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Has anyone else read The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene? (archive.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by znonymous@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net

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If anyone has read this, and could provide a Marxist/materialist perspective, or a link to a known one, I would greatly appreciate it.

Edit: Wow! I am glad I asked before wasting any time at all reading any part of this. Thank you.

I am asking, because I was recommended to read Dale Carnegie's 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by my current boss, and I had read that when I was 19 at the recommendation of my Evangelical father. I mostly disliked it then, finding it trite and vague. So, I was trying to find an alternative, and tried to look up an alternative that I could read instead. I saw that this 48 Laws book was highly read by people incarcerated in US prisons, and the book had been banned by many prisons. I was hoping it had some sort of subversive anti-authoritarian messaging that could fly under my boss's radar.

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[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago

I read it when I was a depressed ball of repression and anxiety in my early 20s, and in retrospect I'm half convinced that the book was an elaborate shitpost to get the sort of person who wants to read a book on manipulating people to instead read a bunch of old arabic parables and ultimately get indirectly called a dumbass in the final chapter for thinking they could learn how to manipulate people and wield power from a book, which also praises Mao and the CPC's strategic ability during the revolution.