Virtue without power is benign, but power without virtue tears lives and civilizations apart.
So it’s a pity good people often don’t understand how power works, and what people holding the levers of power are up to. Part of wisdom is understanding that ignorance of reality leaves us susceptible to manipulation by those who lack scruples, and less effective in doing good.
If the United States broke any ground with its constitution, it was in assuming saints wouldn’t be elected — that politicians would in fact possess numerous vices. Alexander Hamilton correctly intuited that counterbalancing vice with vice would keep America on the rails while planning on angels showing up would lead to catastrophe.
Hamilton and the founding fathers had an unusually high degree of power literacy, probably because they’d read Plutarch and studied classical history. For instance, John Adams was a vocal fan of Machiavelli, the famous political realist.
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On the other hand, most communist governments were built with starry-eyed optimism about the type of people who’d live in and lead them. The results are predictably lackluster.
Power literacy for the wise and the just isn’t about manipulation, and is largely defensive and preventative in nature. Someone with high power literacy will:
* Be able to spot the power games played around them and respond appropriately.
* Understand that power is amoral, but its execution always has moral implications.
* Understand human nature and how it’s manipulated.
Power Literacy at Home:
Most of us don’t design governments, but power literacy helps us act appropriately in the local arenas we find ourselves in.
If you’re a good person, you may not realize the extent to which an entire class of people sees our world through a zero-sum lens, and views relationships and institutions as vehicles for personal gain. The world throws around clinical terms like sociopath and psychopath, but many are simply power-literate people who lack a strong moral foundation and introspection. When backed into a corner, they pull the puppet strings they intuit will help them get their way. Good people often have strings that are very easy to tug on.
Isn’t it yourself you should reproach—for not anticipating that they’d act this way?—It was you who did wrong by assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.42
It’s only when we understand the power games they use so successfully — in the home, in petty work disputes, and at the highest levels of government — that we can protect ourselves and effectively pursue worthwhile goals. A significant part of humanity won’t play by the rules, and good people need to act like it. Any community built without power literacy degrades over time because bad actors take advantage of it. You’re probably part of such a group right now.
A Classic Manipulation
There are countless power games, but a basic two-step manipulation looks something like this:
* Disorient a person and knock them off balance. Using a person’s emotional responses against them is a strategy as old as time. Fear is the classic tool, but other emotions, such as greed and anger, are also viable. If a manipulator can make you fear for your life, your family, your livelihood, or your reputation, for instance, they’ll often have you. And people goaded into anger become stupid, stop thinking clearly, and make mistakes. If you’re disoriented and reeling, you’re going to be easier to manipulate.
* Apply external pressure. Disorienting people with anger, fear, or other strong emotions may be enough. If it isn’t, external pressure may cause them to dance to someone else’s tune. Can a friend be turned against them? Can they be blackmailed or make you look bad in front of their boss? Where might some adroitly-planted gossip turn the screws?
Resisting Manipulation:
Some people are hard to knock off balance with emotional manipulation. They might also stand up to external threats with unusual resilience. Why?
Power literacy helps us keep our balance when someone is playing a game with us because we see what they’re doing. If you’ve inculcated an understanding of how politicians manipulate people with fear and anger, and look for instances of them doing it, you probably won’t be tricked next time “your side,” points out something worthy of scorn.
But there’s no better way to resist manipulation than a philosophic practice. The two-step manipulation above threatens externals that Stoics discount. If you care more about doing the right thing (virtue) than reputation, wealth, or anything else, you become very hard to manipulate.
Virtuous people with power literacy tend to get left alone by sociopathic types. If initial probing fails to make you dance, bad actors often look for easier targets unless you pose an existential threat to them or their power base.
Increasing Power Literacy:
Experience may be the most effective way to understand power and its abuses. If you spot manipulation in progress or retrospectively retrace how you were manipulated, you’ll probably never be fooled in the same way again.
But books are safe and provide far more examples than you’ll come across yourself.
Plutarch’s Lives
Plutarch was incredibly popular in Colonial America. His mini-biographical pairings of one prominent Greek and one prominent Roman show leaders possessing virtues and vices in equal measure. Plutarch details some of the successful manipulations used by his subjects.
An in-depth study of business tycoons and politicians from other eras may yield similar insights and help you to see people for what they are.
Machiavelli's The Prince
Machiavelli suggests leaders try to be effective rather than good. Drawing on examples from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance, he shows how this can be done. Don’t study The Prince to learn how to manipulate, but rather to understand how power games are played by those without scruples.
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power
What if Machiavelli had access to far more information from which to draw conclusions? Perhaps he would have ended up with something like this book. Some of the laws contradict each other, but that’s not really the point. Greene shows us the levers by which humans are manipulated, and the psychological landscape of the worst of us.
Perspective
“That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It's to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant—the act of a tyrant.”
―Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.18
We must understand what’s in our power and what isn’t. It’s foolish to think sociopathic types can be kept from positions of influence and power, or that we’ll “defeat” them.
Nero and other despotic Roman emperors were surrounded by depraved courtiers mirroring imperial vices, ancient historians tell us. And yet Emperor Marcus Aurelius complained of people pretending to be philosophers because his interest in Stoicism made the topic en vogue. Vice “was out,” and virtue was “in,” and yet sociopaths appear to be prominent in both types of courts. The morally flexible will discover what it takes to have influence and contort themselves into the required shape, regardless of how good the person at the top is.
As Marcus would put it, don’t expect Plato’s Republic, or even Plato’s softball team.
Yet remaining ignorant of the way the game is played leaves you naive and open for manipulation. Neither is virtuous, and a wise person learns how power works.
The Wooden Beam In Your Eye
“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?”
The biggest risk in power literacy acquisition is distraction from our own faults. We may even manipulate others in a half-aware fashion, engaging in small vices while pointing fingers at others.
“You yourself have many faults and are no different from them,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself. “…You are not even sure that they are doing wrong. Many things are done as part of a larger plan, and generally one needs to know a great deal before one can pronounce with certainty on another's actions.”
So yes, acquire an understanding of human nature and power, but don’t forget that we mostly need to pay attention on ourselves and the few things that are totally within our power.
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