The ‘Dark Arts’ of Success: Should You Use Them?

Machiavelli, Robert Greene, Chin-Ning Chu

In the 1990s, Robert Greene was a struggling screenwriter.

While doing a short working stint at Fabrica, an arts and writing school in northern Italy, he met Joost Elffers, a book packaging wizard who had produced the bestselling The Secret Language of Birthdays (1994).

Elffers asked Greene if he had any ideas for books.

He did.

Three years later, Elffers’ book industry knowhow, combined with Greene’s knowledge of the classics (and his writing skills), led to The 48 Laws of Power – a publishing phenomenon that’s sold millions of copies.

From the start, Greene wanted to write something that would shock:

“I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.” (The Guardian, 2012)

But the literary shock value sat on top of a serious motive:

“Power is not the sense we think of in politics, or great leaders doing dastardly things for political advantage. I think of power at an individual level—people want a degree of control over their lives.”

(2023, Thought Economics podcast)

Greene is hailed as the modern-day Machiavelli. I’ve written about Machiavelli in 50 Philosophy Classics and in a Capstone edition, so this post will give just a quick reminder of his story.

I’ll then ask: Does ‘dark arts’ success wisdom (which spans East and West) actually work? If it does, should we use it?

If Robert Greene could meet Machiavelli (AI-gen)

Dark Arts Lineage: Machiavelli to Robert Greene

Having lost his high position in Florence’s republic when it was usurped by the Medici family in 1512, Niccolo Machiavelli was desperate to be at the centre of power again.

The Prince, written in exile when he was in his mid-40s, amounted to a job application to Florence’s new ruler, Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The ploy did not work, and he lived in relative obscurity on his family farm outside Florence for the next 14 years. He earned money from writing commissions such as the Florentine Histories and doing minor diplomatic jobs for the Medicis, but was no longer the well-off official he’d once been. The Prince was published five years after his death.

The Prince was groundbreaking because of its brutal honesty. In the 14^th-16^th centuries there was a genre of guidebooks called ‘mirror-for-princes’, written for young men about to inherit kingdoms. Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince, for instance, exhorted rulers to act as if they were saints, arguing that successful rule naturally corresponds with the goodness of the ruler.

Given human nature, Machiavelli did not believe that a truly ‘good’ ruler or perfect state could exist. Religion was needed to create a cohesive society, but the direct involvement of the Church in state affairs ultimately corrupted both state and Church. In Machiavelli’s time the powerful Papal or ecclesiastical states could make big states like France tremble. Some popes had several mistresses, sired illegitimate children, and grew personally very rich through their territorial conquests.

For Machiavelli, ‘the good’, while a noble aim, was best left to the private and religious spheres. Rulers should be measured by the decisive strength or prowess needed to build and preserve a state. They had to make choices that the normal citizen never does, such as whether to go to war or what to do about people trying to kill or overthrow you. To preserve the state, it may be necessary to act in a way that, as a private citizen, you never would. The leader’s role is lonely and brings with it dark responsibilities. Such is the nature of power.

So, both on a literary and philosophical level, Machiavelli’s The Prince is an original work.

Although very nicely written and put together, the same can’t be said for its literary descendant, Greene’s 48 Laws of Power. It is littered with quotes from Machiavelli, Baltasar Gracian, Schopenhauer, Sun Tzu, and Napoleon, with many of the ‘laws’ being taken direct from lines by these historical figures. Yet Greene’s book is still a handy, page-turning condensation of ‘dark arts’ wisdom.

Some of this wisdom is not even very dark; it is just good success strategy.

For instance, Law 34: relates to the “Strategy of the Crown”:

“If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king. This outward radiance will infect the people around us, who will think we must have reasons to feel so confident.”

Acting with dignity and calm in any situation will reinforce this perception, Greene says. Yet regal dignity is not the same as arrogance. It’s a relaxed knowledge that you have time, that destiny awaits. Greene:

“Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.”

This is much the same as a ‘sense of destiny’ that Richard Koch has named, and that I wrote about in ‘The Success X Factor Few Will Talk About’.

It’s perhaps the most powerful success law there is. Yet it harms no-one, and involves no Machiavellian power plays.

Some of Greene’s other laws do have a vibe of taking advantage. For example:

“21. Play a sucker to catch a sucker – seem dumber than your mark”

Because people are very self-conscious about their level of intelligence, you can use this to your advantage by making them feel smarter than you. That makes them less suspicious and more open to your ideas or plans, at which point “you can run rings around them”. Or as the Chinese say: Masquerade as a swine to kill the tiger.

Such a tactic has, in moral terms, a bad scent. On the other hand, you could argue that the ‘losers’ in any situation or transaction have simply not put in the work to master human psychology. If they had, they would not have been duped. Moreover, Greene and Machiavelli do not demand you reproduce their strategies; they just say you will not be taken in when others try to use them on you.

The main defense for using Greene’s laws and Machiavelli’s principles is that people can be ruthless for noble reasons. John D Rockefeller was considered the most ruthless businessman of the 20^th century, employing many of the stratagems that these authors advocate. Yet he did so in order to modernize the oil industry and make oil safer and cheaper for all. His vast wealth, in turn, saved millions of lives through health philanthropy, and educated millions more.

But the ‘dark arts’ of success theory are not yet off the hook.

Let’s turn to two figures you may be less familiar with: the ‘Chinese Machiavelli’ Li Zongwu, and his modern exponent, Chin-Ning Chu.

Chinese Dark Arts: A Moral Dimension?

In 1949, as Mao’s communist army closed in on Shanghai, Chin-Ning Chu’s family boarded what was to be the last commercial flight out of China.

Only three years old, she had been born into a world of affluence. When the family landed in Taiwan, they would have to start all over again. In Formosa, Chu would be raised Catholic, but Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist influences were all around her.

When, in her early 20s, she moved to the United States, two books accompanied her: Sun Tzu’s Art of War; and a more obscure tome by Li Zongwu: Thick Black Theory (李宗吾 or Hòuhēi Xué). She would attribute much of her entrepreneurial success in America to Li Zongwu’s thinking.

A modern Taiwanese edition of Li Zongwu’s Thick Black Theory

If The Prince is a reaction to Christian norms, Thick Black Theory is an antidote to Confucian ideas about how politics and rulership should work. Chu describes it as a “frank discussion of the uses of ruthlessness and hypocrisy” – so frank it would be banned by governments in China: first by the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek; later by the Communist Party. Apparently, both saw it as an affront to the traditional Confucian respect for political leadership. But they knew its power. Mao Zedong is said to have studied the book prior to the Cultural Revolution.

Like Machiavelli, Li Zongwu (born 1879) lived through a time of great political turbulence, specifically the fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of the first Chinese republic. He was a noted scholar, but craved real-world influence.

Li Zongwu

In 1911, during the Xinhai Revolution that would bring about the fall of the Quing dynasty, Li Zongwu had a series of articles published in the Chengdu Daily. The articles skewered what he saw as the weakness and hypocrisy of Chinese leaders, compared to the ‘thick face’ (shamelessness) and ‘black heart’ (ruthlessness) of historical figures such as Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan.

Later, in the 1930s, Zongwu’s friends and supporters published a book version called Thick Black Theory. It is still little translated into European languages, and remains obscure. But Chin-Ning Chu, who died in 2009, did her best to promote it.

Similar to Robert Greene, Chin-Ning Chu found American self-help and motivational books soft and shallow. Thick Face, Black Heart (1992) was her riposte.

Chu’s book, which I included a chapter on in 50 Success Classics, shocked me, because she argues against compassion as we normally understand it. Instead, we must think of the larger whole and what that whole requires. One of her examples is the ‘nice boss’ who, unable to bring himself to sack people, brings on the collapse of an entire business:

“Contrary to common understanding, a good man’s actions are not always gentle. They may be ruthless, cold and dispassionate.”

Surgeons naturally try to minimize patient pain, but pain is not their main concern.

In the West, people have the concept of good and evil, or ‘virtue’ drummed into them. But the Asian mindset involves more shades of grey, Chu said. To achieve something worthy, it is difficult not to bring an element of deception into your actions.

Her example is Abraham Lincoln, who in his slow ascent to power seemed to follow the majority opinion on segregation and slavery. He knew that if he did not, the presidency might elude him. Things changed once in office, and as the Civil War progressed. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln delivered the famous Gettysburg Address affirming that “all men are created equal” – a stance that would have been politically untenable for him just a few years earlier during his bid for the presidency.

Chin-Ning Chu teaches that we all need a little ‘dark arts’ to be true to ourselves and achieve the goals unique to us. We must be OK with appearing to be ruthless, amoral, or immoral to others. This does not mean we are amoral or immoral.

In an interview following the collapse of energy company Enron, Chu said:

“Many people think that applying strategy is a devious activity. I disagree. What they are probably thinking is the cases of Enron and Arthur Andersen where these companies operated on clever maneuvers. Strategy to me is about being one with the Tao, both in thought and in practice.”

- Sonshi (Art of War resource)

Success means being at peace with ourselves and being aligned with a “righteous objective.” She says: “If you don’t have a righteous objective, eventually you will suffer”.

Li Zongwu says the same, noting that his philosophy is neutral - a weapon that can be used for good or bad:

My invention of Thick Black Theory is like Watt's invention of steam, which can be used in any way. Steam can be used to build trains. If driven properly, they can travel a thousand miles a day. If driven improperly, they will fall off a cliff… or run over pedestrians on the street.

- Baidu encyclopedia entry on Zongwu

Zongwu’s friend Xie Shouqing believed that the world “misunderstood his original intention, thinking that he was talking about a kind of personal success theory.”

Rather, Zongwu was concerned with understanding how the universe works, and then within that context what effective personal action looks like.

Li Zongwu said:

“if one uses thick-skinned and cunning tactics to pursue personal gain, the thicker and cunninger he is, the more likely he is to fail; if one uses thick-skinned and cunning tactics to pursue the public good of all, the thicker and cunninger he is, the more successful he is, and the more noble his character will be.”

Statue of Li Zongwu in Sechuan province

This, then, is the surprise at the bottom of dark arts success theory, particularly of the Chinese type: its moral dimension. Even Machiavelli is seen by some contemporary scholars as a moral thinker (see Erica Benner’s Machiavelli’s Ethics, Yale University Press), favoring as he did the rule of law over dictatorship.

But whether or not Machiavellian strategy has a moral dimension, we all want to know (asking for a friend) - does it work?

Do the ‘Dark Arts’ of Success Work?

In a word, yes. I knew this from the time I tried out the ‘principles’ from Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People in my workplace, and was astonished how effective they were. Very intelligent people had no idea what I was doing.

People would not use Machiavellian principles if they had no effect, or could be seen through immediately.

I would even hazard that respectable psychology books like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, with its revelation of human thinking biases, have been used by many people not as a means to correct their own biases, but to take advantage of myopic or wrong thinking in others. If you can understand someone’s psychological weak points, you ‘own’ them to some extent.

The question is not the efficacy of the ‘dark arts’, but whether we should use them, and whether they could turn out to be a net negative for all in the long run.

Power for power’s sake is at odds with my definition of success as “truth revealed in time” (truth being quality, freedom, or beauty). After all, Hitler and Stalin both ‘understood power’, and their names are mud today.

But let’s go deeper into this question.

Should We Use Dark Arts Strategy?

Greene’s 48 Laws are part of the wizened-skeptical, hard-bitten subcategory of the success literature. Take the blackest view of human nature, and then presume that people are out to destroy or take what you have. Exponents include Machiavelli, Baltasar Gracian, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Le Rochefoucauld, and Lord Chesterfield. Exemplars from politics, war, and business, include Napoleon, Tallyrand, Bismarck, Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Netanyahu, Putin, and Andy Grove of Intel (Grove’s tagline was “Only the paranoid survive”) - among many others.

Such figures believe, above all, in their smartness. They are so skeptical of human motives that they believe no-one is capable of deceiving them. Their worst nightmare is to be outmaneuvered or swindled.

But these kinds of people can be too smart. Their paranoia is such that they give too much of their energies to killing off perceived threats instead of building something lasting. Their view of humanity is so dark that they can miss out on genuine opportunities for beneficial effect or win/win situations.

Talleyrand, by Francois Gerard. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The skeptical/dark arts approach is at its most useful when it invokes protective qualities i.e. preserving or saving what is good. In Business @ The Speed of Thought (1999) Bill Gates said, “You have to be consistently receptive to bad news, and then you have to act on it. Sometimes I think my most important job as CEO is to listen for bad news." Every institution needs a dark skeptic who is always looking for what could go wrong. Such people may save the institution.

But suspicion and paranoia can be self-fulfilling. And the tactical, crafty approach to success must be mentally exhausting.

One other way to think about dark arts or manipulative success wisdom is to think about the motivations of its purveyors.

For example:

• Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a means to get back to power

• Greene wrote The 48 Laws as a way out of a failing career

• Li Zongwu developed Thick Black Theory to get recognition and influence

• Chin-ning Chu was desperate to succeed in America after her family’s fall from grace

Each wrote a book that was extreme in a literary sense, but it’s telling that the books were more extreme than how their authors were in real life. By all accounts each were (or are) in fact ‘nice people’ at a personal level.

The nature of these motivations suggest that these books may have ‘worked’ for their authors, but are they the best success guides for you? It could be a case of using a hammer to crack a peanut shell. Everyone has different life situations and karmas that are playing out, and yours may be totally different to Greene’s or Chin-Ning Chu’s.

You could become very successful by taking a very different strategy, such as having noble intentions and being scrupulous about treating others well. You could work on the state of your mind so that it becomes clearer and less prone to egoistic delusion. That positive mental state soon produces an A-grade reality, i.e. ‘success’.

Conclusion

I resisted reading The 48 Laws of Power for years because I thought it sounded too dark and manipulative. My job as a writer is meant to be about lifting people up. But then I realized that what many crave is simply a little more agency and power in their lives - to not feel impotent. To that end, these seemingly ‘dark’ books can be just what is needed. In sum, they are part of the rich tapestry of personal development.

If nothing else, The Prince, The 48 Laws, and Thick Face Black Heart provide an admirable contrast to the sea of politically correct yet anodyne self-help and business books.

Another reason I am comfortable with ‘dark arts/Machiavellian’ success philosophies is that they are a modern manifestation of what Carl Jung called the ‘shadow’.

Carl Jung, 1909

We may present a certain personality to the world, but there is always an opposite version we try to keep hidden. To seem macho, some men deny their anima or unconscious female nature, while many women try not to let the world see their animus – their ruthless or violent-minded masculine self - which nevertheless exists and which those close to the woman know well.

To pretend we are all sweetness and light, and to not have goals that require strong, sometimes ruthless action, is a denial of our totality.

Moreover, it is practical. As Jung put it in one of his letters:

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

The Tibetan Buddhist archetype Black Coat is a fearsome figure, appearing in a blaze of fire and wielding knives. Black Coat is about destruction – not of external enemies, but of our own negativity. A ‘holy’ or ‘good’ deity would not be strong enough to defeat the jealousy, envy, anger, and pessimism inside. Only in recognizing the large amounts of negativity in us can be we begin purifying it. To deny it exists is counterproductive, even pathological.

Black Coat (Tibetan: Bernakchen)

Consider this:

Embracing the darkness ultimately means loving ourselves, because in doing so we recognize that our potential for influence and impact is much greater than our ‘nice’ self might ever allow.

Kind regards,

Tom

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Tom Butler-Bowdon

Author of the 50 Classics series (click to find out more)

Editor of the Capstone Classics (click on image for more info)

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