Robert Greene on The will of expansion, influence, power etc.

 The will of expansion, influence, power etc.

As Friedrich Nietzsche put is, the longing for wholeness makes all things “strive toward the immeasurable in nature, individual character rarely is fixed, but instead constantly expanding.”

Jordan Peterson says he’s shocked about the some of the laws. Especially since Jordan is a preacher of speaking the truth.

Jordan “It is shocking, these are very manipulative”

Greene answer, >>Yes<<

Greene is however examining the shadow of us humans. All humans all have it, either unconsciously or consciously aware of it.

Here are Robert Greene comments about some of his rules in the book The 48 laws on Power, here in this Jordan B. Peterson podcast:

”The idea for me comes from Nietzsche and his idea of Will to Power which he explains as every organism has the desire to expand, has a desire of expansion.

And so I think for human beings the desire that we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits. We want to feel like we have some degree of ability to influence other people. That we can control our own career and learn more and develop greater skills and have more kind of power and influence in our life

The feeling that I cannot have any power or influence over my children, my spouse, my colleagues, my boss, my career in general is deeply unsettling for the human animal and causes all kinds of attempts at what I call negative power passive aggression etc. Setting yourself up as a victim's kind of leverage power in a negative way.

And so the problem is and I this a lot of this comes from Machiavelli who inspired a lot of the 48 laws the problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter in particular in the 21st century about what is acceptable about what is politically correct. So we're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragraphs of fairness and democracy etc and at the same time we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships etc.

And so because of that dynamic we have to be extremely careful in this world and I compare it to the courts of like Louis xiv where all of the courtiers if they're too overt in their power moves the king will disapprove of them and will not banish them but they'll be kind of excluded to the corner of the palace. And so the game was to be sort of indirect. To be polite and ingratiating and if you had an enemy to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them. And so this is kind of,” [. . .]”where the 48 laws of power came out from so you quoted me I had like 80 different jobs, probably more like 60 65. But I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had and I worked in every conceivable field, and i didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world. And it really kind of irritated me all the self-help books were sort of describing a world that I never saw existed, you know.

I saw people being very political having egos and having problems with their egos and I didn't see anybody any books like they're kind of describing what I encountered every day.

So law number one is Never outshine the Master, and the idea is that if you try too hard to impress your boss or the person above you you're liable to make them feel insecure you're going to trip on their ego and something bad will happen to you, right. And so this seemed like the fact that people have egos and operate with egos and you have to be careful with them seems very clear to me but i didn't find books out there that were describing it so i hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out.” – Robert Greene, (Motivation For Writing The 48 Laws Of Power, 2022)

Reference

Jordan B Peterson [Youtube channel], (march 2022). Robert Greene's Motivation For Writing The 48 Laws Of Power. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Ndl0cdn_E