Be all these, not merely seem to be them, still less affect to be them... the discovery of deceit was always thought the true nourishment of a thoughtful mind, the true delight of a virtuous soul.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The hundredth maxim describes the book's finished product: a person who has seen through the games, the flattery, the machinery of self-interest, and been neither captured nor curdled by the seeing. Three fates await the perceptive. The naive stop being naive and become bitter, wearing their disillusion as a personality. The clever weaponise what they see and join the machinery. The third path, the one this maxim prescribes, treats each discovered deceit as nourishment: information that improves your navigation without touching your conduct. Such a person is unfoolable AND clean, which is the rarest combination in any institution, and the most powerful over time; note the one condition attached, be it, don't perform it: affected wisdom is just one more deceit for the genuinely disillusioned to discover.
Practice
- When you uncover a manipulation, harvest it twice: adjust your defences, and refuse the third harvest, the bitterness.
- Keep conduct independent of discovery: what others' games justify is vigilance, never imitation (the power directive in one line: tactics read, values fixed).
- Check yourself for the performance version: worldly-wise talk is cheap; the real article is visible only in decisions, mostly refusals.
Use this when
- Use this as the frame for the whole collection: every reading maxim in this book is for the third path, none for the second.
- Use it hiring and allying: the unfoolable-and-clean are the only people worth binding your name to for decades.
Ignore this when
- Don't let seeing-through become your identity; the man without illusions still builds, enjoys, and trusts selectively; disillusion is his lens, not his home.
- Don't rush the disillusionment of the young; they need it in doses, with the third path shown alongside, or you produce cynics and call it education.
A picture of it
Thirty years of procurement had shown him every trick in the vendor bible, and his juniors could never reconcile the two facts of him: nothing got past the man, and nothing had stuck to him. He read every game in the room and played none of them; knew exactly which colleagues had sold their signatures and had tea with them anyway, pleasantly, revealing nothing they could use. Asked once, near retirement, how he stayed uncorrupted while so unfooled, he gave the answer this maxim was written to produce: seeing the dirt is intelligence. Handling it is a choice. He had simply never confused the two.
Learn every trick ever played. Play none of them. That combination is what this whole book was for.