The Dark Arts: Robert Greene’s Laws of Human Nature

“I’m not evil — I’m a realist,” rails Robert Greene, against his critics.

The soft-spoken and silver-tongued man has been labelled Machiavellian, sociopathic, and even evil. His previous works have been banned by American prisons in fear of arming its readers with “weapons of persuasion and charm.” [1,2] Without yield, Greene shot back with The Laws of Human Nature. You’ll find below 11 key ideas in his own words:

1. Law of Irrationality — Master Your Emotional Self

The Motivation: Like everyone, you think you are rational, but you are not. Rationality is not a power you are born with but one you acquire through training and practice.

Try It: The first step toward becoming rational is to understand our fundamental irrationality.

Examine your emotional self: What weaknesses come out? The desire to please, to bully or control, deep levels of mistrust?

The Advice: Exercise rationality by channeling the energy of your emotions. This begins by cultivating an awareness of how your emotions affect your thoughts and patterns of behaviour in the first place. Grow this awareness by entering flow state through, for example, creating art or music, yoga, or meditation.

The Greeks had an appropriate metaphor for the optimal balance of thinking and emotion: the rider (skepticism) and the horse (curiosity). Without the rider, there is no directed movement or purpose. Without the horse, there is no energy and no power.

2. Law of Narcissism — Transform Self-Love into Empathy

The Motivation: We are all on the spectrum of self-absorption. We assume what people are emoting behind their words.

Try It: There is always an emotion behind any intention. When figuring out another’s intentions, begin with the assumption that you are ignorant and that you have natural biases that will make you judge people incorrectly.

Attune to what they want, their goals, which will also register physically in you if you pay attention. Focus on the overall tone that you are pick up. How deeply are they listening? Are they making consistent eye contact? Does it feel like even though they are listening to you, they are absorbed in themselves? Understand the value system of the other person; keeping in mind their value system will allow you to enter their spirit and perspective precisely in the moment you would normally turn defensive.

The Advice: Each person you meet is like an undiscovered country, with a very particular psychological chemistry that you will carefully explore. You are more than ready to be surprised by what you uncover.

3. Law of Role-playing — See Through People’s Masks

The Motivation: Our real feelings continually leak out in the form of gestures, tones of voice, facial expressions, and posture.

Try It: When in conversation, note any changes in pitch or the pace of talking. Later, graduate to elements of body language such as posture, hand gesture, and the positioning of legs.

The Advice: Accept the theatrical quality of life. The word personality comes from the Latin persona which means “mask.”

In confident and powerful people, eyelids are more closed, a sign of seriousness and competence. If they are bored or annoyed, they show it more freely and openly. They often smile less, frequent smiling being a sign of overall insecurity. They feel more entitled to touch people. Most important, others feel compelled to imitate their style and mannerisms. The leader will tend to impose of a form of nonverbal communication on the group in very subtle ways.

4. Law of Compulsive Behaviour — Determine the Strength of People’s Character

The Motivation: People’s characters are formed in their earliest years and by their daily habits.

Try It: Look at how people lose in games. Can they do so graciously? Their body language will say a lot on that front.

Look at how people handle stressful moments and responsibility. Look at their patterns: what have they actually completed or accomplished? You can also test people. For instance, a good-natured joke at their expense can be quite revealing. Do they respond graciously to this, or do their eyes flash resentment or even anger? Criticize them in a direct manner. Do they take this to heart and try to learn and improve, or do they show overt signs of resentment?

The Advice: The etymology of the word character from the ancient Greek refers to an engraving or stamping instrument. Character, then, is something that is so deeply ingrained or stamped within us that it compels us to act in certain ways, beyond our awareness and control.

Based on genetic and social dispositions, you will tend to rely on certain strategies for dealing with stress, looking for pleasure, or handling people. Shine awareness on these habits.

5. Law of Desire — Become an Elusive Object of Desire

The Motivation: People do not want truth and honesty, no matter how much we hear such nonsense endlessly repeated. They want their imaginations to be stimulated and to be taken beyond their banal circumstances. They want fantasy and objects of desire to covet and grope after.

Try It: Create an air of mystery around you and your work. Associate it with something new, unfamiliar, exotic, progressive, and taboo. Do not define your message, but leave it vague.

The Advice: More and more people have come to believe that others should simply desire them for who they are. This means revealing as much as they can about themselves. They leave no room for imagination or fantasy.

People may claim we humans are becoming more honest and truthful, but human nature does not change within a few generations. People have become more obvious and forthright not out of some deep moral calling but out of increasing self-absorption and overall laziness. Do not swallow the easy moralism of the day, which urges honesty at the expense of desirability.

Objectify yourself and what you produce. Let people project onto you their own fantasies and preconceptions. Know how and when to withdraw. Create the impression that others desire you or your work.

6. Law of Shortsightedness — Elevate Your Perspective

Story 1: In Ancient Rome, a group of men loyal to the Republic feared that Julius Caesar was going to make his dictatorship permanent and establish a monarchy. In 44 BC they decided to assassinate him, thereby restoring the Republic. In the ensuing chaos and power vacuum, Caesar’s great-nephew Octavius quickly rose to the top, assumed power, and permanently ended the Republic by establishing a de facto monarchy. After Caesar’s death it came out that he had never intended to create a monarchial system. The conspirators brought about precisely what they had tried to stop.

Story 2: In nineteenth-century India, under British colonial rule, authorities decided there were too many venomous cobras in the streets of Delhi, making life uncomfortable for the British residents and their families. To solve this, they offered a reward for every dead cobra residents would bring in. Soon, enterprising locals began to breed cobras in order to making a living from the bouty. The government caught onto this and cancelled the program. The breeders, resentful of the rulers and angered by their actions, decided to release their cobras ack on the streets, hereby tripling the population from before the government program.

The Motivation: You cannot possibly map out causal chains or get a complete handle on consequences. But by making your thinking more consequential you can at least become aware of the more obvious negative consequences that could ensue.

Good intentions often lead to what are known as cobra effects, because people with the noblest intentions are often blinded by feelings of self-righteousness and do not consider the complex and often malevolent motivations of others.

Try It: Ask yourself if you get lost in trivia: Do you get overwhelmed by the complexity of your work, feel the need to be on top of all the details and global trends and drown in information? These are sure signs that you have lost a sense of your priorities. Instead, be a farsighted human.

The Advice: Be a farsighted human:

• Contextualizing / thinking of what ifs
• You anticipate / visualize people’s adverse reactions / overreactions, which will give you a calmer and more realistic disposition
• Keep long term goals at the forefront of your mind so as not to get lost in trivia
• Feel a deep sense of connection to your childhood. Pay greater attention to the lessons of the past instead of repressing them.

7. Law of Defensiveness — Soften People’s Resistance by Confirming Their Self-Opinion

Story: In 1782, the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais put the finishing touches on his great masterpiece the Marriage of Figaro. The approval of King Louis XVI was required, and when he read the manuscript, he was furious. Such a play would lead to a revolution, he said: “This man mocks everything that must be respected in a government.” After much pressure, he agreed to have it privately performed in a theatre at Versailles. The aristocratic audience loved it. The king allowed more performances, but he directed his censors to get their hands on the cript and alter its worst passages before it was presented to the public. To bypass this, Beaumarchais commissioned a tribunal of academics, intellectuals, courtiers, and government ministers to go over the play with him. A man who attended the meeting wrote, “M. de Beaumarchais announced that he would submit unreservedly to every cut and change that the gentlemen and even the ladies present might deem appropriate… Everyone wanted to add something of his own… M. de Breutil suggested a witticism, Beaumarchais accepted it and thanked him… ‘It will save the fourth act’ Mme de Matignon contributed the color of the little page’s ribbon. The color was adopted and became fashionable.” Beaumarchais was indeed a very clever courtier. By allowing others to make even the smallest changes to his masterpiece, he greatly flattered their egos and intelligence. Of course, on the larger changes later requested by Louis’s censors, Beaumarchais did not relent. By then he had so won over the members of his own tribunal that they stridently defended him, and Louis had to back down. Lowering people’s defenses in this way on matters that are not so important will give you great latitude to move them in the direction you desire and get them to concede to your desires on more important matters.

Try It: Pay attention to their non-verbal cues. You will see their eyes light up when certain topics are mentioned, you must guide the conversation in that direction.

The advice: “The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself,” writes Jean de La Bruyere. With the other feeling validated and mirrored, you have some latitude to make gentle corrections and even apply some reverse psychology.

Remind them of the good things they have done for you in the past. This will help confirm their self-opinion: “Yes, I am generous.” The key to flattery is to make it strategic. Look for those qualities people are uncertain about and offer reassurance.

Never follow up your praise with a request for help. Your flattery is a setup and requires the passage of some time. If possible, get third parties to pass along your compliments, as if they had simply overheard them.

When it comes to the ideas and opinions you hold, see them as toys or building blocks that you are playing with. Some you will keep, others you will knock down, but your spirit remains flexible and playful.

8. Law of Repression — Confront Your Dark Side

The Motivation: Every now and then, we glimpse behaviour that seems to contradict what we normally see. What we glimpse in these moments is the dark side of their character, what the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the Shadow. It is as if we only see a two-dimensional, flattened image of people — their pleasant social side. Knowing the contours of their Shadow makes them come to life in three dimensions. This ability to see the rounded person is a critical step in our knowledge of human nature. Armed with this knowledge, we can anticipate people’s behaviour in moments of stress, understand their hidden motives, and not get dragged under by any self-destructive tendencies.

We internalized all of the ideals of our culture — being nice, having prosocial values. Much of this is essential for the smooth functioning of social life, but in the process a large part of our nature moved underground, into the Shadow.

Try It: Decipher your shadow: take note of any particular one-sided, emphatic traits in yourself. Assume that the opposite trait lies buried deep within, and from there try to see more signs of this trait in your behaviour.

The Advice: Look deeply at your tendencies to project emotions and bad qualities onto people you know. We are particularly sensitive to traits and weaknesses in others that we are repressing in ourselves. Not only completely accept the shadow but desire to integrate it into your present personality.

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is,” writes Carl Jung.

9. Law of Grandiosity — Know Your Limits

The Motivation: We imagine we have the golden touch and that we can now magically transfer our skills to some other medium or field. The belief that they can easily transfer their skills — a movie executive can become a theme park designer, a businessman can become the leader of a nation.

Try It: You can measure the levels of grandiosity in people in simple ways: Notice how people respond to criticism of them or their work. It’s normal for any of us to feel defensive and a bit upset when criticized.

If people are successful, notice how they act in more private moments. Have they so overidentified with their powerful public image that it carries over into their private life?

The Advice: In the past, we humans were able to channel our grandiose needs into religion. Connected to something much larger than ourselves, we felt enlarged. Today, religions and great causes have lost their binding power. The need to feel larger and significant however does not simply disappear; it is stronger than ever. And absent any other channels, people will tend to direct this energy toward themselves. Although rarely conscious of this, what they are choosing to idealize and worship is the self.

The greatest protection you can have against grandiosity is to maintain a realistic attitude. You cannot be skilled at everything. You need to play to your strengths. You must have a solid grasp on your social position — your allies. You cannot please everyone.

10. Law of Aimlessness — Advance with a Sense of Purpose

The Motivation: We lack a sense of cohesion and direction in life. We could choose any number of paths, depending on our shifting emotions which pull us this way and that. Why go here instead of there? We wander through life, never quite reaching the goals that we feel are so important to us, or realizing our potential. The moments in which we feel clarity and purpose are fleeting. To soothe the pain from our aimlessness, we might enmesh ourselves in various addictions, pursue new forms of pleasure, or give ourselves over to some cause that interests us for a few months or weeks. As King expressed it: “We have a responsibility to set out to discover what we are made for, to discover our life’s work, to discover what we are called to do. And after we discover that, we should set out to do it with all the strength and all of the power that we can muster.”

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” — Nietzsche

Try It: To discover your calling in life, look for signs of primal inclinations in your earliest years. When it comes to exercise, you understand the importance of manageable levels of pain and discomfort, because they later yield strength, stamina, and other positive sensations. The same will come to you by actually embracing the tedium in your practice. You want to use and embrace any kind of deadline. If necessary, manufacture reasonably tight deadlines to intensify your sense of purpose.

The Advice: The real purpose comes from within, a sense of mission that we feel personally and intimate connected to. One that nobody imposed on us and that nobody can take away.

Under the influence of drugs or alcohol, for instance, we can temporarily feel transported beyond the banality of our lives. All of us require pleasurable moments outside work, ways to relieve our tension. But when we operate with a sense of purpose, we know the value of limiting ourselves, opting for depth of experience, rather than overstimulation.

If we make money our primary goal, we never truly cultivate our uniqueness, and eventually someone younger and hungrier will supplant us.

As for cynics, they would rather have the void as purpose than be void of purpose. It’s really hard to take anything so seriously; we should just laugh and have a good time. It’s all the same. This attitude presents itself as cool and hip. Its adherents display a somewhat apathetic and sardonic air that gives them the appearance that they see through it all. But the attitude is not what it seems. Behind it is the adolescent pose of appearing to not care, which disguises a great fear of trying and failing, of standing out and being ridiculed. It stems from sheer laziness and offers its believers consolation for their lack of accomplishments.

11. Law of Conformity — Resist the Downward Pull of the Group

Story: Throughout Beijing, posters with large headlines had appeared everywhere attacking the ‘antiparty black line,’ meaning those who were secretly trying to put the brakes on the communist revolution. By June, the movement sweeping Beijing and soon all of China, had acquired a name — the Great Socialist Cultural Revolution. As in schools around China, they also suspended all classes and exams at Yizhen Middle School (YMS). Students were to devote themselves to making revolution. Students were to form their own committee, choose a school official to be its head, and run the school itself through the committee. Posters appeared attacking teachers; others carried old spears and swords as they patrolled the school looking for spies; teachers were put in stress positions. Mao had dispatched army units throughout the country to take control of schools. The increasing chaos and violence that was engulfing YMS was going on all over China, not only in schools but in factories and government offices as well; the Cultural Revolution was spinning out of control. Citizens fled and entire buildings were abandoned, and looters scoured them for goods.

The events depicted in Born Red reveal in a microcosm the result of Mao’s experiment — how human nature cannot be uprooted; try to alter it and it merely reemerges in different shapes and forms. Mao had the following specific strategy to enact his bold idea: focus people’s attention on a legitimate enemy — in this case, revisionists, those who consciously or unconsciously were clinging to the past. Encourage people, particularly the young, to actively fight against this reactionary force, but also against any entrenched forms of authority. His strategy however had a fatal flaw at its core: when people operate in groups, they do not engage in nuanced thinking and deep analysis. Only individuals with a degree of calmness and detachment can do so. Deliberately creating chaos, as Mao did, only makes the group more certain to fall into these primitive patterns of thinking

The Motivation: The moment we enter a workspace or any group, we undergo a change. We easily slip into more primitive modes of thinking and behaving, without realizing it.

Try It: Develop the ability to detach yourself from the group and create some mental space for true independent thinking. We begin this experiment by accepting the reality of the powerful effect that the group has on us.

There is a need to perform, in the group setting, we are always performing. You should feel no shame about this need. Better to be aware, to retain that inner distance, and to transform yourself into a conscious and superior actor. Discern which emotions are the most contagious for you.

The Advice: Let’s use the viral nature of emotions in the group but play on a different set of emotions: by staying calm and patient, by focusing on results and cooperating with others to get practical things done, we can begin to spread this spirit throughout the group. Phil jackson, the most successful basketball coach in history, noticed that a lot of other coaches would try to rev up the team before a game, get them excited and even angry. He found it much more productive to instill a sense of calmness that helped the players execute the game plan and not overreact to the ups and downs in the game.

Become a consummate observer of yourself as you interact with groups of any size. Begin with the assumption that you are not nearly as much of an individual as you imagine. To a great extent, your thoughts and belief system are heavily influenced by the people who raised you, your colleagues at work, your friends, and the culture at large. Consider yourself an anthropologist studying the strange customs of an alien tribe. You may also try entertaining an idea that is the very opposite of the group you belong to or the conventional wisdom. See if there is any value in deliberately going against the grain.

References

[1] Indigo

[2] Seattle Times