The 48 Laws Of Power

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I found this article on the internet, The 48 Laws Of Power. I find it pretty interesting, because I do the opposite of many things in there, and some of those things I do could be dumb according to this article.

I wonder, when and where can you use these laws, and how far can you go?[/url]

Last edited by hybrid on 18 Dec 2005, 7:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think the writers might have been being ironic.

A lot of those suggestions look like the makings of a very annoying person.

It looks like a joke page or something. Don't take it seriously, and especially don't follow the rules listed.

The internetnet? Is that like "teh interweb"?

I think thats basically an annotation of a book. Ive seen one of that guys other books, which is 'the art of seduction' - interesting, but maybe too convoluted to be of much practical use. Probably limited use to an AS person anyway.

I met a businessman FOAF whos studied both books, he said the '48 laws..' was by far the superior volume and he'd really gotten into it. He was driving a very expensive sports car, so make of that what you will.

No no. This page is not a joke. I read these rules years ago. They were given to me by a very successful businessman. They are very serious, and seriously effective.

Some of it is a distillation of Machiavelli's book The Prince, and some from Sun Tzu's ancient text The Art of War. The rest was observation these guys made.

Granted, if you follow these sorts of rules, you may be in for a karmic disaster. They aren't pretty. But they are how the successful lowest common denominator functions in the world.

I would strongly recommend going over them carefully. You can use them or not, as your conscience dictates. But regardless of whether you use them, you'll know when they are being used on you, and that's tremendous power in itself.

Yeah, those rules work, but like groove said, they're not beneficient to the karma, which means YOU don't get more powerful by using them. You'll weaken from letting others do all the hard work for you and your perspective of the effects of what you do will be distorted from what's actually happening around you, so if you sometime lose, you'll be surprised how much it's going to hurt - the bigger they are the harder they fall, you know.
Then also, what's the point of becoming powerful if the world around you has to suffer for it? True happiness comes from doing things with others, those you suppress won't give you anything but a false and shallow attitude, and since your mind will be locked on following these rules by self conditioning - provided of course that you use them - you'll also never know what life's about, like true love, since you'll be too busy thinking along those rules that you can't be powerful enough to show weakness and let someone else inside.
But sure, you'll probably get rich if that's what you're after, but I don't think you want that when your hormones leaves you and you just want someone to hold and have the company of someone you don't have to pay anymore.
In the extreme sense, if everyone used those rules and acted for those motives the world would be smoking ruins and no fancy sports cars would exist. I say go the other way, but that's me.

These are the rules the corporate elite and conservative politicians follow all the time!!

That is a tad disturbing, then....

LOL hee hee we accually agree on something! lol!

Yeah, this hits at the core of one of the great philosophical debates of all time: what is true power?

The rules in the article are the rules of TEMPORAL power. like RobertN said, they are the rules of the corporate elite, politicians, the movers and shakers of the business, financial, and government realms. If you want to play their game, that article gives you many of the rules.

Great thinkers like Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, and thousands of others have pointed out that there is another kind of power, SPIRITUAL power. Spiritual power is power over yourself, your thoughts, your desires, etc. This power derives from God (or the Universe). It makes you happy no matter what, because you see the world as it is and accept it. You might get riches and temporal power too, you might not; but you're still happy with what you've got. Spiritual teachers universally say that this spiritual power is true power, because once gained it cannot be taken away or lost in any respect.

The Dalai Lama has the latter; George W. Bush and friends have the former. You decide.

It's very Machiavellian. This isn't a joke; some people actually believe that stuff, which is scary.

An interesting discussion indeed!
I would say that the definition for real power includes the entire chain of events included in the situation where it is performed. So if something leads you to believe you're powerful and you later realize that's made you weaker instead, then you've lost power instead of gained.
That's because the temporal sense is an illusion: you don't gain power since you don't gain anything, i.e. you don't create anything more for yourself, you just change the relative proportions to make it seem like it. In war, like Zun Tzu said, if you have to fight you've already lost. He meant that no one wins anything, both lose; one just loses more than the other, so war and violence is always a negative thing. Seeing as people following those rules benefit from going to war with others, they weaken in that sense.



I don't see it so much as a personal choice of habit or some such as the fundamental outcome of universal termodynamics. But then again, of course, there's no absolute truth to anything.

The powerful are not made by reading tips about being powerful. Someone who can become powerful may be helped to study other powerful people and their methods, but it really isn't something you can "learn." You need natural aptitude for it.

So as for any truth these tips have is kind of irrelevant. The powerful may read it at their leisure and take from it what they will. Naturally timid people won't be helped that much from knowing these.

I disagree. If that's the case, it only means that the tips are flawed, not that power can't be learned. The problem is that what works for one person may not work for another, so if you try to teach someone to be powerful "your" way, they may very well seem completely inept at it, when really they're just taking a different route to power. It's easy to turn around and say that if someone became powerful, they must have had the will to power all along, and if they never did, then they must be fundamentally lacking in some way. But that's flawed logic, 20-20 hindsight, Nietzsche's mistake. Because at a certain point, a person who will never gain power looks identical to a person who just hasn't done it yet.

Telling a naturally timid person that they just don't have the aptitude for it and will never be able to change sounds a lot like a death sentence to me. That's just one woman's opinion, but it's a deeply held one, because believing people when they told me that has caused me a lot of grief in the past.