannot appear in two places at once; it cannot have been visible, in other words, from both windows.
Apparently the mere thought, idea, and symbol of the moon were enough, for the ladies did not complain, and would later remark confidently that the wife of the Moon Doctor had the same healing powers as he.
Interpretation
Dr. Weisleder may have known nothing about medicine, but he understood human nature. He recognized that people do not always want words, or rational explanations, or demonstrations of the powers of science; they want an immediate appeal to their emotions. Give them that and they will do the rest—such as imagine they can be healed by the light reflected from a rock
a quarter million miles away. Dr. Weisleder had no need of pills, or of lengthy lectures on the moon’s power, or of any silly gadgetry to amplify its rays. He understood that the simpler the spectacle the better—just the moonlight pouring in from the side, the stairway leading to the heavens, and the rays of the moon, whether directly visible or not. Any added effects might have made it seem that the moon was not strong enough on its own.
And the moon was strong enough—it was a magnet for fantasies, as it has been throughout history. Simply by associating himself with the image of the moon, the doctor gained power.
Remember: Your search for power depends on shortcuts. You must always circumvent people’s suspicions, their perverse desire to resist your will.
Images are an extremely effective shortcut: Bypassing the head, the seat of doubt and resistance, they aim straight for the heart. Overwhelming the eyes, they create powerful associations, bringing people together and stirring their emotions.
With the white light of the moon in their eyes, your targets are blinded to the deceptions you practice.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II
In 1536 the future king Henri II of France took his first mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Diane was thirty-seven at the time, and was the widow of the grand seneschal of Normandy. Henri, meanwhile, was a sprightly lad of seventeen, who was just beginning to sow his wild oats. At first their union seemed merely platonic, with Henri showing an intensely spiritual devotion to Diane. But it soon became clear that he loved her in every way, preferring her bed to that of his young wife, Catherine de’ Médicis.
In 1547 King Francis died and Henri ascended to the throne. This new situation posed perils for Diane de Poitiers. She had just turned forty-eight, and despite her notorious cold baths and rumored youth potions, she was beginning to show her age; now that Henri was king, perhaps he would return to the queen’s bed, and do as other kings had done—choose mistresses from the bevy of beauties who made the French court the envy of Europe. He was, after all, only twenty-eight, and cut a dashing figure. But
Diane did not give up so easily. She would continue to enthrall her lover, as she had enthralled him for the past eleven years.
In the Middle Ages the symbolist attitude was much more in evidence. ... Symbolism appears as a sort of short cut of thought. Instead of looking for the relation between two things by following the hidden detours of their causal connexions, thought makes a leap and discovers their relation not in the connexion of cause and effects, but in a connexion of signification....
Symbolist thought permits an infinity of relations between things. Each thing may denote a number of distinct ideas by its different special qualities, and a quality may have several symbolic meanings. The highest conceptions have symbols by the thousand. Nothing is too humble to represent and glory the sublime.
The walnut signifies Christ: the sweet kernel is His divine nature, the green and pulpy outer peel is His humanity, the wooden shell
between is the cross. Thus all things raise his thoughts to the eternal.... Every precious stone, besides its natural splendour sparkles with the brilliance of its symbolic values. The assimilation of roses and virginity is much more than a poetic comparison, for it reveals their common essence. As each notion arises in the mind the logic of symbolism creates an harmony of ideas.
THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES, JOHAN HUIZINGA, 1928
Diane’s secret weapons were symbols and images, to which she had always paid great attention. Early on in her relationship with Henri, she had created a motif by intertwining her initials with his, to symbolize their union.
The idea worked like a charm: Henri put this insignia everywhere— on his royal robes, on monuments, on churches, on the facade of the Louvre, then the royal palace in Paris. Diane’s favorite colors were black and white, which she wore exclusively, and wherever it was possible the insignia appeared in these colors. Everyone recognized the symbol and its meaning. Soon after Henri took the throne, however, Diane went still further: She decided to identify herself with the Roman goddess Diana, her
namesake. Diana was the goddess of the hunt, the traditional royal pastime and the particular passion of Henri.
Equally important, in Renaissance art she symbolized chastity and purity. For a woman like Diane to identify herself with this goddess would instantly call up those images in the court, giving her an air of respectability.
Symbolizing her “chaste” relationship with Henri, it would also set her apart from the adulterous liaisons of royal mistresses past.
To effect this association, Diane began by completely transforming her castle at Anet. She razed the building’s structure and in its place erected a magnificent Doric-columned edifice modeled after a Roman temple. It was made in white Normandy stone flecked with black silex, reproducing Diane’s trademark colors of black and white. The insignia of her and
Henri’s initials appeared on the columns, the doors, the windows, the carpet. Meanwhile, symbols of Diana—crescent moons, stags, and hounds —adorned the gates and facade. Inside, enormous tapestries depicting episodes in the life of the goddess lay on the floors and hung on the walls.
In the garden stood the famous Goujon sculpture Diane Chasseresse, which is now in the Louvre, and which had an uncanny resemblance to Diane de Poitiers. Paintings and other depictions of Diana appeared in every corner of the castle.
Anet overwhelmed Henri, who soon was trumpeting the image of Diane de Poitiers as a Roman goddess. In 1548, when the couple appeared together in Lyons for a royal celebration, the townspeople welcomed them with a tableau vivant depicting a scene with Diana the huntress. France’s greatest poet of the period, Pierre de Ronsard, began to write verses in honor of Diana—indeed a kind of cult of Diana sprang up, all inspired by
the king’s mistress. It seemed to Henri that Diane had given herself a kind of divine aura, and as if he were destined to worship her for the rest of his life. And until his death, in 1559, he did remain faithful to her—making her a duchess, giving her untold wealth, and displaying an almost religious devotion to his first and only mistress.
Interpretation
Diane de Poitiers, a woman from a modest bourgeois background, managed to captivate Henri for over twenty years. By the time he died she was well into her sixties, yet his passion for her only increased with the years. She knew the king well. He was not an intellectual but a lover of the outdoors— he particularly loved jousting tournaments, with their bright pennants, brilliantly caparisoned horses, and beautifully dressed women. Henri’s love of visual splendor seemed childlike to Diane, and she played on this weakness of his at every opportunity. Most astute of all was Diane’s appropriation of the goddess Diana. Here she took the game beyond physical imagery into the realm of the psychic symbol. It was quite a feat to transform a king’s mistress into an emblem of power and purity, but she managed it. Without the resonance of the goddess, Diane was merely an aging courtesan. With the imagery and symbolism of Diana on her shoulders, she seemed a mythic force, destined for greatness.
You too can play with images like these, weaving visual clues into an encompassing gestalt, as Diane did with her colors and her insignia.
Establish a trademark like these to set yourself apart. Then take the game further: Find an image or symbol from the past that will neatly fit your situation, and put it on your shoulders like a cape. It will make you seem larger than life.
There was a man named Sakamotoya Hechigwan who lived in upper Kyoto.... When [Emperor] Hideyoshi gave his great Cha-no-yu [tea ceremony] meeting at Kitano in the tenth month of 1588, Hechigwan set up a great red umbrella nine feet across mounted on a stick seven feet high.
The circumference of the handle he surrounded for about two feet by a reed fence in such a way that the rays of the sun were reflected from it and diffused the colour of the umbrella all around. This device pleased
Hideyoshi so much that he remitted Hechigwan’s taxes as a reward.
CHA-NO-YU: THE JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY, A. L. SADLER, 1962
Because of the light it shines on the other stars which make up a kind of court around it, because of the just and equal distribution of its rays to all alike, because of the good it brings to all places, producing life, joy and action, because of its constancy from which it never varies, I chose the sun as the most magnificent image to represent a great leader.
Louis XIV, the Sun King, 1638-1715
KEYS TO POWER
Using words to plead your case is risky business: Words are dangerous instruments, and often go astray. The words people use to persuade us virtually invite us to reflect on them with words of our own; we mull them over, and often end up believing the opposite of what they say. (That is part of our perverse nature.) It also happens that words offend us, stirring up associations unintended by the speaker.
The visual, on the other hand, short-circuits the labyrinth of words. It strikes with an emotional power and immediacy that leave no gaps for reflection and doubt. Like music, it leaps right over rational, reasonable thoughts. Imagine the Moon Doctor trying to make a case for his medical practice, trying to convince the unconverted by telling them about the healing powers of the moon, and about his own special connection to a distant object in the sky. Fortunately for him, he was able to create a compelling spectacle that made words unnecessary. The moment his
patients entered the beer hall, the image of the moon spoke eloquently enough.
Understand: Words put you on the defensive. If you have to explain yourself your power is already in question. The image, on the other hand, imposes itself as a given. It discourages questions, creates forceful associations, resists unintended interpretations, communicates instantly, and forges bonds that transcend social differences. Words stir up arguments and
divisions; images bring people together. They are the quintessential instruments of power.
The symbol has the same force, whether it is visual (the statue of Diana) or a verbal description of something visual (the words “the Sun King”). The symbolic object stands for something else, something abstract (such as the image “Diana” standing for chastity). The abstract concept—purity, patriotism, courage, love—is full of emotional and powerful associations.
The symbol is a shortcut of expression, containing dozens of meanings in one simple phrase or object. The symbol of the Sun King, as explained by Louis XIV, can be read on many layers, but the beauty of it is that its associations required no explanation, spoke immediately to his subjects, distinguished him from all other kings, and conjured up a kind of majesty that went far beyond the words themselves.
The symbol contains untold power.
The first step in using symbols and images is to understand the primacy of sight among the senses. Before the Renaissance, it has been argued, sight and the other senses—taste, touch, and so on—operated on a relatively equal plane.
Since then, however, the visual has come to dominate the others, and is the sense we most depend on and trust.
As Gracián said, “The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.”
When the Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi was a captured slave among the Moors, he won his freedom by sketching a drawing of his master on a white wall with a piece of charcoal; when the owner saw the drawing, he instantly understood the
power of a man who could make such images, and let Fra Lippi go. That one image was far more powerful than any argument the artist could have made with words.
Never neglect the way you arrange things visually.
Factors like color, for example, have enormous symbolic resonance. When the con artist Yellow Kid Weil created a newsletter touting the phony stocks he was peddling, he called it the “Red Letter Newsletter” and had it printed, at considerable
expense, in red ink. The color created a sense of urgency, power, and good fortune.
Weil recognized details like these as keys to deception—as do
modern advertisers and mass-marketers. If you use “gold” in the title of anything you are trying to sell, for example, print it in gold. Since the eye predominates, people will respond more to the color than to the word.
The visual contains great emotional power. The Roman emperor
Constantine worshipped the sun as a god for most of his life; one day, though, he looked up at the sun, and saw a cross superimposed on it. The vision of the cross over the sun proved to him the ascendancy of the new religion, and he converted not just himself but the whole Roman Empire to Christianity soon thereafter.
All the preaching and proselytizing in the world could not have been as powerful.
Find and associate yourself with the images and symbols that will communicate in this immediate way today, and you will have untold power.
Most effective of all is a new combination—a fusion of images and symbols that have not been seen together before, but that through their association clearly demonstrate your new idea, message, religion.
The creation of new images and symbols out of old ones in this way has a poetic effect—viewers’ associations run rampant, giving them a sense of participation.
Visual images often appear in a sequence, and the order in which they appear creates a symbol.
The first to appear, for instance, symbolizes power; the image at the center seems to have central importance.
Near the end of World War II, orders came down from General
Eisenhower that American troops were to lead the way into Paris after its liberation from the Nazis. The French general Charles de Gaulle, however, realized that this sequence would imply that the Americans now commanded the fate of France. Through much manipulation, de Gaulle made certain that he and the French Second Armored Division would appear at the head of the liberating force.
The strategy worked: After he had successfully pulled off this stunt, the Allies started treating him as the new leader of an independent France. De Gaulle knew that a leader has to locate
himself literally at the head of his troops. This visual association is crucial to the emotional response that he needs to elicit.
Things change in the game of symbols: It is probably no longer possible to pose as a “sun king,” or to wrap the mantle of Diana around you. Yet you can associate yourself with such symbols more indirectly.
And, of course, you can make your own mythology out of figures from more recent history, people who are comfortably dead but still powerfully associative in the public eye.
The idea is to give yourself an aura, a stature that your normal
banal appearance simply will not create.
By herself Diane de Poitiers had no such radiant powers; she was as human and ordinary as most of us. But the symbol elevated her above the human lot, and made her seem divine.
Using symbols also has a courtier-like effect, since they are often gentler than brutish words. The psychotherapist Dr. Milton H. Erickson always tried to find symbols and images that would communicate to the patient in ways that words could not.
When dealing with a severely troubled patient, he would not question him directly but would talk about something irrelevant, such as driving through the desert in Arizona, where he practiced
in the 1950s. In describing this he would eventually come to an appropriate symbol for what he suspected was the man’s problem. If he felt the patient was isolated, say, Dr. Erickson would talk of a single iron-wood tree, and how its isolation left it battered by the winds. Making an emotional connection with the tree as a symbol, the patient would open up more readily to the doctor’s probing.
Use the power of symbols as a way to rally, animate, and unite your troops or team.
During the rebellion against the French crown in 1648,
those loyal to the king disparaged the rebels by comparing them to the slingshots (in French, frondes) that little boys use to frighten big boys. Cardinal de Retz decided to turn this disparaging term into the rebels’ symbol: The uprising was now known as the Fronde, and the rebels as frondeurs. They began to wear sashes in their hats that symbolized the slingshot, and the word became their rallying cry. Without it the rebellion might well have petered out.
Always find a symbol to represent your cause —the more emotional associations, the better.
The best way to use images and symbols is to organize them into a grand spectacle that awes people and distracts them from unpleasant realities.
This is easy to do: People love what is grand, spectacular, and larger than life.
Appeal to their emotions and they will flock to your spectacle in hordes.
The visual is the easiest route to their hearts.
Image:
The Cross and the Sun. Crucifixion and total radiance. With one
imposed over the other, a new reality takes shape— a new power is in the ascendant. The symbol—no explanation necessary.
Authority: The people are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things.... The [prince] should, at fitting times of the year, keep the people occupied and distracted with festivities and spectacles.
(Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527)
REVERSAL
No power is made available by ignoring images and symbols. There is no possible reversal to this law.
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