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Law 20
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The 48 Laws of Power, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Morality, and Pragmatism
Emotion vs. Action
The Pitfalls of Greed
History and Human Nature
Summary
Analysis
Play a sucker to catch a sucker—seem dumber than your mark. People hate to feel stupid, so Greene advises that you should play dumb to make victims feel smart and trust you. The con men Philip Arnold and John Slack followed this law, managing to swindle the famous jeweler Charles Tiffany and other well-off financiers out of a large sum of money. They were so good at pretending to be rubes that no one suspected them of foul play.
Although Greene writes extensively about pursuing self-interest, he believes that self-interest becomes dangerous when it spills over into greed. In this passage, he considers how, by appearing foolish, one can use other people’s arrogance and greed to their own advantage.
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Greene believes people never want to accept that another person could be smarter, always trying to justify a reason for it—and you can take advantage on this tendency by feigning foolishness. You don’t have to limit yourself to playing down intelligence—it can also be useful to pretend to be unsophisticated.
Greene relates pragmatism to self-knowledge. He believes that knowing one’s own limits and abilities can help prevent a person from being misled by greed. This knowledge can also help you identity the greed of others and use it as a weakness.
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Themes
An exception to this law is when you can better hide a deception by showing off your intelligence instead of hiding it. There are times when it pays to look like an authority, particularly when you need people to trust what you’re saying.
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