The 50th Law (14 page)

This split creates an ambivalence and awkwardness in our actions. We are not very good at being either good or bad. When we do the manipulative acts that are necessary, it is with half a heart and some guilt. We are not sure how to operate in this way—when to play the more aggressive role, or how far to go.

The great sixteenth-century Florentine writer Niccolò Machiavelli noticed a similar phenomenon in his day, on a different level. Italy had splintered into several city-states that were constantly intriguing for power. It was a dangerous, complicated environment for a leader. In facing a rival state, a prince had to be extremely careful. He knew that these rivals would do anything to advance their interests, including cutting deals with others to isolate or destroy him. He had to be ready to attempt any kind of maneuver to protect his state. At the same time he was imbued with Christian values. He had to juggle two codes of behavior—one for private life and another for the game of power. This made for awkwardness. Nobody really defined the moral parameters for how to defend and advance his state. If he became too aggressive, he would look bad on the world stage and suffer for it. If he was too good and gentle, his state could be overrun by a rival, bringing misery for his citizenry.

For Machiavelli, the problem wasn’t a leader adjusting his morality to the circumstance—everyone does that. It was that he did not do it well. Too often he would be aggressive when he needed to be cunning, or vice versa. He would not recognize in time the once friendly state that was now plotting against him, and his response would be too desperate. When a venture succeeds, people tend to overlook some of the nasty tactics you were forced to use; when a venture fails, those same tactics become scrutinized and condemned.

A prince or leader must first and foremost be effective in his actions and to do so he must master the art of knowing when and how to be bad. This requires some fearlessness and flexibility. When the situation calls for it, he must be the lion—aggressive and direct in protecting his state, or grabbing something to secure its interests. At other times, he has to be the fox—getting his way through crafty maneuvers that disguise his aggression. And often he must play the lamb—the meek, deferential, and good creature exalted in culture. He is bad in the right way, calibrated to the situation, and careful to make his actions look justified to the public, reserving his nastier tactics for behind the scenes. If he masters the art of being bad, he uses it sparingly and he creates more peace and power for his citizens than the awkward prince who tries to be too good.

This should be the model for us as well. We are all now princes competing with thousands of rival “states.” We have our aggressive impulses, our desires for power. These impulses are dangerous. If we act upon them unconsciously or awkwardly, we can create endless problems for ourselves. We must learn to recognize the situations that require assertive (yet controlled) actions, and which mode of attack (fox or lion) is suitable.

The following are the most common foes and scenarios that you will encounter in which some form of badness is required to defend or advance yourself.

AGGRESSORS

By 1935, there were some on the left in the United States who had grown discontented with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reforms, known as the New Deal. They believed these reforms were not working fast enough. They decided to band together to form what would later be known as the Union Party, to galvanize this discontent. They were going to run against FDR in 1936, and the threat was very real that they would gain enough support to throw the election to the Republicans. Within this group was Huey Long, the great populist senator from Louisiana, and Father Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who had a popular radio program. Their ideas were vaguely socialistic and appealed to many who felt disenfranchised during the Great Depression. Their attacks on FDR began to have effect; his poll numbers went down. Feeling emboldened, they became even more aggressive and relentless in their campaign.

In the midst of this, FDR remained mostly silent, letting them fill the air with their charges and threats. His advisers panicked; they felt he was being too passive. But for Roosevelt it was part of a plan—he felt certain that the public would grow tired of their shrill attacks as the months went on; he sensed that the factions within the Union Party would begin to fight among themselves as the election neared. He ordered his surrogates to not attack these men.

At the same time, he went to work behind the scenes. In Louisiana, he fired as many Long supporters working for the government as possible and replaced them with those on his side. He launched detailed investigations into the senator’s dubious financial affairs. With Coughlin, he worked to isolate him from other notable Catholic priests, making him look like a fringe radical. He introduced laws that forced Coughlin to get an operating permit to broadcast his shows; the government found reasons to deny his requests and temporarily silenced him. All of this served to confuse and frighten FDR’s foes. As he had predicted, the party began to splinter and the public lost interest. Roosevelt won the 1936 election in an unprecedented landslide.

FDR had understood the basic principle in squaring off against aggressors who are direct and relentless. If you meet them head on, you are forced to fight on their terms. Unless you happen to be an aggressive type, you are generally at a disadvantage against those who have simple ideas and fierce energy. It is best to fight them in an indirect manner, concealing your intentions and doing what you can behind the scenes—hidden from the public—to create obstacles and sow confusion. Instead of reacting, you must give aggressors some space to go further with their attacks, getting them to expose themselves in the process and provide you plenty of juicy targets to hit. If you become too active and forceful in response, you look defensive. You are playing the fox to their lion—remaining cool and calculating, doing whatever you can to make them more emotional and baiting them to fall apart through their own reckless energy.

PASSIVE AGGRESSORS

These types are masters at disguise. They present themselves as weak and helpless, or highly moral and righteous, or friendly and ingratiating. This makes them hard to pick out at first glance. They send all kinds of mixed signals—alternating between friendly, cool, and hostile—creating confusion and conflicting emotions. If you try to call them on their behavior, they use this confusion to make you feel guilty, as if you were the one who was the source of the problem. Once you are drawn into their dramas, with your emotions engaged, it can be very difficult to detach yourself. The key is recognizing them in time to take appropriate action.

When the Grand Duchess Catherine (future empress of Russia, Catherine the Great) met her husband-to-be, Peter, she felt he was an innocent child at heart. He continued to play with toy soldiers and had a petulant, moody temperament. Then shortly after their marriage in 1745, she began to detect a different side to his character. In private they got along well enough. But then she would hear from secondhand sources all kinds of nasty stories about how he had regretted their marriage and how he preferred her chambermaid. What was she to believe—these stories or his geniality when they were together? After he became Czar Peter III, he would graciously invite Catherine to visit him in the morning, but then he would ignore her. When the royal gardener stopped delivering her favorite fruits, she found out it was on his orders. Peter was doing everything he could to make her life miserable and humiliate her in subtle ways.

Fortunately Catherine figured out early on that he was a master manipulator. His childish exterior was clearly there to distract attention from his petty, vindictive core. His goal, she believed, was to bait her into doing something rash that would give him an excuse to isolate or get rid of her. She decided to bide her time, be as gracious as possible, and win over some key allies in the court and the military, many of whom had come to despise the czar.

Finally, certain of her allies’ support, she instigated a coup that would get rid of him once and for all. When it became clear that the military had sided with Catherine and that he was to be arrested, Peter started to beg and plead with her: he would change his ways, and they would rule together. She did not reply. He sent another message saying he would abdicate, if only he could return peacefully to his own estate with his mistress. She refused to bargain. He was arrested and soon thereafter murdered by one of the coup intriguers, perhaps with the approval of the empress.

Catherine was a classic fearless type. She understood that with passive aggressors you must not get emotional and drawn into their endless intrigues. If you respond indirectly, with a kind of passive aggression yourself, you play into their hands—they are better at this game than you are. Being underhanded and tricky only spurs on their insecurities and intensifies their vindictive nature. The only way to treat these types is to take bold, uncompromising action that either discourages further nonsense or sends them running away. They respond only to power and leverage. Having allies higher up the chain can serve as a means of blocking them. You are playing the lion to their fox, making them afraid of you. They see there will be real consequences if they continue their behavior in any form.

To recognize such types, look for extremes in behavior that are not natural—too kind, too ingratiating, too moral. These are most likely disguises that are worn to deflect attention from their true nature. Better to be proactive and take precautionary measures the moment you feel they are trying to get into your life.

UNJUST SITUATIONS

Some time in the early 1850s, Abraham Lincoln came to the conclusion that the institution of slavery was the great stain on our democracy and had to be eliminated. But as he surveyed the political landscape he became concerned: the politicians on the left were too noisy and righteous—in their fervor to promote abolition, they would polarize the country and the slaveholders could easily exploit these political divisions to maintain their way of life for decades. Lincoln was the consummate realist—if your goal is to end an injustice, you have to aim for results, and that requires being strategic and even deceptive. To end slavery he would be willing to do almost anything.

He decided he was the politician best suited for this cause. His first step was to present a moderate front to the public in the 1860 campaign and after his election to the presidency. He gave the impression that his main goal was to maintain the Union and to gradually phase slavery out of existence through a policy of containment. When war became inevitable in 1861, he decided to lay a clever trap for the South, baiting them into an attack on Fort Sumter that would force him to declare war. This made it seem that the North was the victim of aggression. All of these maneuvers were designed to keep his support in the North relatively unified—to oppose him was to oppose his efforts to defeat the South and maintain the Union, the slavery issue slipping into the background. This unified front on his side made it almost impossible for the enemy to play political games.

As the tide of the war turned in favor of the North, he gradually shifted to more radical positions (stated in the Emancipation Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address), knowing he had more leeway to reveal his real goals and act on them. Leading the North to victory in the war, he had even more room to continue his campaign. In sum, to defeat slavery Lincoln was prepared to publicly manipulate opinion by concealing his intentions, and to practice outright deceit in his political maneuverings. This required great fearlessness and patience on his part, as almost everyone misread his intentions and criticized him as an opportunist. (Some still do.)

In facing an unjust situation, you have two options. You can loudly proclaim your intentions to defeat the people behind it, making yourself look good and noble in the process. But in the end, this tends to polarize the public (you create one hardened enemy for every sympathizer won over to the cause), and it makes your intentions obvious. If the enemy is crafty, this makes it almost impossible to defeat them. Or, if it is results you are after, you must learn instead to play the fox, letting go of your moral purity. You resist the pull to get emotional, and you craft strategic maneuvers designed to win public support. You shift your position to suit the circumstance, baiting the enemy into actions that will win you sympathy. You conceal your intentions. Think of it as war—short of unnecessary violence, you are called to do whatever it takes to defeat the enemy. There is no nobility in losing if an injustice is allowed to prevail.

STATIC SITUATIONS

In any venture, people quickly create rules and conventions that must be followed. This is often necessary to instill some discipline and order. But most often these rules and conventions are arbitrary—they are based on something that was successful in the past but might have little relevance to the present. They are often instruments for those in power to maintain their grip and keep the group unified. If this goes on long enough, they become stultifying and crowd out any new ways for doing things. In such a situation, what is called for is the total destruction of these dead conventions, creating space for something new. In other words you must be the complete lion, as bad as can be.

This was how several important black jazz musicians—such as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie—responded to the musical conventions that had hardened in the early 1940s. From its more freewheeling earlier days, jazz had become co-opted by white performers and audiences. The sound that became popular—big band, swing—was more controlled and regimented. To make any money in the business you had to play by the rules and perform these popular genres. But even those black musicians who followed the conventions were still paid considerably less than their white counterparts. The only way around this oppressive situation was to destroy it with a completely new sound, in this case with something that later became known as bebop. This new genre went against all the current conventions. The music was wild and improvisatory. As it became popular, it gave these musicians some space to perform on their own terms and some control over their careers. Now the static situation was broken and the field was left open to the great jazz innovations of the 1950s and ’60s.