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Video Description
Three very different books turn out to describe the same game of power almost move for move. This video from the Conscious Radical channel maps Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and Plato’s Republic onto one playbook.
The smile, the division, the promise, dependence, and the purge appear in all three, from Plato’s account of democracy sliding into tyranny to Greene’s steps for creating a cult. What separates the writers, the video says, is where each stands and what each wants you to do with what they have shown you.
Full Video Transcript
If you have spent any time at all on YouTube, you will almost certainly have come across
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, which was published in 1998. So there have been
several regurgitations of this work. It’s been summarized, it’s been added over gym footage,
and now I’m adding to that. So if you haven’t read it or heard of it, Greene’s material feeds
into the dark side of human nature where people manipulate others or conceal their intentions.
So he wanted to document the ugly, scary and dark rules of interaction and politics drawing on
Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. If you were to put Plato’s Republic, Books 8 and 9,
alongside the 48 Laws of Power and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, you’d uncover a symbiotic map of human
ambition, decay and survival. The patterns line up but what is different is the viewpoint from
which each writer stands and what they want to achieve with what they’ve shown you. So in The
Republic Plato traced how a democracy turns into a tyranny and I did go through this in detail in
my last video, The Demagogue’s Playbook, which I will link somewhere. Plato provides a diagnostic
map which details how human psychology breaks down when ethics are stripped away and I think
we’ve all seen various scales or varying scales of this in society. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is more
about breaking the enemy’s will without having to go to war and he said to win 100 victories
in 100 battles is not the acme of skill, to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
Sun Tzu provides a strategy of how to weaponize human psychology by exploiting
instability, pride and greed to win without fighting. Green teaches the
tactics to be aware of so that you can spot any Machiavellian maneuvers and act
accordingly. So I thought it would be interesting to map the moves and I would
be interested to know what examples of this you may have seen and by the way
this isn’t exhaustive there are more parallels but I wanted to focus on the
main ones that we see in our everyday lives. So Plato described a tyrant as being full of smiles
and he salutes everyone whom he meets. Now this reminds me of every living politician who rolls
up their sleeves and walks on the factory floor or holds a baby with a slightly incongruous smile.
Now this person swears they’re not a tyrant and they hand out favours. In the art of war in chapter
to one. Sun Tzu says all warfare is based on deception. Now Green spreads this same idea over
three laws. Law three, conceal your intentions. Law 12, use selective honesty and generosity to
disarm your victim. And law 14, pose as a friend, work as a spy. In Plato, the drones, which are the
political class, set the rich against the poor, accusing the rich of being oligarchs, which
basically produces actual oligarchs. Sun Tzu says if his forces are united, separate them. And Green
in Law 39 says stir up waters to catch fish. So the concept is to divide and conquer. In our world
today, you could see that demonstrated in the polarisation that we see every day on the news,
in politics and down the pub. Neighbours divided and against each other, nations at war. It serves
a purpose but the question you really need to ask yourself is to what aim and for whose benefit?
Now there’s a promise. Plato’s protector starts off as the people’s champion because the people
have grown so tired and fed up with the chaos of freedom that they want someone to champion them
And the champion drops hints that all the debts will be cancelled and land will be handed out.
Sun Tzu said, hold out baits to entice the enemy.
Green in Law 32 says, play to people’s fantasies.
And Law 27, play on people’s need to believe, to create a cult-like following.
Now, this one in particular piqued my interest.
In it, Green provides detail on how to create a cult in five easy steps.
And if this wasn’t so close to the truth, you’d think that you were reading some sort of satirical page on Facebook.
Plato’s tyrant keeps people poor and busy, which prevents them from organising.
Imagine trying to organise when your whole survival instinct is working to keep food on the table for your family or to keep your home warm.
Now Sun Tzu said keep them in total ignorance and he meant your own men. Never let them fully know
what the plan is if you do indeed have a plan. And this links with Green’s Law 11. Learn to keep
people dependent on you. It’s important to always be needed because the more you are relied on
the more freedom you apparently have. When dependence disappears so does civility and
decency and respect, so says Balthasar Gratian. So Plato’s tyrant removes the brave and the wise
and he keeps the rest. While Sun Tzu doesn’t talk about this directly in relation to the enemy,
he does describe how an incompetent sovereign can place an ignorant person in command,
a misplaced administration, which is what would happen once the tyrant removes the brave
and the wise. Green highlights this in law 15, crush your enemy totally. Law 42, strike the
shepherd and the sheep will scatter. And law one, never outshine the master. Okay so that’s where
they meet but there are places where these books disagree and that in itself can tell you a lot.
Sun Tzu despite his reputation didn’t like fighting. He said there is no instance of a
country having benefited from prolonged warfare but Plato’s tyrant wants the war to keep going
not because of the enemy but to hold his own people down because people at war need a leader
and people paying for a war are too tired to organise and as we know conflicts and wars
they’re a huge price at home. Although Sun Tzu would have preferred to avoid a battle he wasn’t
adverse to throwing soldiers into positions from which there was no escape because desperate men
lose their fear. But he also says something that Green doesn’t. He said there are commands of the
sovereign which must not be obeyed. Now Socrates would have agreed with this having refused to
follow illegal orders twice.
The first time was under the democracy in 406,
when he served on the committee
that presided over the assembly.
The crowd demanded an illegal mass trial of the generals,
and Socrates refused to put it to a vote.
The second time he did that was under the 30 tyrants,
when he was ordered to arrest an innocent man,
and instead Socrates went home.
Another difference is knowledge of self.
Sun Tzu’s most quoted line is, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the
result of a hundred battles. How well do you think Plato’s tyrant knows himself? By book nine, he is
the most enslaved man in the city, run by one appetite, unable to trust anyone or travel. He
can’t see his own chains. And Greene agrees in the sense of law 18, do not build fortresses to
protect yourself. Isolation is dangerous. Now, although Plato’s tyrant serves as a warning,
it’s also important to remember that in book three, he says the rulers of his ideal city
are allowed to lie to their own citizens for the public good. Haven’t we heard this before in our
lifetime? And Plato then goes on to write the lie, where every citizen is to be told that they were
born with gold, silver or bronze and iron mixed into their soul. Hearing this they will accept
their role and status in life and this is usually called the noble lie. Now in 1945 Karl Popper, a
philosopher and academic, published The Open Society and Its Enemies, placing Plato at the
head of the enemies as the first totalitarian philosopher. Popper saw the Republic as a
blueprint for a closed and managed society. Now I agree with Papa to a degree, it certainly could
be perceived that way, but the Republic was not a political manifesto, it was more of a search
for a seemingly impossible constitution. Sun Tzu and Green both talk about formlessness. Green’s
final law, number 48, is assume formlessness, to be as fluid and formless as water. Sun Tzu compares
strategy to water which retains no constant shape. And Plato finds something similar to
formlessness too, in the citizen who allows their desires to take charge, who is one thing on a
Monday and another thing on a Friday. But a mind with a shape of its own is very difficult to
manipulate. One thing that you will notice about all three books is that they assume there is a
person at the head of the controls. Plato has his tyrant, Sun Tzu the general and the sovereign
and Green has the master you mustn’t outshine. But what happens when you can’t see anyone sitting on
the throne or the one who’s pulling the strings? Now I’ll be looking at that in my next video
because it’s very close to how we live now and if you’d like to read my essay about that you can
find it on my sub stack which I will post the link below. Coming soon is The Philosopher’s
Citizen so I will put a link to that too and you can watch that straight away hopefully.
Source: The Conscious Radical