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Law 37
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
Think as you like but behave like others. If you try too hard to seem unconventional, you might just look like an attention-seeker, so often it’s better to blend in unless you know you’re with friends who appreciate originality. The ancient Spartan Pausanias broke this rule when, after military successes in Persia, he began adopting Persian culture as his own, dressing in a lavish Persian style. While he defied expectations for a while, eventually fellow Spartans became suspicious of him, attempting to capture him in a standoff that led to his death.
Many of Greene’s laws involve acting in an unconventional way and going against conformity. But in this law, he suggests that, in fact, conformity can be helpful—or at least a surface-level adherence to conformity. He uses the example of Pausanias to show why standing out can be a bad thing. Even someone successful can alienate their followers if they do something that marks them as too strange.
Active
Themes
By contrast, the late 16th-century philosopher and Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella followed this law. He was a materialist who didn’t believe in miracles, heaven, or hell, and so he was imprisoned during the Inquisition. He got out of prison by pretending to have been temporarily mad. In the future, he was more careful, writing books like Atheism Conquered that claimed to expose and contradict heretics but in fact collected many of their supposedly dangerous ideas in one volume, with Campanella’s defense against them being half-hearted.
By contrast to Pausanias, Tommaso Campanella represents someone who conformed on the surface, but who didn’t compromise on his ideals. Greene understands why it might be appealing to break with convention. But, as he shows with Campanella, sometimes the best way to accomplish something revolutionary is to appear to conform on the surface. This allowed Campanella to publish Atheism Conquered, spreading the books ideas precisely because Campanella resisted drawing unwanted attention.
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Greene argues that it’s natural to hide one’s true feelings and that humans learn to do it at a young age. While some view this deception as intolerable, vowing always to speak the truth, most people learn to say the conventional thing at times without actually believing it. Greene thinks it would be a mistake to believe that institutions like the Inquisition are a thing of the past—unconventional ideas still face challenges today. Still, it might be necessary to break this law in situations where you already stand out—if you become a “gadfly” and people expect you to be unconventional, this can be a route to success. Oscar Wilde followed this route, although his eventual downfall showed its dangers.
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