Robert Greene, The Machiavelli The Economy Needs
Robert Greene’s books on persuasion, seduction, and influence are so powerful that a number of American prisons still ban them. I had the chance to interview this modern Machiavelli for the How To Academy on November 17th, 2021. The video interview is available here. Greene burst onto the scene as a master of power dynamics at the age of 37 two decades ago after having had more than sixty very different jobs. He was drifting from one thing to another by day and trying to be a comedy screenwriter. But, the Hollywood Studio system was chock-a-block with narcissists, psychopaths, and the worst sort of morally-challenged people that Hollywood inevitably attracts. He got fired because he was so good. He outshone his masters. That’s when he realized that the real world has a hidden language of power. He began to write about how people really are and how the world really works. That culminated in a range of iconic books: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, Laws of Human Nature and now The Daily Laws, which has just been released.
The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature is a grown-up’s advent calendar, filled with charming and dark surprises for a whole year. Each day you open the page to find a new law to learn and practice. It may seem at first that Greene is all about showing humans at their very worst. But his goal is to bring out the very best in us by helping us understand and integrate our dark side. Some of his stuff has been described as “amoral, cunning and ruthless”. The ghost of Carl Jung is dancing in his grave with joy at the appearance of this book! Only by going deep into the dark can a person emerge as a healthy soul with true direction and purpose. He wants to help people become what they were meant to be and stop being kicked around by circumstances or “the rules” or by evil people. “The work will be arduous but it will reanimate your soul and make you remember” that it is “insanely awesome to be alive” he says. Each person is unique and capable of experiencing the sublime. It just takes work to get there. Greene advises us to read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way as reminders that pretty much everybody feels dragged down by dark forces at some point. The moment is a gift that always creates the opportunity for an alchemical-like transformation. The bitterest lemons can become the sweetest lemonade. The post-COVID economy may well be like this too!
Greene is also a historian and an astute observer of the human condition. He sees the dark side of humanity slipping into conflict. There is societal conflict everywhere in part because of connectivity. He had thought the internet would unite us. Now he sees the internet as a force that divides us. Perhaps the internet is literally channeling the dark side of humanity. Greene says we are drawn to the things that are normally suppressed. It’s not just the algorithms driving us into hate. It’s our won unwillingness to deal with the hate that lurks inside. Netizens make terrible citizens it seems.
He also hears the rumblings of war. This is a subject he knows well. His book War identifies 33 strategies for conducting war. If we look carefully, it’s easy to see that they are all being expertly deployed by the various superpowers today. There is an accumulation of events that has the possibility of igniting a conflagration.
He too has noticed the uptick in warfare across different domains. One domain is outer space. Is it really a coincidence that both Russia and China launched hunter-killer satellites at about the same time last week? China’s new Shijian “Hunter-Killer” satellite, which cleans up space debris, also defines US military satellites as “debris”. It started blasting things in space at about the same time as the Russian “Hunter-Killer” satellite started creating so much debris that the astronauts on the International Space Station had to ready themselves for evacuation. Another domain is territorial. He noted the “weaponization” of immigrants on the Poland/Belarus/Lithuanian borders. The so-called “Grey Zone”, where warlike activities occur beyond the realm of established military doctrines or usual physical domains of conflict, is now the main warzone.
Rene Girard argued that war is mimetic. People just start mimicking each other’s actions. If the US puts up ever high-altitude satellites, then other superpowers will too. We desire things because others do. Soon we are competing for the same stuff, the same space. Maybe this explains why most nations are engaging in record-level defense spending at the same time? Maybe it explains why all nations do quantitative easing at the same time? Maybe it explains why humanity seems in hot pursuit of a fight on almost any level over just about any topic? It sure explains keeping up with the Jones’s. Green suggests that all our troubles, including the trouble in the world economy, arises because we won’t do the work needed to acknowledge and integrate the dark side at the level of the individual. Green is telling us all to re-read Carl Jung and to reconsider how to re-connect the idea behind the ancient Yin with the Yang symbol.
What does all this have to do with tomorrow’s economy? Everything. All this may be more the reason we are drifting into conflict, confrontation, and even war. It’s why we buy things we don’t need. It explains the “superlative economy” where everything has to be the first and biggest when in fact the first-mover advantage is usually a massive disadvantage and being the biggest makes for less agility. Maybe let’s just try to be better. It may be that Greene’s humble little Daily Laws is a way to avert disaster because it will make us better. The Machiavelli of our generation advises us to make more love if we want less war. This is why his next book is tentatively titled Sublime. It’s going to be about love and joy. So, do the economy and yourself a favor. Buy his little book of daily meditations and maybe we’ll manage to avert the dark side of conflict and war.
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