From Robert Greene “The 48 Laws of Power”.

Preface, page xvii

The feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us – when we feel helpless we feel miserable.  No one wants less power; everyone wants more.  In the world today, however, it is dangerous to seem too power hungry, to be overt with your power moves.  We have to seem fair and decent.  So we need to be subtle – congenial yet cunning, democratic yet devious.

This game of constant duplicity most resembles the power dynamic that existed in the scheming world of the old aristocratic court.

[…]

The successful courtier learned over time to make all of his moves indirect; if he stabbed an opponent in the back, it was with a velvet glove on his hand and the sweetest of smiles on his face.  Instead of using coercion or outright treachery, the perfect courtier got his way though seduction, charm, deception, and subtle strategy, always planning several moves ahead.  Life in the court was a never-ending game that required constant vigilance and tactical thinking.  It was civilized war.

Today we face a peculiarly similar paradox to that of the courtier: Everything must appear civilized, decent, democratic, and fair.  But if we play by those rules too strictly, if we take them too literally, we are crushed by those around us who are not so foolish.  As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”  The court imagined itself the pinnacle of refinement, but underneath its glittering surface a cauldron of dark emotions – greed, envy, lust, hatred – boiled and simmered.  Our world similarly imagines itself the pinnacle of fairness, yet the same ugly emotions still stir within us, as they have forever.  The game is the same.  Outwardly, you must seem to respect the niceties, but inwardly, unless you are a fool, you learn quickly to be prudent, and to do as Napoleon advised: Place your iron hand inside a velvet glove.  If, like the courtier of times gone by, you can master the arts o indirection, learning to seduce, charm, deceive, and subtly outmaneuver your opponents, you will attain the heights of power.  You will be able to make people bend to your will without their realizing what you have done.  And if they do not realize what you have done, they will never resent nor resist you.

Boris Pasternak (1890 – 1960)

it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy.  The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact.  By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson.  Few can resist the power of the Mirror Effect.

“48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene

A lesson in Seduction

In 1652 the recently widowed Baroness Mancini moved her family from Rome to Paris, where she could count on the influence and protection of her brother Cardinal Mazarin, the French Prime Minister.  Of the baroness’s five daughters, four dazzled the court with their beauty and high spirits.  These infamously charming nieces of Cardinal Mazarin became known as the Mazarinettes, and soon found themselves invited to all the most important court functions.

One daughter, Marie Mancini, did not share this good fortune, for she lacked the beauty and grace of her sisters – who, along with her mother and even Cardinal Mazarin, eventually came to dislike her, for they felt she spoiled the family image.  They tried to persuade her to enter a convent, where she would be less of an embarrassment, but she refused.  Instead she applied herself to her studies, learning Latin and Greek, perfecting her French, and practicing her musical skills. On the rare occasions when her family would let her attend court affairs, she trained herself to be an artful listener, sizing people up for their weaknesses and hidden desires.  And when she finally met the future King Louis XIV, in 1657 (Louis was seventeen years old, Marie eighteen), she decided that to spite her family and uncle, she would find a way to make this young man fall in love with her.

This was a seemingly impossible task for such a plain-looking girl, but Marie studied the future king closely.  She noticed that her sisters’ frivolity did not please him, and she sensed that he loathed the scheming and petty politicking that went on all around him.  She saw that he had a romantic nature – he read adventure novels, insisted on marching at the head of his armies, and had high ideals and a passion for glory.  The court did not feed these fantasies of his; it was a banal, superficial world that bored him.

The key to Louis’s heart, Marie saw, would be to construct a mirror reflecting his fantasies and his youthful yearnings for glory and romance.  To begin with she immersed herself in the romantic novels, poems, and plays that she knew the young king read voraciously.  When Louis began to engage her in conversation, to his delight she would talk of the things that stirred his soul – not this fashion or that piece of gossip, but rather courtly love, the deeds of great knights, the nobility of past kings and heroes.  She fed his thirst for glory by creating an image of an august, superior king whom he could aspire to become.  She stirred his imagination.

As the future Sun King spent more and more time in Marie’s presence, it eventually became clear that he had fallen in love with the least likely young woman of the court.  To the horror of her sisters and mother, he showered Marie Mancini with attention.  He brought her along on his military campaigns, and made a show of stationing her where she could watch as he marched into battle.  He even promised that he would marry her and make her queen.

Mazarin, however, would never allow the king to marry his niece, a woman who could bring France no diplomatic or royal alliances.  Louis had to marry a princess of Spain or Austria.  In 1658 Louis succumbed to the pressure and agreed to break off the first romantic involvement of his life.  He did so with much regret, and at the end of his life he acknowledged that he never loved anyone as much as Marie Mancini.