The maxims in this volume of the Penguin Little Black Classics are excerpted from the 17th century, Jesuit priest Baltasar Gracian’s The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence (1647). Notable, largely, for the quantity of advice, the maxims in this pamphlet fall neatly into three categories: the Machiavellian, the Bad, and the Meaningless.
The Machiavellian
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince was published a century earlier, in 1532, and clearly, if How to Use Your Enemies is anything to go off, its influence was being widely felt.
For instance, a typical piece of advice goes:
“Know how to be all things to all people. A discrete Proteus: with the learned, learned, and with the devout, devout. A great art to win everyone over, since similarity creates goodwill. Observe each person’s temperament and tune yours to it.”
In other words, suit your tongue to your company. Inveigle your way into their graces, and then (later) bend them to your will. What is interesting is that this initial piece of advice is followed immediately by its obvious corollary; don’t be taken in yourself!
“Take care when gathering information. We live mainly on information. We see very little for ourselves and live on others’ testimony. Hearing is truth’s last entry point, and a lie’s first.”
The essential point to grasp is that all this chameleon-like behaviour is not about being a people pleaser; quite the reverse, it is about being able to tune yourself to others so that they like you, and so that you are therefore better able to persuade/manipulate them. After all, one should:
“Make people depend on you. An image is made sacred not by its creator but by its worshipper. The shrewd would rather people needed them than thanked them.”
How to Use Your Enemies is suffused with the two key Machiavellian ideas. First, have an extremely low view of people and their motives. Second, always consider outward appearances rather than essence. This kind of advice works particularly well in a showy, or shame, culture where it’s very embarrassing to make a mistake or be shown up:
“Princes like to be helped, but not surpassed. Advice should be offered as if a reminder of what they’ve forgotten, not an insight that they’ve never had.”
In addition, much of Senor Gracian’s advice will seem rather old hat to us woke things in 2023. For instance he is at pains to say we must:
“make sure of a successful outcome. […] Most people don’t see the precise circumstances, only a good or bad outcome. Reputation is therefore never lost when goals are achieved. A successful conclusion makes everything golden, however mistaken the means.”
Reputation is key, and he is right (as many a Premier League football manager would, I’m sure, tell you) that “it’s a results game”. However, note this last half clause – “however mistaken the means” – which is the real kicker. Not only should you strive for the ‘golden’ result, but in doing so you should subordinate the ends to the means. Danger lurks this way.
The Bad
Gracian then moves swiftly on to some really bad advice:
“Take more care not to fail once than to succeed 100 times. Nobody looks at the sun when it’s going, everyone when it’s eclipsed.”
If ever there was a sentence calculated to damage self-esteem and stop anyone ever doing anything worthwhile out of a fear of what others might think, it was this one. Fear of failure is the bane of action. More than this, to realise that no one really cares very much about what other people are doing, that you are the hero of your own story, but no one else’s, is an immensely freeing realisation. By contrast, the feeling that everyone is watching and judging you (which is called the Spotlight Effect, and is a well-known psychological phenomenon), exacerbated today by the fact of social media, is a terrible stifler of the creation of all sorts of interesting things. How the editor of the Penguin edition could allow this to be juxtaposed next to great advice like “Use occasions that don’t matter to practise for those that do” is quite baffling.
The Meaningless
There is one more kind of advice in ‘How to Use Your Enemies’ which I should like to rant about briefly, the advice which is almost totally meaningless :
“You should speak as wills are written, for the fewer the words the fewer the disputes.”
Not only would actually speaking as wills are written lose you most of your friends, I suspect it is not a good analogy in any case; vague language has probably been the cause of just as many disputes as provisions in wills which are unpopular. Worst of all, it sounds like it should be true.
This kind of advice (essentially tosh with a designer handbag) is actually, I would suggest, the most pernicious that we receive in the 21st century. Throughout our daily lives we are bombarded with neatly-turned phrases from people trying to sell things. These phrases may of course be evidence-backed and meaningful, or they may be basically wrong or they may, indeed, be totally meaningless. Next time you wander down a supermarket aisle and see “natural”, “premium”, “hand crafted” etc written in bold or beautiful lettering, you’ll know what I mean.
Now for some advice of my own: With the increasing popularity of AI generated text, this kind of meaningless yet persuasive language is something we should all be on the lookout for, now more than ever. Generative AI does not know what it is creating; it only produces a facsimile of reasoned thought. Its next word is only the sum of what it thinks is the most likely next word, based on its training set, the prompt given, and the output it has generated so far. This is particularly the case when less sophisticated language models are used e.g. ChatGPT i.e., GPT-3.5, rather than GPT-4. Don’t confuse eloquence for meaning.
Rupert Swallow 