PREFACE
The feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us--when we feel helpless we feel miserable. No one wants less
power; everyone wants more. In the world today, however, it is dangerous
to seem too power hungry, to be overt with your power moves. We have
to seem fair and decent. So we need to be subtle-congenial yet cunning,
democratic yet devious.
This game of constant duplicity most resembles the power dynamic
that existed in the scheming world of the old aristocratic court. Throughout
history, a court has always formed itself around the person in power-king,
queen, emperor, leader. The courtiers who filled this court were in an especially delicate position: They had to serve their masters, but if they seemed
to fawn, if they curried favor too obviously, the other courtiers around
them would notice and would act against them. Attempts to win the master's favor, then, had to be subtle. And even skilIed courtiers capable of
such subtlety still had to protect themselves from their fellow courtiers,
who at all moments were scheming to push them aside.
Meanwhile the court was supposed to represent the height of civilization and refinement. Violent or overt power moves were frowned upon;
courtiers would work silently and secretly against any among them who
used force. This was the courtier's dilemma: While appearing the very
paragon of elegance, they had to outwit and thwart their own opponents in
the subdest of ways. The successful courtier learned over time to make all
of his moves indirect; if he stabbed an opponent in the back, it was with a
velvet glove on his hand and the sweetest of srniles on his face. Instead of
using coercion or outright treachery, the perfect courtier got his way
through seduction, charm, deception, and subtle strategy, always planning
several moves ahead. Life in the court was a never-ending game that required constant vigilance and tactical thinking. It was civilized war.
Today we face a peculiarly similar paradox to that of the courtier:
Everything must appear civilized, decent, democratic, and fair. But if we
play by those rules too strictly, if we take them too literally, we are crushed
by those around us who are not so foolish. As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolö Machiavelli wrote, ''Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who
are not good." The court imagined itself the pinnacle of refinement, but underneath its glittering surface a cauldron of dark emotions---greed, envy,lust, hatred-boiled and simmered. Our world today similarly imagines itself the pinnacle of fairness, yet the same ugly emotions still stir within us,
as they have forever. The game is the same. Outwardly, you must seem to
respect the niceties, but inwardly, unless you are a fool, you learn quickly
to be prudent, and to do as Napoleon advised: Place your iron hand inside
a velvet glove. If, like the courtier of times gone by, you can master the arts
of indirection, leaming to seduce, charm, deceive, and subtly outmaneuver
your opponents, you will attain the heights of power. You will be able to
make people bend to your will without their realizing what you have done.
And if they do not realize what you have done, they will neither resent nor
resist you.
To some people the notion of consciously playing power games---no matter how indirect-seems evil, asocial, a relic of the past. They believe they
can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with
power. You must beware of such people, for while they express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power.
They utilize strategies that cleverly disguise the nature of the manipulation
involved. These types, for example, will often display their weakness and
lack of power as a kind of moral virtue. But true powerlessness, without
any motive of self-interest, would not publicize its weakness to gain sympathy or respect. Making a show of one's weakness is actually a very effective
strategy, subtle and deceptive, in the game of power (see Law 22, the Surrender Tactic).
Another strategy of the supposed nonplayer is to demand equality in
every area of life. Everyone must be treated alike, whatever their status and
strength. But if, to avoid the taint of power, you attempt to treat everyone
equally and fairly, you will confront the problem that some people do certain things better than others. Treating everyone equally means ignoring
their differences, elevating the less skillful and suppressing those who
excel. Again, many of those who behave this way are actually deploying
another power strategy, redistributing people's rewards in a way that they
determine.
Yet another way of avoiding the game would be perfect honesty and
straightforwardness, since one of the main techniques of those who seek
power is deceit and secrecy. But being perfectly honest will inevitably hurt
and insult a great many people, some of whom will choose to injure you in
return. No one will see your honest statement as completely objective and
free of some personal motivation. And they will be right: In truth, the use
of honesty is indeed a power strategy, intended to convince people of one's
noble, good-hearted, selfless character. It is a form of persuasion, even a
subtle form of coercion.
Finally, those who claim to be nonplayers may affect an air of na'ivete,
to protect them from the accusation that they are after power. Beware
again, however, for the appearance of naivete can be an effective means of
deceit (see Law 21, Seem Dumber Than YOUR Mark). And even genuine
naivete is not free of the snares of power. Children may be naive in many
ways, but they often act from an elemental need to gain control over those around them. Children suffer greatly from feeling powerless in the adult world, and they use any means available to get their way. Genuinely innocent people may still be playing for power, and are often horribly effective
at the game, since they are not hindered by reflection. Once again, those
who make a show or display of innocence are the least innocent of all.
You can recognize these supposed nonplayers by the way they flaunt
their moral qualities, their piety, their exquisite sense of justice. But since
all of us hunger for power, and almost all of our actions are aimed at gaining it, the nonplayers are merely throwing dust in OUR eyes, distracting us
from their power plays with their air of moral superiority. If you observe
them closely, you will see in fact that they are often the ones most skillful at
indirect manipulation, even if some of them practice it unconsciously. And
they greatly resent any publicizing of the tactics they use every day.
If the world is like a giant scheming court and we are trapped inside it,
there is no use in trying to opt out of the game. That will only render you
powerless, and powerlessness will make you miserable. Instead of struggling against the inevitable, instead of arguing and whining and feeling
guilty, it is far better to excel at power. In fact, the better you are at dealing
with power, the better friend, lover, husband, wife, and person you become. By following the route of the perfect courtier (see Law 24) you learn
to make others feel better about themselves, becoming a SOURCE of pleasure
to them. They will grow dependent on YOUR abilities and desirous of YOUR
presence. By mastering the 48 laws in this book, you spare others the pain
that comes from bungling with power-by playing with fire without knowing its properties. If the game of power is inescapable, better to be an artist
than a denier or a bungler Leaning the game of power requires a certain way of looking at the world,
a shifting of perspective. It takes effort and years of practice, for much of
the game may not come naturally. Certain basic skills are required, and
once you master these skills you will be able to apply the laws of power
more easily.
The most important of these skills, and power's crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is
the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more
than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly,
you cannot prepare for and respond to it with any degree of contro!.
Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for it clouds
your vision the most. It also has a ripple effect that invariably makes situations less controllable and heightens your enemy's resolve. If you are trying to destroy an enemy who has hurt you, far better to keep hirm off-guard
by feigning friendliness than showing your anger.
Love and affection are also potentially destructive, in that they blind
you to the often self-serving interests of those whom you least suspect of
playing a power game. You cannot repress anger or love, or avoid feeling
them, and you should not try. But you should be careful about how you express them, and most important, they should never influence your plans
and strategies in any way.
Related to mastering your emotions is the ability to distance yourself
from the present moment and think objectively about the past and future.
Like Janus, the double-faced Roman deity and guardian of all gates and
doorways, you must be able to look in both directions at one, the better to
handle danger from wherever it comes. Such is the face you must create for
yourself-one face looking continuously to the future and the other to the
past. For the future, the motto is, "No days unalert." Nothing should catch
you by surprise because you are constantly imagining problems before
they arise. Instead of spending your time dreaming of your plan's happy
ending, you must work on calculating every possible permutation and pitfall that might emerge in it. The further you see, the more steps ahead you
plan, the more powerful you become.
The other face of Janus looks constantly to the past-though not to remember past hurts or bear grudges. That would only hurt your power.
Half of the game is learning how to forget those events in the past that eat
away at you and cloud your reason. The real purpose of the backward glancing eye is to educate yourself constantly-you look at the past to learn
from those who came before you. (The many historical examples in this
book will greatly help that process.) Then, having looked to the past, you
look doser at hand, to your own actions and those of your friends. This is
the most vital school you ean learn from, because it comes from personal
experience.
You begin by examining the mistakes you have made in the past, the
ones that have most grievously held you back. You analyze them in terms
of the 48 laws of power, and you extract from them a lesson and an oath:
"I shall never repeat such a mistake; I shall never fall into such a trap
again." If you can evaluate and observe yourself in this way, you can learn
to break the patterns of the past-an immensely valuable skill.
Power requires the ability to play with appearanees. To this end you
must learn to wear many masks and keep a bag full of deceptive tricks. Deception and masquerade should not be seen as ugly or immoral. All human
interaction requires deception on many levels, and in some ways what separates humans from animals is our ability to lie and deceive. In Greek
myths, in India's Mahabharata cyde, in the Middle Eastern epic of Gilgamesh, it is the privilege of the gods to use deceptive arts; a great man,
Odysseus for instance, was judged by his ability to riyal the craftiness of the
gods, stealing some of their divine power by matching them in wits and deception. Deeeption is a developed art of civilization and the most potent
weapon in the game of power.
You cannot succeed at deception unless you take a somewhat distanced approach to yourself-unless you can be many different people,
wearing the mask that the day and the moment require. With such a flexible approach to all appearances, induding your own, you lose a lot of the
inward heaviness that holds people down. Make your face as malleable as
the actor's, work to conceal your intentions from others, practice luring
people into traps. Playing with appearances and mastering arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.
if deception is the most potent weapon in your arsenal, then patience
in all things is your crucial shield. Patience will protect you from making
moronic blunders. Like mastering your emotions, patience is a skill-it
does not come naturally. But nothing about power is natural; power is
more godlike than anything in the natural world. And patience is the
supreme virtue of the gods, who have nothing but time. Everything good
will happen-the grass will grow again, if you give it time and see several
steps into the future. Impatience, on the other hand, only makes you look
weak. It is a principal impediment to power.
Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil. Power is a
game-this cannot be repeated too often-and in games you do not judge
your opponents by their intentions but by the effect of their actions. You
measure their strategy and their power by what you can see and feel. How
often are someone's intentions made the issue only to doud and deceive!
What does it matter if another player, your friend or rival, intended good
things and had only your interests at heart, if the effects of his action lead to
so much ruin and confusion? It is only natural for people to cover up their
actions with all kinds of justifications, always assuming that they have acted
out of goodness. You must learn to inwardly laugh each time you hear this
and never get caught up in gauging someone's intentions and actions
through a set of moral judgments that are really an excuse far the accumulation of power.
It is a game. Your opponent sits opposite you. Both of you behave as
gentlemen or ladies, observing the rules of the game and taking nothing
personally. You play with a strategy and you observe your opponent's
moves with as much calmness as you can muster. In the end, you will appreciate the politeness of those you are playing with more than their good
and sweet intentions. Train your eye to follow the results of their moves,
the outward circumstances, and do not be distracted by anything else.
Half of your mastery of power comes from what you do not do, what
you do not allow yourself to get dragged into. For this skill you must learn
to judge all things by what they cost you. As Nietzsche wrote, "The value of
a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays
for it-what it costsus." Perhaps you will attain your goal, and a worthy goal
at that, but at what price? Apply this standard to everything, induding
whether to collaborate with other people or come to their aid. In the end, life is short, opportunities are few, and you have only so much energy to
draw on. And in this sense time is as important a consideration as any
other. Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of
others-that is too high a price to pay.
Power is a social game. To leam and master it, you must develop the
ability to study and understand people. As the great seventeenth-century
thinker and courtier Baltasar Graciän wrote: "Many people spend time
studying the properties of animals or herbs; how much more important it
would be to study those of people, with whom we must live or die!" To be a
master player you must also be a master psychologist. You must recognize
motivations and see through the cloud of dust with which people surround
their actions. An understanding of people's hidden motives is the single
greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power. It opens up
endless possibilities of deception, seduction, and manipulation.
People are of infinite complexity and you can spend a lifetime watching them without ever fully understanding them. So it is all the more important, then, to begin your education now. In doing so you must also keep
( one principle in mind: Never discriminate as to whom you study and
i whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.
Finally, you must leam always to take the indirect route to power. Disguise your cunning. Like a billiard ball that caroms several times before it
hits its target, your moves must be planned and developed in the least obvious way. By training yourself to be indirect, you can thrive in the modem
court, appearing the paragon of decency while being the consummate manipulator.
Consider The 48 Laws of Power a kind of handbook on the arts of indirection. The laws are based on the writings of men and women who have
studied and mastered the game of power. These writings span a period of
more than three thousand years and were created in civilizations as disparate as ancient China and Renaissance Italy; yet they share common
threads and themes, together hinting at an essence of power that has yet to
be fully articulated. The 48 laws of power are the distillation of this accumulated wisdom, gathered from the writings of the most illustrious strategists (Sun-tzu, Clausewitz), statesmen (Bismarck, Talleyrand), courtiers
(Castiglione, Graciän), seducers (Ninon de Lenclos, Casanova), and con
artists ("Yellow Kid" Weil) in history.
The laws have a simple premise: Certain actions almost always increase one's power (the observance of the law), while others decrease it
and even ruin us (the transgression of the law). These transgressions and
observances are illustrated by historical examples. The laws are timeless
and definitive.
The 48 Laws of Power can be used in several ways. By reading the book
straight through you can leam about power in general. Although several of
the laws may seem not to pertain directly to your life, in time you will
probably find that all of them have some application, and that in fact they
are interrelated. By getting an overview of the entire subject you will best
be able to evaluate your own past actions and gain a greater degree of control over your immediate affairs. A thorough reading of the book will inspire thinking and reevaluation long after you finish it.
The book has also been designed for browsing and for examining the
law that seems at that particular moment most pertinent to you. Say you
are experiencing problems with a superior and cannot understand why
your efforts have not lead to more gratitude or a promotion. Several laws
specifically address the master-underling relationship, and you are almost certainly transgressing one of them. By browsing the initial paragraphs for the 48 laws in the table of contents, you can identify the pertinent law.
Finally, the book can be browsed through and picked apart for entertainment, for an enjoyable ride through the foibles and great deeds of our predecessors in power. A warning, however, to those who use the book for this purpose: It might be better to turn back. Power is endlessly seductive and deceptive in its own way. It is a labyrinth-your mind becomes consumed with solving its infinite problems, and you so on realize how pleasantly lost you have become. In other words, it becomes most amusing by
taking it seriously. Do not be frivolous with such a critical matter. The gods
of power frown on the frivolous; they give ultimate satisfaction only to
those who study and reflect, and punish those who skim the surfaces looking for a good time.
Any man who tries to be good alt the time is bound to come to ruin
among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants
to keep his authority must leam how not to be good, and use that
knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.
THE PRINCE, Niccolo Machiavelli, 7469-7527
