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LAW 36
DISDAIN THINGS YOU CANNOT HAVE: IGNORING THEM IS THE BEST REVENGE
JUDGMENT
By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
The Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa started out as the chief of a gang of bandits, but after revolution broke out in Mexico in 1910, he became a kind of folk hero—robbing trains and giving the money to the poor, leading daring raids, and charming the ladies with romantic escapades. His exploits fascinated Americans—he seemed a man from another era, part Robin Hood, part Don Juan. After a few years of bitter fighting, however, General
Carranza emerged as the victor in the Revolution; the defeated Villa and his troops went back home, to the northern state of Chihuahua. His army dwindled and he turned to banditry again, damaging his popularity. Finally, perhaps out of desperation, he began to rail against the United States, the gringos, whom he blamed for his troubles.
In March of 1916, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico.
Rampaging through the town, he and his gang killed seventeen American soldiers and civilians. President Woodrow Wilson, like many Americans, had admired Villa; now, however, the bandit needed to be punished.
Wilson’s advisers urged him to send troops into Mexico to capture Villa. For a power as large as the United States, they argued, not to strike back at an army that had invaded its territory would send the worst kind of signal.
Furthermore, they continued, many Americans saw Wilson as a pacifist, a principle the public doubted as a response to violence; he needed to prove his mettle and manliness by ordering the use of force.
The pressure on Wilson was strong, and before the month was out, with the approval of the Carranza government, he sent an army of ten thousand soldiers to capture Pancho Villa. The venture was called the Punitive Expedition, and its leader was the dashing General John J. Pershing, who had defeated guerrillas in the Philippines and Native Americans in the American Southwest. Certainly Pershing could find and overpower Pancho Villa.
The Punitive Expedition became a sensational story, and carloads of U.S. reporters followed Pershing into action. The campaign, they wrote, would be a test of American power. The soldiers carried the latest in weaponry, communicated by radio, and were supported by reconnaissance from the air.
In the first few months, the troops split up into small units to comb the wilds of northern Mexico. The Americans offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to Villa’s capture. But the Mexican people, who had been disillusioned with Villa when he had returned to banditry, now idolized him for facing this mighty American army.
They began to give Pershing false leads: Villa had been seen in this village, or in that mountain hideaway, airplanes would be dispatched, troops would scurry after them, and no one would ever see him. The wily bandit seemed to be always one step ahead of the American military.
THE FOX AND THE GRAPES
A starving fox ... saw a cluster of luscious-looking grapes of purplish luster Dangling above him on a trellis-frame. He would have dearly liked them for his lunch, but when he tried and failed to reach the bunch: “Ah well, it’s more than likely they’re not sweet—Good only for green fools to eat!” Wasn’t he wise to say they were unripe Rather than whine and gripe?
FABLES, JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, 1621-1695
Once when G. K. Chesterton’s economic views were abused in print by George Bernard Shaw, his friends waited in vain for him to reply. Historian Hilaire Belloc reproached him.
“My dear Belloc,” Chesterton said,
“I have answered him. To a man of Shaw’s wit, silence is the one unbearable repartee.
THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES, CLIFTON FADIMAN,
ED., 1985
By the summer of that year, the expedition had swelled to 123,000 men. They suffered through the stultifying heat, the mosquitoes, the wild terrain. Trudging over a countryside in which they were already resented, they infuriated both the local people and the Mexican government. At one point Pancho Villa hid in a mountain cave to recover from a gunshot wound he received in a skirmish with the Mexican army; looking down from his aerie,
he could watch Pershing lead the exhausted American troops back and forth across the mountains, never getting any closer to their goal. All the way into winter, Villa played his cat-and-mouse game. Americans came to see the affair as a kind of slapstick farce—in fact they began to admire Villa again, respecting his resourcefulness in eluding a superior force.
In January of 1917, Wilson finally ordered Pershing’s withdrawal. As the troops made their way back to American territory, rebel forces pursued them, forcing the U.S. Army to use airplanes to protect its rear flanks. The Punitive Expedition was being punished itself—it had turned into a retreat of the most humiliating sort.
Interpretation
Woodrow Wilson organized the Punitive Expedition as a show of force: He would teach Pancho Villa a lesson and in the process show the world that no one, large or small, could attack the mighty United States and get away with it. The expedition would be over in a few weeks, and Villa would be forgotten. That was not how it played out. The longer the expedition took, the more
it focused attention on the Americans’ incompetence and on Villa’s cleverness. Soon what was forgotten was not Villa but the raid that had started it all. As a minor annoyance became an international embarrassment, and the enraged Americans dispatched more troops, the imbalance between the size of the pursuer and the size of the pursued—who still managed to stay free—made the affair a joke. And in the end this white elephant of an army had to lumber out of Mexico, humiliated. The Punitive Expedition did the opposite of what it set out to do: It left Villa not only free but more popular than ever.
What could Wilson have done differently?
He could have pressured the Carranza government to catch Villa for him. Alternatively, since many Mexicans had tired of Villa before the Punitive Expedition began, he could have worked quietly with them and won their support for a much smaller raid to capture the bandit. He could have organized a trap on the American side of the border, anticipating the next raid. Or he could have ignored the matter altogether for the time being, waiting for the Mexicans themselves to do away with Villa of their own accord.
THE ASS AND THE GARDENER
An ass had once by some accident lost his tail, which was a grievous affliction to him; and he was everywhere seeking after it, being fool enough to think he could get it set on again. He passed through a meadow, and afterwards got into a garden. The gardener seeing him, and not able to endure the mischief he was doing in trampling down his plants, fell into a violent rage, ran to the ass, and never standing on the ceremony of a pillory, cut off both his ears, and beat him out of the ground. Thus the ass,
who bemoaned the loss of his tail, was in far greater affliction when he saw himself without ears.
FABLES, PILPAY, INDIA, FOURTH CENTURY
THE PRODIGY OX
Once, when the Tokudaiji minister of the right was chief of the imperial police, he was holding a meeting of his staff at the middle gate when an ox belonging to an official named Akikane got loose and wandered into the ministry building. It climbed up on the dais where the chief was seated and lay there, chewing its cud. Everyone was sure that this was some grave portent, and urged that the ox be sent to a yin-yang diviner. However, the
prime minister,
the father of the minister of the right, said, “An ox has no discrimination. It has legs—there is nowhere it won’t go. It does not make sense to deprive an underpaid official of the wretched ox he needs in order to attend court.”
He returned the ox to its owner and changed the matting on which it had lain. No untoward event of any kind occurred afterward. They say that if you see a prodigy and do not treat it as such, its character as a prodigy is destroyed.
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, KENKO, JAPAN, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Remember: You choose to let things bother you. You can just as easily choose not to notice the irritating offender, to consider the matter trivial and unworthy of your interest. That is the powerful move. What you do not react to cannot drag you down in a futile engagement. Your pride is not involved. The best lesson you can teach an irritating gnat is to consign it to oblivion by ignoring it. If it is impossible to ignore (Pancho Villa had in fact killed American citizens), then conspire in secret to do away with it, but never inadvertently draw attention to the bothersome insect that will go away or die on its own. If you waste time and energy in such
entanglements, it is your own fault. Learn to play the card of disdain and turn your back on what cannot harm you in the long run.
Just think—it cost your government $130 million to try to get me. I took them over rough, hilly country. Sometimes for fifty miles at a stretch they had no water. They had nothing but the sun and mosquitoes.... And nothing was gained.
Pancho Villa, 1878-1923
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
In the year 1527, King Henry VIII of England decided he had to find a way to get rid of his wife, Catherine of Aragon. Catherine had failed to produce a son, a male heir who would ensure the continuance of his dynasty, and Henry thought he knew why:
He had read in the Bible the passage, “And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered
his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.”
Before marrying Henry, Catherine had married his older brother Arthur, but Arthur had died five months later. Henry had waited an appropriate time, then had married his brother’s widow.
Catherine was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, and by marrying her Henry had kept alive a valuable alliance. Now,
however, Catherine had to assure him that her brief marriage with Arthur had never been consummated. Otherwise Henry would view their relationship as incestuous and their marriage as null and void. Catherine insisted that she had remained a virgin through her marriage to Arthur, and
Pope Clement VII supported her by giving his blessing to the union, which he could not have done had he considered it incestuous. Yet after years of marriage to Henry, Catherine had failed to produce a son, and in the early 1520s she had entered menopause.
To the king this could only mean one thing: She had lied about her virginity, their union was incestuous, and God had punished them.
There was another reason why Henry wanted to get rid of Catherine: He had fallen in love with a younger woman, Anne Boleyn. Not only was he in love with her, but if he married her he could still hope to sire a legitimate son.
The marriage to Catherine had to be annulled. For this, however, Henry had to apply to the Vatican. But Pope Clement would never annul the marriage.
By the summer of 1527, rumors spread throughout Europe that Henry was about to attempt the impossible—to annul his marriage against Clement’s wishes. Catherine would never abdicate, let alone voluntarily enter a nunnery, as Henry had urged her.
But Henry had his own strategy: He stopped sleeping in the same bed with Catherine, since he considered her his sister-in-law, not his lawful wife. He insisted on calling her Princess Dowager of Wales, her title as Arthur’s widow.
Finally, in 1531, he banished her from court and shipped her off to a distant castle. The pope ordered him to return her to court, on pain of excommunication, the most severe penalty a Catholic could suffer. Henry not only ignored this threat, he insisted that his marriage to Catherine had been dissolved, and in 1533
he married Anne Boleyn. Clement refused to recognize the marriage, but Henry did not care. He no longer recognized the pope’s authority, and proceeded to break with the Roman Catholic Church, establishing the Church of England in its stead,
with the king as the head of the new church. And so, not surprisingly, the newly formed Church of England proclaimed Anne Boleyn England’s rightful queen.
The pope tried every threat in the book, but nothing worked. Henry simply ignored him. Clement fumed—no one had ever treated him so contemptuously. Henry had humiliated him and he had no power of recourse. Even excommunication (which he constantly threatened but never carried out) would no longer matter.
Catherine too felt the devastating sting of Henry’s disdain. She tried to fight back, but in appealing to Henry her words fell on deaf ears, and soon they fell on no one’s. Isolated from the court, ignored by the king, mad with anger and frustration, Catherine slowly deteriorated, and finally died in January of 1536, from a cancerous tumor of the heart.
Interpretation
When you pay attention to a person, the two of you become partners of sorts, each moving in step to the actions and reactions of the other.
In the process you lose your initiative. It is a dynamic of all interactions: By acknowledging other people, even if only to fight with them, you open yourself to their influence.
Had Henry locked horns with Catherine, he would have found himself mired in endless arguments that would have weakened his resolve and eventually worn him down. (Catherine was a
strong, stubborn woman.) Had he set out to convince Clement to change his verdict on the marriage’s validity, or tried to compromise and negotiate with him, he would have gotten bogged down in Clement’s favorite tactic: playing for time, promising flexibility, but actually getting what popes always got—their way. Henry would have none of this. He played a devastating power game— total disdain.
By ignoring people you cancel them out. This unsettles and infuriates them—but since they have no dealings with you, there is nothing they can do.
And in this view it is advisable to let everyone of your acquaintance— whether man or woman—feel now and then that you could very well dispense with their company. This will consolidate friendship.
Nay, with most people there will be no harm in occasionally mixing a grain of disdain with your treatment of them; that will make them value your friendship all the more. Chi non stima vien stimato, as a subtle Italian proverb has it—to disregard is to win regard. But if we really think very highly of a person, we should conceal it from him like a crime. This is not a very gratifying thing
to do, but it is right. Why, a dog will not bear being treated too kindly, let alone a man!
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
THE MONKEY AND THE PEAS
A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and spilt twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and spilt them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions, and ran away.
FABLES, LEO TOLSTOY, 1828-1910
This is the offensive aspect of the law. Playing the card of contempt is immensely powerful, for it lets you determine the conditions of the conflict.
The war is waged on your terms. This is the ultimate power pose: You are the king, and you ignore what offends you.
Watch how this tactic infuriates people—half of what they do is to get your attention, and when you withhold it from them, they flounder in frustration.
MAN: Kick him—he’ll forgive you. Flatter him—he may or may not
see through you. But ignore him and he’ll hate you.
Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams, 1968
As some make gossip out of everything, so others make much ado about everything. They are always talking big, [and] take everything seriously, making a quarrel and a mystery of it.
You should take very few grievances to heart, for to do so is to give yourself groundless worry. It is a topsyturvy way of behaving to take to heart cares which you ought to throw over your shoulder. Many things which seemed important [at the time] turn out to be of no account when they are ignored; and others, which seem trifling, appear formidable when you pay attention to them. Things can easily be settled at the outset, but not so later on.
In many cases, the remedy itself is the cause of the disease: to let things be is not the least satisfactory of life’s rules.
BALTASAR GRACIÁN, 1601-1658
KEYS TO POWER
Desire often creates paradoxical effects: The more you want something, the more you chase after it, the more it eludes you. The more interest you show, the more you repel the object of your desire. This is because your interest is too strong—it makes people awkward, even fearful. Uncontrollable desire makes you seem weak, unworthy, pathetic.
You need to turn your back on what you want, show your contempt and disdain. This is the kind of powerful response that will drive your targets crazy. They will respond with a desire of their own, which is simply to have an effect on you—perhaps to possess you, perhaps to hurt you.
If they want to possess you, you have successfully completed the first step of seduction.
If they want to hurt you, you have unsettled them and made them play by your rules (see Laws 8 and 39 on baiting people into action).
Contempt is the prerogative of the king. Where his eyes turn, what he decides to see, is what has reality; what he ignores and turns his back on is as good as dead.
That was the weapon of King Louis XIV—if he did not like you, he acted as if you were not there, maintaining his superiority by
cutting off the dynamic of interaction. This is the power you have when you play the card of contempt, periodically showing people that you can do without them.
If choosing to ignore enhances your power, it follows that the opposite approach—commitment and engagement—often weakens you.
By paying undue attention to a puny enemy, you look puny, and the longer it takes you to crush such an enemy, the larger the enemy seems. When Athens set out to conquer the island of Sicily, in 415 B.C., a giant power was attacking a tiny one. Yet by entangling Athens in a long-drawn-out conflict, Syracuse, Sicily’s most important city-state, was able to grow in stature and
confidence. Finally defeating Athens, it made itself famous for centuries to come. In recent times, President John F. Kennedy made a similar mistake in his attitude to Fidel Castro of Cuba:
His failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in 1961, made Castro an international hero.
A second danger: If you succeed in crushing the irritant, or even if you merely wound it, you create sympathy for the weaker side. Critics of Franklin D. Roosevelt complained bitterly about the money his administration spent on government projects, but their attacks had no resonance with the public, who saw the president as working to end the Great Depression. His opponents thought they had an example that would show just how wasteful he had become: his dog, Fala, which he lavished with favors and attention. Critics railed at his insensitivity—spending taxpayers’ money on a dog while so many Americans were still in poverty.
But Roosevelt had a response: How dare his critics attack a defenseless little dog?
His speech in defense of Fala was one of the most popular he
ever gave. In this case, the weak party involved was the president’s dog and the attack backfired—in the long run, it only made the president more sympathetic, since many people will naturally side with the “underdog,” just as the American public came to sympathize with the wily but outnumbered Pancho Villa.
It is tempting to want to fix our mistakes, but the harder we try, the worse we often make them. It is sometimes more politic to leave them alone. In
1971, when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a group of government documents about the history of U.S. involvement in Indochina,
Henry Kissinger erupted into a volcanic rage. Furious about the Nixon administration’s vulnerability to this kind of damaging leak, he made recommendations that eventually led to the formation of a group called the Plumbers to plug the leaks. This was the unit that later broke into Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel, setting off the chain of events that led to Nixon’s downfall. In reality the publication of the Pentagon Papers was not a serious threat to the administration, but Kissinger’s reaction made it a big deal. In trying to fix one problem, he created another: a paranoia for security that in the end was much more
destructive to the government. Had he ignored the Pentagon Papers, the scandal they had created would eventually have blown over.
Instead of inadvertently focusing attention on a problem, making it seem worse by publicizing how much concern and anxiety it is causing you, it is often far wiser to play the contemptuous aristocrat, not deigning to acknowledge the problem’s existence. There are several ways to execute this strategy.
First there is the sour-grapes approach. If there is something you want but that you realize you cannot have, the worst thing you can do is draw attention to your disappointment by complaining about it. An infinitely
more powerful tactic is to act as if it never really interested you in the first place.
When the writer George Sand’s supporters nominated her to be the first female member of the Académie Française, in 1861, Sand quickly saw that the academy would never admit her. Instead of whining, though, she claimed she had no interest in belonging to this group of worn-out, overrated, out-of-touch windbags.
Her disdain was the perfect response: Had she shown her anger at her exclusion, she would have revealed how much it meant to her. Instead she branded the academy a club of old men— and why should she be angry or disappointed at not having to spend her time with them?
Crying “sour grapes” is sometimes seen as a reflection of the weak; it is actually the tactic of the powerful.
THE MAN AND HIS SHADOW
There was a certain original man who desired to catch his own shadow. He makes a step or two toward it, but it moves away from him. He quickens his pace; it does the same. At last he takes to running; but the quicker he goes, the quicker runs the shadow also, utterly refusing to give itself up, just as if it had been a treasure. But see! our eccentric friend suddenly turns round,
and walks away from it. And presently he looks behind him; now the shadow runs after him. Ladies fair, I have often observed... that Fortune treats us in a similar way. One man tries with all his might to seize the goddess, and only loses his time and his trouble. Another seems, to all appearance, to be running out of her sight; but, no: she herself takes a pleasure in pursuing him.
FABLES, IVAN KRILOFF, 1768-1844
Second, when you are attacked by an inferior, deflect people’s attention by making it clear that the attack has not even registered.
Look away, or answer sweetly, showing how little the attack concerns you. Similarly, when you yourself have committed a blunder, the best response is often to make less of your mistake by treating it lightly.
The Japanese emperor Go-Saiin, a great disciple of the tea ceremony, owned a priceless antique tea bowl that all the courtiers envied. One day a guest, Dainagon Tsunehiro, asked if he could carry the tea bowl into the light, to examine it more closely. The bowl rarely left the table, but the emperor was in good spirits and he consented. As Dainagon carried the bowl to the railing of the verandah, however, and held it up to the light, it
slipped from his hands and fell on a rock in the garden below, smashing into tiny fragments.
The emperor of course was furious.
“It was indeed most clumsy of me to let it drop in this way,” said Dainagon, with a deep bow,
“ but really there is not much harm done. This Ido tea-bowl is a very old one and it is impossible to say how much longer it would have lasted, but anyhow it is not a thing of any public use, so I think it rather fortunate that it has broken thus.”
This surprising response had an immediate effect: The emperor
calmed down. Dainagon neither sniveled nor overapologized, but signaled his own worth and power by treating his mistake with a touch of disdain.
The emperor had to respond with a similar aristocratic indifference; his anger had made him seem low and petty—an image Dainagon was able to manipulate.
Among equals this tactic might backfire: Your indifference could make you seem callous.
But with a master, if you act quickly and without great fuss, it can work to great effect: You bypass his angry response, save him the time and energy he would waste by brooding over it, and allow him the opportunity to display his own lack of pettiness publicly.
If we make excuses and denials when we are caught in a mistake or a deception, we stir the waters and make the situation worse. It is often wiser to play things the opposite way.
The Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino often boasted of his aristocratic lineage, which was, of course, a fiction, since he was actually the son of a shoemaker. When an enemy of his finally revealed the embarrassing truth, word quickly spread, and soon all of Venice (where he lived at the time) was aghast at Aretino’s lies. Had he tried to defend himself, he would have only dragged himself down.
His response was masterful: He announced that he was indeed the son of a shoemaker, but this only proved his greatness, since he had risen from the lowest stratum of society to its very pinnacle.
From then on he never mentioned his previous lie, trumpeting instead his new position on the matter of his ancestry.
Remember: The powerful responses to niggling, petty annoyances and irritations are contempt and disdain.
Never show that something has affected you, or that you are offended—that only shows you have acknowledged a problem. Contempt is a dish that is best served cold and without affectation.
Image:
The Tiny Wound. It is small but painful and irritating. You try all sorts of medicaments, you complain, you scratch and pick at the scab. Doctors only make it worse, transforming the tiny wound into a grave matter.
If only you had left the wound alone, letting time heal it and freeing yourself of worry.
Authority: Know how to play the card of contempt. It is the most politic kind of revenge. For there are many of whom we should have known nothing if their distinguished opponents had taken no notice of them. There is no revenge like oblivion, for it is the entombment of the unworthy in the dust of their own nothingness.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
You must play the card of contempt with care and delicacy.
Most small troubles will vanish on their own if you leave them be; but some will grow and fester unless you attend to them.
Ignore a person of inferior stature and the next time you look he has become a serious rival, and your contempt has made him vengeful as well.
The great princes of Renaissance Italy chose to ignore Cesare Borgia at the outset of his career as a young general in the army of his father, Pope Alexander VI. By the time they paid attention it was too late—the cub was now a lion, gobbling up chunks of
Italy.
Often, then, while you show contempt publicly you will also need to keep an eye on the problem privately, monitoring its status and making sure it goes away. Do not let it become a cancerous cell.
Develop the skill of sensing problems when they are still small and taking care of them before they become intractable.
Learn to distinguish between the potentially disastrous and the mildly irritating, the nuisance that will quietly go away on its own. In either case, though, never completely take your eye off it. As long as it is alive it can smolder and spark into life.
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LAW 35
MASTER THE ART OF TIMING
JUDGMENT
Never seem to be in a hurry-hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time. Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually. Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power. Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition.
SERTORIUS’S LESSON
Sertorius’s strength was now rapidly increasing, for all the tribes between the Ebro and the Pyrenees came over to his side, and troops came flocking daily to join him from every quarter. At the same time he was troubled by the lack of discipline and the overconfidence of these newly arrived barbarians, who would shout at him to attack the enemy and had no patience with his delaying tactics, and he therefore tried to win them over by argument. But when he saw that they were discontented and persisted in pressing their demands regardless of the circumstances, he let them have their way and allowed them to engage the enemy; he hoped that they would suffer a severe defeat without being completely crushed, and that this would
make them better disposed to obey his orders in future. The event turned out as he expected and Sertorius came to their rescue, provided a rallying point for the fugitives, and led them safely back to his camp. His next step was to revive their dejected spirits, and so a few days later he summoned a general assembly. Before it he produced two horses, one of them old and enfeebled,
the other large and lusty and possessing a flowing tail, which was
remarkable for the thickness and beauty of its hair. By the side of the weak horse stood a tall strong man, and by the side of the powerful horse a short man of mean physique. At a signal the strong man seized the tail of his horse and tried with all his strength to pull it towards him, as if to tear it off, while the weak man began to pull the hairs one by one from the tail of the strong horse.
The strong man, after tugging with all his might to no purpose and causing the spectators a great deal of amusement in the process, finally gave up the attempt, while the weak man quickly and with very little trouble stripped his horse’s tail completely bare. Then Sertorius rose to his feet and said,
“Now you can see, my friends and allies, that perseverance is more effective than brute strength and that there are many difficulties that cannot be overcome if you try to do everything at once, but which will yield if you master them little by little. The truth is that a steady continuous effort is irresistible, for this is the way in which Time captures and subdues the greatest powers on earth. Now Time, you should remember, is a good friend and ally to those who use their intelligence to choose the right moment, but a most dangerous enemy to those who rush into action at the wrong one.”
LIFE OF SERTORIUS, PLUTARCH, C.A.D. 46-120
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
Starting out in life as a nondescript French seminary-school teacher, Joseph Fouché wandered from town to town for most of the decade of the 1780s, teaching mathematics to young boys. Yet he never completely committed himself to the church, never took his vows as a priest—he had bigger plans. Patiently waiting for his chance, he kept his options open. And when the French Revolution broke out, in 1789, Fouché waited no longer: He got rid of his cassock, grew his hair long, and became a revolutionary. For this was the spirit of the times. To miss the boat at this critical moment could have spelt disaster. Fouché did not miss the boat: Befriending the revolutionary leader Robespierre, he quickly rose in the rebel ranks.
In 1792 the town of Nantes elected Fouché to be its representative to the National Convention (created that year to frame a new constitution for a French republic). When Fouché arrived in Paris to take his seat at the convention, a violent rift had broken out between the moderates and the radical Jacobins. Fouché sensed that in the long run neither side would emerge victorious. Power rarely ends up in the hands of those who start a revolution, or even of those who further it; power sticks to those who bring it to a conclusion. That was the side Fouché wanted to be on. His sense of timing was uncanny. He started as a moderate, for moderates were in the majority. When the time came to decide on whether or not to execute Louis XVI, however, he saw that the people were clamoring for the king’s head, so he cast the deciding vote—for the guillotine. Now he had become a radical. Yet as tensions came to the boil in Paris, he foresaw the danger of being too closely associated with any one faction, so he accepted
a position in the provinces, where he could lie low for a while. A few months later he was assigned to the post of proconsul in Lyons, where he oversaw the execution of dozens of aristocrats. At a certain moment, however, he called a halt to the killings, sensing that the mood of the country was turning-and despite the blood already on his hands, the citizens of Lyons hailed him as a savior from what had become known as the Terror. So far Fouché had played his cards brilliantly, but in 1794 his old friend
Robespierre recalled him to Paris to account for his actions in Lyons.
Robespierre had been the driving force behind the Terror. He had sent heads on both the right and the left rolling, and Fouché, whom he no longer trusted, seemed destined to provide the next head. Over the next few weeks, a tense struggle ensued: While Robespierre railed openly against Fouché, accusing of him dangerous ambitions and calling for his arrest, the crafty Fouché worked more indirectly, quietly gaining support among those who were beginning to tire of Robespierre’s dictatorial control. Fouché was playing for time. He knew that the longer he survived, the more disaffected citizens he could rally against Robespierre. He had to have broad support before he moved against the powerful leader. He rallied support among both the moderates and the Jacobins, playing on the widespread fear of
Robespierre-everyone was afraid of being the next to go to the guillotine.
It all came to fruition on July 27: The convention turned against Robespierre, shouting down his usual lengthy speech. He was quickly arrested, and a few days later it was Robespierre’s head, not Fouché’s, that fell into the basket. When Fouché returned to the convention after Robespierre’s death, he played his most unexpected move: Having led the conspiracy against Robespierre, he was expected to sit with the moderates, but lo and behold, he once again changed sides, joining the radical Jacobins.
For perhaps the first time in his life he aligned himself with the minority. Clearly he sensed a reaction stirring: He knew that the moderate faction that had executed Robespierre, and was now about to take power, would initiate a new round of the Terror, this time against the radicals. In siding with the Jacobins, then, Fouché was sitting with the martyrs of the days to come—the people who would be considered blameless in the troubles that were on their way.
Taking sides with what was about to become the losing team was a risky gambit, of course, but Fouché must have calculated he could keep his head long enough to quietly stir up the populace against the moderates and watch them fall from power. And indeed, although the moderates did call for his arrest in December of 1795, and would have sent him to the guillotine, too
much time had passed. The executions had become unpopular with the people, and Fouché survived the swing of the pendulum one more time.
A new government took over, the Directoire. It was not, however, a Jacobin government, but a moderate one—more moderate than the government that had reimposed the Terror. Fouché, the radical, had kept his head, but now he had to keep a low profile. He waited patiently on the sidelines for several years, allowing time to soften any bitter feelings against him, then he approached the Directoire and convinced them he had a new passion: intelligence-gathering. He became a paid spy for the
government, excelled at the job, and in 1799 was rewarded by being made minister of police. Now he was not just empowered but required to extend his spying to every corner of France—a responsibility that would greatly reinforce his natural ability to sniff out where the wind was blowing. One of the first social trends he detected, in fact, came in the person of Napoleon, a brash young general whose destiny he right away saw was entwined with the future of France.
When Napoleon unleashed a coup d‘etat, on November 9, 1799, Fouché pretended to be asleep. Indeed he slept the whole day. For this indirect assistance—it might have been thought his job,
after all, to prevent a military coup—Napoleon kept him on as minister of police in the new regime.
Over the next few years, Napoleon came to rely on Fouché more and more. He even gave this former revolutionary a title, duke of Otranto, and rewarded him with great wealth. By 1808, however, Fouché, always attuned to the times, sensed that Napoleon was on the downswing. His futile war with Spain, a country that posed no threat to France, was a sign that he was losing a sense of proportion. Never one to be caught on a sinking ship, Fouché conspired with Talleyrand to bring about Napoleon’s downfall.
Although the conspiracy failed—Talleyrand was fired; Fouché stayed, but was kept on a tight leash—it publicized a growing discontent with the emperor, who seemed to be losing control. By 1814 Napoleon’s power had crumbled and allied forces finally conquered him. The next government was a restoration of the monarchy, in the form of King Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI. Fouché, his nose always sniffing the air for the next social shift, knew Louis would not last long—he had none of Napoleon’s flair. Fouché once again played his waiting game, lying low, staying away from the spotlight.
Sure enough, in February of 1815,
Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba, where he had been imprisoned.
Louis XVIII panicked: His policies had alienated the citizenry, who were clamoring for Napoleon’s return. So Louis turned to the one man who could maybe have saved his hide, Fouché, the former radical who had sent his brother, Louis XVI, to the guillotine, but was now one of the most popular and widely admired politicians in France. Fouché,
however, would not side with a loser: He refused Louis’s request for help by pretending that his help was unnecessary—by swearing that Napoleon would never return to power
(although he knew otherwise).
A short time later, of course, Napoleon and his new citizen army were closing in on Paris. Seeing his reign about to collapse, feeling that Fouché had betrayed him, and certain that he did not want this powerful and able man on Napoleon’s team,
King Louis ordered the minister’s arrest and execution.
On March 16, 1815, policemen surrounded Fouché’s coach on a Paris boulevard.
Was this finally his end?
Perhaps, but not immediately: Fouché told the police that an ex-member of government could not be arrested on the street. They fell for the story and allowed him to return home. Later that day, though, they came to his house and once again declared him under arrest. Fouché nodded—
but would the officers be so kind as allow a gentleman to wash and to change his clothes before leaving his house for the last time?
They gave their permission, Fouché left the room, and the minutes went by. Fouché did not return. Finally the policemen went into the next room—where they saw a ladder against an open window, leading down to the garden below. That day and the next the police combed Paris for Fouché, but by then
Napoleon’s cannons were audible in the distance and the king and all the king’s men had to flee the city. As soon as Napoleon entered Paris, Fouché came out of hiding. He had cheated the executioner once again. Napoleon greeted his former minister of police and gladly restored him to his old post.
During the 100 days that Napoleon remained in power, until Waterloo, it was essentially Fouché who governed France. After Napoleon fell, Louis XVIII returned to the throne, and like a cat with nine lives, Fouché stayed on to serve in yet another government—by then his power and influence had grown so great that not even the king dared challenge him.
Mr. Shih had two sons: one loved learning; the other war. The first
expounded his moral teachings at the admiring court of Ch‘i and was made a tutor, while the second talked strategy at the bellicose court of Ch’u and was made a general. The impecunious Mr. Meng, hearing of these successes, sent his own two sons out to follow the example of the Shih boys.
The first expounded his moral teachings at the court of Ch‘in,
but the King of Ch’in said: “At present the states are quarreling violently and every prince is busy arming his troops to the teeth. If I followed this prig’s pratings we should soon be annihilated.” So he had the fellow castrated.
Meanwhile, the second brother displayed his military genius at the court of Wei.
But the King of Wei said: “Mine is a weak state. If I relied on force
instead of diplomacy, we should soon be wiped out. If, on the other hand, I let this fire-eater go, he will offer his services to another state and then we shall be in trouble.”
So he had the fellow’s feet cut off Both. families did exactly the same thing, but one timed it right, the other wrong. Thus success
depends not on ratiocination but on rhythm.
LIEH TZU, QUOTED IN THE CHINESE LOOKING GLASS, DENNIS
BLOODWORTH, 1967
Interpretation
In a period of unprecedented turmoil, Joseph Fouché thrived through his mastery of the art of timing. He teaches us a number of key lessons.
First, it is critical to recognize the spirit of the times. Fouché always looked two steps ahead, found the wave that would carry him to power, and rode it. You must always work with the times, anticipate twists and turns,
and never miss the boat. Sometimes the spirit of the times is obscure: Recognize it not by what is loudest and most obvious in it, but by what lies hidden and dormant. Look forward to the Napoleons of the future rather than holding on to the ruins of the past.
Second, recognizing the prevailing winds does not necessarily mean running with them. Any potent social movement creates a powerful reaction, and it is wise to anticipate what that reaction will be, as Fouché did after the execution of Robespierre. Rather than ride the cresting wave of the moment, wait for the tide’s ebb to carry you back to power.
Upon occasion bet on the reaction that is brewing, and place yourself in the vanguard of it.
Finally, Fouché had remarkable patience. Without patience as your sword and shield, your timing will fail and you will inevitably find yourself a loser. When the times were against Fouché, he did not struggle, get emotional, or strike out rashly. He kept his cool and maintained a low profile, patiently building support among the citizenry, the bulwark in his next rise to power. Whenever he found himself in the weaker position, he played for time, which he knew would always be his ally if he was patient.
Recognize the moment, then, to hide in the grass or slither under a rock, as well as the moment to bare your fangs and attack.
Space we can recover, time never.
Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821
KEYS TO POWER
Time is an artificial concept that we ourselves have created to make the limitlessness of eternity and the universe more bearable, more human.
Since we have constructed the concept of time, we are also able to mold it to some degree, to play tricks with it. The time of a child is long and slow, with vast expanses; the time of an adult whizzes by frighteningly fast. Time, then, depends on perception, which, we know, can be willfully altered.
This is the first thing to understand in mastering the art of timing. If the inner turmoil caused by our emotions tends to make time move faster, it follows that once we control our emotional responses to events, time will move much more slowly.
This altered way of dealing with things tends to lengthen our
perception of future time, opens up possibilities that fear and anger close off, and allows us the patience that is the principal requirement in the art of timing.
The sultan [of Persia] had sentenced two men to death. One of them, knowing how much the sultan loved his stallion, offered to teach the horse to fly within a year in return for his life. The sultan, fancying himself as the rider of the only flying horse in the world, agreed. The other prisoner looked at his friend in disbelief “You know horses don’t fly. What made you come up with a crazy idea like that? You’re only postponing the inevitable.”
“Not so,” said the (first prisoner].
“I have actually given myself four chances for freedom.
First, the sultan might die during the year.
Second, I might die.
Third, the horse might die.
And fourth ... I might teach the horse to fly!”
THE CRAFT OF POWER, R.G.H. SIU, 1979
There are three kinds of time for us to deal with; each presents problems that can be solved with skill and practice.
First there is long time: the drawn-out, years-long kind of time that must be managed with patience and gentle guidance. Our handling of long time should be mostly defensive— this is the art of not reacting impulsively, of waiting for opportunity.
Next there is forced time: the short-term time that we can manipulate as an offensive weapon, upsetting the timing of our opponents.
Finally there is end time, when a plan must be executed with speed and force. We have waited, found the moment, and must not hesitate.
Long Time. The famous seventeenth-century Ming painter Chou Yung relates a story that altered his behavior forever. Late one winter afternoon he set out to visit a town that lay across the river from his own town. He was bringing some important books and papers with him and had commissioned a young boy to help him carry them. As the ferry neared the other side of the river, Chou Yung asked the boatman if they would have time to get to the town before its gates closed, since it was a mile away and
night was approaching. The boatman glanced at the boy, and at the bundle of loosely tied papers and books—
“Yes,” he replied,
“if you do not walk too fast.”
As they started out, however, the sun was setting. Afraid of being locked out of the town at night, prey to local bandits, Chou and the boy walked faster and faster, finally breaking into a run. Suddenly the string around the papers broke and the documents scattered on the ground. It took them many minutes to put the packet together again, and by the time they had reached the city gates, it was too late.
When you force the pace out of fear and impatience, you create a nest of problems that require fixing, and you end up taking much longer than if you had taken your time. Hurriers may occasionally get there quicker, but papers fly everywhere, new dangers arise, and they find themselves in constant crisis mode, fixing the problems that they themselves have created.
Sometimes not acting in the face of danger is your best move—you wait, you deliberately slow down. As time passes it will eventually present opportunities you had not imagined.
Waiting involves controlling not only your own emotions but those of your colleagues, who, mistaking action for power, may try to push you into making rash moves. In your rivals,
on the other hand, you can encourage this same mistake: If you let them rush headlong into trouble while you stand back and wait, you will soon find ripe moments to intervene and pick up the pieces.
This wise policy was the principal strategy of the great earlyseventeenth-century emperor Tokugawa Ieyasu of Japan. When his predecessor, the headstrong Hideyoshi, whom he served as a general, staged a rash invasion of Korea, Ieyasu did not involve himself. He knew the invasion would be a disaster and would lead to Hideyoshi’s downfall. Better to stand patiently on the sidelines, even for many years, and then be in position to seize power when the time is right—exactly what Ieyasu did, with great artistry.
THE TROUT AND THE GUDGEON
A fisherman in the month of May stood angling on the bank of the Thames with an artificial fly. He threw his bait with so much art, that a young trout was rushing toward it, when she was prevented by her mother.
“Never,” said she,
“my child, be too precipitate, where there is a possibility of
danger. Take due time to consider, before you risk an action that may be fatal. How know you whether yon appearance be indeed a fly, or the snare of an enemy? Let someone else make the experiment before you. If it be a fly, he will very probably elude the first attack: and the second may be made, if not with success, at least with safety.”
She had no sooner spoken, than a gudgeon seized the pretended fly, and became an example to the giddy daughter of the importance of her mother’s counsel.
FABLES, ROBERT DODSLEY, 1703-1764
You do not deliberately slow time down to live longer, or to take more pleasure in the moment, but the better to play the game of power.
First, when your mind is uncluttered by constant emergencies you will see further into the future.
Second, you will be able to resist the baits that people dangle in front of you, and will keep yourself from becoming another
impatient sucker.
Third, you will have more room to be flexible.
Opportunities will inevitably arise that you had not expected and would have missed had you forced the pace. Fourth, you will not move from one deal to the next without completing the first one. To build your power’s foundation can take years; make sure that foundation is secure.
Do not be a flash in the pan—success that is built up slowly and surely is the only kind that lasts.
Finally, slowing time down will give you a perspective on the times you live in, letting you take a certain distance and putting you in a less emotionally charged position to see the shapes of things to come.
Hurriers will often mistake surface phenomena for a real trend, seeing only what they want to see. How much better to see what is really happening, even if it is unpleasant or makes your task harder.
Forced Time. The trick in forcing time is to upset the timing of others—to make them hurry, to make them wait, to make them abandon their own pace, to distort their perception of time. By upsetting the timing of your opponent while you stay patient, you open up time for yourself, which is half the game.
In 1473 the great Turkish sultan Mehmed the Conqueror invited
negotiations with Hungary to end the off-and-on war the two countries had waged for years. When the Hungarian emissary arrived in Turkey to start the talks, Turkish officials humbly apologized—Mehmed had just left Istanbul, the capital, to battle his longtime foe, Uzun Hasan. But he urgently wanted peace with Hungary, and had asked that the emissary join him at the front.
When the emissary arrived at the site of the fighting, Mehmed had already left it, moving eastward in pursuit of his swift foe. This happened several times. Wherever the emissary stopped, the Turks lavished gifts and banquets on him, in pleasurable but time-consuming ceremonies. Finally Mehmed defeated Uzun and met with the emissary. Yet his terms for peace with Hungary were excessively harsh. After a few days, the negotiations ended, and the usual stalemate remained in place. But this was fine with
Mehmed.
In fact he had planned it that way all along: Plotting his campaign
against Uzun, he had seen that diverting his armies to the east would leave his western flank vulnerable.
To prevent Hungary from taking advantage of his weakness and his preoccupation elsewhere, he first dangled the lure of peace before his enemy, then made them wait—all on his own terms.
Making people wait is a powerful way of forcing time, as long as they do not figure out what you are up to. You control the clock, they linger in limbo—and rapidly come unglued, opening up opportunities for you to strike.
The opposite effect is equally powerful: You make your opponents hurry.
Start off your dealings with them slowly, then suddenly apply
pressure, making them feel that everything is happening at once. People who lack the time to think will make mistakes—so set their deadlines for them.
This was the technique Machiavelli admired in Cesare Borgia, who, during negotiations, would suddenly press vehemently for a decision, upsetting his opponent’s timing and patience.
For who would dare make Cesare wait?
Joseph Duveen, the famous art dealer, knew that if he gave an indecisive buyer like John D. Rockefeller a deadline—the painting had to leave the country, another tycoon was interested in it—the client would buy just in time. Freud noticed that patients who had spent years in psychoanalysis without improvement would miraculously recover just in time if he fixed a definite date for the end of the therapy. Jacques Lacan, the famous French psychoanalyst, used a variation on this tactic—he would sometimes end the customary hour session of therapy after only ten minutes, without warning.
After this happened several times, the patient would realize that he had better make maximum use of the time, rather than wasting much of the hour with a lot of talk that meant nothing. The deadline, then, is a powerful tool.
Close off the vistas of indecision and force people to make up their damn minds or get to the point never let them make you play on their excruciating terms.
Never give them time. Magicians and showmen are experts in forcing time. Houdini could often wriggle free of handcuffs in minutes, but he would draw the escape out to an hour, making the audience sweat, as time came to an apparent standstill.
Magicians have always known that the best way to alter our perception of time is often to slow down the pace.
Creating suspense brings time to a terrifying pause: The slower the magician’s hands move, the easier it is to create the illusion of speed, making people think the rabbit has appeared instantaneously.
The great nineteenth-century magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin took explicit notice of this effect:
“The more slowly a story is told,” he said,
“the shorter it seems.”
Going slower also makes what you are doing more interesting—the audience yields to your pace, becomes entranced. It is a state in which time whizzes delightfully by. You must practice such illusions, which share in the hypnotist’s power to alter perceptions of time.
End Time. You can play the game with the utmost artistry—waiting patiently for the right moment to act, putting your competitors off their form by messing with their timing—but it won’t mean a thing unless you know how to finish.
Do not be one of those people who look like paragons of patience but are actually just afraid to bring things to a close: Patience is worthless unless combined with a willingness to fall ruthlessly on your opponent at the right moment. You can wait as long as necessary for the conclusion to come, but when it comes it must come quickly. Use speed to paralyze your opponent, cover up any mistakes you might make, and impress people with your aura of authority and finality.
With the patience of a snake charmer, you draw the snake out with calm and steady rhythms. Once the snake is out, though, would you dangle your foot above its deadly head?
There is never a good reason to allow the slightest hitch in your endgame.
Your mastery of timing can really only be judged by how you work with end time—how you quickly change the pace and bring things to a swift and definitive conclusion.
Image: The Hawk. Patiently and silently it circles the sky, high above, all-seeing with its powerful eyes. Those below have no awareness that they are being tracked. Suddenly, when the moment arrives, the hawk swoops down with a speed that cannot be defended against; before its prey knows what has happened,
the bird’s viselike talons have carried it up into the sky.
Authority: There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
(Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, 1564-1616)
REVERSAL
There is no power to be gained in letting go of the reins and adapting to whatever time brings.
To some degree you must guide time or you will be its merciless victim. There is accordingly no reversal to this law.
There is a large celebration for their arrival at Qarth apparent as Daenerys’ khalasar approaches the city and a column of camelry rides from the city to provide her an honor guard. The warlock Pyat Pree told Daenerys that Qarth is the greatest city, a crossroads, and ancient. Upon seeing the city, Daenerys has to admit the city is magnificent. It has three thick walls: the first is 30 feet high and made of red sandstone carved with animals, the second 40 feet high and made of granite carved with scenes of war, and the third 50 feet high, made of black marble carved with scenes of sex. Qartheen line the streets and balconies to watch them pass, black Drogon on her shoulder. The women are in gowns that bare one breast, and the men wear beaded silk shirts while the children wear only sandals and paint. Daenerys thinks how the Dothraki call these people “Milk Men" for their skin and how Khal Drogo dreamed sacking the great city.
The merchant prince Xaro Xhoan Daxos rides up on his camel, which the Dothraki horses shy away from. He tells Daenerys that if she desires anything she sees it is hers. Pyat Pree sings from her other side “Qarth itself is hers, she has no need of baubles,” and she should come to the House of the Undying to drink wisdom and truth. Daenerys tells them both that she only wants the Red Keep in King's Landing and if they want to give her gifts, to give her ships and swords. Pyat states that it will be as she commands and the other complements her on her wisdom. Xaro Xhoan Daxos warns her that warlocks are not to be trusted. The two continue to bicker until Ser Jorah Mormont mutters in the common tongue “The crow calls the raven black,” that she should avoid both men, and that it would be best to not linger here. Daenerys, however, wants their help in winning her throne.
Daenerys expected something grand when Xaro Xhoan Daxos offered the hospitality of his home, but not a palace larger than a market town, with an entire wing given over to her. He tells her that there will be a feast the next day with delicacies and music, and the Thirteen will come to do her honor. Xaro Xhoan Daxos and Pyat depart. The last of the three seekers, the shadowbinder Quaithe gives Daenerys a warning to beware of everyone, for they all lust for the power of her dragons, and then departs.
After Quaithe leaves, Ser Jorah states she is right, but he also does not trust her. Daenerys admits that she does not understand Quaithe. While the others shower her in promises, she has only cryptic words. It also concerns her that she has not seen her face. Then Daenerys declares that they will keep their own watch, and will keep a sharp eye on the dragons. After Aggo confirms it will be done, she tells Rakharo to use good men and women to explore the rest of Qarth since they have only seen the parts that the seekers wanted them to see. She then asks Ser Jorah to go to the docks to get news of the Seven Kingdoms, and maybe find a ship to carry them home. Ser Jorah tells her the usurper will kill her and wants to stay with her but she tells him that Jhogo can guard her, and he has the languages and more experience with the sea.
After they leave, her handmaidens strip her of her travel stained silks and she bathes in a marble pool with golden fish. She wonders if the Red Keep has a pool like this with fragrant gardens, remembering Viserys saying that the Seven Kingdoms are the most beautiful place in the world. She also thinks she no longer has Drogo’s khalasar behind her, only her four fierce bloodriders, and that the Dothraki plundered but do not know how to govern. She ponders Ser Jorah’s words: "The Usurper will kill you." She then thinks about Robert Baratheon, strong as a bull, fearless in battle and loving war, who killed her brother Rhaegar Targaryen, and his dogs: Eddard Stark, Tywin Lannister and Jaime Lannister. How will she overthrow them? Even her dragons might not be enough. Viserys, who was a fool, believed the realm would rise for their rightful king. She then decides that the Bleeding Star has led her to Qarth for a purpose, and if the gods intend for her to conquer they will send a sign.
Near eveningfall, Irri brings word that Ser Jorah has returned. He enters with Quhuru Mo, captain of the Cinnamon Wind out of Tall Trees Town. Daenerys has her dragons all around her. He has the news that Robert Baratheon is dead, reported in Oldtown, Dorne and Lys. There are tales that the queen, his brother (Stannis Baratheon or Renly Baratheon, or Eddard Stark betrayed him. Joffrey Baratheon sits on the throne with House Lannister ruling, Robert’s brothers have fled, and the Hand of the King has been seized for treason. Jorah does not think it likely that Eddard is a traitor, saying the long summer will come again before he besmirches his honor. Daenerys wonders if her brother would have been wiser had he known that vengeance was so close at hand. When asked, the captain replies he is not returning to Westeros for a year or more since his ship will sail east from Qarth, making the trader’s circle around the Jade Sea. When Daenerys states he has brought her a precious gift, he tells her that he has been amply repaid by being allowed to see dragons. She aks him to come to her one day in King's Landing.
After the trader leaves, Ser Jorah warns Daenerys of speaking so freely. Daenerys replies that the Seven Kingdoms are flying to pieces like the khalasar did after Khal Drogo died. Ser Jorah tells her that she will still need gold, armies, and ships. Daenerys responds that she knows this, but she is the blood of the dragon. Jorah goes on to say that King Robert killed a dragon with a warhammer. To this she replies that dragons die, but so do dragon slayers.
LAW 34
BE ROYAL IN YOUR OWN FASHION: ACT LIKE A KING TO BE TREATED LIKE ONE
JUDGMENT
The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW
In July of 1830, a revolution broke out in Paris that forced the king, Charles X, to abdicate. A commission of the highest authorities in the land gathered to choose a successor, and the man they picked was Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans.
From the beginning it was clear that Louis-Philippe would be a different kind of king, and not just because he came from a different branch of the royal family, or because he had not inherited the crown but had been given it, by a commission, putting his legitimacy in question. Rather it was that he disliked ceremony and the trappings of royalty; he had more friends among the bankers than among the nobility; and his style was not to create a new kind of royal rule, as Napoleon had done, but to downplay his status, the better to mix with the businessmen and middle-class folk who had called him to lead. Thus the symbols that came to be associated with LouisPhilippe were neither the scepter nor the crown, but the gray hat and umbrella with which he would proudly walk the streets of Paris, as if he were a bourgeois out for a stroll. When Louis-Philippe invited James
Rothschild, the most important banker in France, to his palace, he treated him as an equal. And unlike any king before him, not only did he talk business with Monsieur Rothschild but that was literally all he talked, for he loved money and had amassed a huge fortune.
As the reign of the “bourgeois king” plodded on, people came to despise him. The aristocracy could not endure the sight of an unkingly king, and within a few years they turned on him. Meanwhile the growing class of the poor, including the radicals who had chased out Charles X, found no satisfaction in a ruler who neither acted as a king nor governed as a man of the people. The bankers to whom Louis-Philippe was the most beholden soon realized that it was they who controlled the country, not he, and they treated him with growing contempt. One day, at the start of a train trip organized for the royal family, James Rothschild actually berated him—and in public—for being late.
Once the king had made news by treating the banker as an equal; now the banker treated the king as an inferior. Eventually the workers’ insurrections that had brought down LouisPhilippe’s predecessor began to reemerge, and the king put them down with force.
But what was he defending so brutally?
Not the institution of the monarchy, which he disdained, nor a democratic republic, which his rule prevented. What he was really defending, it seemed, was his own fortune, and the fortunes of the bankers—not a way to inspire loyalty among the citizenry.
Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yourself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude,
and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgment of yourself than to all external precepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the strictures of external authority.
Come to hold yourself in awe, and you will have no need of Seneca’s imaginary tutor.
BALTASAR GRACIÁN, 1601-1658
In early 1848, Frenchmen of all classes began to demonstrate for
electoral reforms that would make the country truly democratic. By February the demonstrations had turned violent.
To assuage the populace, Louis-Philippe fired his prime minister and appointed a liberal as a replacement. But this created the opposite of the desired effect: The people sensed they could push the king around. The demonstrations turned into a full-fledged revolution, with gunfire and barricades in the streets.
On the night of February 23, a crowd of Parisians surrounded the palace. With a suddenness that caught everyone by surprise, Louis-Philippe abdicated that very evening and fled to England. He left no successor, nor even the suggestion of one—his whole government folded up and dissolved like a traveling circus leaving town.
Interpretation
Louis-Philippe consciously dissolved the aura that naturally pertains to kings and leaders. Scoffing at the symbolism of grandeur, he believed a new world was dawning, where rulers should act and be like ordinary citizens.
He was right: A new world, without kings and queens, was certainly on its way. He was profoundly wrong, however, in predicting a change in the dynamics of power.
The bourgeois king’s hat and umbrella amused the French at first, but soon grew irritating. People knew that Louis-Philippe was not really like them at all—that the hat and umbrella were essentially a kind of trick to encourage them in the fantasy that the country had suddenly grown more equal. Actually, though, the divisions of wealth had never been greater. The French expected their ruler to be a bit of a showman, to have some presence.
Even a radical like Robespierre, who had briefly come to power during the French Revolution fifty years earlier, had understood this,
and certainly Napoleon, who had turned the revolutionary republic into an imperial regime, had known it in his bones. Indeed as soon as LouisPhilippe fled the stage, the French revealed their true desire: They elected Napoleon’s grand nephew president. He was a virtual unknown, but they hoped he would re-create the great general’s powerful aura, erasing the
awkward memory of the “bourgeois king.”
Powerful people may be tempted to affect a common-man aura, trying to create the illusion that they and their subjects or underlings are basically the same. But the people whom this false gesture is intended to impress will quickly see through it. They understand that they are not being given more power—that it only appears as if they shared in the powerful person’s fate.
The only kind of common touch that works is the kind affected by Franklin Roosevelt, a style that said the president shared values and goals with the common people even while he remained a patrician at heart. He never pretended to erase his distance from the crowd. Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear, or love. Instead they elicit contempt. Like Louis-Philippe, they are too uninspiring even to be worth the guillotine—the best they can do is simply vanish in the night, as if they were never there.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
When Christopher Columbus was trying to find funding for his legendary voyages, many around him believed he came from the Italian aristocracy.
This view was passed into history through a biography written after the explorer’s death by his son, which describes him as a descendant of a Count Colombo of the Castle of Cuccaro in Montferrat. Colombo in turn was said to be descended from the legendary Roman general Colonius, and two of his first cousins were supposedly direct descendants of an emperor of Con
stantinople.
An illustrious background indeed. But it was nothing more than
illustrious fantasy, for Columbus was actually the son of Domenico Colombo, a humble weaver who had opened a wine shop when Christopher was a young man, and who then made his living by selling cheese.
Columbus himself had created the myth of his noble background,
because from early on he felt that destiny had singled him out for great things, and that he had a kind of royalty in his blood. Accordingly he acted as if he were indeed descended from noble stock. After an uneventful career as a merchant on a commercial vessel, Columbus, originally from Genoa, settled in Lisbon. Using the fabricated story of his noble background, he married into an established Lisbon family that had excellent connections with Portuguese royalty.
Through his in-laws, Columbus finagled a meeting with the king of Portugal, João II, whom he petitioned to finance a westward voyage aimed at discovering a shorter route to Asia. In return for announcing that any discoveries he achieved would be made in the king’s name, Columbus wanted a series of rights: the title Grand Admiral of the Oceanic Sea; the office of viceroy over any lands he found; and 10 percent of the future commerce with such lands. All of these rights were to be hereditary and for all time. Columbus made these demands even though he had previously
been a mere merchant, he knew almost nothing about navigation, he could not work a quadrant, and he had never led a group of men. In short he had absolutely no qualifications for the journey he proposed. Furthermore, his petition included no details as to how he would accomplish his plans, just vague promises.
When Columbus finished his pitch, João II smiled: He politely declined the offer, but left the door open for the future. Here Columbus must have noticed something he would never forget: Even as the king turned down the sailor’s demands, he treated them as legitimate. He neither laughed at Columbus nor questioned his background and credentials.
In fact the king was impressed by the boldness of Columbus’s requests, and clearly felt comfortable in the company of a man who acted so confidently.
The meeting must have convinced Columbus that his instincts were correct: By asking for the moon, he had instantly raised his own status, for the king assumed that unless a man who set such a high price on himself were mad, which Columbus did not appear to be, he must somehow be worth it.
HIPPOCLEIDES AT SICYON
In the next generation the family became much more famous than before through the distinction conferred upon it by Cleisthenes the master of Sicyon. Cleisthenes... had a daughter, Agarista, whom he wished to marry to the best man in all Greece. So during the Olympic games, in which he had himself won the chariot race, he had a public announcement made, to the effect that any Greek who thought himself good enough to become
Cleisthenes’ son-in-law should present himself in Sicyon within sixty days— or sooner if he wished—
because he intended, within the year following the sixtieth day, to betroth his daughter to her future husband. Cleisthenes had
had a race-track and a wrestling-ring specially made for his purpose, and presently the suitors began to arrive—
every man of Greek nationality who had something to be proud of either in his country or in himself....
Cleisthenes began by asking each [of the numerous suitors] in turn to name his country and parentage; then he kept them in his house for a year, to get to know them well, entering into conversation with them sometimes singly, sometimes all together, and testing each of them for his manly qualities and temper, education and manners.... But the most important test of all was their behaviour at the dinner-table. All this went on throughout their stay in Sicyon, and all the time he entertained them handsomely. For one reason or another it was the two Athenians who impressed Cleisthenes most favourably, and of the two Tisander’s son Hippocleides came to be preferred.... At last the day came which had been fixed for the betrothal, and
Cleisthenes had to declare his choice. He marked the day by the sacrifice of a hundred oxen, and then gave a great banquet, to which not only the suitors but everyone of note in Sicyon was invited. When dinner was over, the suitors began to compete with each other in music and in talking in company. In both these accomplishments it was Hippocleides who proved by far the doughtiest champion, until at last, as more and more wine was
drunk, he asked the flute-player to play him a tune and began to dance to it.
Now it may well be that he danced to his own satisfaction; Cleisthenes, however, who was watching the performance, began to have serious doubts about the whole business. Presently, after a brief pause, Hippocleides sent for a table; the table was brought, and Hippocleides, climbing on to it, danced first some Laconian dances, next some Attic ones, and ended by standing on his head and beating time with his legs in the air The Laconian
and Attic dances were bad enough; but Cleisthenes, though he already loathed the thought of having a son-in-law like that, nevertheless restrained himself and managed to avoid an outburst; but when he saw Hippocleides beating time with his legs, he could bear it no longer.
“Son of Tisander,”he cried,
“you have danced away your marriage.”
THE HISTORIES, HERODOTUS, FIFTH CENTURY B.C.
A few years later Columbus moved to Spain. Using his Portuguese
connections, he moved in elevated circles at the Spanish court, receiving subsidies from illustrious financiers and sharing tables with dukes and princes. To all these men he repeated his request for financing for a voyage to the west—and also for the rights he had demanded from João II. Some, such as the powerful duke of Medina, wanted to help, but could not, since they lacked the power to grant him the titles and rights he wanted. But Columbus would not back down. He soon realized that only one person could meet his demands: Queen Isabella.
In 1487 he finally managed a meeting with the queen, and although he could not convince her to finance the voyage, he completely charmed her, and became a frequent guest in the
palace.
In 1492 the Spanish finally expelled the Moorish invaders who centuries earlier had seized parts of the country. With the wartime burden on her treasury lifted, Isabella felt she could finally respond to the demands of her explorer friend, and she decided to pay for three ships, equipment, the salaries of the crews, and a modest stipend for Columbus.
More important, she had a contract drawn up that granted Columbus the titles and rights on which he had insisted. The only one she denied—and only in the contract’s fine print—was the 10 percent of all revenues from any lands discovered:
an absurd demand, since he wanted no time limit on it. (Had the clause been left in, it would eventually have made Columbus and his heirs the wealthiest family on the planet. Columbus never read the fine print.) Satisfied that his demands had been met, Columbus set sail that same year in search of the passage to Asia. (Before he left he was careful to hire the best navigator he could find to help him get there.)
The mission failed to find such a passage, yet when Columbus petitioned the queen to finance an even more ambitious voyage the following year, she agreed. By then she had come to see Columbus as destined for great things.
Interpretation
As an explorer Columbus was mediocre at best. He knew less about the sea than did the average sailor on his ships, could never determine the latitude and longitude of his discoveries, mistook islands for vast continents, and treated his crew badly. But in one area he was a genius: He knew how to sell himself How else to explain how the son of a cheese vendor, a lowlevel sea merchant, managed to ingratiate himself with the highest royal and
aristocratic families?
Columbus had an amazing power to charm the nobility, and it all came from the way he carried himself. He projected a sense of confidence that was completely out of proportion to his means. Nor was his confidence the aggressive, ugly self-promotion of an upstart—it was a quiet and calm selfassurance. In fact it was the same confidence usually shown by the nobility themselves. The powerful in the old-style aristocracies felt no need to prove or assert themselves; being noble, they knew they always deserved more, and asked for it. With Columbus, then, they felt an instant affinity, for he carried himself just the way they did—elevated above the crowd, destined for greatness.
Understand: It is within your power to set your own price. How you carry yourself reflects what you think of yourself. If you ask for little, shuffle your feet and lower your head, people will assume this reflects your character. But this behavior is not you—it is only how you have chosen to present yourself to other people. You can just as easily present the Columbus front: buoyancy, confidence, and the feeling that you were born
to wear a crown.
With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves: it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those around them.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
KEYS TO POWER
As children, we start our lives with great exuberance, expecting and demanding everything from the world. This generally carries over into our first forays into society, as we begin our careers. But as we grow older the rebuffs and failures we experience set up boundaries that only get firmer with time. Coming to expect less from the world, we accept limitations that are really self- imposed.
We start to bow and scrape and apologize for even the simplest of requests. The solution to such a shrinking of horizons is to deliberately force ourselves in the opposite direction—
to downplay the failures and ignore the limitations, to make ourselves demand and expect as much as the child.
To accomplish this, we must use a particular strategy upon ourselves. Call it the Strategy of the Crown.
The Strategy of the Crown is based on a simple chain of cause and effect: If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king. This outward radiance will infect the people around us, who will think we must have reasons to feel so confident. People who wear crowns seem to feel no inner sense of the limits to what they can ask for or what they can accomplish. This too radiates outward. Limits and boundaries disappear.
Use the Strategy of the Crown and you will be surprised how often it bears fruit.
Take as an example those happy children who ask for whatever they want, and get it. Their high expectations are their charm. Adults enjoy granting their wishes—just as Isabella enjoyed granting the wishes of Columbus. Throughout history, people of undistinguished birth—the Theodoras of Byzantium, the Columbuses, the Beethovens, the Disraelis—have managed
to work the Strategy of the Crown, believing so firmly in their own greatness that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The trick is simple: Be overcome by your self-belief. Even while you know you are practicing a kind of deception on yourself, act like a king. You are likely to be treated as one.
The crown may separate you from other people, but it is up to you to make that separation real: You have to act differently, demonstrating your distance from those around you. One way to emphasize your difference is to always act with dignity, no matter the circumstance. Louis-Philippe gave no sense of being different from other people—he was the banker king. And the moment his subjects threatened him, he caved in. Everyone sensed this and pounced. Lacking regal dignity and firmness of purpose, Louis-Philippe seemed an impostor, and the crown was easily toppled from his head. Regal bearing should not be confused with arrogance. Arrogance may seem the king’s entitlement, but in fact it betrays insecurity. It is the very opposite of a royal demeanor.
Haile Selassie, ruler of Ethiopia for forty or so years beginning in 1930, was once a young man named Lij Tafari. He came from a noble family, but there was no real chance of him coming to power, for he was far down the line of succession from the king then on the throne, Menelik II.
Nevertheless, from an early age he exhibited a self-confidence and a royal bearing that surprised everyone around him.
At the age of fourteen, Tafari went to live at the court, where he
immediately impressed Menelik and became his favorite. Tafari’s grace under fire, his patience, and his calm self-assurance fascinated the king.
The other young nobles, arrogant, blustery, and envious, would push this slight, bookish teenager around. But he never got angry—that would have been a sign of insecurity, to which he would not stoop. There were already people around him who felt he would someday rise to the top, for he acted as if he were already there.
Years later, in 1936, when the Italian Fascists had taken over Ethiopia and Tafari, now called Haile Selassie, was in exile, he addressed the League of Nations to plead his country’s case. The Italians in the audience heckled him with vulgar abuse, but he maintained his dignified pose, as if completely unaffected. This elevated him while making his opponents look even uglier. Dignity, in fact, is invariably the mask to assume under difficult
circumstances: It is as if nothing can affect you, and you have all the time in the world to respond. This is an extremely powerful pose.
A royal demeanor has other uses. Con artists have long known the value of an aristocratic front; it either disarms people and makes them less suspicious, or else it intimidates them and puts them on the defensive—and as Count Victor Lustig knew, once you put a sucker on the defensive he is doomed. The con man Yellow Kid Weil, too, would often assume the trappings of a man of wealth, along with the nonchalance that goes with them. Alluding to some magical method of making money, he would stand aloof, like a king, exuding confidence as if he really were fabulously rich.
The suckers would beg to be in on the con, to have a chance at the wealth that he so clearly displayed.
Finally, to reinforce the inner psychological tricks involved in projecting a royal demeanor, there are outward strategies to help you create the effect.
First, the Columbus Strategy: Always make a bold demand. Set your price high and do not waver. Second, in a dignified way, go after the highest person in the building. This immediately puts you on the same plane as the chief executive you are attacking.
It is the David and Goliath Strategy: By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness.
Third, give a gift of some sort to those above you.
This is the strategy of those who have a patron: By giving your patron a gift, you are essentially saying that the two of you are equal. It is the old con game of giving so that you can take.
When the Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino wanted the Duke of Mantua as his next patron, he knew that if he was slavish and
sycophantic, the duke would think him unworthy; so he approached the duke with gifts, in this case paintings by the writer’s good friend Titian.
Accepting the gifts created a kind of equality between duke and writer: The duke was put at ease by the feeling that he was dealing with a man of his own aristocratic stamp. He funded Aretino generously.
The gift strategy is subtle and brilliant because you do not beg: You ask for help in a dignified way that implies equality between two people, one of whom just happens to have more money.
Remember: It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom.
Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.
Image: The Crown. Place it upon your head and you assume a different pose—tranquil yet radiating assurance.
Never show doubt, never lose your dignity beneath the crown, or it will not fit. It will seem to be destined for one more worthy.
Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.
Authority: Everyone should be royal after his own fashion. Let all your actions, even though they are not those of a king, be, in their own sphere, worthy of one.
Be sublime in your deeds, lofty in your thoughts; and in all your doings show that you deserve to be a king even though you are not one in reality.
(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
The idea behind the assumption of regal confidence is to set yourself apart from other people, but if you take this too far it will be your undoing.
Never make the mistake of thinking that you elevate yourself by humiliating people. Also, it is never a good idea to loom too high above the crowd— you make an easy target. And there are times when an aristocratic pose is eminently dangerous.
Charles I, king of England during the 1640s, faced a profound public disenchantment with the institution of monarchy.
Revolts erupted throughout the country, led by Oliver Cromwell. Had Charles reacted to the times with insight, supporting reforms and making a show of sacrificing some of his power, history might have been different. Instead he reverted to an even more regal pose, seeming outraged by the assault on his power and on the divine institution of monarchy.
His stiff kingliness offended people and spurred on their revolts. And eventually Charles lost his head, literally.
Understand: You are radiating confidence, not arrogance or disdain.
Finally, it is true that you can sometimes find some power through affecting a kind of earthy vulgarity, which will prove amusing by its extreme-ness. But to the extent that you win this game by going beyond the limits, separating yourself from other people by appearing even more vulgar than they are, the game is dangerous: There will always be people more vulgar than you, and you will easily be replaced the following season by someone younger and worse.
LAW 33
DISCOVER EACH MAN’S THUMBSCREW
JUDGMENT
Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usually an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.
FINDING THE THUMBSCREW:
A Strategic Plan of Action We all have resistances. We live with a perpetual armor around ourselves to defend against change and the intrusive actions of friends and rivals. We would like nothing more than to be left to do things our own way. Constantly butting up against these resistances will cost you a lot of energy.
One of the most important things to realize about people, though, is that they all have a weakness, some part of their psychological armor that will not resist, that will bend to your will if you find it and push on it. Some people wear their weaknesses openly, others disguise them. Those who disguise them are often the ones most effectively undone through that one chink in their armor.
THE LION, THE CHAMOIS, AND THE FOX
A lion was chasing a chamois along a valley. He had all but caught it, and with longing eyes was anticipating a certain and a satisfying repast. It seemed as if it were utterly impossible for the victim to escape; for a deep ravine appeared to bar the way for both the hunter and the hunted. But the nimble chamois, gathering together all its strength, shot like an arrow from a bow across the chasm, and stood still on the rocky cliff on the other side.
Our lion pulled up short. But at that moment a friend of his happened to be near at hand. That friend was the fox.
“What!” said he, “
with your strength and agility, is it possible that you will yield to a feeble chamois? You have only to will, and you will be able to work wonders. Though the abyss be deep, yet, if you are only in earnest, I am certain you will clear it. Surely you can confide in my disinterested friendship. I would not expose your life to danger if I were not so well aware of your strength and dexterity.”
The lion’s blood waxed hot, and began to boil in his veins. He flung himself with all his might into space. But he could not clear the chasm; so down he tumbled headlong, and was killed by the fall.
Then what did his dear friend do?
He cautiously made his way down to the bottom of the ravine. and there, out in the open space and the free air, seeing that the lion wanted neither flattery nor obedience now, he set to work to pay the last sad rites to his dead friend, and in a month picked his bones clean.
FABLES, IVAN KRILOFF, 1768-1844
In planning your assault, keep these principles in mind:
Pay Attention to Gestures and Unconscious Signals. As Sigmund Freud remarked, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
This is a critical concept in the search for a person’s weakness—it is revealed by seemingly unimportant gestures and passing words.
The key is not only what you look for but where and how you look. Everyday conversation supplies the richest mine of weaknesses, so train yourself to listen. Start by always seeming interested—the appearance of a sympathetic ear will spur anyone to talk.
A clever trick, often used by the nineteenth-century French statesman Talleyrand, is to appear to open up to the other person, to share a secret with them. It can be completely made up, or it can be real but of no great importance to you—the important thing is that it should seem to come from the heart. This will usually elicit a response that is not only as frank as yours but more genuine—a response that reveals a weakness.
If you suspect that someone has a particular soft spot, probe for it indirectly.
If, for instance, you sense that a man has a need to be loved, openly flatter him.
If he laps up your compliments, no matter how obvious,
you are on the right track. Train your eye for details—how someone tips a waiter, what delights a person, the hidden messages in clothes. Find people’s idols, the things they worship and will do anything to get—perhaps you can be the supplier of their fantasies.
Remember: Since we all try to hide our weaknesses, there is little to be learned from our conscious behavior. What oozes out in the little things outside our conscious control is what you want to know.
Find the Helpless Child. Most weaknesses begin in childhood, before the self builds up compensatory defenses. Perhaps the child was pampered or indulged in a particular area, or perhaps a certain emotional need went unfulfilled; as he or she grows older, the indulgence or the deficiency may be buried but never disappears.
Knowing about a childhood need gives you a powerful key to a person’s weakness.
One sign of this weakness is that when you touch on it the person will often act like a child. Be on the lookout, then, for any behavior that should have been outgrown.
If your victims or rivals went without something important, such as parental support, when they were children, supply it, or its facsimile. If they reveal a secret taste, a hidden indulgence, indulge it.
In either case they will be unable to resist you. Look for Contrasts. An overt trait often conceals its opposite. People who thump their chests are often big cowards; a prudish exterior may hide a
lascivious soul; the uptight are often screaming for adventure; the shy are dying for attention.
By probing beyond appearances, you will often find people’s weaknesses in the opposite of the qualities they reveal to you.
Find the Weak Link. Sometimes in your search for weaknesses it is not what but who that matters. In today’s versions of the court, there is often someone behind the scenes who has a great deal of power, a tremendous influence over the person superficially on top.
These behind-the-scenes powerbrokers are the group’s weak link: Win their favor and you indirectly influence the king. Alternatively, even in a group of people acting with the appearance of one will—as when a group under attack closes ranks to resist an outsider—there is always a weak link in the chain.
Find the one person who will bend under pressure.
Fill the Void. The two main emotional voids to fill are insecurity and unhappiness. The insecure are suckers for any kind of social validation; as for the chronically unhappy, look for the roots of their unhappiness.
The insecure and the unhappy are the people least able to disguise their weaknesses. The ability to fill their emotional voids is a great source of power, and an indefinitely prolongable one.
Feed on Uncontrollable Emotions. The uncontrollable emotion can be a paranoid fear—a fear disproportionate to the situation—or any base motive such as lust, greed, vanity, or hatred. People in the grip of these emotions often cannot control themselves, and you can do the controlling for them.
IRVING LAZAR
[Hollywood super-agent] Irving Paul Lazar was once anxious to sell [studio mogul] Jack L. Warner a play.
“I had a long meeting with him today,” Lazar explained [to screenwriter Garson Kanin],
“but I didn’t mention it, I didn’t even bring it up.” ฃ
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I’m going to wait until the weekend after next, when I go to Palm Springs.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t? I go to Palm Springs every weekend, but Warner isn’t going this weekend. He’s got a preview or something. So he’s
not coming down till the next weekend, so that’s when I’m going to bring it up. ”
“Irving, I’m more and more confused.” “Look,” said Irving impatiently,
” I know what I’m doing. I know how to sell Warner. This is a
type of material that he’s uneasy with, so I have to hit him with it hard and suddenly to get an okay.”
”But why Palm Springs?”
”Because in Palm Springs, every day he goes to the baths at The Spa. And that’s where I’m going to be when he’s there. Now there’s a thing about Jack: He’s eighty and he’s very vain, and he doesn’t like people to see him naked. So when I walk up to him naked at The Spa—I mean he’s naked—well, I’m naked too, but I don’t care who sees me. He does. And I walk up to him naked, and I start to talk to him about this thing, he’ll be very embarrassed.And he’ll want to get away from me, and the easiest way is to say ‘Yes,’ because he knows if he says ‘No,’ then I’m going to stick with him, and stay right on it, and not give up. So to get rid of me, he’ll probably say, ‘Yes.’”
Two weeks later, I read of the acquisition of this particular property by Warner Brothers.
I phoned Lazar and asked how it had been accomplished.
”How do you think?” he asked.
”In the buff, that’s how... just the way I told you it was going to work.”
HOLLYWOOD, GARSON KANIN, 1974
OBSERVANCES OF THE LAW
Observance I
In 1615 the thirty-year-old bishop of Luçon, later known as Cardinal Richelieu, gave a speech before representatives of the three estates of France—clergy, nobility, and commoners. Richelieu had been chosen to serve as the mouthpiece for the clergy—an immense responsibility for a man still young and not particularly well known. On all of the important issues of the day, the speech followed the Church line. But near the end of it Richelieu did something that had nothing to do with the Church and everything to do with his career. He turned to the throne of the fifteen-yearold King Louis XIII, and to the Queen Mother Marie de’ Médicis, who sat beside Louis, as the regent ruling France until her son reached his majority.
Everyone expected Richelieu to say the usual kind words to the young king. Instead, however, he looked directly at and only at the queen mother. Indeed his speech ended in long and fulsome praise of her, praise so glowing that it actually offended some in the Church. But the smile on the queen’s face as she lapped up Richelieu’s compliments was unforgettable.
A year later the queen mother appointed Richelieu secretary of state for foreign affairs, an incredible coup for the young bishop. He had now entered the inner circle of power, and he studied the workings of the court as if it were the machinery of a watch. An Italian, Concino Concini, was the queen mother’s favorite, or rather her lover, a role that made him perhaps the most powerful man in France. Concini was vain and foppish, and Richelieu played him perfectly—attending to him as if he were the king.
Within months Richelieu had become one of Concini’s favorites. But something happened in 1617 that turned everything upside down: the young king, who up until then had shown every sign of being an idiot, had Concini murdered and his most important associates imprisoned. In so doing Louis took command of the country with one blow, sweeping the queen mother aside.
Had Richelieu played it wrong?
He had been close to both Concini and Marie de Médicis, whose advisers and ministers were now all out of favor, some even arrested. The queen mother herself was shut up in the Louvre, a
virtual prisoner. Richelieu wasted no time. If everyone was deserting Marie de Médicis, he would stand by her. He knew Louis could not get rid of her, for the king was still very young, and had in any case always been inordinately attached to her. As Marie’s only remaining powerful friend,
Richelieu filled the valuable function of liaison between the king and his mother. In return he received her protection, and was able to survive the palace coup, even to thrive. Over the next few years the queen mother grew still more dependent on him,
and in 1622 she repaid him for his loyalty: Through the intercession of her allies in Rome, Richelieu was elevated to
the powerful rank of cardinal.
By 1623 King Louis was in trouble. He had no one he could trust to advise him, and although he was now a young man instead of a boy, he remained childish in spirit, and affairs of state came hard to him.
Now that he had taken the throne, Marie was no longer the regent and theoretically had no power, but she still had her son’s ear, and she kept telling him that Richelieu was his only possible savior.
At first Louis would have none of it —he hated the cardinal with a passion, only tolerating him out of love for Marie.
In the end, however, isolated in the court and crippled by his own
indecisiveness, he yielded to his mother and made Richelieu first his chief councilor and later prime minister.
Now Richelieu no longer needed Marie de Médicis. He stopped visiting and courting her, stopped listening to her opinions, even argued with her and opposed her wishes. Instead he concentrated on the king, making himself indispensable to his new master.
All the previous premiers, understanding the king’s childishness, had tried to keep him out of trouble; the shrewd Richelieu played him differently, deliberately pushing him into one ambitious project after another, such as a crusade against the Huguenots
and finally an extended war with Spain. The immensity of these projects only made the king more dependent on his powerful premier, the only man able to keep order in the realm.
And so, for the next eighteen years, Richelieu, exploiting the king’s weaknesses, governed and molded France according to his own vision, unifying the country and making it a strong European power for centuries to come.
Interpretation
Richelieu saw everything as a military campaign, and no strategic move was more important to him than discovering his enemy’s weaknesses and applying pressure to them. As early as his speech in 1615, he was looking for the weak link in the chain of power, and he saw that it was the queen mother.
Not that Marie was obviously weak—she governed both France and her son; but Richelieu saw that she was really an insecure woman who needed constant masculine attention. He showered her with affection and respect, even toadying up to her favorite, Concini. He knew the day would come when the king would take over, but he also recognized that Louis loved his mother dearly and would always remain a child in relation to her.
The way to control Louis, then, was not by gaining his favor, which could change overnight, but by gaining sway over his mother, for whom his affection would never change.
Once Richelieu had the position he desired—prime minister—he
discarded the queen mother, moving on to the next weak link in the chain: the king’s own character. There was a part of him that would always be a helpless child in need of higher authority. It was on the foundation of the king’s weakness that Richelieu established his own power and fame.
Remember: When entering the court, find the weak link. The person in control is often not the king or queen; it is someone behind the scenes—the favorite, the husband or wife, even the court fool. This person may have more weaknesses than the king himself, because his power depends on all kinds of capricious factors outside his control.
Finally, when dealing with helpless children who cannot make decisions, play on their weakness and push them into bold ventures. They will have to depend on you even more, for you will become the adult figure whom they rely on to get them out of scrapes and to safety.
THE LITTLE THINGS COUNT
As time went on I came to look for the little weaknesses.... It’s the little things that count. On one occasion, I worked on the president of a large bank in Omaha. The [phony] deal involved the purchase of the street railway system of Omaha, including a bridge across the Mississippi River.
My principals were supposedly German and I had to negotiate with Berlin. While awaiting word from them I introduced my fake mining-stock proposition. Since this man was rich, I decided to play for high stakes....
Meanwhile, I played golf with the banker, visited his home, and went to the theater with him and his wife. Though he showed some interest in my stock deal, he still wasn’t convinced. I had built it up to the point that an investment of $1,250,000 was required. Of this I was to put up $900,000, the banker $350,000. But still he hesitated. One evening when I was at his home for dinner I wore some perfume-Coty’s “April Violets.” It was not
then considered effeminate for a man to use a dash of perfume. The banker’s wife thought it very lovely.
“Where did you get it?” “It is a rare blend,” I told her,
“especially made for me by a French perfumer. Do you like it?” ”I love it,” she replied.
The following day I went through my effects and found two empty bottles. Both had come from France, but were empty. I went to a downtown department store and purchased ten ounces of Coty’s “April Violets.” I poured this into the two French bottles, carefully sealed them, wrapped them in tissue paper. That evening I dropped by the banker’s home and presented the two bottles to his wife.
”They were especially put up for me in Cologne,” I told her.
The next day the banker called at my hotel. His wife was enraptured by the perfume. She considered it the most wonderful, the most exotic fragrance she had ever used. I did not
tell the banker he could get all he wanted right in Omaha. ”She said,”
the banker added, ”that I was fortunate to be associated with a man like you.”
From then on his attitude was changed, for he had complete faith in his wife’s judgment .... He parted with $350,000. This, incidentally was my biggest [con] score.
“YELLOW KID” WEIL, 1875-1976
Observance II
In December of 1925, guests at the swankiest hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, watched with interest as a mysterious man arrived in a Rolls-Royce driven by a Japanese chauffeur. Over the next few days they studied this handsome man, who walked with an elegant cane, received telegrams at all hours, and only engaged in the briefest of conversations. He was a count, they heard,
Count Victor Lustig, and he came from one of the wealthiest families in Europe—but this was all they could find out.
Imagine their amazement, then, when Lustig one day walked up to one of the least distinguished guests in the hotel, a Mr. Herman Loller, head of an engineering company, and entered into conversation with him. Loller had made his fortune only recently, and forging social connections was very important to him. He felt honored and somewhat intimidated by this sophisticated man, who spoke perfect English with a hint of a foreign accent. Over the days to come, the two became friends. Loller of course did most of the talking, and one night he confessed that his business was doing poorly, with more troubles ahead. In return, Lustig
confided in his new friend that he too had serious money problems— Communists had seized his family estate and all its assets. He was too old to learn a trade and go to work. Luckily he had found an answer—
“ a money-making machine.” “You counterfeit?” Loller whispered in halfshock.
No, Lustig replied, explaining that through a secret chemical
process, his machine could duplicate any paper currency with complete accuracy.
Put in a dollar bill and six hours later you had two, both perfect.
He proceeded to explain how the machine had been smuggled out of Europe, how the Germans had developed it to undermine the British, how it had supported the count for several years, and on and on. When Loller insisted on a demonstration, the two men went to Lustig’s room, where the count produced a magnificent mahogany box fitted with slots, cranks, and dials. Loller watched as Lustig inserted a dollar bill in the box. Sure enough, early the following morning Lustig pulled out two bills, still wet from the chemicals. Lustig gave the notes to Loller, who immediately took the bills to a local bank—which accepted them as genuine. Now the businessman feverishly begged Lustig to sell him a machine. The count explained that there was only one in existence, so Loller made him a high offer: $25,000, then a considerable amount (more than $400,000 in today’s terms). Even so, Lustig seemed reluctant: He did not feel right about making his friend pay so much. Yet finally he agreed to the sale.
After all, he said, “I suppose it matters little what you pay me. You are, after all, going to recover the amount within a few days by duplicating your own bills.”
Making Loller swear never to reveal the machine’s existence to other people, Lustig accepted the money. Later the same day he checked out of the hotel. A year later, after many futile attempts at duplicating bills, Loller finally went to the police with the story of how Count Lustig had conned him with a pair of dollar bills, some chemicals, and a worthless mahogany box.
Interpretation
Count Lustig had an eagle eye for other people’s weaknesses. He saw them in the smallest gesture. Loller, for instance, overtipped waiters, seemed nervous in conversation with the concierge, talked loudly about his business. His weakness, Lustig knew, was his need for social validation and for the respect that he thought his wealth had earned him. He was also chronically insecure. Lustig had come to the hotel to hunt for prey. In Loller he homed in on the perfect sucker—a man hungering for someone to fill his
psychic voids.
In offering Loller his friendship, then, Lustig knew he was offering him the immediate respect of the other guests. As a count, Lustig was also offering the newly rich businessman access to the glittering world of old wealth. And for the coup de grace, he apparently owned a machine that would rescue Loller from his worries. It would even put him on a par with Lustig himself, who had also used the machine to maintain his status. No wonder Loller took the bait.
Remember: When searching for suckers, always look for the dissatisfied, the unhappy, the insecure. Such people are riddled with weaknesses and have needs that you can fill. Their neediness is the groove in which you place your thumbnail and turn them at will.
Observance III
In the year 1559, the French king Henri II died in a jousting exhibition. His son assumed the throne, becoming Francis II, but in the background stood Henri’s wife and queen, Catherine de’ Médicis, a woman who had long ago proven her skill in affairs of state. When Francis died the next year, Catherine took control of the country as regent to her next son in line of succession, the future Charles IX, a mere ten years old at the time.
The main threats to the queen’s power were Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, and his brother, Louis, the powerful prince of Condé, both of whom could claim the right to serve as regent instead of Catherine, who, after all, was Italian—a foreigner. Catherine quickly appointed Antoine lieutenant general of the kingdom, a title that seemed to satisfy his ambition. It also meant that he had to remain in court, where Catherine could keep an eye on him. Her next move proved smarter still: Antoine had a notorious weakness for young women, so she assigned one of her most attractive maids of honor, Louise de Rouet, to seduce him. Now Antoine’s intimate, Louise reported all of his actions to Catherine. The move worked so brilliantly that Catherine assigned another of her maids to Prince Condé, and thus was formed her escadron volant—“flying squadron”—of young girls whom she used to keep the unsuspecting males in the court under her
control.
In 1572 Catherine married off her daughter, Marguerite de Valois, to Henri, the son of Antoine and the new king of Navarre. To put a family that had always struggled against her so close to power was a dangerous move, so to make sure of Henri’s loyalty she unleashed on him the loveliest member of her “flying squadron,” Charlotte de Beaune Semblançay, baroness of Sauves. Catherine did this even though Henri was married to her daughter. Within weeks,
Marguerite de Valois wrote in her memoirs, “Mme. de Sauves so completely ensnared my husband that we no longer slept together, nor even conversed.”
And while I am on the subject, there is another fact that deserves mention. It is this. A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles-for then he is off his guard. This will often afford a good opportunity of observing the boundless egoism of a man’s nature, and his total lack of consideration for others; and if these defects show themselves in small things, or merely in his general demeanour, you will find that they also
underlie his action in matters of importance, although he may disguise the fact. This is an opportunity which should not be missed. If in the little affairs of every day—the trifles of life...—a man is inconsiderate and seeks only what is advantageous or convenient to himself, to the prejudice of others’ rights; if he appropriates to himself that which belongs to all alike, you may be sure there is no justice in his heart, and that he would be a
scoundrel on a wholesale scale, only that law and compulsion bind his hands.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860
The baroness was an excellent spy and helped to keep Henri under Catherine’s thumb. When the queen’s youngest son, the Duke of Alençon, grew so close to Henri that she feared the two might plot against her, she assigned the baroness to him as well. This most infamous member of the flying squadron quickly seduced Alençon, and soon the two young men fought over her and their friendship quickly ended, along with any danger of a conspiracy.
Interpretation
Catherine had seen very early on the sway that a mistress has over a man of power: Her own husband, Henri II, had kept one of the most infamous mistresses of them all, Diane de Poitiers. What Catherine learned from the experience was that a man like her husband wanted to feel he could win a woman over without having to rely on his status, which he had inherited rather than earned. And such a need contained a huge blind spot: As long as
the woman began the affair by acting as if she had been conquered, the man would fail to notice that as time passed the mistress had come to hold power over him, as Diane de Poitiers did over Henri. It was Catherine’s strategy to turn this weakness to her advantage, using it as a way to conquer and control men. All she had to do was unleash the loveliest women in the court, her “flying squadron,” on men whom she knew shared her husband’s vulnerability.
Remember: Always look for passions and obsessions that cannot be controlled. The stronger the passion, the more vulnerable the person. This may seem surprising, for passionate people look strong.
In fact, however, they are simply filling the stage with their theatricality, distracting people from how weak and helpless they really are. A man’s need to conquer women actually reveals a tremendous helplessness that has made suckers out of them for thousands of years. Look at the part of a person that is most
visible—their greed, their lust, their intense fear.
These are the emotions they cannot conceal, and over which they have the least control. And what people cannot control, you can control for them.
THE BATTLE AT PHARSALIA
When the two armies [Julius Caesar’s and Pompey‘s] were come into Pharsalia, and both encamped there, Pompey’s thoughts ran the same way as they had done before, against fighting.... But those who were about him were greatly confident of success ... as if they had already conquered.... The cavalry especially were obstinate for fighting, being splendidly armed and bravely mounted, and valuing themselves upon the fine horses they kept,
and upon their own handsome persons; as also upon the advantage of their numbers, for they were five thousand against one thousand of Caesar’s. Nor were the numbers of the infantry less disproportionate, there being fortyfive thousand of Pompey’s against twenty-two thousand of the enemy. [The next day] whilst the infantry was thus sharply engaged in the main battle, on the flank Pompey’s horse rode up confidently, and opened [his cavalry’s] ranks very wide, that they might surround the right wing of Caesar. But before they engaged, Caesar’s cohorts rushed out and attacked them, and did not dart their javelins at a distance, nor strike at the thighs and legs, as they usually did in close battle, but aimed at their faces. For thusCaesar had instructed them, in hopes that young gentlemen, who had nol known much of battles and wounds, but came wearing their hair long, in the flower of their age and height of their beauty, would be more apprehensive of such blows, and not care for hazarding both a danger at present and a blemish for the future.
And so it proved, for they were so far from bearing the stroke of the javelins, that they could not stand the sight of them, but turned about, and covered their faces to secure them. Once in disorder, presently they turned about to fly; and so most shamefully ruined all. For those who had beat them back at once outflanked the infantry, and falling on their rear, cut them to pieces.
Pompey, who commanded the other wing of the army, when he saw his cavalry thus broken and flying, was no longer himself, nor did he now remember that he was Pompey the Great, but, like one whom some god had deprived of his senses, retired to his tent without speaking a word, and there sat to expect the event, till the whole army was routed.
THE LIFE OF JULIUS CAESAR, PLUTARCH, c. A.D. 46-120
Observance IV
Arabella Huntington, wife of the great late-nineteenth-century railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, came from humble origins and always struggled for social recognition among her wealthy peers. When she gave a party in her San Francisco mansion, few of the social elite would show up; most of them took her for a gold digger, not their kind. Because of her husband’s fabulous wealth, art dealers courted her, but with such condescension they obviously saw her as an upstart. Only one man of consequence treated her differently: the dealer Joseph Duveen.
For the first few years of Duveen’s relationship with Arabella, he made no effort to sell expensive art to her. Instead he accompanied her to fine stores, chatted endlessly about queens and princesses he knew, on and on.
At last, she thought, a man who treated her as an equal, even a superior, in high society. Meanwhile, if Duveen did not try to sell art to her, he did subtly educate her in his aesthetic ideas—namely, that the best art was the most expensive art. And after Arabella had soaked up his way of seeing things, Duveen would act as if she always had exquisite taste, even though before she met him her aesthetics had been abysmal.
When Collis Huntington died, in 1900, Arabella came into a fortune. She suddenly started to buy expensive paintings, by Rembrandt and Velázquez,
for example—and only from Duveen. Years later Duveen sold her
Gainsborough’s Blue Boy for the highest price ever paid for a work of art at the time, an astounding purchase for a family that previously had shown little interest in collecting.
Interpretation
Joseph Duveen instantly understood Arabella Huntington and what made her tick: She wanted to feel important, at home in society.
Intensely insecure about her lower-class background, she needed confirmation of her new social status. Duveen waited. Instead of rushing into trying to persuade her to collect art, he subtly went to work on her weaknesses. He made her feel that she deserved his attention not because she was the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the world but because of her own special character— and this completely melted her. Duveen never condescended to Arabella; rather than lecturing to her, he instilled his ideas in her indirectly.
The result was one of his best and most devoted clients, and also the sale of The Blue Boy. People’s need for validation and recognition, their need to feel important, is the best kind of weakness to exploit. First, it is almost universal;
second, exploiting it is so very easy. All you have to do is find ways to make people feel better about their taste, their social standing, their intelligence. Once the fish are hooked, you can reel them in again and again, for years—you are filling a positive role, giving them what they cannot get on their own. They may never suspect that you are turning them like a thumbscrew, and if they do they may not care, because you are making them feel better about themselves, and that is worth any price.
Observance V
In 1862 King William of Prussia named Otto von Bismarck premier and minister for foreign affairs. Bismarck was known for his boldness, his ambition—and his interest in strengthening the military. Since William was surrounded by liberals in his government and cabinet, politicians who already wanted to limit his powers, it was quite dangerous for him to put Bismarck in this sensitive position. His wife, Queen Augusta, had tried to dissuade him, but although she usually got her way with him, this time
William stuck to his guns.
Only a week after becoming prime minister, Bismarck made an
impromptu speech to a few dozen ministers to convince them of the need to enlarge the army.
He ended by saying, “The great questions of the time will be decided, not by speeches and resolutions of majorities, but by iron and blood.”
His speech was immediately disseminated throughout Germany.
The queen screamed at her husband that Bismarck was a barbaric militarist who was out to usurp control of Prussia, and that William had to fire him.
The liberals in the government agreed with her. The outcry was so
vehement that William began to be afraid he would end up on a scaffold, like Louis XVI of France, if he kept Bismarck on as prime minister.
Bismarck knew he had to get to the king before it was too late. He also knew he had blundered, and should have tempered his fiery words. Yet as he contemplated his strategy, he decided not to apologize but to do the exact opposite. Bismarck knew the king well. When the two men met, William, predictably, had been worked into a tizzy by the queen. He reiterated his fear of being guillotined.
But Bismarck only replied, “Yes, then we shall be dead! We must die sooner or later, and could there be a more respectable way of dying? I should die fighting for the cause of my king and master. Your Majesty would die sealing with your own blood your royal rights granted by God’s grace. Whether upon the scaffold or upon the battlefield makes no difference to the glorious staking of body and life on behalf of rights granted by God’s grace!”
On he went, appealing to William’s sense of honor and the majesty of his position as head of the army.
How could the king allow people to push him around?
Wasn’t the honor of Germany more important than quibbling over words?
Not only did the prime minister convince the king to stand up to both his wife and his parliament, he persuaded him to build up the army— Bismarck’s goal all along.
Interpretation
Bismarck knew the king felt bullied by those around him. He knew that William had a military background and a deep sense of honor, and that he felt ashamed at his cravenness before his wife and his government. William secretly yearned to be a great and mighty king, but he dared not express this ambition because he was afraid of ending up like Louis XVI. Where a show of courage often conceals a man’s timidity, William’s timidity concealed his
need to show courage and thump his chest.
Bismarck sensed the longing for glory beneath William’s pacifist front, so he played to the king’s insecurity about his manhood, finally pushing him into three wars and the creation of a German empire.
Timidity is a potent weakness to exploit. Timid souls often yearn to be their opposite—to be Napoleons. Yet they lack the inner strength. You, in essence, can become their Napoleon, pushing them into bold actions that serve your needs while also making them dependent on you. Remember: Look to the opposites and
never take appearances at face value.
Image: The Thumbscrew. Your enemy has secrets that he guards, thinks thoughts he will not reveal. But they come out in ways he cannot help. It is there some where, a groove of weakness on his head, at his heart, over his belly. Once you find the groove, put your thumb in it and turn him at will.
Authority: Find out each man’s thumbscrew. ’Tis the art of setting their wills in action. It needs more skill than resolution. You must know where to get at anyone. Every volition has a special motive which varies according to taste. All men are idolaters, some of fame, others of self-interest, most of pleasure. Skill consists in knowing these idols in order to bring them into play. Knowing any man’s mainspring of motive you have as it were the key to his will. (Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)
REVERSAL
Playing on people’s weakness has one significant danger: You may stir up an action you cannot control.
In your games of power you always look several steps ahead and plan accordingly. And you exploit the fact that other people are more emotional and incapable of such foresight. But when you play on their vulnerabilities, the areas over which they have least control, you can unleash emotions that will upset your plans. Push timid people into bold action and they may go too far; answer their need for attention or recognition and they may need
more than you want to give them. The helpless, childish element you are playing on can turn against you.
The more emotional the weakness, the greater the potential danger. Know the limits to this game, then, and never get carried away by your control over your victims. You are after power, not the thrill of control.
LAW 32
PLAY TO PEOPLE’S FANTASIES
JUDGMENT
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
THE FUNERAL OF THE LIONESS
The lion having suddenly lost his queen, every one hastened to show allegiance to the monarch, by offering consolation.
These compliments, alas, served but to increase the widower’s affliction. Due notice was given throughout the kingdom that the funeral would be performed at a certain time and place;
the lion’s officers were ordered to be in attendance, to regulate the ceremony, and place the company according to their respective rank. One may well judge no one absented himself. The monarch gave way to his grief, and the whole cave, lions having no other temples, resounded with his cries. After his example, all the courtiers roared in their different tones. A court is the sort of place where everyone is either sorrowful, gay, or indifferent to everything, just as the reigning prince may think fit; or if any one is not actually, he at least tries to appear so; each endeavors to mimic the master. It is truly said that one mind animates a thousand bodies, clearly showing that human beings are mere machines. But let us return to our subject. The stag alone shed no tears.
How could he, forsooth?
The death of the queen avenged him; she had formerly strangled his wife and son. A courtier thought fit to inform the bereaved monarch, and even affirmed that he had seen the stag laugh. The rage of a king, says Solomon, is terrible, and especially that of a lion-king.
“Pitiful forester!” he exclaimed, “darest thou laugh when all around are dissolved in tears? We will not soil our royal claws with thy profane blood! Do thou, brave wolf, avenge our queen, by immolating this traitor to her august manes. ”
Hereupon the stag replied: “Sire, the time for weeping is passed; grief is here superfluous. Your revered spouse appeared to me but now, reposing on a bed of roses; I instantly recognized her. ‘Friend,’ said she to me,
‘have done with this funereal pomp, cease these useless tears. I have tasted a thousand delights in the Elysian fields, conversing with those who are saints like myself. Let the king’s despair remain for some time unchecked, it gratifies me.’
” Scarcely had he spoken, when every one shouted:
“A miracle! a miracle!” The stag, instead of being punished, received a handsome gift. Do but entertain a king with dreams, flatter him, and tell him a few pleasant fantastic lies: whatever his indignation against you may be, he will swallow the bait, and make you his dearest friend.
FABLES, JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, 1621-1695
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW
The city-state of Venice was prosperous for so long that its citizens felt their small republic had destiny on its side.
In the Middle Ages and High Renaissance, its virtual monopoly on trade to the east made it the wealthiest city in Europe. Under a beneficent republican government, Venetians enjoyed liberties that few other Italians had ever known.
Yet in the sixteenth century their fortunes suddenly changed. The opening of the New World transferred power to the Atlantic side of Europe—to the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the Dutch and English. Venice could not compete economically and its empire gradually dwindled. The final blow was the devastating loss of a prized Mediterranean possession, the island of Cyprus,
captured from Venice by the Turks in 1570.
Now noble families went broke in Venice, and banks began to fold. A kind of gloom and depression settled over the citizens. They had known a glittering past—had either lived through it or heard stories about it from their elders. The closeness of the glory years was humiliating.
The Venetians half believed that the goddess Fortune was only playing a joke on them, and that the old days would soon return. For the time being, though, what could they do?
In 1589 rumors began to swirl around Venice of the arrival not far away of a mysterious man called “Il Bragadino,” a master of alchemy, a man who had won incredible wealth through his ability, it was said, to multiply gold through the use of a secret substance. The rumor spread quickly because a few years earlier, a Venetian nobleman passing through Poland had heard a
learned man prophesy that Venice would recover her past glory and power if she could find a man who understood the alchemic art of manufacturing gold. And so, as word reached Venice of the gold this Bragadino possessed —he clinked gold coins continuously in his hands, and golden objects filled his palace—some began to dream: Through him, their city would prosper
again.
Members of Venice’s most important noble families accordingly went together to Brescia, where Bragadino lived. They toured his palace and watched in awe as he demonstrated his gold-making abilities, taking a pinch of seemingly worthless minerals and transforming it into several ounces of gold dust. The Venetian senate prepared to debate the idea of extending an official invitation to Bragadino to stay in Venice at the city’s expense, when word suddenly reached them that they were competing with the Duke of Mantua for his services. They heard of a magnificent party in Bragadino’s palace for the duke, featuring garments with golden buttons, gold watches, gold plates, and on and on. Worried they might lose Bragadino to Mantua, the senate voted almost unanimously to invite him to Venice, promising him
the mountain of money he would need to continue living in his luxurious style—but only if he came right away. Late that year the mysterious Bragadino arrived in Venice. With his piercing dark eyes under thick brows, and the two enormous black mastiffs
that accompanied him everywhere, he was forbidding and impressive. He took up residence in a sumptuous palace on the island of the Giudecca, with the republic funding his banquets, his expensive clothes, and all his other whims. A kind of alchemy fever spread through Venice. On street corners, hawkers would sell coal, distilling apparatus, bellows, how-to books on the
subject. Everyone began to practice alchemy—everyone except Bragadino. The alchemist seemed to be in no hurry to begin manufacturing the gold that would save Venice from ruin. Strangely enough this only increased his popularity and following; people thronged from all over Europe, even Asia, to meet this remarkable man. Months went by, with gifts pouring in to
Bragadino from all sides. Still he gave no sign of the miracle that the Venetians confidently expected him to produce. Eventually the citizens began to grow impatient, wondering if he would wait forever. At first the senators warned them not to hurry him—he was a capricious devil, who needed to be cajoled. Finally, though, the nobility began to wonder too, and the senate came under pressure to show a return on the city’s ballooning investment.
Bragadino had only scorn for the doubters, but he responded to them. He had, he said, already deposited in the city’s mint the mysterious substance with which he multiplied gold. He could use this substance up all at once, and produce double the gold, but the more slowly the process took place, the more it would yield. If left alone for seven years, sealed in a casket, the substance would multiply the gold in the mint thirty times over.
Most of the senators agreed to wait to reap the gold mine Bragadino promised. Others, however, were angry: seven more years of this man living royally at the public trough! And many of the common citizens of Venice echoed these sentiments. Finally the alchemist’s enemies demanded he produce a proof of his skills: a substantial amount of gold, and soon. Lofty, apparently devoted to his art, Bragadino responded that Venice, in its impatience, had betrayed him, and would therefore lose his services. He left town, going first to nearby Padua, then, in 1590, to Munich, at the invitation of the Duke of Bavaria, who, like the entire city of Venice, had known great wealth but had fallen into bankruptcy through his own profligacy, and hoped to regain his fortune through the famous alchemist’s services. And so Bragadino resumed the comfortable arrangement he had known in Venice, and the same pattern repeated itself.
Interpretation
The young Cypriot Mamugnà had lived in Venice for several years before reincarnating himself as the alchemist Bragadino. He saw how gloom had settled on the city, how everyone was hoping for a redemption from some indefinite source. While other charlatans mastered everyday cons based on sleight of hand, Mamugnà mastered human nature. With Venice as his target
from the start, he traveled abroad, made some money through his alchemy scams, and then returned to Italy, setting up shop in Brescia. There he created a reputation that he knew would spread to Venice. From a distance, in fact, his aura of power would be all the more impressive. At first Mamugnà did not use vulgar demonstrations to convince people of his alchemic skill. His sumptuous palace, his opulent garments, the clink of gold in his hands, all these provided a superior argument to anything
rational. And these established the cycle that kept him going: His obvious wealth confirmed his reputation as an alchemist, so that patrons like the Duke of Mantua gave him money, which allowed him to live in wealth, which reinforced his reputation as an alchemist, and so on. Only once this reputation was established, and dukes and senators were fighting over him, did he resort to the trifling necessity of a demonstration. By then, however,
people were easy to deceive: They wanted to believe. The Venetian senators who watched him multiply gold wanted to believe so badly that they failed to notice the glass pipe up his sleeve, from which he slipped gold dust into his pinches of minerals. Brilliant and capricious, he was the alchemist of their fantasies—and once he had created an aura like this, no one noticed his simple deceptions.
Such is the power of the fantasies that take root in us, especially in times of scarcity and decline. People rarely believe that their problems arise from their own misdeeds and stupidity. Someone or something out there is to blame—the other, the world, the gods—and so salvation comes from the outside as well. Had Bragadino arrived in Venice armed with a detailed analysis of the reasons behind the city’s economic decline, and of the hardnosed steps that it could take to turn things around, he would have been scorned.
The reality was too ugly and the solution too painful—mostly the
kind of hard work that the citizens’ ancestors had mustered to create an empire. Fantasy, on the other hand—in this case the romance of alchemy— was easy to understand and infinitely more palatable.
To gain power, you must be a source of pleasure for those around you— and pleasure comes from playing to people’s fantasies. Never promise a gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold. No man need despair of gaining converts to the most extravagant hypothesis who has art enough to represent it in favorable colors.
David Hume, 1711-1776
If you want to tell lies that will be believed, don’t tell the truth that won’t.
EMPEROR TOKUGAWA IEYASU OF JAPAN, SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY
KEYS TO POWER
Fantasy can never operate alone. It requires the backdrop of the humdrum and the mundane. It is the oppressiveness of reality that allows fantasy to take root and bloom. In sixteenth-century Venice, the reality was one of decline and loss of prestige. The corresponding fantasy described a sudden recovery of past glories through the miracle of alchemy. While the reality only got worse, the Venetians inhabited a happy dream world in which their city restored its fabulous wealth and power overnight, turning dust into gold.
The person who can spin a fantasy out of an oppressive reality has access to untold power. As you search for the fantasy that will take hold of the masses, then, keep your eye on the banal truths that weigh heavily on us all.
Never be distracted by people’s glamorous portraits of themselves and their lives; search and dig for what really imprisons them. Once you find that, you have the magical key that will put great power in your hands.
Although times and people change, let us examine a few of the
oppressive realities that endure, and the opportunities for power they provide:
The Reality: Change is slow and gradual. It requires hard work, a bit of luck, a fair amount of self-sacrifice, and a lot of patience.
The Fantasy: A sudden transformation will bring a total change in one’s fortunes, bypassing work, luck, self-sacrifice, and time in one fantastic stroke.
This is of course the fantasy par excellence of the charlatans who prowl among us to this day, and was the key to Bragadino’s success. Promise a great and total change—from poor to rich, sickness to health, misery to ecstasy—and you will have followers.
How did the great sixteenth-century German quack Leonhard Thurneisser become the court physician for the Elector of Brandenburg without ever studying medicine? Instead of offering amputations, leeches, and foultasting purgatives (the medicaments of the time), Thurneisser offered sweet- tasting elixirs and promised instant recovery. Fashionable courtiers
especially wanted his solution of “drinkable gold,” which cost a fortune.
If some inexplicable illness assailed you, Thurneisser would consult a horoscope and prescribe a talisman. Who could resist such a fantasy— health and well-being without sacrifice and pain!
The Reality: The social realm has hard-set codes and boundaries. We understand these limits and know that we have to move within the same familiar circles, day in and day out.
The Fantasy: We can enter a totally new world with different codes and the promise of adventure.
In the early 1700s, all London was abuzz with talk of a mysterious
stranger, a young man named George Psalmanazar. He had arrived from what was to most Englishmen a fantastical land: the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), off the coast of China. Oxford University engaged Psalmanazar to teach the island’s language; a few years later he translated the Bible into Formosan, then wrote a book—an immediate best-seller—on Formosa’s history and geography. English royalty wined and dined the young man, and
everywhere he went he entertained his hosts with wondrous stories of his homeland, and its bizarre customs.
After Psalmanazar died, however, his will revealed that he was in fact merely a Frenchman with a rich imagination. Everything he had said about Formosa—its alphabet, its language, its literature, its entire culture—he had invented. He had built on the English public’s ignorance of the place to concoct an elaborate story that fulfilled their desire for the exotic and strange. British culture’s rigid control of people’s dangerous dreams gave him the perfect opportunity to exploit their fantasy.
The fantasy of the exotic, of course, can also skirt the sexual. It must not come too close, though, for the physical hinders the power of fantasy; it can be seen, grasped, and then tired of—the fate of most courtesans. The bodily charms of the mistress only whet the master’s appetite for more and different pleasures, a new beauty to adore. To bring power, fantasy must remain to some degree unrealized, literally unreal. The dancer Mata Hari,
for instance, who rose to public prominence in Paris before World War I, had quite ordinary looks. Her power came from the fantasy she created of being strange and exotic, unknowable and indecipherable. The taboo she worked with was less sex itself than the breaking of social codes.
Another form of the fantasy of the exotic is simply the hope for relief
from boredom. Con artists love to play on the oppressiveness of the working world, its lack of adventure. Their cons might involve, say, the recovery of lost Spanish treasure, with the possible participation of an alluring Mexican señorita and a connection to the president of a South American country—anything offering release from the humdrum.
The Reality: Society is fragmented and full of conflict.
The Fantasy: People can come together in a mystical union of souls. In the 1920s the con man Oscar Hartzell made a quick fortune out of the age-old Sir Francis Drake swindle—basically promising any sucker who happened to be surnamed “Drake” a substantial share of the long-lost “Drake treasure,” to which Hartzell had access. Thousands across the Midwest fell for the scam, which Hartzell cleverly turned into a crusade against the government and everyone else who was trying to keep the Drake
fortune out of the rightful hands of its heirs. There developed a mystical union of the oppressed Drakes, with emotional rallies and meetings.
Promise such a union and you can gain much power, but it is a dangerous power that can easily turn against you. This is a fantasy for demagogues to play on.
The Reality: Death. The dead cannot be brought back, the past cannot be changed.
The Fantasy: A sudden reversal of this intolerable fact.
This con has many variations, but requires great skill and subtlety.
The beauty and importance of the art of Vermeer have long been
recognized, but his paintings are small in number, and are extremely rare.
In the 1930s, though, Vermeers began to appear on the art market. Experts were called on to verify them, and pronounced them real. Possession of these new Vermeers would crown a collector’s career. It was like the resurrection of Lazarus: In a strange way, Vermeer had been brought back to life. The past had been changed. Only later did it come out that the new Vermeers were the work of a middle-aged Dutch forger named Han van Meegeren. And he had chosen Vermeer for his scam because he understood fantasy: The paintings would seem real precisely because the public, and the experts as well, so desperately wanted to believe they were.
Remember: The key to fantasy is distance. The distant has allure and promise, seems simple and problem free. What you are offering, then, should be ungraspable. Never let it become oppressively familiar; it is the mirage in the distance, withdrawing as the sucker approaches. Never be too direct in describing the fantasy—keep it vague. As a forger of fantasies, let your victim come close enough to see and be tempted, but keep him far
away enough that he stays dreaming and desiring.
Image: The Moon. Unattainable, always changing shape, disappearing and reappearing. We look at it, imagine, wonder, and pine—never familiar, continuous provoker of dreams. Do not offer the obvious. Promise the moon.
Authority: A lie is an allurement, a fabrication, that can be embellished into a fantasy. It can be clothed in the raiments of a mystic conception. Truth is cold, sober fact, not so comfortable to absorb. A lie is more palatable. The most detested person in the world is the one who always tells the truth, who never romances.... I found it far more interesting and profitable to romance than to tell the truth.
(Joseph Weil, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid,” 1875-1976)
REVERSAL
If there is power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses, there is also danger. Fantasy usually contains an element of play—the public half realizes it is being duped, but it keeps the dream alive anyway, relishing the entertainment and the temporary diversion from the everyday that you are providing. So keep it light—never come too close to the place where you are actually expected to produce results. That place may prove extremely
hazardous. After Bragadino established himself in Munich, he found that the soberminded Bavarians had far less faith in alchemy than the temperamental Venetians. Only the duke really believed in it, for he needed it desperately to rescue him from the hopeless mess he was in. As Bragadino played his familiar waiting game, accepting gifts and expecting patience, the public grew angry. Money was being spent and was yielding no results.
In 1592 the Bavarians demanded justice, and eventually Bragadino found himself swinging from the gallows. As before, he had promised and had not delivered, but this time he had misjudged the forbearance of his hosts, and his inability to fulfill their fantasy proved fatal.
One last thing: Never make the mistake of imagining that fantasy is always fantastical. It certainly contrasts with reality, but reality itself is sometimes so theatrical and stylized that fantasy becomes a desire for simple things. The image Abraham Lincoln created of himself, for example, as a homespun country lawyer with a beard, made him the common man’s president.
P. T. Barnum created a successful act with Tom Thumb, a dwarf who dressed up as famous leaders of the past, such as Napoleon, and lampooned them wickedly. The show delighted everyone, right up to Queen Victoria, by appealing to the fantasy of the time: Enough of the vainglorious rulers of history, the common man knows best. Tom Thumb reversed the familiar pattern of fantasy in which the strange and unknown becomes the ideal. But
the act still obeyed the Law, for underlying it was the fantasy that the simple man is without problems, and is happier than the powerful and the rich. Both Lincoln and Tom Thumb played the commoner but carefully maintained their distance. Should you play with such a fantasy, you too must carefully cultivate distance and not allow your “common” persona to become too familiar or it will not project as fantasy
controversial blackbook of english vocabulary all spelling asked in ssc exams controversy crater contusion convalescence convene craftmanship crayon creativity creator creature credential convenience convent conversation credible cylinder cynic daughter dealer debates debilitate debtor decaffeinated deceive decibel creditable decease converse credulous deceit conversion cremator convert crevice decency conveyance cricketer decennial convict criminal deception conviction cringe convincing criteria decide convoluted criterion cooking criticism cooperate cooperation cropping croton decision decisive declension declination copulate crouching corollary cruel corporate cruelly corporation crunchy decorative decrease defamation defence correlative crushing correspond crust correspondence correspondent crystal cube corresponding corrigendum corrigible corroborate corrupt corruption cortege cosmetic cosmopolitan crystallisation cubicle cuddle cuisine culminate cultural defer deferred defiance deficiency deficient demeanour demolish define definite definitely definition cumbersome deforestation curiosity curious currently
2Tim3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
1Jn5:13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.
Jn5:39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me,
Hos6:6 For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.
Mt7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, „Lord, Lord,‟ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Ex3:14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: „I AM has sent me to you.‟”
Jn4:24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
Ps103:20-22 Praise the LORD, you his angels, you mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word. 21 Praise the LORD, all his heavenly hosts, you his servants who do his will. 22 Praise the LORD, all his works everywhere in his dominion. Praise the LORD, my soul.
Heb1:14 Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?
Is14:12-14 How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! 13 You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. 14 I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”
1Sam15:22 But Samuel replied: “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
Is55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. 9“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Heb5:12-14 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
Jn13:2 The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus.
Mt16:22-23 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!” 23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Eph6:11-12 Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
1Cor15:3-4 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
Is14:24 The LORD Almighty has sworn, “Surely, as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will happen.
Num23:19 God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?
Jn7:24 Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
Jn19:30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Rv21:6 He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.
Ps89:3 You said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to David my servant,
Ex19:5-6 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.‟ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.”
Lk24:44 He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
Jn1:11-12 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God
Mt27:25 All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!”
Heb8:7 For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.
Lk22:20 In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.
Jn14:23 Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.
Lk18:8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Acts13:26-27 “Fellow children of Abraham and you Godfearing Gentiles, it is to us that this message of salvation has been sent. 27The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath
1Cor10:11 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.
2Tim3:15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Jn14:29 I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe.
Amos3:7 Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.
Hos12:10 I spoke to the prophets, gave them many visions and told parables through them.”
2Pt3:16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Is34:16 Look in the scroll of the LORD and read: None of these will be missing, not one will lack her mate. For it is his mouth that has given the order, and his Spirit will gather them together.
Lk12:56-57 Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time? 57 “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?
Dan12:8-9 I heard, but I did not understand. So I asked, “My lord, what will the outcome of all this be?” 9 He replied, “Go your way, Daniel, because the words are rolled up and sealed until the time of the end.
Acts17:30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
Deut29:4 But to this day the LORD has not given you a mind that understands or eyes that see or ears that hear.
Mt13:16-17 But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.17 For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
Heb9:28 so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
Acts17:11 Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
Mt10:34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Amos8:11-12 “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.
1Cor3:9 For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
Jn17:8 For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me.
Bound and gagged, I cannot move or speak these things I want to say. (I can't explain them anyway). So if I had it all again. If I could start from the first words I ever said (I would do it all the same).
LAW 31
CONTROL THE OPTIONS: GET OTHERS TO PLAY WITH THE CARDS YOU DEAL
JUDGMENT
The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice: Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored
wherever they turn.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I
From early in his reign, Ivan IV, later known as Ivan the Terrible, had to confront an unpleasant reality: The country desperately needed reform, but he lacked the power to push it through. The greatest limit to his authority came from the boyars, the Russian princely class that dominated the country and terrorized the peasantry.
In 1553, at the age of twenty-three, Ivan fell ill. Lying in bed, nearing death, he asked the boyars to swear allegiance to his son as the new czar. Some hesitated, some even refused. Then and there Ivan saw he had no power over the boyars. He recovered from his illness, but he never forgot the lesson: The boyars were out to destroy him. And indeed in the years to come, many of the most powerful of them defected to Russia’s main enemies, Poland and Lithuania, where they plotted their return and the
overthrow of the czar. Even one of Ivan’s closest friends, Prince Andrey Kurbski, suddenly turned against him, defecting to Lithuania in 1564, and becoming the strongest of Ivan’s enemies.
When Kurbski began raising troops for an invasion, the royal dynasty seemed suddenly more precarious than ever. With émigré nobles fomenting invasion from the west, Tartars bearing down from the east, and the boyars stirring up trouble within the country, Russia’s vast size made it a nightmare to defend.
In whatever direction Ivan struck, he would leave himself
vulnerable on the other side. Only if he had absolute power could he deal with this many-headed Hydra. And he had no such power.
Ivan brooded until the morning of December 3, 1564, when the citizens of Moscow awoke to a strange sight. Hundreds of sleds filled the square before the Kremlin, loaded with the czar’s treasures and with provisions for the entire court. They watched in disbelief as the czar and his court boarded the sleds and left town. Without explaining why, he established himself in a
village south of Moscow. For an entire month a kind of terror gripped the capital, for the Muscovites feared that Ivan had abandoned them to the bloodthirsty boyars. Shops closed up and riotous mobs gathered daily.
Finally, on January 3 of 1565, a letter arrived from the czar, explaining that he could no longer bear the boyars’ betrayals and had decided to abdicate once and for all.
The German Chancellor Bismarck, enraged at the constant criticisms from Rudolf Virchow (the German pathologist and liberal politician), had his seconds call upon the scientist to challenge him to a duel.
“As the challenged party, I have the choice of weapons,” said Virchow,
“and I choose these.” He held aloft two large and apparently identical sausages.
“One of these,” he went on,
“is infected with deadly germs; the orher is perfectly sound. Let His Excellency decide which one he wishes to eat, and I will eat the other.”
Almost immediately the message came back that the chancellor had decided to cancel the duel.
THE LITTLE BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES, CLIFTON FADIMAN,
ED., 1985
Read aloud in public, the letter had a startling effect: Merchants and commoners blamed the boyars for Ivan’s decision, and took to the streets, terrifying the nobility with their fury. Soon a group of delegates representing the church, the princes, and the people made the journey to Ivan’s village, and begged the czar, in the name of the holy land of Russia, to return to the throne. Ivan listened but would not change his mind. After days of hearing their pleas, however, he offered his subjects a choice: Either they grant him absolute powers to govern as he pleased, with no
interference from the boyars, or they find a new leader. Faced with a choice between civil war and the acceptance of despotic
power, almost every sector of Russian society “opted” for a strong czar, calling for Ivan’s return to Moscow and the restoration of law and order.
In February, with much celebration, Ivan returned to Moscow. The Russians could no longer complain if he behaved dictatorially—they had given him this power themselves.
Interpretation
Ivan the Terrible faced a terrible dilemma: To give in to the boyars would lead to certain destruction, but civil war would bring a different kind of ruin. Even if Ivan came out of such a war on top, the country would be devastated and its divisions would be stronger than ever. His weapon of choice in the past had been to make a bold, offensive move. Now, however, that kind of move would turn against him—the more boldly he confronted his enemies, the worse the reactions he would spark.
The main weakness of a show of force is that it stirs up resentment and eventually leads to a response that eats at your authority. Ivan, immensely creative in the use of power, saw clearly that the only path to the kind of victory he wanted was a false withdrawal. He would not force the country over to his position, he would give it “options”: either his abdication, and
certain anarchy, or his accession to absolute power. To back up his move, he made it clear that he preferred to abdicate:
“Call my bluff,” he said,
“and watch what happens.” No one called his bluff. By withdrawing for just a month, he showed the country a glimpse of the nightmares that would follow his abdication—Tartar invasions, civil war, ruin. (All of these did eventually come to pass after Ivan’s death, in the infamous “Time of the Troubles.”)
Withdrawal and disappearance are classic ways of controlling the
options. You give people a sense of how things will fall apart without you, and you offer them a “choice”: I stay away and you suffer the consequences, or I return under circumstances that I dictate. In this method of controlling people’s options, they choose the option that gives you power
because the alternative is just too unpleasant. You force their hand, but indirectly: They seem to have a choice. Whenever people feel they have a choice, they walk into your trap that much more easily.
THE LIAR
Once upon a time there was a king of Armenia, who, being of a curious turn of mind and in need of some new diversion, sent his heralds throughout the land to make the following proclamation: “Hear this! Whatever man among you can prove himself the most outrageous liar in Armenia shall receive an apple made of pure gold from the hands of His Majesty the King!” People began to swarm to the palace from every town and hamlet in the country,
people of all ranks and conditions, princes, merchants, farmers, priests, rich and poor, tall and short, fat and thin. There was no lack of liars in the land, and each one told his tale to the king. A ruler, however, has heard practically every sort of lie, and none of those now told him convinced the king that he had listened to the best of them. The king was beginning to grow tired of his new sport and was thinking of calling the whole contest off without declaring a winner, when there appeared before him a poor, ragged man, carrying a large earthenware pitcher under his arm. “What can I do for you?” asked His Majesty.
“Sire!” said the poor man, slightly bewildered.
“Surely you remember? You owe me a pot of gold, and I have
come to collect it.” “You are a perfect liar, sir!’ exclaimed the king “I owe you no money” “A perfect liar, am I?” said the poor man. “Then give me the golden apple!” The king, realizing that the man was trying to trick him, started to hedge.
”No. no! You are not a liar!” ”Then give me the pot of gold you owe me, sire.” said the man.
The king saw the dilemma, He handed over the golden apple.
ARMENIAN FOLK-TALES AND FABLES, RETOLD BY CHARLES
DOWNING, 1993
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II
As a seventeenth-century French courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos found that her life had certain pleasures. Her lovers came from royalty and aristocracy, and they paid her well, entertained her with their wit and intellect, satisfied her rather demanding sensual needs, and treated her almost as an equal.
Such a life was infinitely preferable to marriage. In 1643, however, Ninon’s mother died suddenly, leaving her, at the age of twenty-three, totally alone in the world—no family, no dowry, nothing to fall back upon. A kind of panic overtook her and she entered a convent, turning her back on her illustrious lovers. A year later she left the convent and moved to Lyons. When she finally reappeared in Paris, in 1648, lovers and suitors flocked to
her door in greater numbers than ever before, for she was the wittiest and most spirited courtesan of the time and her presence had been greatly missed.
Ninon’s followers quickly discovered, however, that she had changed her old way of doing things, and had set up a new system of options. The dukes, seigneurs, and princes who wanted to pay for her services could continue to do so, but they were no longer in control—she would sleep with them when she wanted, according to her whim. All their money bought them was a
possibility. If it was her pleasure to sleep with them only once a month, so be it. Those who did not want to be what Ninon called a payeur could join the large and growing group of men she called her martyrs—men who visited her apartment principally for her friendship, her biting wit, her lute-playing, and the company of the most vibrant minds of the period, including Molière, La Rochefoucauld, and Saint-Évremond. The martyrs, too, however, entertained a possibility: She would regularly select from them a
favori, a man who would become her lover without having to pay, and to whom she would abandon herself completely for as long as she so desired —a week, a few months, rarely longer. A payeur could not become a favori, but a martyr had no guarantee of becoming one, and indeed could remain disappointed for an entire lifetime. The poet Charleval, for example, never enjoyed Ninon’s favors, but never stopped coming to visit—he did not want to do without her company.
As word of this system reached polite French society, Ninon became the object of intense hostility. Her reversal of the position of the courtesan scandalized the queen mother and her court. Much to their horror, however, it did not discourage her male suitors—indeed it only increased their numbers and intensified their desire. It became an honor to be a payeur,
helping Ninon to maintain her lifestyle and her glittering salon,
accompanying her sometimes to the theater, and sleeping with her when she chose. Even more distinguished were the martyrs, enjoying her company without paying for it and maintaining the hope, however remote, of some day becoming her favori. That possibility spurred on many a young nobleman, as word spread that none among the courtesans could surpass Ninon in the art of love. And so the married and the single, the old and the young, entered her web and chose one of the two options presented to them, both of which amply satisfied her.
Interpretation
The life of the courtesan entailed the possibility of a power that was denied a married woman, but it also had obvious perils. The man who paid for the courtesan’s services in essence owned her, determining when he could possess her and when, later on, he would abandon her. As she grew older, her options narrowed, as fewer men chose her. To avoid a life of poverty she had to amass her fortune while she was young. The courtesan’s legendary greed, then, reflected a practical necessity, yet also lessened her
allure, since the illusion of being desired is important to men, who are often alienated if their partner is too interested in their money. As the courtesan aged, then, she faced a most difficult fate. Ninon de Lenclos had a horror of any kind of dependence. She early on tasted a kind of equality with her lovers, and she would not settle into a system that left her such distasteful options. Strangely enough, the system she devised in its place seemed to satisfy her suitors as much as it did her. The payeurs may have had to pay, but the fact that Ninon would only sleep
with them when she wanted to gave them a thrill unavailable with every other courtesan: She was yielding out of her own desire. The martyrs’ avoidance of the taint of having to pay gave them a sense of superiority; as members of Ninon’s fraternity of admirers, they also might some day experience the ultimate pleasure of being her favori. Finally, Ninon did not force her suitors into either category. They could “choose” which side they
preferred—a freedom that left them a vestige of masculine pride.
Such is the power of giving people a choice, or rather the illusion of one, for they are playing with cards you have dealt them. Where the alternatives set up by Ivan the Terrible involved a certain risk—one option would have led to his losing his power—Ninon created a situation in which every option redounded to her favor. From the payeurs she received the money she needed to run her salon. And from the martyrs she gained the ultimate in
power: She could surround herself with a bevy of admirers, a harem from which to choose her lovers.
The system, though, depended on one critical factor: the possibility, however remote, that a martyr could become a favori. The illusion that riches, glory, or sensual satisfaction may someday fall into your victim’s lap is an irresistible carrot to include in your list of choices. That hope, however slim, will make men accept the most ridiculous situations, because it leaves
them the all-important option of a dream. The illusion of choice, married to the possibility of future good fortune, will lure the most stubborn sucker into your glittering web.
J. P. Morgan Sr. once told a jeweler of his acquaintance that he was interested in buying a pearl scarf-pin. Just a few weeks later, the jeweler happened upon a magnificent pearl. He had it mounted in an appropriate setting and sent it to Morgan, together with a bill for $5,000. The following day the package was returned. Morgan’s accompanying note read:
“I like the pin, but I don’t like the price. If you will accept the enclosed check for $4,000, please send back the box with the seal unbroken.”
The enraged jeweler refused the check and dismissed the messenger in disgust. He opened up the box to reclaim the unwanted pin, only to find that it had been removed. In its place was a check for $5,000.
THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES. CLIFTON FADIMAN,
ED.. 1985
KEYS TO POWER
Words like “freedom,” “options,” and “choice” evoke a power of possibility far beyond the reality of the benefits they entail. When examined closely, the choices we have—in the marketplace, in elections, in our jobs—tend to have noticeable limitations: They are often a matter of a choice simply between A and B, with the rest of the alphabet out of the picture. Yet as
long as the faintest mirage of choice flickers on, we rarely focus on the missing options. We “choose” to believe that the game is fair, and that we have our freedom. We prefer not to think too much about the depth of our liberty to choose. This unwillingness to probe the smallness of our choices stems from the fact that too much freedom creates a kind of anxiety. The phrase “unlimited options” sounds infinitely promising, but unlimited options would actually paralyze us and cloud our ability to choose. Our limited range of choices comforts us. This supplies the clever and cunning with enormous opportunities for
deception. For people who are choosing between alternatives find it hard to believe they are being manipulated or deceived; they cannot see that you are allowing them a small amount of free will in exchange for a much more powerful imposition of your own will. Setting up a narrow range of choices, then, should always be a part of your deceptions. There is a saying: If you can get the bird to walk into the cage on its own, it will sing that much more prettily.
The following are among the most common forms of “controlling the options”:
Color the Choices. This was a favored technique of Henry Kissinger. As President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, Kissinger considered himself better informed than his boss, and believed that in most situations he could make the best decision on his own. But if he tried to determine policy, he would offend or perhaps enrage a notoriously insecure man. So Kissinger
would propose three or four choices of action for each situation, and would present them in such a way that the one he preferred always seemed the best solution compared to the others. Time after time, Nixon fell for the bait, never suspecting that he was moving where Kissinger pushed him. This is an excellent device to use on the insecure master.
Force the Resister. One of the main problems faced by Dr. Milton H. Erickson, a pioneer of hypnosis therapy in the 1950s, was the relapse. His patients might seem to be recovering rapidly, but their apparent susceptibility to the therapy masked a deep resistance: They would soon relapse into old habits, blame the doctor, and stop coming to see him.
To avoid this, Erickson began ordering some patients to have a relapse, to make themselves feel as bad as when they first came in—to go back to square one. Faced with this option, the patients would usually “choose” to avoid the relapse—which, of course, was what Erickson really wanted.
This is a good technique to use on children and other willful people who enjoy doing the opposite of what you ask them to: Push them to “choose” what you want them to do by appearing to advocate the opposite.
Alter the Playing Field. In the 1860s, John D. Rockefeller set out to create an oil monopoly. If he tried to buy up the smaller oil companies they would figure out what he was doing and fight back. Instead, he began secretly buying up the railway companies that transported the oil. When he then attempted to take over a particular company, and met with resistance, he reminded them of their dependence on the rails. Refusing them shipping, or
simply raising their fees, could ruin their business. Rockefeller altered the playing field so that the only options the small oil producers had were the ones he gave them.
In this tactic your opponents know their hand is being forced, but it doesn’t matter. The technique is effective against those who resist at all costs.
The Shrinking Options. The late-nineteenth-century art dealer Ambroise Vollard perfected this technique.
Customers would come to Vollard’s shop to see some Cézannes. He would show three paintings, neglect to mention a price, and pretend to doze off. The visitors would have to leave without deciding. They would usually come back the next day to see the paintings again, but this time Vollard would pull out less interesting works, pretending he thought they were the same ones. The baffled customers would look at the new offerings, leave to think them over, and return yet again.
Once again the same thing would happen: Vollard would show paintings of lesser quality still. Finally the buyers would realize they had better grab what he was showing them, because tomorrow they would have to settle for something worse, perhaps at even higher prices.
A variation on this technique is to raise the price every time the buyer hesitates and another day goes by. This is an excellent negotiating ploy to use on the chronically indecisive, who will fall for the idea that they are getting a better deal today than if they wait till tomorrow.
The Weak Man on the Precipice. The weak are the easiest to maneuver by controlling their options. Cardinal de Retz, the great seventeenth-century provocateur, served as an unofficial assistant to the Duke of Orléans, who was notoriously indecisive. It was a constant struggle to convince the duke to take action—he would hem and haw, weigh the options, and wait till the last moment, giving everyone around him an ulcer.
But Retz discovered a way to handle him: He would describe all sorts of dangers, exaggerating them as much as possible, until the duke saw a yawning abyss in every direction except one: the one Retz was pushing him to take.
This tactic is similar to “Color the Choices,” but with the weak you have to be more aggressive. Work on their emotions—use fear and terror to propel them into action. Try reason and they will always find a way to procrastinate.
Brothers in Crime. This is a classic con-artist technique: You attract your victims to some criminal scheme, creating a bond of blood and guilt between you. They participate in your deception, commit a crime (or think they do—see the story of Sam Geezil in Law 3), and are easily manipulated.
Serge Stavisky, the great French con artist of the 1920s, so entangled the government in his scams and swindles that the state did not dare to prosecute him, and “chose” to leave him alone. It is often wise to implicate in your deceptions the very person who can do you the most harm if you fail. Their involvement can be subtle—even a hint of their involvement will
narrow their options and buy their silence.
The Horns of a Dilemma. This idea was demonstrated by General William Sherman’s infamous march through Georgia during the American Civil War. Although the Confederates knew what direction Sherman was heading in, they never knew if he would attack from the left or the right, for he divided his army into two wings—and if the rebels retreated from one wing they found themselves facing the other.
This is a classic trial lawyer’s technique: The lawyer leads the witnesses to decide between two possible explanations of an event, both of which poke a hole in their story. They have to answer the lawyer’s questions, but whatever they say they hurt
themselves. The key to this move is to strike quickly: Deny the victim the time to think of an escape. As they wriggle between the horns of the dilemma, they dig their own grave.
Understand: In your struggles with your rivals, it will often be necessary for you to hurt them. And if you are clearly the agent of their punishment, expect a counterattack—expect revenge. If, however, they seem to themselves to be the agents of their own misfortune, they will submit quietly. When Ivan left Moscow for his rural village, the citizens asking him to return agreed to his demand for absolute power. Over the years to come, they resented him less for the terror he unleashed on the country, because, after all, they had granted him his power themselves. This is why it is always good to allow your victims their choice of poison, and to cloak your involvement in providing it to them as far as possible.
Image: The Horns of the Bull. The bull backs you into the corner with its horns—not a single horn, which you might be able to escape, but a pair of horns that trap you within their hold. Run right or run left—either way you move into their piercing ends and are gored.
Authority: For the wounds and every other evil that men inflict upon themselves spontaneously, and of their own choice, are in the long run less painful than those inflicted by others.
(Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527)
REVERSAL
Controlling the options has one main purpose: to disguise yourself as the agent of power and punishment. The tactic works best, then, for those whose power is fragile, and who cannot operate too openly without incurring suspicion, resentment, and anger. Even as a general rule, however, it is rarely wise to be seen as exerting power directly and forcefully, no matter how secure or strong you are. It is usually more elegant and more effective to give people the illusion of choice.
On the other hand, by limiting other people’s options you sometimes limit your own. There are situations in which it is to your advantage to allow your rivals a large degree of freedom: As you watch them operate, you give yourself rich opportunities to spy, gather information, and plan your deceptions. The nineteenth-century banker James Rothschild liked this method: He felt that if he tried to control his opponents’ movements, he lost the chance to observe their strategy and plan a more effective course. The more freedom he allowed them in the short term, the more forcefully he could act against them in the long run.
LAW 30
MAKE YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS SEEM EFFORTLESS
JUDGMENT
Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work—it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.
KANO TANNYU, MASTER ARTIST
Date Masamune once sent for Tannyu to decorate a pair of gold screens seven feet high. The artist said he thought black-and-white sketches would suit them, and went home again after considering them carefully. The next morning he came early and made a large quantity of ink into which he dipped a horseshoe he had brought with him, and then proceeded to make impressions of this all over one of the screens. Then, with a large brush, he
drew a number of lines across them. Meanwhile Masamune had come in to watch his work, and at this he could contain his irritation no longer, and muttering,
“What a beastly mess!” he strode away to his own apartments. The retainers told Tannyu he was in a very bad temper indeed. “He shouldn’t look on while I am at work, then,” replied the painter,
“he should wait till it is finished.” Then he took up a smaller brush and dashed in touches here and there, and as he did so the prints of the horse-shoe turned into crabs, while the big broad strokes became rushes. He then turned to the other screen and splashed drops of ink all over it, and when he had added a few brush-strokes here and there they became a flight of swallows over
willow trees.
When Masamune saw the finished work he was as overjoyed at
the artist’s skill as he had previously been annoyed at the apparent mess he was making of the screens.
CHA-NO-YU: THE JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY A. L. SADLER, 1962
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I
The Japanese tea ceremony called Cha-no-yu (“Hot Water for Tea”) has origins in ancient times, but it reached its peak of refinement in the sixteenth century under its most renowned practitioner, Sen no Rikyu. Although not from a noble family, Rikyu rose to great power, becoming the preferred tea master of the Emperor Hideyoshi, and an important adviser on aesthetic and even political matters. For Rikyu, the secret of success consisted in appearing natural, concealing the effort behind one’s work.
One day Rikyu and his son went to an acquaintance’s house for a tea ceremony. On the way in, the son remarked that the lovely antique-looking gate at their host’s house gave it an evocatively lonely appearance.
“I don’t think so,” replied his father,
“it looks as though it had been brought from some mountain temple a long way off, and as if the labor required to import
it must have cost a lot of money.”
If the owner of the house had put this much effort into one gate, it would show in his tea ceremony—and indeed Sen no Rikyu had to leave the ceremony early, unable to endure the affectation and effort it inadvertently revealed.
On another evening, while having tea at a friend’s house, Rikyu saw his host go outside, hold up a lantern in the darkness, cut a lemon off a tree, and bring it in. This charmed Rikyu—the host needed a relish for the dish he was serving, and had spontaneously gone outside to get one. But when the man offered the lemon with some Osaka rice cake, Rikyu realized that he had planned the cutting of the lemon all along, to go with this expensive delicacy.
The gesture no longer seemed spontaneous—it was a way for the
host to prove his cleverness. He had accidentally revealed how hard he was trying. Having seen enough, Rikyu politely declined the cake, excused himself, and left.
Emperor Hideyoshi once planned to visit Rikyu for a tea ceremony. On the night before he was to come, snow began to fall. Thinking quickly, Rikyu laid round cushions that fit exactly on each of the stepping-stones that led through the garden to his house. Just before dawn, he rose, saw that it had stopped snowing, and carefully removed the cushions. When Hideyoshi arrived, he marveled at the simple beauty of the sight—the
perfectly round stepping stones, unencumbered by snow—and noticed how it called no attention to the manner in which Rikyu had accomplished it, but only to the polite gesture itself.
After Sen no Rikyu died, his ideas had a profound influence on the
practice of the tea ceremony. The Tokugawa shogun Yorinobu, son of the great Emperor Ieyasu, was a student of Rikyu’s teachings. In his garden he had a stone lantern made by a famous master, and Lord Sakai Tadakatsu asked if he could come by one day to see it. Yorinobu replied that he would be honored, and commanded his gardeners to put everything in order for the
visit. These gardeners, unfamiliar with the precepts of Cha-no-yu, thought the stone lantern misshapen, its windows being too small for the present taste. They had a local workman enlarge the windows.
A few days before Lord Sakai’s visit, Yorinobu toured the garden. When he saw the altered windows he exploded with rage, ready to impale on his sword the fool who had ruined the lantern, upsetting its natural grace and destroying the whole purpose of Lord Sakai’s visit.
When Yorinobu calmed down, however, he remembered that he had originally bought two of the lanterns, and that the second was in his garden on the island of Kishu. At great expense, he hired a whale boat and the finest rowers he could find, ordering them to bring the lantern to him within two days—a difficult feat at best. But the sailors rowed day and night, and with the luck of a good wind they arrived just in time.
To Yorinobu’s delight, this stone lantern was more magnificent than the first, for it had stood untouched for twenty years in a bamboo thicket, acquiring a brilliant antique appearance and a delicate covering of moss. When Lord Sakai arrived, later that same day, he was awed by the lantern, which was more magnificent than he had imagined—so graceful and at one with the elements. Fortunately he had no idea what time and effort it had cost Yorinobu to create this sublime effect.
THE WRESTLING MASTER
There was once a wrestling master who was versed in 360 feints and holds. He took a special liking to one of his pupils, to whom he taught 359 of them over a period of time. Somehow he never got around to the last trick. As months went by the young man became so proficient in the art that he bested everyone who dared to face him in the ring. He was so proud of his prowess that one day he boasted before the sultan that he could readily whip his master, were it not out of respect for his age and gratitude for his tutelage.
The sultan became incensed at this irreverence and ordered an immediate match with the royal court in attendance. At the gong the youth barged forward with a lusty yell, only to be confronted with the unfamiliar 360th feint. The master seized his former
pupil, lifted him high above his head, and flung him crashing to the ground. The sultan and the assembly let out a loud cheer. When the sultan asked the master how he was able to overcome such a strong opponent, the master confessed that he had reserved a secret technique for himself for just such a contingency. Then he related the lamentation of a master of archery, who taught everything he knew. “No one has learned archery from me,” the poor fellow complained, “who has not tried to use me as a butt in the end.”
A STORY OF SAADI, AS TOLD IN THE CRAFT OF POWER, R.G. H.
SIU, 1979
Interpretation
To Sen no Rikyu, the sudden appearance of something naturally, almost accidentally graceful was the height of beauty. This beauty came without warning and seemed effortless.
Nature created such things by its own laws and processes, but men had to create their effects through labor and contrivance. And when they showed the effort of producing the effect, the effect was spoiled. The gate came from too far away, the cutting of the lemon looked contrived. You will often have to use tricks and ingenuity to create your effects—the cushions in the snow, the men rowing all night—but your audience must never suspect the work or the thinking that has gone into them. Nature does
not reveal its tricks, and what imitates nature by appearing effortless approximates nature’s power.
OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II
The great escape artist Harry Houdini once advertised his act as “The Impossible Possible.” And indeed those who witnessed his dramatic escapes felt that what he did onstage contradicted commonsense ideas of human capacity.
One evening in 1904, an audience of 4,000 Londoners filled a theater to watch Houdini accept a challenge: to escape from a pair of manacles billed as the strongest ever invented. They contained six sets of locks and nine tumblers in each cuff; a Birmingham maker had spent five years constructing them. Experts who examined them said they had never seen anything so intricate, and this intricacy was thought to make them impossible to escape. The crowd watched the experts secure the manacles on Houdini’s wrists. Then the escape artist entered a black cabinet on stage. The minutes went by; the more time passed, the more certain it seemed that these manacles would be the first to defeat him. At one point he emerged from the cabinet, and asked that the cuffs be temporarily removed so that he could take off
his coat—it was hot inside. The challengers refused, suspecting his request was a trick to find out how the locks worked. Undeterred, and without using his hands, Houdini managed to lift the coat over his shoulders, turn it inside out, remove a penknife from his vest pocket with his teeth, and, by moving his head, cut the coat off his arms. Freed from the coat, he stepped back into
the cabinet, the audience roaring with approval at his grace and dexterity.
Finally, having kept the audience waiting long enough, Houdini emerged from the cabinet a second time, now with his hands free, the manacles raised high in triumph. To this day no one knows how he managed the escape. Although he had taken close to an hour to free himself, he had never looked concerned, had shown no sign of doubt. Indeed it seemed by the end that he had drawn out the escape as a way to heighten the drama, to make
the audience worry—for there was no other sign that the performance had been anything but easy. The complaint about the heat was equally part of the act. The spectators of this and other Houdini performances must have felt he was toying with them: These manacles are nothing, he seemed to say, I could have freed myself a lot sooner, and from a lot worse.
Over the years, Houdini escaped from the chained carcass of an
embalmed “sea monster” (a half octopus, half whalelike beast that had beached near Boston); he had himself sealed inside an enormous envelope from which he emerged without breaking the paper; he passed through brick walls; he wriggled free from straitjackets while dangling high in the air; he leaped from bridges into icy waters, his hands manacled and his legs in chains; he had himself submerged in glass cases full of water, hands padlocked, while the audience watched in amazement as he worked himself free, struggling for close to an hour apparently without breathing. Each time he seemed to court certain death yet survived with superhuman aplomb.
Meanwhile, he said nothing about his methods, gave no clues as to how he accomplished any of his tricks—he left his audiences and critics speculating, his power and reputation enhanced by their struggles with the inexplicable. Perhaps the most baffling trick of all was making a tenthousand-pound elephant disappear before an audience’s eyes, a feat he repeated on stage for over nineteen weeks. No one has ever really explained how he did this, for in the auditorium where he performed the trick, there was simply nowhere for an elephant to hide.
The effortlessness of Houdini’s escapes led some to think he used occult forces, his superior psychic abilities giving him special control over his body. But a German escape artist named Kleppini claimed to know Houdini’s secret: He simply used elaborate gadgets. Kleppini also claimed to have defeated Houdini in a handcuff challenge in Holland. Houdini did not mind all kinds of speculation floating around about his methods, but he would not tolerate an outright lie, and in 1902 he challenged Kleppini to a handcuff duel. Kleppini accepted. Through a spy, he found out the secret word to unlock a pair of French combination-lock
cuffs that Houdini liked to use. His plan was to choose these cuffs to escape from onstage.
This would definitively debunk Houdini—his “genius” simply lay in his use of mechanical gadgets. On the night of the challenge, just as Kleppini had planned, Houdini offered him a choice of cuffs and he selected the ones with the combination lock. He was even able to disappear with them behind a screen to make a quick test, and reemerged seconds later, confident of victory.
Acting as if he sensed fraud, Houdini refused to lock Kleppini in the cuffs. The two men argued and began to fight, even wrestling with each other onstage. After a few minutes of this, an apparently angry, frustrated Houdini gave up and locked Kleppini in the cuffs. For the next few minutes Kleppini strained to get free. Something was wrong—minutes earlier he had opened the cuffs behind the screen; now the same code no longer worked.
He sweated, racking his brains. Hours went by, the audience left, and finally an exhausted and humiliated Kleppini gave up and asked to be released.
The cuffs that Kleppini himself had opened behind the screen with the word “C-L-E-F-S” (French for “keys”) now clicked open only with the word “F-R-A-U-D.” Kleppini never figured out how Houdini had accomplished this uncanny feat.
Keep the extent of your abilities unknown. The wise man does not allow his knowledge and abilities to be sounded to the bottom, if he desires to be honored by all. He allows you to know them but not to comprehend them. No one must know the extent of his abilities, lest he be disappointed. No one ever has an opportunity of fathoming him entirely. For guesses and doubts
about the extent of his talents arouse more veneration than accurate knowledge of them, be they ever so great.
BALTASAR GRACIÁN. 1601-1658
Interpretation
Although we do not know for certain how Houdini accomplished many of his most ingenious escapes, one thing is clear: It was not the occult, or any kind of magic, that gave him his powers, but hard work and endless practice, all of which he carefully concealed from the world. Houdini never left anything to chance—day and night he studied the workings of locks, researched centuries-old sleight-of-hand tricks, pored over books on
mechanics, whatever he could use. Every moment not spent researching he spent working his body, keeping himself exceptionally limber, and learning how to control his muscles and his breathing.
Early on in Houdini’s career, an old Japanese performer whom he toured with taught him an ancient trick: how to swallow an ivory ball, then bring it back up. He practiced this endlessly with a small peeled potato tied to a string—up and down he would manipulate the potato with his throat muscles, until they were strong enough to move it without the string.
The organizers of the London handcuff challenge had searched Houdini’s body thoroughly beforehand, but no one could check the inside of his throat, where he could have concealed small tools to help him escape. Even so, Kleppini was fundamentally wrong: It was not Houdini’s tools but his practice, work, and research that made his escapes possible.
Kleppini, in fact, was completely outwitted by Houdini, who set the whole thing up. He let his opponent learn the code to the French cuffs, then baited him into choosing those cuffs onstage. Then, during the two men’s tussle, the dexterous Houdini was able to change the code to “F-R-A-U-D.” He had spent weeks practicing this trick, but the audience saw none of the sweat and toil behind the scenes. Nor was Houdini ever nervous; he induced
nervousness in others. (He deliberately dragged out the time it would take to escape, as a way of heightening the drama, and making the audience squirm.) His escapes from death, always graceful and easy, made him look like a superman.
As a person of power, you must research and practice endlessly before appearing in public, onstage or anywhere else. Never expose the sweat and labor behind your poise. Some think such exposure will demonstrate their diligence and honesty, but it actually just makes them look weaker—as if anyone who practiced and worked at it could do what they had done, or as if
they weren’t really up to the job. Keep your effort and your tricks to yourself and you seem to have the grace and ease of a god. One never sees the source of a god’s power revealed; one only sees its effects.
A line [of poetry] will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Adam’s Curse, William Buller Yeats, 1865-1939
KEYS TO POWER
Humanity’s first notions of power came from primitive encounters with nature—the flash of lightning in the sky, a sudden flood, the speed and ferocity of a wild animal. These forces required no thinking, no planning— they awed us by their sudden appearance, their gracefulness, and their power over life and death. And this remains the kind of power we have always wanted to imitate. Through science and technology we have recreated the speed and sublime power of nature, but something is missing: Our machines are noisy and jerky, they reveal their effort. Even the very best creations of technology cannot root out our admiration for things that move easily and effortlessly. The power of children to bend us to their will comes from a kind of seductive charm that we feel in the presence of a creature less reflective and more graceful than we are. We cannot return to
such a state, but if we can create the appearance of this kind of ease, we elicit in others the kind of primitive awe that nature has always evoked in humankind.
One of the first European writers to expound on this principle came from that most unnatural of environments, the Renaissance court. In The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, Baldassare Castiglione describes the highly elaborate and codified manners of the perfect court citizen. And yet, Castiglione explains, the courtier must execute these gestures with what he calls sprezzatura, the capacity to make the difficult seem easy. He urges the courtier to “practice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.”
We all admire the achievement of some unusual feat, but if it is
accomplished naturally and gracefully, our admiration increases tenfold —“whereas ... to labor at what one is doing and ... to make bones over it, shows an extreme lack of grace and causes everything, whatever its worth, to be discounted.”
Much of the idea of sprezzatura came from the world of art. All the great Renaissance artists carefully kept their works under wraps. Only the finished masterpiece could be shown to the public. Michelangelo forbade even popes to view his work in process. A Renaissance artist was always careful to keep his studios shut to patrons and public alike, not out of fear of
imitation, but because to see the making of the works would mar the magic of their effect, and their studied atmosphere of ease and natural beauty. The Renaissance painter Vasari, also the first great art critic, ridiculed the work of Paolo Uccello, who was obsessed with the laws of perspective. The effort Uccello spent on improving the appearance of perspective was too obvious in his work—it made his paintings ugly and labored, overwhelmed
by the effort of their effects. We have the same response when we watch performers who put too much effort into their act: Seeing them trying so hard breaks the illusion. It also makes us uncomfortable. Calm, graceful performers, on the other hand, set us at ease, creating the illusion that they are not acting but being natural and themselves, even when everything they are doing involves labor and practice.
The idea of sprezzatura is relevant to all forms of power, for power depends vitally on appearances and the illusions you create. Your public actions are like artworks: They must have visual appeal, must create anticipation, even entertain. When you reveal the inner workings of your creation, you become just one more mortal among others. What is understandable is not awe-inspiring—we tell ourselves we could do as well if we had the money and time. Avoid the temptation of showing how clever
you are—it is far more clever to conceal the mechanisms of your
cleverness.
Talleyrand’s application of this concept to his daily life greatly enhanced the aura of power that surrounded him. He never liked to work too hard, so he made others do the work for him—the spying, the research, the detailed analyses. With all this labor at his disposal, he himself never seemed to strain. When his spies revealed that a certain event was about to take place, he would talk in social conversation as if he sensed its imminence. The
result was that people thought he was clairvoyant. His short pithy
statements and witticisms always seemed to summarize a situation perfectly, but they were based on much research and thought. To those in government, including Napoleon himself, Talleyrand gave the impression of immense power—an effect entirely dependent on the apparent ease with which he accomplished his feats.
There is another reason for concealing your shortcuts and tricks: When you let this information out, you give people ideas they can use against you.
You lose the advantages of keeping silent. We tend to want the world to know what we have done—we want our vanity gratified by having our hard work and cleverness applauded, and we may even want sympathy for the hours it has taken to reach our point of artistry. Learn to control this propensity to blab, for its effect is often the opposite of what you expected.
Remember: The more mystery surrounds your actions, the more awesome your power seems. You appear to be the only one who can do what you do —and the appearance of having an exclusive gift is immensely powerful.
Finally, because you achieve your accomplishments with grace and ease, people believe that you could always do more if you tried harder. This elicits not only admiration but a touch of fear. Your powers are untapped— no one can fathom their limits.
Image: The Racehorse. From up close we would see the strain, the effort to control the horse, the labored, painful breathing. But from the distance where we sit and watch, it is all gracefulness, flying through the air. Keep others at a distance and they will only see the ease with which you move.
Authority: For whatever action [nonchalance] accompanies, no matter how trivial it is, it not only reveals the skill of the person doing it but also very often causes it to be considered far greater than it really is. This is because it makes the onlookers believe that a man who performs well with so much facility must possess even greater skill than he does.
(Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)
REVERSAL
The secrecy with which you surround your actions must seem lighthearted in spirit. A zeal to conceal your work creates an unpleasant, almost paranoiac impression: you are taking the game too seriously. Houdini was careful to make the concealment of his tricks seem a game, all part of the show.
Never show your work until it is finished, but if you put too much
effort into keeping it under wraps you will be like the painter Pontormo, who spent the last years of his life hiding his frescoes from the public eye and only succeeded in driving himself mad. Always keep your sense of humor about yourself.
There are also times when revealing the inner workings of your projects can prove worthwhile. It all depends on your audience’s taste, and on the times in which you operate. P. T. Barnum recognized that his public wanted to feel involved in his shows, and that understanding his tricks delighted them, partly, perhaps, because implicitly debunking people who kept their sources of power hidden from the masses appealed to America’s democratic
spirit. The public also appreciated the showman’s humor and honesty.
Barnum took this to the extreme of publicizing his own humbuggery in his popular autobiography, written when his career was at its height.
As long as the partial disclosure of tricks and techniques is carefully planned, rather than the result of an uncontrollable need to blab, it is the ultimate in cleverness. It gives the audience the illusion of being superior and involved, even while much of what you do remains concealed from them
