Power and influence

The teaching

As the long line of writers on power and influence since Sun Tzu teaches it.

What power is

In the books of this art, power is the capacity to bring about what one wants when other people stand in the way or must lend a hand. Joseph Nye gives the plainest definition: the ability to affect others so as to get the outcomes one wants. Robert Greene adds why no one stands outside the matter: the feeling of having no power over people and events is unbearable, so everyone seeks power, and because open grasping is frowned on, most of the seeking is done indirectly. Nietzsche goes furthest and finds the same drive in all of life, which seeks not merely to survive but to grow.

Power, then, is not only the business of rulers. It is at work wherever two people want different things: in a family choosing where to live, an office choosing who leads, a market settling a price. The books study it at the scale of armies, courts and states because there the moves are largest and easiest to see. A student reads them to see the same moves at the scale of a kitchen table.

Three ways of moving another person

Nye names three ways in which one party moves another. There is force, or the threat of it, which he calls the stick. There is payment, or the promise of it, the carrot. And there is attraction, which makes the other want what one wants. Most moves described in the books of this art are one of these, or a mixture of them.

Machiavelli's prince uses all three: he must be able to make himself feared, he hands out benefits little by little so that they are savoured, and he takes care to seem merciful, faithful and devout, since people judge by what they see. Sun Tzu ranks the means by their cost: the best victory spoils the enemy's plans without a battle, and the worst is the siege of a walled city. Greene's catalogue uses all three and gives many of its chapters to appearances: reputation, presence, spectacle and the hiding of intent.

Attraction divides in two, and the whole art turns on the division. It can be honest: a good example, a sound argument, a true account of what is offered. Or it can be counterfeit: flattery, a false front, a hurry that has been manufactured, a gift that is really a hook. The honest tradition gives one test for telling them apart: would the method still work if the other person could see all of it?

Appearance and what lies beneath

The second foundation is that power works through appearances. Machiavelli teaches that everyone sees what a ruler seems to be and few touch what he is, and that people judge by the outcome. Baltasar Gracián, the Spanish Jesuit whose maxims Greene drew on, says that things pass for what they seem and not for what they are. Sun Tzu founds war on the same fact: when able, seem unable; when near, seem far. Greene's laws on concealing intentions, guarding a reputation and staging effects carry the teaching into the modern court.

For a student this gives the art's first discipline: to look beneath. A reputation is weighed against the record of acts over time, a show of virtue against what is done when no one is watching, a sudden warmth against what it turns out to be asking for. Machiavelli's name for what is found there is the effectual truth, the way things actually go, as against the way they are said to go.

Knowing the other and knowing oneself

Sun Tzu's best-known teaching is that whoever knows the enemy and knows themselves need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. The books agree that knowledge comes before any move. Machiavelli judges a ruler first by the people he keeps about him, and by whether he can bear to hear the truth from them. Greene prizes the ability to see people as they are.

Knowing oneself, in this art, means above all knowing where one can be moved. The moves in these books seldom work on a person at rest. They need someone flattered, hurried, cut off, in debt, afraid or lost in a dream, and each of those states can be felt from inside: praise that comes too warm and too fast, a rush that forbids sleeping on a decision, the friend one has quietly stopped seeing. A student who learns to notice these states in themselves has learned the art's chief defence.

Command of oneself comes first

Nearly every book on this shelf puts power over oneself before power over others. Sun Tzu counts a hasty temper and a touchy sense of honour among the faults that ruin a general, and forbids any battle fought out of anger, since anger passes and a kingdom destroyed does not come back. Greene's game rewards self-control, patience and the mastery of one's emotions. Gracián makes it a mark of prudence never to be thrown off balance.

Nietzsche gives the same teaching its deepest form: the highest power is the overcoming of oneself, and to do another harm, he writes, is a sign that one still lacks power. Aristotle gives its honest form: a speaker persuades most of all by being trusted, for good sense, good character and goodwill toward the hearer. A student begins, then, where these books begin, with their own temper and their own word.

Time, chance and cost

Three more ideas run through the art. The first is timing: Sun Tzu likens energy to a bent crossbow and decision to the release of its trigger, and the patience Greene asks for waits until a moment is ripe. The second is chance: Machiavelli gives fortune half of what happens and leaves the other half to virtù, the skill and nerve that build dykes in calm weather against the next flood.

The third is cost. A win can cost so much that it is a loss. Plutarch tells how King Pyrrhus, having beaten the Romans at a ruinous price, said that one more such victory would undo him, and a Pyrrhic victory has meant that ever since. Sun Tzu holds that no country has ever gained from a long war, and one of Greene's last laws counsels knowing when to stop. Every move in this art is weighed against what it costs, and the dearest cost is often trust.

When the moves are made on a person

When the moves of the books are made on one particular person, they have names a student needs. Machiavellianism, named after the Florentine, is cunning and bad faith used for advantage. Gaslighting is the steady denial of what plainly happened until the other doubts their own memory. Coercive control is a campaign of isolation, watching, rules and threat inside a close relationship, and in several countries it is a crime. Robert Cialdini's levers of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, show how each such move borrows an ordinary good habit and points it the wrong way. All of this is taught in full on Recognising the moves.

The art's rule for all of it is the same. A move that is seen and named loses much of its hold, and the ordinary answers follow: take time, ask for it in writing, talk to someone outside. When a person is being controlled or frightened, the matter has left the field of technique. The right step is to tell someone they trust, and, if they are in danger, to call the police.

How a student begins

A student begins with the shortest books and the smallest scale. The Art of War is thirteen short chapters and The Prince twenty-six, and each can be read in a few evenings. Read them slowly, with a notebook beside them. For each move met on the page, write one line on where it has been seen, at work, at home or in the news, and one line on what it needed from the person it was made on.

Beside the reading, keep a second and shorter record for a week. Each evening, note one moment when someone tried to move you and by which means, force, payment or attraction, honest or counterfeit; and one moment when you held power over your own temper or your own word. The first record trains the eye. The second is where, by the books' own account, power begins.

One rule holds from the first page to the last. The art is studied to recognise moves, and never to work them on a partner, a relative, a colleague or a child.

How the branches stand

Three branches teach the old books, each a picture of the game at its own scale. The Art of War teaches conflict between states and armies, and its lesson is to win before the fight or not to fight. The Prince teaches the holding of power by one person among rivals and the people. The 48 Laws of Power gathers both, with Gracián and the memoirs of courtiers, into a catalogue for the modern court.

Three branches answer them. Recognising the moves brings the levers down to close quarters, where they are worked on one person. The will to power turns the drive inward, toward mastery of oneself. Keeping your footing gives influence without deceit: Aristotle's three sources of persuasion, and negotiation that looks to interests and knows where it stops. A student does well to read the three old books first, with Recognising the moves beside them, and to end with Keeping your footing, which is the art's answer to all the rest. Gracián himself, the shrewdest of the writers on prudence, ends his three hundred maxims with the counsel to be, in a word, a saint.