The Dark Arts: Moral Quandaries About Teaching Power

Ethics? I hardly know 'er!

By pretending to bare your heart to other people…you make them more likely to reveal their own secrets. Give them a false confession and they will likely give you a real one…the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer suggested violently contradicting people you’re in conversation with as a way of irritating them, stirring them up so that they lose some of the control over their words. In their emotional reaction they will reveal all kinds of truths about themselves, truths you can later use against them.

This quote is from The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. I picked it pretty much at random to illustrate my point in this article. That book is, as I recently described it to a Lyft driver, “A fucked-up kind of awesome.” It is the Dark Arts of Power: manipulative, unapologetic, and effective.

I have recently gotten obsessed with power, aka “the conscious manipulation of resources, status, and authority” (definition mine). I’m obsessed with it because I think that underneath every interaction - beneath every disagreement with Mom, frustration with our partners, conflict with our colleagues, friends, or boss - actually lies a power play. Every interaction involves a subtle testing, bid for, or rejection of our power relative to others.

This doesn’t form the whole of the interaction but it does influence it, and we tend not to see or understand that mechanism. It’s like the dark matter of social skills.

But, even as I’m starting to tease out more distinctions around this topic, I’m finding a lot of trepidation in myself for how (or if) to teach it.

For example:

I recently got upset at another leader for the way they held a training. Using my Authentic Relating skills, I planned out a conversation with them where I would share my withholds and try to navigate an equitable solution.

But then I asked myself - what if this leader doesn’t listen? I don’t want them to continue leading in an ineffective, even mildly harmful way (I will get on a soapbox someday about what I actually believe constitutes “harm” and the ways that word gets overused. But one polemic at a time).

I moved from my Authentic Relating toolbox into my store of power practices.

I considered how I could assert authority by getting the organization we had presented for to hire me for their next training, instead of this person. How I could gain status by presenting myself as more knowledgeable on the very topics they most enjoyed speaking about, using some of their own distinctions. How I could hire their co-facilitators for my own next trainings and treat them better, to highlight the disparity between this leader’s practices and my own, and start to sow discord in their organization.

It was then that I realized I was Becoming Evil.

The Core Problem

The 48 Laws of Power might occupy the same section in a bookstore as texts like Getting Real and Nonviolent Communication. They’re all about Communication and Psychology. All skills can be mis-used; I’m sure every one of us knows someone who uses nonviolent communication to enforce their will on others. But Power skills can be mis-used more effectively.

Nonviolent Communication with evil ends

So, the question comes, “Why teach Power skills at all?” The problem is, if we don’t understand these skills, we can’t defend against them. We don’t know when somebody is using the Reciprocity Principle against us, or how to dissipate coalitions. We have brought open hands to a gunfight, and unfortunately, the person with the gun is behind us. It’s harder to talk them down, and they can’t always see our face when they shoot.

IMO, the mis-use of power causes much of our pain - certainly much of our pain within hierarchies. Teaching these skills might help a lot of people stay out of suffering, which is my main mission in life (“to reduce suffering”). But, since it is very hard to pre-screen for narcissists AND everyone is a narcissist when they’re really triggered, will teaching these skills just create MORE bad actors and hierarchies?