As a preface, I'm taking a Devil's Advocate position here, so, if you really like the book and don't feel up to having a net debate on what amounts to a personal opinion, skip my post.
The only one of Greene's books I've read is
The 48 Laws of Power, but looking up summaries of the others more or less confirms they're written along the same lines for the most part.
First, an epic digression:
I've read a lot of books about writing novels. And perhaps the most common form of how-to book about writing is where the author comes up with a variation on the standard model of three-act structure, character progression, and theme as a filter for the work, and then goes on to suggest that this, their model, is the one that works. They then proceed to look at a handful of bestselling books and demonstrate how their variant of the standard novel structure is present in that book, thus proving that their variant is the key to success.
Reading this sort of book is hilarious when you get through enough of these sorts of books and see each variant model often applied to the same bestseller book.
The Godfather in particular has been analysed through many of these models. It gets to the point where it's like watching two solipsists arguing with each other about whose universe actually exists. It's only when you read what Mario Puzo himself said about the novel -- like Hemingway, he had only a few and simple aphorisms for the writing of novels -- that you realise Puzo was churning out what he thought of at the time as a potboiler, cheap-arse novel which he hardly researched (certainly not to the point of sitting down with Mafia Dons, as is the common myth) and sure as fuck wasn't following any of the models any of these how-to novels set out.
(It's doubly amusing when the author himself can't even cite his examples properly. I have seen so many how-to authors misstate the sequence of events of the climax of
Empire Strikes Back it makes me wonder whether anybody actually still watches the film. For future reference, the line is
not "Luke, I am your father." The sequence is:
Darth Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him.
Darth Vader: No.
I am your father.)
Similar can be said about Harper Lee with
To Kill a Mockingbird. At one of her very infrequent lectures about the book -- John T. Reed talks about attending it -- she was pestered with the question that there must have been some thematic significance to all the evil characters having the names of Civil War generals. Lee testily replied "Those characters were all white trash. All the white trash in the South are named after Civil War generals." The room went silent ... while, as John T. Reed puts it, every guy in the room thought about his friends named Robert E. and similar.
You can find equivalent, chuckleworthy encounters from a lot of mainstream (not literary) authors when they get asked by an academic about the theme of their books only for the academic to be embarrassingly told "No, that's actually got nothing to do with what I was getting at. I was just trying to write a good story that would sell. I was not trying to say fuck all about the imagination of man by having Joe light a cigarette in the alleyway, the character was just nervous as fuck and lit up to get a burst of nicotine in him before he went to try and get in Wanda's pants."
In short:
(1) It's easy to make up reasons or principles for things
post facto and say they explain past events
(2) The reasons for events are often nothing like what you expect when you talk to the people involved in them, and they're often for startlingly different reasons than you think.
But I digress.
Let's leave aside the scholarly objection that Greene pulls out isolated examples and uses them to claim a greater principle at work (which is the logical fallacy of Inappropriate Generalisation, or proof by example). The book is filled with it, and this is the most common complaint.
The next complaint I'd have is: by what expertise or example from his own life does Greene claim the ability to write about this stuff? Donald Trump's
The Art of the Deal at least can be read on the basis that Trump has the experience to back his claims: he has not just talked the talk, he has walked the walk and that direct experience is what he speaks about in his book. What is Robert Greene's pertinent life experience? By Wikipedia:
Quote:Quote:
Before becoming an author, Greene estimates that he worked 80 jobs, including as a construction worker, translator, magazine editor, and Hollywood movie writer. In 1995, Greene worked as a writer at Fabrica, an art and media school in Italy, and met a book packager named Joost Elffers. Greene pitched a book about power to Elffers and wrote a treatment which eventually became The 48 Laws of Power. He would note this as the turning point of his life.
His university qualification is in classical studies. But do you regard a university-trained guy who had 80 jobs
before he turned to writing as well-travelled, or as a dilettante who was no fucking good at anything he turned his hand to until he starting writing? (To be fair, any number of writers do say there's nothing else they could do because writing was the
only thing they were good at.) Additionally, has he ridden to the heights of fame and success by practicing the principles he preaches?
Why, in short, should you believe a guy who espouses self-help principles if he doesn't use them himself?
The next thing is that it would appear the book is, by Greene's own admission, hyperbole. In an interview with the Guardian, he said:
Quote:Quote:
I believe I described a reality that no other book tried to describe… I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.”
Fair enough that he gets mad at self-help books out there: so do I. Most of them are shit rolled in glitter and generally regurgitating classical or Renaissance thought on life and success. But there seems a certain level of hypocrisy here: he hates self-help books, so he wrote one that goes completely the other way. I see self-help books as resting on something of a continuum: at one end are books like Brian Tracy's work on self-discipline -- which focuses on internal transformation and internal character to the exception of almost all else -- and at the other end are books like this which focus on the manipulation of others in order to gain success.
Why do so? Why not write a parody of a self-help book? Why not join a skeptics' society, or become an investigative journalist ripping up people like James Redfield et. al.?
The third element is a personal one on my behalf, and it is something of a philosophical objection. In terms of a rough worldview, I tend to resonate closer to the Brian Tracy or John T. Reed view of the world: to a large extent, the world runs on trust. Where it's low -- particularly trust of government institutions -- you also find third world countries and Islamic shitholes (often at the same time.) Where trust is high -- by reason of an independent rule of law, though not solely so -- you have a world where atoms are split and premature babies saved and riches for a vast majority of the population.
I see this sort of book as advancing the other, cynical end of the spectrum. It makes us more cynical about people, it destroys a part of the soul, it proposes a fairly immoral way of looking at the world and at people for the benefit of material ends only. This way of seeing the world might be good for the bank balance, but someone following these principles to the letter is going to wind up a hollowed-out personality.
I personally cannot see the reason for such a book and think it retards civilisation, not advancing it. It advocates form over substance, and I would have thought the manosphere was much more interested in advancing substance and seeing through form. Can you read it for a sort of catalogue of how assholes behave? Maybe: but as said, its principles are derived from isolated incidents and I see little proffered in the book for how to avoid such schemes or such people. As a whole, the book leaves you with a deeper cynicism about people in general. I'm not certain this is necessarily a good thing - especially when the world if not our movement is crying out for more people who
can be trusted, who will stand up for principles and are morally courageous.
I am not surprised when I read who finds the book personally inspirational: rappers, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, and allegedly Hollywood film producers. In short, the appearance-is-everything crowd. The book is, at best, a survival guide in places where there are no objective measures of performance. These are not places that masculine men in my view ought to be frequenting; they are the demesnes of women for the most part, women being creatures of appearance above all.
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