the 48 laws of power are bumming me out

xp

I get the impression that there are probably a lot more people in the music business fantasizing that they're living by these rules than actually living by them.

ANNALS OF POWER

FRESH PRINCE

Hp -hop's Machiavelli.

BY NICK PAUMGAIkTEN
e first law of power, as set forth (or down) by Robert Greene in his 1998 book, 'The 48 Laws of Power," is "Never outshine the master." Thou shalt not upstage the boss, the benefactor, the mentor, or the talent, whose good graces bestow clout upon thee and whose ego must therefore be stroked. Greene illustrates each of his laws with historical instances of transgression and observance, and for the first one the exemplars are, respectively, Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's
finance minister, who threw such extrav-agant parties that the King had him im-
prisoned for life, and Galileo, who was
clever enough not only to discover Jupi-
tei2s moons but to name them after the
Medicis. "Do not fool yourself into think-
ing that life has changed much," Greene
writes. Every trading desk, district office,
or shop floor has its Sun King. You just
need to figure out who it is.
This first law has achieved special resonance in the hip-hop community, which has adopted Greene's book as a hallowed text, and Greene himself as a kind of sage. Rappers and executives frequently cite other statutes as models for their industry maneuverings (Law 15: "Crush your enemy totally"; Law 2.: 'Play a sucker to catch a sucker"), but thfirst lay/s invocation of hierarchy seems to suit the image that rappers and their handlers have of themselves and their line-that they are knights who must abide by a code. Greene is their Capellanus.
Six years ago, the rapper Busta Rhymes was working on the film "Halloween: Resurrection," the eighth in the series. His acting coach gave him a special copy of "The48Laws" asagift, with hisname inscribed on the cover. One of the production executives had been making what some in the cast and crew considered unreasonable demands, and it occurred to Busta Rhymes, as he consulted the book in his trailer, that, as he recalled recently, "the way you had to approach him, when you were objecting to something he was
saying, was to make it like he was always right. Bingo: 'Never outshine the master." In time, "Halloween" was indeed resurrected, and thirty million dollars were grossed. (At least one master-John Carpenter, the director of the first "Halloween"-was not outshone.) By then, Rhymes had come to feel that almost every situation in his life had a power law that suited it. For example, a friend recommended him to a casting agent for a role in "Shaft," and, when Rhymes got a part and the friend did not, the friend surreptitiously tried to sabotage him. "Instead of reacting as I would've, I just kept cool," Rhymes told me. "I showed my appreciation. I am now an enemy of this person, but he doesn't know it. I know where that person's malicious energy lies. I get to use this person like a puppet on a string." (Law 2: "Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies.") Meanwhile, Law 10 ("Avoid the unhappy and unlucky") encouraged him to jettison other friends-the criminally inclined,
s'This f
ay. riend brings his dirt in from the street and gets it in your shit," Rhymes observed. Loyalty, it turned out, was overrated. For a time, he sensed that he had esoteric knowledge, a competitive edge: "I felt like I had some Deep Sea scroll or some shit."
About the same time, the book began to make the rounds at Def Jam records, circulating first among the managerial class, before filtering up (or down) to the artists. Chris Lighty, who manages Busts Rhymes and 50 Cent, and who might therefore be inclined to refer to each of them, publicly at least, as his master, still bestows that honor on his old Def jam mentor Lyor Cohen, another early adopter. When Lighty first came across the book, he joked that Cohen had written it-that Robert Greene didn't exist.
Greene does exist, although perhaps not in the state of diabolical radiance that his admirers sometimes imagine. They instruct their people to arrange
meetings with Mr. Greene, and they end up encountering an understated, somewhat geeky guy whose implementation of his own teachings is, if anything, very subtle. Whether by design or by nature, his reserve comes off as selfpossession, and his reputation remains undiminished. "He's the Jedi master, that's for sure," Lighty says.
Greene is forty-seven years old and lives in Los Angeles. He began writing "The 48 Laws" in the mid-nineties, after having held, by his count, eighty jobs, none of which brought him any power, except that which accrues from observation and experience. The book has sold more than eight hundred thousand copies in the U.S. and another million worldwide, and has been translated into twenty languages (including Latvian and Arabic but not French). It is in some ways just an exhaustive collation of the work of other sages, such as Machiavelli and Sun Tzuwhose "Art of War" was espoused by Hollywood and hip-hop, too. But its frank and ruthless approach, and its easy digest of admonishments-some innocuous ("Always say less than necessary"; "Keep your hands dean") and some less so ("Pose as a friend, work as a spy"; "Keep others in suspended terror")make it seem like some kind of gospel The design is stately, with great-man quotes in the margins, in red ink. Greene would say that the laws are not so much pieces of advice as they are observations of behavior-the fruit of research, if not quite revelation. "If the world is like a giant scheming court and we are trapped inside it, there is no use in trying to opt out of the game," Greene writes. "That will only render you powerless, and powerlessness will make you miserable."
Greene's next two books, "The Art of Seduction," a lush guide to inveigling, published in 2001 (the marginalia are lavender-hued), and "The 33 Strategies of War," a concordance of tactical thinking, published last winter, sold well, too. Not surprisingly, some people find all the books sinister or upsetting, in that they basically tell you how to be a creep, albeit a happy and successful one. But Greene's way of seeing the world-play or be played-has earned him a ragtag apostolate, which includes the T-shirt magnate Dov Charney (who says of Greene, "I call him Jesus"), the Knicks guard Stephon Marbury (his copy of "The 48 Laws"
came from a friend of his brother's, who encountered it in prison; "It's an inspiration from somewhere else," Marbuiy told me), and the producer Brian Grazer ("There was a time Mike Ovitz was one of my agents, and I didn't understand him, but when I saw this book I began to understand how he used power"), as well as rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent: people who, by position or disposition, must think a little harder to identify someone whom they'd be comfortable calling master.
To Greene, the master is Machiavelli. "Of course, it doesn't matter if I outshine him," Greene told me recently. "But rm not that presumptuous. rm not on his level."

Greene spent a week in New York in September, attending to various projects and disciples. The main event was a meeting with 50 Cent, the rapper and former crack dealer, who wants to collaborate with Greene on a street ver-
sion of "The 48 Laws": a slinger's gloss on Castiglione. He is not the first to advance some variation on this idea. A dozen or so people have approached Greene with movie adaptations in mind. None of them made much sense to Greene, until a few weeks ago, when he met with Busta Rhymes, who proposed a feature film about a family who lives by the forty-eight laws. "Ifs kind of Biblical," Greene says. "'The Godfather' meets 'East of Eden.'"
Greene has excellent posture and a muscular neck, a result in part of Pilates he has done over the years to counteract a chronic problem with his spine, but he walks with short steps and often wears a backpack, the straps snug on both shoulders, in a manner that suggests the fürtive application of a kick-me sign. If he wore black pants and white shirts, instead of hipster jeans and untucked rayon shirts, you'd mistake him for a Mormon missionary. To see him crossing the street in the rain, with a tattered
umbrella and puddle water soaking the cuffs of his jeans, is to witness firsthand the tendency for a sage to ignore his own precepts: in this case, Law 37 ("Create compelling spectacles") and Law 34 ("Be royal in your own fashion").
His meeting with 50 Cent was at the headquarters, in Chelsea, of Violator Management & Records, Chris Lights firm, where every employee is encouraged to read "The 48 Laws," and where no one can agree on who came across the book first. (An intern told me that she had been assigned the book in college.) A Violator partner named James (Cruz Control) Cruz cornered Greene and said, "I swear on everything that is dear to me. Call my wife and ask her where the book is in my house, and she will ask, 'Which one?' I have a copy in the den, one in the bedroom, one-and I mean no disrespect-in the bathroom." Greene laughed nervously and said, "Wow."
"1 want to get drunk around you so that I can hear what you have to say," Cruz said. "You and Fiddy-it's a marriage of geniuses."
Interns and guests (among them two shy young Yankee stars, Melky Cabrera
and Robinson Cano) milled around the office suite. Greene and 50 Cent found each other and exchanged greetings. Greene had expressed some anxiety, before this meeting, about how one should address 50 Cent: he didn't feel quite right saying "Fiddy." They had met once before and discovered that they had things in common, such as a tendency, in their youth, to carry around, and talk to, little green toy plastic soldiers, but, as Greene said, "There are disparities: I wasn't dealing drugs when I was eight years old."
Greene, Lighty, 50 Cent, and his literary agent, Marc Gerald, went into a conference room. 50 Cent sat with his back to a window, so that Greene faced the glare. The atmosphere was giddy, to suit 50 Cent's mood. "Chris takes all the credit for my work," 50 Cent said, referring to Lighty. "He's the dollar man. People say, '50 Cent, he can't possibly have come up with all that.'"
"Well, you know what?" Greene said. "We're going to change that."
50 Cent, wearing baggy jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black ball cap, has a warm smile and a gift for eye contact, and he
began talking profusely and without apparent direction, as though relieved to be in the company of someone who could appreciate the tactical workings of his mind. The previous week, he had been arrested, on Thirty-fourth Street, for driving an unregistered Lamborghini in an erratic manner, and then, after being released, had got into a scrape at a fashion show, when a photographer refused to get out of the seat next to his. As 50 Cent related it now, presumably for the purposes of strategy evaluation, the photographer yielded only when 50 Cent stood over him, put his hand on the man's shoulder, and said, 'Yo, get up."
"Law 49," Greene said, drolly.
"His perception of me is what got him up," 50 Cent went on. 'The respect comes from two things: admiration and fear."
"Ifs better to be feared than loved."
50 Cent grinned and said, "It makes it easier for me to continue to sell music. And my interest is really business, period."
50 Cent began to discuss certain strategic considerations in his career: how he must constantly beat back rival challenges, yet must sometimes also ignore them, so as not to legitimatize them; how people press him to do good works, when he knows that the image that sells is the opposite. He spends a great deal of time considering the workings of ill repute. "The waythey buyyou is the way you absolutely have to stay," he said. "It's better to be remembered than-tqitbe remembered. What makes me unsure about this is not being able to control people's perceptions."
"People have a lot of envy," Greene said. "They try and bring people down. That's Law 46." ("Never appear too perfect: envy creates silent enemies." See Rhymes, Busta.)
50 Cent shook his head and said, "it must be amazing to hang out with you. All kind of shit must fall out your ass, in passing."
In this meeting, however, Greene said little, as 50 Cent held forth. It was unclear whether this was a reflection of tactics or of Greene's own intuitive sense of his place in this power firmament, in the presence of a charismatic but not wholly coherent power strategist (whose debut album, incidentally, sold more copies in the United States in its first week than "The 48
Laws" has sold here in four hundred and twenty-five weeks). Occasionally, 50 Cent stood to make a point, or mimicked a punch, or pounded the table, while Greene sat still, with a perplexed smile on his face. Almost nothing had been said about the book proposal that was supposed to come out of the meeting. This appeared to be an audience.
50 Cent had a story to tell about dealing drugs, one that involved his seizure of market share on a corner in Queens. The key tactical maneuver, it seemed, was robbing his competitors at gunpoint, while wearing a mask, and then giving away their product free. The chain of events that this set off revealed 50 Cent to be a man of prodigious foresight.
"What made you think of this?" Greene asked, with a note of admiration.
50 Cent beamed.
The rivalries and grievances in rap music, as in local politics or professional wrestling, can be hard to keep up with. The consequences are occasionally real50 Cent has been stabbed, and once was shot nine times-but the beefs are not always entirely sincere. It's a game, like any other where reputation is the coin of the realm-the corner, the court, the House of Representatives-and strategy is as integral to it as beats and rhymes. At one point, 50 Cent talked about how he had erred in letting a petulant rival off the hook.
"There's a law in there for that," 50
Cent said. "I shoulda just finished his ass."
"Is that Machiavelli?" I asked.
"No, that's me," Greene said. "And Moses."
"Crush your enemy totally": 50 Cent wasn't entirely dear on the implications. "You say destroy completely," he said. "My problem is that I kind of begin to enjoy the destructive part, when I get 'em on the ropes. Because I enjoy it, I don't quite know when to stop."
"Right," Greene replied. "What about Law 47? 'In victory learn when to stop.' In war, they call it the 'culminating point of victory.' You have to get to the sweet spot where you destroy them and then just walk away."
After an hour and a half, 50 Cen?s representatives popped in to announce an imminent end to the meeting. And so, with the five minutes Greene had left, he tried to talk about their collaboration. He said, "Like Pve done with Napoleon and Hannibal, rd like to do with you."
"You know how in your books you went back to, like, Moses and great war tactics?" 50 Cent said. "Whaddaya think of the concept of utilizing some of the activities from street gangsters? The right method in the wrong situations. We don't want to give the message in the book 'Ifs O.K., you're just doing business, if you blow someone's head off.' But the mentality and movement of it is the mentality and movement of good business. The negative charge
travels faster than the positive charge."
"Whenever you watch a movie yoiire always more interested in the villain than the hero," Greene said.
50 Cent concurred. "You root for the villain. It's almost cinematic law."

Wen Greene was a kid, in Brentwood, he and some of the boys on his street played a game they called Gestapo. Two boys, impersonating prison-camp escapees, would run off separately into the hills, and the others would give chase, with a bloodhound. "It was terrifying," Greene told me. He suspects that, despite being the only Jewish boy in the group, he was the one who came up with the game.
Greene's father, who died six years
ago, sold cleaning supplies. His mother
stayed home. (Greene talks to his mother
nearly every other day. She goes into
bookstores and asks for his books, and
then reports back. He likes to tease her
by threatening to write a book about
Bozo the Clown, another area of inter-
est. As he put it, "What about power, se-
duction, war... Bozo?") Greene was a
good student and something of a loner.
He graduated early from high school
and went to Berkeley, to study English
literature, but one summer he took a
crash course in ancient Greek-eight
hours a day, for eight weeks. "I had a
weird connection to ancient Greek," he
said. "I could almost understand it before
1tarted studying it." One of the Greek
tethers was a professor at the University
of Wisconsin and offered to help him get
a scholarship there. "I hated Berkeley,"
Greene says. 'The hippie culture bugged
me." So he went to Madison.
Greene is what you might call a homegrown intellectual, and his house, a Spanish-style bungalow in Los Feliz, is filled with books, especially faded undergradera paperbacks. They are, fundamentally, his stock-in-trade, and there is little he'd rather do than sit with his cat, Bmtus, underlining passages and organizing the salient ideas on color-coded note cards. A good bookwill generate thirty cards. This interest was of little use to him, however, in the days before "The 48 Laws," when he wandered from project to project, waiting for something to take. He wrote online encyclopedia entries on philosophy, and at one point worked as a skip tracer, finding people over the phone. "It was all
about deception," he said. "You had to act like someone who knows them."
Really, Greene, like everyone else in a
twenty-mile radius, was trying to make it
as a screenwriter. He wrote TV treat-
ments (spontaneous combustion, alien
sightings) and film scripts (a hippie inher-
its a pile of money, a real-estate scheme).
A couple of them were optioned but never
made, and over time he accumulated
enough experience as gum on the indus-
try's shoe to witness some of the power
maneuvers that were practiced up and
down the line. One day, a film producer
told him, "You should be writing for the
theatre"-"Go to hell," in Los Angelese.
So he did. He wrote a half-dozen plays,
including one, "Drab Bard," which had a
palindrome structure: in the middle of the
play, the story reverses, and descends into
surrealistic nonsense. "People didn't know
what to make of it," Greene said.
Greene spent much of his twenties living in Europe, teaching or writing or scraping by. London, Crete, Barcelona. In Paris, he got a job as a receptionist at the Hotel Saint-André-des-Arts, in the Latin Quarter. To obtain working papers, he had pretended that he was Irish, accent and all. Borrowing from James Joyce, he invented a childhood on Gardiner Street, in Dublin, which, unbeknownst to him, had become a red-light district. He had a girlfriend from New York, and at one point she took him home, to Douglaston, Queens, to her parents, who were IrishAmerican and thrilled to meet a real Irishman. "It spiralled into this interesting and then irritating adventure that lasted for many years," Greene recalled.
It was in Paris that he learned to appreciate the seduction game. Another girlfriend introduced him to Laclos's novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," a key text. "I'm fascinated by courtesans and gold-diggers," he told me. "A woman who can use intelligence and strategy to get a man, who can treat a seduction like a military campaign-it just excites me." Most of the people who seek his counsel, however, are men looking for pickup tricks. ("Victim" is his word for the object of a seduction.) One executive called on him, ostensibly for power advice, but it became dear that what the man really wanted was an affair with his secretary. "I could have told him in a second how to go about it," Greene said. "But he was married and had a family and it would
probably have really screwed up his life, so I advised him to seduce someone else, as far from his office as possible."
Greene is a friend of the writer Neil Strauss, who last year published a pickupartist book called "The Game," and Strauss introduced him to the Izen twins, Brianne and Brittany, aspiring starlets and writers whom Greene likens to the Gabor and the Hilton sisters. The Izens are working on a television series they call "Gold-Diggers," which chronicles their efforts to ensnare rich, older men. Greene has been giving them advice. "Robert's a genius," Brianne told me. "When we first met him, he called us 'amateurs."
Greene is not a libertine. Drawing upon a list of the nine seducer types in his book (the Coquette, the Charmer, the Dandy, the Natural, etc.), he is, as he told me, "a reformed Rake." (Reformed rakes live in constant danger of recidivism.) He lives with his girlfriend, Anna Biller, a filmmaker and old-Hollywood fetishist, on whom he practiced some of the tactics suggested in "The Art of Seduction." Having seen her around Santa Monica, he got himself invited to a party at her house, where he slipped away to study her record collection. Afterward, he invited her to a Debussy opera that he knew would appeal to her. Still, the victim resisted. So he asked her to his thirtyseventh birthday party. He also invited seven other attractive women, friends who, at his bidding, did little to dispel the impression that they might be sleeping with him. It worked. He and Biller have been together for ten years.
Greene comes across as both reserved and sincere, a canny question-asker and embarrassment-revealer--a regular guy. He professes not to be a practitioner of his own power rules, but you can never quite shake the feeling that you may be a victim. His books, which are full of ploys and deceptions, induce mistrust. I had noticed on the acknowledgments page of "The 48 Laws" that his parents' name didn't have the "&' on the end. He said that after college he worked at Esquire, and wanted to differentiate himself from other Greens. (His author bio in "The 48 Laws" says that he was an editor at Esquire; in fact, he was an assistant.) Later, he decided that he couldn't remember where or when he'd added the "e."
The day I visited his house, Greene and I shot pool in his garage. (He drives
a beat-up Toyota Avalon, in a halting manner that would fail to get even 50 Cent arrested.) Greene is an avid player, and I am a terrible one, but somehow I won two games in a row, which led me to suspect that he'd let me win, which in turn had me second-guessing his every gesture. He had Biller show me a scene from a film she'd just finished, called "Viva," about, a bored housewife, circa 1972. (Biller was the writer, director, editor, and lead actress.) She had an old editing machine in the garage, so we crowded in and she cued up a sequence in which her character strips naked and takes a bath, while paging through a hard-core skin magazine. When the scene ended, Greene said, "This is where everything starts to turn a little tawdry." I wasn't sure what to think

A Jhile in New York, Greene, in V V defiance of Law 40 ("Despise the free luncit"), stayed in one of several apamnents belonging to Dov Charney, who owns AmericariApparei Charney reckons that he has bought four hundred copies of "The 48 Laws," which he calls "the BH1e for atheists." (He likes to give the,øolc to employees when he fires them) Chamey also keeps Greene on retainer, as a kind of rabbi, to help him chart a course beyond the mere manufacture of apparel toward some measure of c!Jltural supremacy. Greene helps Charn±ink through decisions and predicaments. Charney is known now chiefly for his relatively progressive labor practices and his aggressive libertinism (a female reporter from Jane wrote that he masturbated eight times in her presence), but in his concupiscent charisma Greene sees the potential for greatness. "I want him to be the Hugh Heftier of his generation," Greene told me. Chamey would prefer to be thought of as its Jack Wlch.
One evening, I spent a few hours with them in another one of Chames apartments. If Greene isJesus, Charney acted as his Paul, holding forth, unabated, for two hours, while Greene sat silently on the floor, in a lotus pose. A young woman lay in a corner taking occasional tokes off a joint. "I believe the laws to be divine," Charney said. "There may be fifty-one laws, there may be thirty-six. They may have existed before language itself"
The physics of striving are subject to certain principles, and blaming Greene for pointing this out is, in Charney's view, absurd. "He's like Newton: Newton didn't invent gravity," Chamey said. "Why should Robert be responsible for the imperfections of humanity?" The book serves as validation for those already practicing its precepts. It also abets defenses. In an unjust world, where the social order is apparently determined not by virtue or merit but by the inscrutable workings of dashing self-interests, it is thrilling to hear that there may be a secret code for the recognition and manipulation of these interests-a set of universal procedures for advancement.
How far the genre goes back depends on your definition of it. Certainly, anyone looking to get ahead could have found, as Greene has, something salutary in the writings of Aristotle or Epicurus, or in the Book of Exodus. There was a whole medieval Persian genre, called the Mirror for Princes, about practicing statecraft. The modern era may well begin in 1859, with "SelfHelp," by a Scottish reformer named Samuel Smiles, who preached positive thinking. But the best exemplar may have been Napoleon Hill, who, in 1908, as a twenty-five-year-old law-school dropout, got an assignment to write a magazine story about Andrew Carnegie. Believing that he had identified a formula for success, Carnegie encouraged Hill to interview hundreds of other rich and powerful people in order to fill it out. One result was a book called "Law of Success" (Hill had sixteen lessons); another was success itself. In 1937, he published "Think and Grow Rich," which is still in print and has sold more than a hundred million copies. (Hill also coined countless dad-ready dicta, such as "A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.") The thirties were selfimprovement's first of many boom decades. It was in 1936 that Dale Carnegie (no relation to Andrew) published "How
to Win Friends and Influence People" and with it began doing just that.
Greene doesn't mention any modem forerunners in his books. He does not consider himself their heir. I once asked GreFne about Michael Korda, whose 197/s book "Power! How to Get It, How toUse It," an instructive, if somewhat satirical, roundup of devious maneuvers, became a primer to the proto -yuppie set, and Greene claimed not to have heard of him. He'd rather dwell on Kierkegaard or Kissinger. This maybe so for Greene's readers as well. The game seems less petty or low when you can consider your little turf wars or office politics in terms of the grand maneuvers of Napoleon, Hannibal, or Mazarin. There is a long and well-established American tradition of adorning ill-begotten gains and undernourished minds with classical and Continental accoutrements: Doric columns, a Bentley, the compleat works. In a way, Greene's parables are a form of aspirational camouflage.
Quincy Jones III, the son of the music producer, is making a documentary about "The 48 Laws" and their ubiquity in the "urban realm." Jones's working thesis is that hip-hop has evolved beyond its gangster period, which was exemplified by its fixadon with the movie "Scarface," into a more mature phase, for which the cold-eyed but buttoned-up ethos of "The 48 Laws" is better suited. Tony Montana gives way to Talleyrand. It is a business now, not a street fight, but one with myth-, making prerequisites. "I view it as more of an empowerment tool than as a way to screw people," Jones told me. "A lot of the feuds in hip-hop stem from misunderstandings in business. When Cam'ron went at Jay-Z recently, said a, bunch of things, derogatory comments, Jay-Z, instead of coming back at him, just ignored him. He won the battle by default." He added, "Maybe if Biggie and Tupac had read this book, we would've had a different outcome." They might have shown each other their appreciation and pretended to be friends.
Another one of Greene's fans is Karrime Steffens, a.ka. Superhead, who slept with a host of hip-hop celebrities and' then wrote a book about them, "Confessions of a Video Vixen," which, owing in large part to explicit accounts of bedroom proclivities and shortcomings (Law 28:
"Enter action with boldness"), has sold about a half million copies. She initially got "The 48 Laws" from the rapper Method Man ("Having the book and applying it are two different things," she told me pointedly), and keeps it next to her bed, with the works of Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, and Suze Orman. (She professes to have no need for "The Art of Seduction.") She also has the laws up on her refrigerator. "My whole career is based on Law 21: 'Play a sucker to catch a sucker,'" she told me. "I love to play stupid. Even though I might be prancing around in my underwear or popping my gum like an idiot, rm paying attention to everything you're saying." Her favorite law is Law 48: "Assume formlessness." During our conversation, she cited it, along with Law 35 ("Master the art of timing") and Law 4 ("Always say less than necessary"), with regard to a predicament she'd found herself in: that week, she'd been hounded by the press as the woman who'd broken up the marriage of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. She had said nothing publicly so far. "I'll bide my time, stay silent," she said. This impulse came naturally to her, but the tacit approval of Han Fei-tzu, Otto von Bismarck, and Cardinal de Retz, if not of her media advisers, gave her strength. "Some of us are lionesses, and some of us are not," she said.

Another master, whom Greene has perhaps allowed himself to outshine, is Joost Elifers, whose name adorns the covers of the three books, and who is credited, rather mysteriously, as their producer. He is also mistaken, frequently (and to Greene's irritation), as their co-author.
In 1995, Greene was in Italy, serving as an adviser at Fabrica, a new art and media school, near Venice, founded by Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani. A friend introduced Greene to Elffers, a Dutch designer who had recently achieved success as the producer of a book called "The Secret Language of Birthdays," which comprised three hundred and sixty-five fulsome personality profiles. One day, Greene and Elffers went for a walk along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Elffers asked Greene if he had any book ideas. The honest answer would have been "Not really," but Greene began to talk about one of his
pet subjects, the court of Louis XIV, and then about Machiavelli. Elffers was intrigued. They fixed on the idea of a book about power, and Elifers wrote out twelve postdated 9hecks, one per month. Now, as Elffei4ut it, "Robert could sit on a mattress on the floor and read a thousand books" without having to worry about money.
Elffers eventually took the project to Viking Penguin (although-power move-not until it was nearly done, so as to minimize the potential for publisher interference). "The 48 Laws of Power" sold for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, of which Elffers got half: (The split for the next two books, each of which sold for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, was weighted in Greene's favor. They share the royalties fifty-fifty.) Elifers encouraged Greene to cultivate an attitude of distrust toward the publishers. "It's about intimidation," Elifers told me. "It's a battle against the numbness of people who go to meetings." ("Neither of us live by these rules, although we are clearly not naïve," he added.)
I met Elffers one day at his house in Greenwich Village. Elifers is fiftynine years old, and ascribes some of his own familiarity with the mechanics of power, war, and seduction to his parents' experiences in the resistance in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam (his mother was Jewish), and to three decades he has spent on the downtown New York art scene. (His wife is the artist Pat Steir.) He wore a light-brown thin-wale corduroy suit and webbed-leather loafers, and had the impish hauteur of an aesthete accustomed to getting his way.
"The book for me is an engine," he said. "My role is to build the engine." The main component is the book's design, which is essentially Elffers's. The cover's genesis was a source of some sour feelings at Viking Penguin. The art director spent weeks developing a cover, and then Elifers sowed up for a meeting with his own version, in a brown paper bag. "They came up with a cover, and I showed them mine, and the whole meeting was over in one second," Elffers 1 said. ("Joost didn't have to do that," the book's editor, Molly Sterr, realied. "I wouldn't let that situation happen again. I have a lot more power now, by the
w") Elff 's cover was modelled on
ay. ers
the heraldic shield of Amsterdam: two vertical red stripes flank a royal-blue one, and in the middle, in place of Amsterdam's three stars, the word "Power," reading top to bottom. "It is an amoral design," Elffers told me. (You might say that the cover of "Seduction," an elongated pink ovoid on a black background, has an anatomical design.)
For the genre, "Power" is long (four hundred and fifty pages) and dense (allusions to everyone from Abraham to Zhang Yu), but the chapters break down into modular sections, delineated by red or black type. "You can enter it anywhere," Elffers said. The engine is designed to transport softheads as well as fhture Presidents and kings. The prose is insistent, simple, and portentous. To pick one example: "In 1514 the twenty-two-year-old Pietro Aretino was working as a lowly assistant scullion to a wealthy Roman family. He had ambitions of greatness as a writer, to enflame the world with his name, but how could a mere lackey hope to realize such dreams?"
Elffers hopes and believes that the book should resist modish redesign. (Most foreign editions mimic the American edition, although the Russian cover features a chess piece shackled to a ball and chain.) It aspires to timelessnessor at least to a long and lucrative residency on Penguin's backlist. "This book is built for a century in print," Elffers told me. "It has no time or place. It is from all cultures. It roams three thousand years of history."
Originally, Greene wrote fifty-two laws, although now, in his eagerness to foster the impression that they were writ in stone, he is reluctant to admit this. The publishers felt that fifty-two was not a good number-too pat an invocation of weeks in a year or cards in a deck. Greene relented, integrating the four extraneous laws (for example, "Create an air of mystery" and "Stay above the fray) into the others. Greene considered the book a work of philosophy, but Elffers told me, "I said to Robert, 'The best place for our books is in the business section.' Robert almost vomited."
One evening, Greene asked me to read Chapter 30 in "The 33 Strategies of War," because, as he said, "that's where I kind of reveal myself." The chapter, called "Penetrate Their Minds: Communication Strategies," urges the aspiring war-
nor to lure "people into coming to the conclusions you desire and into thinking they've gotten them by themselves." Greene's models here are Alfred Hitchcock, Socrates, and, of course, Machiavelli, who in this telling resurrects his career bywriting a bold, amoral treatise, full of anecdotes and aphorisms, which works its way into the halls of power. It is dear enough that Greene is writing about himself, less dear is what, or how much, this reveals about him. "Over the centuries millions upon millions of readers have used Machiavelli's books for invaluable advice on power," Greene writes. "But could it possibly be the oppositethat it is Machiavelli who has been using his readers?"
If a book like Greene's is an engine, its primary function, you could say, is the aggrandizement of its author, and its readers are instruments in the writer's bid for whatever it is-power, success, money, immortality-that he is supposedly helping them to acquire. People who write about how to get such things often have very little of them themselves, at least before sales take off.
"I start with a nobody and work with him for years," Elffers told me. "The subject and the way it is done are bigger than the writer. Now the writer is climbing the mountain on the shadowy side and one day will stand on top of it, and on top of his own book. Right now more people know the book than the guy. But that is changing. The moment he is asked for comment about why Israel has lost in Lebanon, then he is on top of his own book."
Elffers and Greene are no longer working together, although they may again someday. "I have said to Robert that the debt he had to me was paid," Elffers said. "Tm not your pimp. Now we are free from each other.'" Greene has an agent now, Michael Carlisle, who described his new clienr's relationship with Elifers as "a marriage that wasn't finished, although its light and heat had been exhausted."
Greene told me, "When I did the books, people were telling me, 'Careful with thatJoost guy. Ask for more money here, blali blah blah.' And I said, 'This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and rm going to get what I need out of it, and I'll never have to work another shit job in my life.' Now I have a friend for
life, and I have my three books. I believe in grand strategy."
He went on, "I carry around this image of myself as a marginalized figure in New York and Hollywood, who owes much of his success to luck-the luck of meeting Joost, and so on. When I go deeper into it, yes, there was luck, but there was also design. I was like the narrator in 'Notes from the Underground.' When this opportunity came, I was able to draw upon the anger and hostility l felt toward how people had acted toward me. But I was strategic-with Joost, with Penguin, with everything.-

Green bits several -nw books in
mine i rniuid-fie1d theory of
power, the one with
50 Cent, and one on the idea of the sub-
lime. Writing time, however, is harder
to come by. He is bombarded with
propositions and side projects, and his
role as a paid adviser, which he says that
he did, not seek, has grown, taking in a
curious cross-section of American am-
bition. An executive at Microsoft has
enlisted him to help the company in its
war with Google. He writes a monthly
career strategy column for Maxim. There are occasional detours on the speaking circuit. Recently, a friend of Phil Angelides, who is running against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California, met with Greene to discuss whether he might have ideas for the campaign, but nothing came of it. Still, he's eager to get into politics. Despite the occasional warm welcome from right-wing talk radio ("I have a good rapport with G. Gordon Liddy," he told me), Greene is a lifelong liberal, one whose frustration over the Democratic Party's tactics reaches back to the Clinton era. "I'd like to be the Karl Rove of the Democratic Party," Greene says.
Then there are hip-hop's social and professional lures. Greene is nonchalant but susceptible. One night in Los Angeles, I went along with Greene and Qiincy Jones Ill to a party celebrating the release of a new album by Ludacris. It was held at Social Hollywood, a lounge on Sunset. Ludaciis and his manager, Chaka Zulu, a "48 Laws" fanatic, were expecting him. As Castiglione wrote, "Therefore I should wish our courtier to... insure that whenever he has to go where he is a stranger,
he is preceded by a good reputation." The music was loud, so people had to shout to be not quite heard. They performed a nearly wordless pantomime of congratutory fellowship: embrace, stand still for the camera, embrace again, release. From he number of guests hunched over their BlackBerries, you got the impression that everyone was communicating by text message, as though the room were full of invisible carrier pigeons. Greene borrowed a Treo to check his email, but had received only spam. One by one, members of the Ludacris entourage came to pay their respects to Mr. Greene. "I've seen the principles work!" "First time I read it, I didn't understand it. Then I got a bit older and I was, like, 'Oh man, that shit is right.'" Greene listened patiently, with just the right amount of embarrassment and pride.
The elder OincyJones arrived, with a pair of very young women, and as he posed for photographs his bearing, stout but sly, made it dear that he had no need to solicit any advice. Greene exhibited some ingenuousness by asking Jones whether one of the girls was his wife. (The short answer was no.) Then the younger Jones introduced Greene to Joe Francis, the creator of the "Girls Gone Wild" series. Francis's bearing was frenetic, at once overly familiar and eerily remote. After he turned away, Greene observed, "He's got nothing behind his eyes."
Later, Jones recalled meeting Greene for the first time. "I was surprised he was the guy who wrote these potent books," Jones said. "But as we started talking I began to see a lot of different layers, a lot of suiprises." As a practitioner, Jones said, he might be so good we don't even see it. You're never quite sure." Jones has come to prize Greene's advice, in matters large and small, and suggested that the best way to get a glimpse of Greene's brilliance would be to ask him about current events, to get his opinion on what each side should do. So later, thinking of Elffers, I asked Greene about Israel and Lebanon, and he replied, "Israel's bombing campaign was such a political mistake. War is politics now. This is what the Americans don't understand, the Israelis used to understand, and Hezbollah understands so well." And Iraq? "What would Napoleon or Rommel or Grant or Hannibal say?" Greene said. "They'd be appalled." The writer climbs the mountain. •

otm

interesting piece too. I had no idea those hip hop guys were fans of it. but for politics, I recall posting once on daily kos that I really liked the book & kos said it was one of his favorites..

yeah that's what the guy thinks too - believing the only sensible reaction to power dynamics is to be utterly self-severing is a symptom of an impoverished imagination.

(foucault can get fucked too)

Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking.

# Be conspicuous, at all cost.
# [I]solation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from ... it makes you conspicuous.

# If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.
# Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge.

# Stage spectacles for those around you, then full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence.
# It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch.

# Do not go Past the Mark you Aimed for; In Victory, Learn when to Stop
# Crush your Enemy Totally

# About the same time, the book began to make the rounds at Def Jam records, circulating first among the managerial class.
# Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.

http://www.saddle-creek.com/bands/brighteyes/photos/images/07_lg.jpg

http://www.gonemovies.com/WWW/TopFilms/Oscar/Spielberg.jpg

http://www.divinenergy.com/le-christ/images/christ.jpg

ugly, unsatisying, extremely effective

LOL maybe you shouldn't talk about that in interviews MORAN

Of course they are the way to obtain power! Except, power can never be obtained, as it's a dynamic, and also, you have to follow them all, but they're mutually contradictory. It's fun.

But, why approach it with a sense of play.. when you can bitch more!

http://scoopsnoodle.com/lix/yay.gif

(It is like some sort of sub-Machiavellian bit mixed with a dash of the Tao Te Ching, though.)

These "laws", however, have no explanation for the ascent to power of someone like Bill Clinton, who -- whatever his faults -- is not cast from this mold at all. Or, to take a different example, Dwight Eisenhower -- again, whatever his faults, he wasn't a crypto-Machiavelli.

lurker otm but
These "laws", however, have no explanation for the ascent to power of someone like Bill Clinton sry but this is rich

i think that you answered your own question. this is precisely the sort of thing that would appeal to someone in some uber-competitive yet somewhat anonymous environment -- who is NOT currently in some sort of power relationship. ergo, its attraction to businesspeople, lawyers, and rappers -- the same sorta people who love sun-tzu and the art of war, really.

(speaking of which -- i wouldn't be surprised if RZA from wu tang has a copy of this thing somewhere in his belongings.)

Take this with the requisite grain of salt, but: I know a couple people who know B.C. personally, and have for years -- suffice it to say that as far as I can tell, he doesn't follow these laws, at least not the majority of them.

(I mean, c'mon, the attempt at integrating gays into the military -- if he was living by the 48 laws, d'you really think he would've gone about it the way he did? I'm not saying he doesn't have a Machiavellian side, few in politics don't...but these laws don't really describe how he came to power -- which was a combination of personal magnetism and an unusual/fluky conjunction of circumstances, IMHO -- or how he acted once he got there. Again, "whatever his flaws".)