Robert Greene’s Motivation for Writing the 48 Laws of Power

From the 48 levels of power, law 21, play a sucker to catch a sucker: seem dumber than your mark. So, when I was preparing for this, I was reading these daily meditations, and I was actually shocked. I was really quite shocked by them. I was shocked by that one, and I was very unclear as a consequence as to your motivations. And so I was thinking, do I want to—do I want to? I don't get this. I don't understand this exactly. It's like this is very deceptive.

Then I talked to my team, who like your books a lot, and my daughter, who really liked interviewing you. I thought, well, there's something going on here that I don't quite understand, which is certainly possible. And then I thought, well, this is maybe a shadow exploration, something like that, yes. And then I thought, like, I was kind of a dimwit for not catching that earlier. But, you know, it is shocking. These are very manipulative laws, let's say.

Can you guide me through the rationale for producing material like that? What were you trying—what are you trying to do with your books? And they've obviously been misunderstood. It says in the Wikipedia that Greene's books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral. So, clear this up for me.

Well, you know that it's a bit manipulative when people write that because a great deal of the 48 laws of power—I'd say, you know, maybe two-thirds of them—are not manipulative, have nothing to do with deception. They have things to do with kind of common sense ideas about power, such as being generous with people, such as creating compelling spectacles, such as entering action with boldness, and kind of how you present yourself—sort of things about your image and your appearance.

But there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative, and my other books don't really go into things like that. So, it is a bit of a distortion to write that. But where this comes from is basically I have a particular idea of power, so maybe I should explain that a little bit. My idea of power, it's not about this kind of grand thing of political or war something; it's on a very individual level.

The idea for me comes from Nietzsche and his idea of the will to power, which he explains as every organism has the desire to expand itself—a desire for expansion. And so I think that for human beings, we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits. We want to feel like we have some degree of ability to influence other people, that we can control our own career and learn more and develop greater skills and have more kind of power and influence in our life.

The feeling that I cannot have any power or influence over my children, my spouse, my colleagues, my boss, my career in general is deeply, deeply unsettling for the human animal and causes all kinds of attempts at what I call negative power—passive aggression, etc.—setting yourself up as a victim as a kind of leverage power in a negative way.

So the problem is, and a lot of this comes from Machiavelli, who inspired a lot of the 48 laws, the problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter in particular in the 21st century about what is acceptable, about what is politically correct.

So we're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragons of fairness and democracy, etc. At the same time, we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, etc. And so because of that dynamic, we have to be extremely careful in this world.

I compare it to the courts of Louis XIV, where all of the courtiers, if they're too overt in their power moves, the king will disapprove of them and will not banish them, but they'll be kind of excluded to the corner of the palace. And so the game was to be sort of indirect, to be polite and ingratiating, and if you had an enemy, to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them.

This is kind of where the 48 laws of power came out from. So you quoted me—I had like 80 different jobs, probably more like 60 or 65—but I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had. I worked in every conceivable field, and I didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world.

It really kind of irritated me: all the self-help books were sort of describing a world that I never saw existed. You know, I saw people being very political, having egos, and having problems with their egos, and I didn't see any books out there that were describing it. So, law number one is never outshine the master.

The idea is that if you try too hard to impress your boss or the person above you, you're liable to make them feel insecure; you're going to trip on their ego, and something bad will happen to you. Right? And so, this seemed like the fact that people have egos and operate with egos and you have to be careful with them seems very clear to me, but I didn't find books out there that were describing it.

I hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out. Okay, yeah, well, the—okay, so I just—I can't remember who sent me this; I think it was Clay Routledge. Yeah, I think that's right. He just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed, stating that something like 40 percent of millennials don't feel they have any control over their life.

Right, so that is related to the first issue that you brought up. And you obviously consider that problematic, and you said that, well, we need to—it's good for us to have some control over our destinies, and also to feel that that's a possibility, to see it at least as a goal. Yes.

And then, if we feel consciously thwarted in that goal or believe that it's impossible, that doesn't mean we're going to give up our striving. It means it's going to go underground, and then it's going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways. Exactly. And then you said that you were interested in Nietzsche's idea of will to power as in some sense the central motivating—the central motivation of the organism, yeah, across species to some degree.

And then you talked about the jobs that you've had. So why—why did—so I got that right, I hope? I hope I've got this. Dude, that was very well, thank you. Okay, okay. And so, to some degree— and then you said, well, you had all these jobs, and you found that people were engaged in manipulative and deceptive strategies a fair amount of the time, and that no one was really warning people about this or delineating out the strategies.

Yeah, okay, so that—you know, that seems to me to be reasonable. I mean, I'm a big admirer of the work of Carl Jung, which everyone listening to this knows more than they even want to know. And he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow, yes, that they would clothe themselves in the garments of moral virtue, right, and act out a virtuous persona.

But because of the thwarted will to strive, in some sense, they have all sorts of motivations—sexual, power-related, dominance, aggression, anger, resentment—that aren't admitted thoroughly and that are snakes under the carpet or elephants under the rug or skeletons in the closet. And they pollute human relationships, and I certainly believe that's true.

I believe that that's the corruption of human relationships by a form of severe deceit, and I also think it's reasonable to warn people against that and also to alert them to the fact that such things operate in their own souls.