Finished reading it a while ago, decided to pick it up again and give it another read. I swear it’s the same feeling of guilt and disgust when I choose to read this again. To be fair, I only decided to buy because at the time I heard what it was about, and of course, reading the book despite how unethical and manipulative it is was just for insight. To be able to understand the mind of people like this. I guess in that sense the book could be fine. But i’m almost 99% certain these business major gymbros read it to apply it to themselves.
by xoVinny-
44 Comments
It was wildly popular with Wall Street stockbrokers so you’re spot on with who it applies to.
Fun fact I recently learned: 48 Laws of Power is banned in American Prison Libraries.
Every time a copy of this book gets added to my library it gets stolen, and I find great joy in telling this to patrons who want to get their hands on one but can’t.
The book is for insecure unloved people who will lead very sad unfulfilling lives. I read it just to know what the hype was about, I just kept thinking “who hurt you”
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this book is the template for politics. This book is also a template for American culture. All we really do is play some sort of dominance game here, money, social status, etc etc. I read the book a while back, and many things about life clicked as a result. I loved reading it. I use the laws sometimes, but im not a sociopath so I dont feel the drive to hurt people. Mostly just to give myself some advantages and also to notice behavior like this in others.
How is it different from the Prince? From what I gather, 48 Laws feels like a derivative of it.
I like to read it to understand the world better. To see the motives behind certain choices. To find out why people maneuver in such a way. Yes, it can be unethical, but I feel its very similar to the book “How to win friends and influence people” but Robert Greene just has a more raw straight-to-it way of speaking. Even though it’s probably 3 times the size of the other book.
If you feel unethical from simply reading it, then I believe you’re reading it from the wrong perspective. If you’re reading it to learn how to manipulate others, then that’s unethical
The book itself is well written and hard to put down, but the idea that ppl would be using it in a Machiavellian way was incredibly disturbing to me and impossible to shake as I made my way through it.
Basically you should read that book and strive to be the exact opposite whenever and wherever possible, though it can give you some idea of what to watch out for when dealing with psychopaths and the like.
It’s helpful in the sense of now you know how these psychopaths think and can counter it.A lot of wantepuenures and actual business people conduct themselves like the book states.It feels like a modernization of the prince.
People who pick it up and think this stuff is actually usable in real life are mad.
I found it to be a fun read for the historical anecdotes, the seduction one is even funnier, and maybe on occasion one of the rules could be used to reflect on your own actions. But people who take it as an actual self help book are fools.
I felt like I already did many of the things detailed in the book when I read it…
I loved it as a young man. Granted, even then I knew it was not to be taken so seriously (now it just seems silly), but it’s a pretty straight catalog of tactics people all over the world use, even by those who find it ‘morally repugnant’. I guarantee even virtue signalers have lied, concealed their intentions, and manipulated others at one point. In fact, they’re doing it by publicly turning their nose up at such concepts.
The best way to read it is, one, not take it so seriously, it’s just fanciful pop psychology book based in anecdotes of doubtful accuracy, and two, use it as way to defend yourself against such attempts by others.
In some ways, it was brilliant marketing. Financial gurus make their money selling, books, courses and seminars to people, instead of actually being experts, this is no different. In the same way that news sells death and tabloids sell gossip. People who rail against moral depravity make just much money off their audience (who are outraged, outraged, I tell ya) as the peddlers of such sordid material. It appeals to people’s baser instincts and lusts for power, or repulsion at such thoughts. As much as some people love to manipulate and cheat and wallow in debauchery, there’s an equal amount of people who love getting mad at manipulators and cheaters and hedonists. Why do you think Jerry Springer got so popular?
I suppose to appreciate a work like that takes a certain perspective. In my mind, the world is a competitive place, the very nature of evolution and survival is competition. If one isn’t at least partially informed of this fact, they’re going to get chewed up and spit out. If people are living a life where there isn’t someone else out to eat their lunch, then they should count their blessings because they live in a comfortable sliver of existence that the majority do not.
Better to have the tools to identify these assholes around you, or even be one if the situation calls for it.
It is practical only to a certain extent. I might add a certain large extent. Laws like making people rely on you ( if you want your job but diy is great antithesis), never dissenting a begrudging master, craving infamy to run your business (Twitter, southpark), reputation can save your life/ condemn you to gallows, get your ownership and protect it like a honeybee — are greatly elaborated through examples and are a necessary know how.
On the other hand it attempts to give you a Machiavellian perspective that aims to cease fleeting power in life’s every encounter. This can prove countereffective.
Power isn’t happiness but not having any power is unhappiness. Techniques may help you acquire it but to keep it requires responsibility and being on edge…. acquiring more than sensible for you may make your life miserable as well.
It is an incomplete book to take as one’s guide for life because chasing power is an incomplete look to what gives meaning to one’s life. It is much less an ideal to followed by a society. It is but a black reflection of it.
People disturbed by 48 Laws are probably high in agreeableness/conscientiousness. That is, they give more than they take, due either to overarching moral/religious reasons or because they never learned to ask for or demand the things they need and want, like working hard and hoping your superiors notice and give you a raise (90% of the time, they won’t if you don’t demand it). Yet *they are the ones who can benefit most from reading and really learning from this book*.
Dark triad personalities will love this book because it’ll hone their predatory tendencies, even though what they need to have functional, long term relationships is more empathy/agreeableness/conscientiousness *to be able to give what others need*.
The balance is in reciprocity: the ability to understand what others need and want and to give it to them while demanding for one’s self the things they want and need in return. 48 Laws teaches you to put your own oxygen mask on first. It isn’t evil, it’s just one side of the coin.
The other purpose of the book is to learn the game so you can protect yourself. People out there have no idea that the game even exists.
Yeah…. I really don’t think those books prepare you for the reality of the situation should you encounter such a person, or systems where those values are enshrined. Some of them are not stupid at all, and as far as I recall, those books don’t lead you to any revelations about your own unfulfilled subconscious needs and hidden axioms to your personal faith that would grant you sufficient immunity from attack. There’s always someone who can see your blind spots, nobody is immune. And…. no matter how many times you conjure up armour to hide the previous blind spots…. there are always more of those to exploit. As long as you have a basic need to survive, you are potential prey.
I grew up poor and blue collar and went to work in the middle class white collar world. That book was indispensable for understanding how corporate management worked and thought, and why decisions were made that seemed illogical. It’s a field guide to assholes by behavior.
If someone’s using it as a guide to their own behavior, they’re using it wrong.
Isn’t part of the point of the book to show how “unethical and manipulative” the people in power are? Like, you don’t get power by following ethics and not manipulating people…
I don’t see why the book is being shamed. John Greene is right about those kinds of people even if you don’t want to hear it. Everyone has the capacity for evil
It is disgusting, but it is very real, and very common.
It very accurately describes how people in charge behave in the vast majority of corporations.
Now read laws of human nature by the same author. Really good
Politicians love this book.
To me it’s no different than reading Machiavelli’s The Prince or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Both of these books can be read by despicable people looking to do harm to others or by good people looking to avoid them.
It does self contradict a lot too
The writer (RG) himself said: If someone reads and follows all the 48 laws, that person would be the most ugly and disgusting one to ever walked the planet.
I don’t believe it’s meant to be a self help book. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive (but it’s masked as a prescriptive book, just like The Prince)
I will argue that it must be made a compulsory reading for high school kids. Each and everyone of us is being manipulated from birth in one way or another by the society. Be it from the corporations, religious cult leaders or govt agencies. This is one of the few books which lets the sheep get a glimpse of the slaughterhouse surrounding it. Reading it and identifying patterns can save you from being a sucker for scammers.
I don’t know how the author originally thought for it to be read.
But I will suggest reading it and taking the information as a grain of salt, at best.Don’t read it all at once, and don’t go too deep.
If you take it very seriously you will have hard time dealing with people, you will always have a sense of danger and you will think that everyone wants something from you (even when they might not).
It is a must-know info to have but also a dangerous one.
(For me personally it took months to be able to again properly face people and take their kindness. Reading it literally made me question my own and other’s religion in this sense “is this real or did a dude just decided to call himself god one day for fame and manipulated the masses??”)
I read it a few months ago and was hugely turned off by the way it plays fast and loose with actual history
As the former victim of sociopathic abuse, I found it very informative, and gave me some skills to turn the tables.
Love all the pearl clutching comments here. The book isn’t some powerful demonic entity. It’s basic human psychology and is extremely informative. If you’re gonna be an asshole, you’re gonna be an asshole. Like anything, it cuts both ways.
Whether you play or not, you will be played. Better know the game.
I bought the book years ago thinking at least the historical anecdotes would be interesting. After a handful og pages I looked up a few of the stories of Bismarck and others and found out they were completely fabricated… threw the book in the trash.
People scoff at books that are about Will to Power tales, but happily consume serial killer content with little reflection on what it might do to them or who it makes them idolize. Greene pulls back the cover on human behavior? Bad. Disney makes a thirty movie series that’s essentially military propaganda? Bring the kids.
I like the forward to the revised edition, which argues that the martyr or person who thinks they’re ‘above the power game’ are playing an even more manipulative game by first lying to themselves and second foisting the burden of any responsibility whatsoever on others who play for power. After all, you’re making a post for imaginary points about how divisive a book on the hierarchy is. You can say it’s because you like engaging with the community, but on some level, the joy of social media is in social credit.
We bid for the power we think we can get, however small.
Personally – I found the book cheesy and full of mediocre “epiphany porn.” I stopped reading halfway through because it felt like I was listening to a drunk bro talk share half-assed life lessons.
From my experience, the types of people who take the book too seriously as a life guide are not competent nor are they very smart. I doubt that many people decide to be unethical and eschew integrity to get ahead in life *because* of this book; more often, they use the book as an excuse.
I’ve heard an enormous amount of bad press about this book and how utterly horrid and immoral it is, along with all the usual jokes about how it was for business majors and psychopaths, and deliberately avoided it for **years** because of it.
I finally read it recently and I **really** wish I had read this long ago. I could only read it in small quantities at a time because it was so long, but the book itself is harmless, mostly involves lots of historical anecdotes, and was incredibly useful in helping me better understand the kinds of power plays people were making around me and how my own behavior was being perceived. This knowledge would have been really helpful in protecting myself against power-hungry people who repeatedly took advantage of me, as well as helping me work towards my own professional and personal goals. If anyone thinks of this as an “icky” book to avoid based off of reviews alone, please take my perspective into account.
Most knowledge’s morality and ethics relate to how that knowledge is used, not what it is. I think we all act without access to an understanding of a situation through the lens of power at our peril, and encourage anyone who is at all interested to give the book a go and see if it teaches them anything useful. There’s no book that can make someone behave ethically or unethically – let’s not blame the messenger and only end up giving an advantage to those who want power at others’ expense.
It’s a fantastic book. REality is often times abrasive and difficult to accept by many.
Spoiler alert: all life is competition. Every living thing competes for resources and reproduction. This book teaches you not only how to get the resources and reproductive opportunities, but it also teaches you how to deal with people who are power hungry, and why they are powerful.
Modern society has led people to believe that humans have evolved past competition. They haven’t. It’s just in another form.
These books are about human psychology. Understanding what makes people attracted to you, and how to get what you want from life is not “manipulative.” It’s survival.
Learning about human psychology should not be frowned upon. Besides, it is up to the individual to decide how to use this information. Let’s not start the authoritarian concept of deciding which information is and is not harmful.
The book is pseudo-scientific and mostly just common sense. Tbh I find posts like these cringe, only because they make such a big deal out of this book.
I just looked into buying it and the kindle version is $17 while the paperback is $12! Is being a ripoff one of the “laws of power”?
48 Laws of power is one of the worst and most disgusting books i have read.
It is so sad to even imagine some people think that way. Let alone write a whole book on topic.
Even when you look at Robert Green you see a very weak, sad, low cunning and manipulative guy.
Everyone that I know of who read this book and liked it and suggest it, are single and or not doing good in life. They don’t let things flow , they tend to not be good pple, u can sense the manipulation radiating from their words. They over think things always making it about power and control. They manipulate in hopes of power. They’re hurting themselves by using this book as a guide.
Ok, my the. 12 year old sister was once busted by my parents for a copy of Playgirl found in her room. I will never forget the laugh we had when she claimed she only had it for their articles.I think people who say they read it to be prepared against people who use the books tactical lessons are like my 12 year of sister.
Come on: you are reading to learn the strategies. Just admit it.