Robert Greene’s Motivation for Writing the 48 Laws of Power

from the 48 levels of power law 21 play a sucker to catch a sucker seem dumber than your mark so when i was preparing for this i was reading these daily um these daily meditations and i was actually shocked i was really quite shocked by them i was shocked by that one and i was very unclear as a consequence as to your motivations and so i was thinking do i want to do i want to i don't get this i don't understand this exactly it's like this is very deceptive and then i talked to my team who like your books a lot and and my daughter who really liked interviewing you and i thought well there's something going on here that i don't quite understand which is certainly possible and then i thought well this is maybe a shadow exploration something like that yes and then i thought like i was kind of a dimwit for not catching that earlier but so but you know it is shocking these are very manipulative uh laws let's say and so can you guide me through the rationale for producing material like that what were you trying what are you trying to do with your books and they've obviously been misunderstood it says in the in wikipedia green's books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral and so clear this up for me well you know that it's a it's a bit manipulative when people write that because a great deal of the 48 laws of power i'd say you know maybe two-thirds of them are not manipulative have nothing to do with deception they have things to do with kind of common sense ideas about power such as such as being generous with people such as creating compelling spectacles such as entering action with boldness and kind of how you present yourself sort of things about your image and your appearance but there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative and then my other books don't really go into things like that so it is a bit of a distortion to write that but where this comes from is basically um i have a particular idea of power so maybe i should explain that a little bit my idea of power it's not about this kind of grand thing of political or war something it's on a very individual level and the idea for me comes from from nietzsche and his idea of the will to power which he explains as all every organism has the desire to expand itself as a desire for expansion and so i think that for human beings the desire that we we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits we want to feel like we have some degree of ability to influence other people that we can control our own career and learn more and develop greater skills and have more kind of power and influence in our life the feeling that i cannot have any power or influence over my children my spouse my colleagues my boss my career in general is deeply deeply unsettling for the human animal and causes all kinds of attempts at what i call negative power passive aggression etc setting yourself up as a victim's kind of leverage power in a negative way and so the problem is um and i this a lot of this comes from machiavelli who inspired a lot of the 48 laws the problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter in particular in the 21st century about what is acceptable about what is politically correct so we're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue these paragraphs of fairness and democracy etc at the same time we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work in our relationships etc and so because of that dynamic we have to be extremely careful in this world and i compare it to the courts of like louis xiv where all of the courtiers if they're too overt in their power moves the king will disapprove of them and will not banish them but they'll be kind of excluded to the corner of the palace and so the game was to be sort of indirect to be polite and ingratiating and if you had an enemy to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them and so this is kind of what i would the what kid where the 48 laws of power came out from so you quoted me i had like 80 different jobs probably more like 60 65 but i saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs i had and i i worked in every conceivable field and i didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world and it really kind of irritated me all the self-help books were sort of describing a world that i never saw existed you know i saw people being very political having egos and having problems with their egos and i didn't see anybody any books like they're kind of describing what i encountered every day so law number one is never outshine the master and the idea is that if you try too hard to impress your boss or the person above you you're liable to make them feel insecure you're going to trip on their ego and something bad will happen to you right and so this seemed like the fact that people have egos and operate with egos and you have to be careful with them seems very clear to me but i didn't find books out there that were describing it so i hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out okay yeah well the okay so i just i can't remember who sent me this i think it was clay routledge yeah i think that's right he just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed stating that something like 40 percent of millennials don't feel they have any control over their life right so that is related to the first issue that you brought up and and you you obviously consider that uh problematic and you said that well we need to it's good for us to have some control over our destinies and also to feel that that's a possibility to see it at least as a goal yes and then and that if if we feel consciously thwarted in that goal or believe that it's impossible that doesn't mean we're going to give up our striving it means it's going to go underground and then it's going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways exactly and then you you said that you were interested in nietzsche's idea of will to power as in some sense the central motivating uh the central motivation of of the organism yeah across species to some degree um and and then you talked about the jobs that you've had so why why did so i got that right i hope i i hope i've got this dude that was very well thank you okay okay and so and so to some degree and then you said well you had all these jobs and you found that people were engaged in manipulative and deceptive strategies a fair number of a fair amount of the time and that no one was really warning people about this or delineating out the strategies yeah okay so that you know that seems to me to be reasonable that i mean i'm a big admirer of the work of carl jung which everyone listening to this knows more than they even want to know um and he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow yes that they would clothe themselves in the garments of moral virtue right and act out a virtuous persona but because of the thwarted will to strive in some sense that they have all sorts of motivations sexual power related dominance um aggression anger resentment that aren't admitted thoroughly and that are snakes under the carpet or elephants under the rug or skeletons in the closet and they pollute human relationships and i certainly believe that's true i believe that that that's the corruption of human relationships by a form of of severe deceit and i also think it's reasonable to warn people against that and also to alert them to the fact that such things operate in their own souls

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, robert greene, 48 laws of power, personal development, robert greene 48 laws of power, self development, robert greene laws of human nature, success habits, laws of power, jordan peterson interview, psychology facts about love, self development tips

Id: D2Ndl0cdn_E

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022