by 50 Cent
In the midst of this, FDR remained mostly silent, letting them fill the air with their charges and threats. His advisers panicked; they felt he was being too passive. But for Roosevelt it was part of a plan—he felt certain that the public would grow tired of their shrill attacks as the months went on; he sensed that the factions within the Union Party would begin to fight among themselves as the election neared. He ordered his surrogates to not attack these men.
At the same time, he went to work behind the scenes. In Louisiana, he fired as many Long supporters working for the government as possible and replaced them with those on his side. He launched detailed investigations into the senator’s dubious financial affairs. With Coughlin, he worked to isolate him from other notable Catholic priests, making him look like a fringe radical. He introduced laws that forced Coughlin to get an operating permit to broadcast his shows; the government found reasons to deny his requests and temporarily silenced him. All of this served to confuse and frighten FDR’s foes. As he had predicted, the party began to splinter and the public lost interest. Roosevelt won the 1936 election in an unprecedented landslide.
FDR had understood the basic principle in squaring off against aggressors who are direct and relentless. If you meet them head on, you are forced to fight on their terms. Unless you happen to be an aggressive type, you are generally at a disadvantage against those who have simple ideas and fierce energy. It is best to fight them in an indirect manner, concealing your intentions and doing what you can behind the scenes—hidden from the public—to create obstacles and sow confusion. Instead of reacting, you must give aggressors some space to go further with their attacks, getting them to expose themselves in the process and provide you plenty of juicy targets to hit. If you become too active and forceful in response, you look defensive. You are playing the fox to their lion—remaining cool and calculating, doing whatever you can to make them more emotional and baiting them to fall apart through their own reckless energy.
PASSIVE AGGRESSORS
These types are masters at disguise. They present themselves as weak and helpless, or highly moral and righteous, or friendly and ingratiating. This makes them hard to pick out at first glance. They send all kinds of mixed signals—alternating between friendly, cool, and hostile—creating confusion and conflicting emotions. If you try to call them on their behavior, they use this confusion to make you feel guilty, as if you were the one who was the source of the problem. Once you are drawn into their dramas, with your emotions engaged, it can be very difficult to detach yourself. The key is recognizing them in time to take appropriate action.
When the Grand Duchess Catherine (future empress of Russia, Catherine the Great) met her husband-to-be, Peter, she felt he was an innocent child at heart. He continued to play with toy soldiers and had a petulant, moody temperament. Then shortly after their marriage in 1745, she began to detect a different side to his character. In private they got along well enough. But then she would hear from secondhand sources all kinds of nasty stories about how he had regretted their marriage and how he preferred her chambermaid. What was she to believe—these stories or his geniality when they were together? After he became Czar Peter III, he would graciously invite Catherine to visit him in the morning, but then he would ignore her. When the royal gardener stopped delivering her favorite fruits, she found out it was on his orders. Peter was doing everything he could to make her life miserable and humiliate her in subtle ways.
Fortunately Catherine figured out early on that he was a master manipulator. His childish exterior was clearly there to distract attention from his petty, vindictive core. His goal, she believed, was to bait her into doing something rash that would give him an excuse to isolate or get rid of her. She decided to bide her time, be as gracious as possible, and win over some key allies in the court and the military, many of whom had come to despise the czar.
Finally, certain of her allies’ support, she instigated a coup that would get rid of him once and for all. When it became clear that the military had sided with Catherine and that he was to be arrested, Peter started to beg and plead with her: he would change his ways, and they would rule together. She did not reply. He sent another message saying he would abdicate, if only he could return peacefully to his own estate with his mistress. She refused to bargain. He was arrested and soon thereafter murdered by one of the coup intriguers, perhaps with the approval of the empress.
Catherine was a classic fearless type. She understood that with passive aggressors you must not get emotional and drawn into their endless intrigues. If you respond indirectly, with a kind of passive aggression yourself, you play into their hands—they are better at this game than you are. Being underhanded and tricky only spurs on their insecurities and intensifies their vindictive nature. The only way to treat these types is to take bold, uncompromising action that either discourages further nonsense or sends them running away. They respond only to power and leverage. Having allies higher up the chain can serve as a means of blocking them. You are playing the lion to their fox, making them afraid of you. They see there will be real consequences if they continue their behavior in any form.
To recognize such types, look for extremes in behavior that are not natural—too kind, too ingratiating, too moral. These are most likely disguises that are worn to deflect attention from their true nature. Better to be proactive and take precautionary measures the moment you feel they are trying to get into your life.
UNJUST SITUATIONS
Some time in the early 1850s, Abraham Lincoln came to the conclusion that the institution of slavery was the great stain on our democracy and had to be eliminated. But as he surveyed the political landscape he became concerned: the politicians on the left were too noisy and righteous—in their fervor to promote abolition, they would polarize the country and the slaveholders could easily exploit these political divisions to maintain their way of life for decades. Lincoln was the consummate realist—if your goal is to end an injustice, you have to aim for results, and that requires being strategic and even deceptive. To end slavery he would be willing to do almost anything.
He decided he was the politician best suited for this cause. His first step was to present a moderate front to the public in the 1860 campaign and after his election to the presidency. He gave the impression that his main goal was to maintain the Union and to gradually phase slavery out of existence through a policy of containment. When war became inevitable in 1861, he decided to lay a clever trap for the South, baiting them into an attack on Fort Sumter that would force him to declare war. This made it seem that the North was the victim of aggression. All of these maneuvers were designed to keep his support in the North relatively unified—to oppose him was to oppose his efforts to defeat the South and maintain the Union, the slavery issue slipping into the background. This unified front on his side made it almost impossible for the enemy to play political games.
As the tide of the war turned in favor of the North, he gradually shifted to more radical positions (stated in the Emancipation Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address), knowing he had more leeway to reveal his real goals and act on them. Leading the North to victory in the war, he had even more room to continue his campaign. In sum, to defeat slavery Lincoln was prepared to publicly manipulate opinion by concealing his intentions, and to practice outright deceit in his political maneuverings. This required great fearlessness and patience on his part, as almost everyone misread his intentions and criticized him as an opportunist. (Some still do.)
In facing an unjust situation, you have two options. You can loudly proclaim your intentions to defeat the people behind it, making yourself look good and noble in the process. But in the end, this tends to polarize the public (you create one hardened enemy for every sympathizer won over to the cause), and it makes your intentions obvious. If the enemy is crafty, this makes it almost impossible to defeat them. Or, if it is results you are after, you must learn instead to play the fox, letting go of your moral purity. You resist the pull to get
emotional, and you craft strategic maneuvers designed to win public support. You shift your position to suit the circumstance, baiting the enemy into actions that will win you sympathy. You conceal your intentions. Think of it as war—short of unnecessary violence, you are called to do whatever it takes to defeat the enemy. There is no nobility in losing if an injustice is allowed to prevail.
STATIC SITUATIONS
In any venture, people quickly create rules and conventions that must be followed. This is often necessary to instill some discipline and order. But most often these rules and conventions are arbitrary—they are based on something that was successful in the past but might have little relevance to the present. They are often instruments for those in power to maintain their grip and keep the group unified. If this goes on long enough, they become stultifying and crowd out any new ways for doing things. In such a situation, what is called for is the total destruction of these dead conventions, creating space for something new. In other words you must be the complete lion, as bad as can be.
This was how several important black jazz musicians—such as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie—responded to the musical conventions that had hardened in the early 1940s. From its more freewheeling earlier days, jazz had become co-opted by white performers and audiences. The sound that became popular—big band, swing—was more controlled and regimented. To make any money in the business you had to play by the rules and perform these popular genres. But even those black musicians who followed the conventions were still paid considerably less than their white counterparts. The only way around this oppressive situation was to destroy it with a completely new sound, in this case with something that later became known as bebop. This new genre went against all the current conventions. The music was wild and improvisatory. As it became popular, it gave these musicians some space to perform on their own terms and some control over their careers. Now the static situation was broken and the field was left open to the great jazz innovations of the 1950s and ’60s.
In general, you must be less respectful of the rules that other people have established. They do not necessarily fit the times or your temperament. And there is great power to be had by being the one to initiate a new order.
IMPOSSIBLE DYNAMICS
Sometimes in life you find yourself in a negative situation that cannot be improved no matter what you do. You might find yourself working for people who are irrational. Their actions seem to serve no purpose apart from imposing their power and making you miserable. Everything you do is wrong. Or it could be a relationship in which you are constantly forced to rescue a person. This usually involves types who present themselves as weak victims in need of attention and assistance. They stir up a lot of drama around them. No matter what you do, the need to be rescued keeps recurring.
You can recognize this dynamic by your emotional need to somehow solve the problem, mixed with your complete frustration in finding any kind of reasonable answer. In truth the only viable solution is to terminate the relationship—no arguing, no bargaining, no compromising. You leave the job (there are always others); you leave the person who is tormenting you with as much finality as possible. Resist the temptation to feel any guilt. You need to create as much distance as possible, so they cannot inveigle these emotions into you. They must become dead to you so you can go on with your life.
Reversal of Perspective
The problem with confrontational moments, and why we often seek to avoid them, is that they churn up a lot of unpleasant emotions. We feel personally aggrieved that someone is trying to hurt or harm us. This makes us wonder about ourselves and feel insecure. Did we deserve this in some way? If we go through a few of these unpleasant moments, we become increasingly skittish. But this is really a problem of perception. In our own inner turmoil we tend to exaggerate the negative intentions of our opponents. In general we take conflicts far too personally. People have problems and traumas that they carry with them from their childhood on. Most often when they do something to harm or block us, it really is not directed at us personally. It comes from some unfinished business from the past, or deep insecurities. We happen to cross their path at the wrong moment.
It is essential that you develop the reverse perspective: life naturally involves conflicting interests; people have their own issues, their own agendas, and they collide with yours. Instead of taking this personally or concerning yourself with people’s intentions, you must simply work to protect and advance yourself in this competitive game, this bloody arena. Focus your attention on their maneuvers and how to deflect them. When you have to resort to something that isn’t conventionally moral, it is just another maneuver you are executing in the game—nothing to feel guilty about. You accept human nature and the idea that people will resort to aggression. This calm, detached perspective will make it that much easier to design the perfect strategy for blunting their aggression. With your emotions unscathed by these battles, you will grow accustomed to them and will even take some pleasure in fighting them well.
IN THE RING, OUR OPPONENTS CAN GOUGE US WITH THEIR NAILS OR BUTT US WITH THEIR HEADS AND LEAVE A BRUISE, BUT WE DON’T DENOUNCE THEM FOR IT OR GET UPSET WITH THEM OR REGARD THEM FROM THEN ON AS VIOLENT TYPES. WE JUST KEEP AN EYE ON THEM…NOT OUT OF HATRED OR SUSPICION. JUST KEEPING A FRIENDLY DISTANCE. WE NEED TO DO THAT IN OTHER AREAS. WE NEED TO EXCUSE WHAT OUR SPARRING PARTNERS DO, AND JUST KEEP OUR DISTANCE—WITHOUT SUSPICION OR HATRED.
—Marcus Aurelius
CHAPTER 6
Lead from the Front—Authority
IN ANY GROUP, THE PERSON ON TOP CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY SETS THE TONE. IF LEADERS ARE FEARFUL, HESITANT TO TAKE ANY RISKS, OR OVERLY CONCERNED FOR THEIR EGO AND REPUTATION, THEN THIS INVARIABLY FILTERS ITS WAY THROUGH THE ENTIRE GROUP AND MAKES EFFECTIVE ACTION IMPOSSIBLE. COMPLAINING AND HARANGUING PEOPLE TO WORK HARDER HAS A COUNTERPRODUCTIVE EFFECT. YOU MUST ADOPT THE OPPOSITE STYLE: IMBUE YOUR TROOPS WITH THE PROPER SPIRIT THROUGH YOUR ACTIONS, NOT WORDS. THEY SEE YOU WORKING HARDER THAN ANYONE, HOLDING YOURSELF TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS, TAKING RISKS WITH CONFIDENCE, AND MAKING TOUGH DECISION. THIS INSPIRES AND BINDS THE GROUP TOGETHER. IN THESE DEMOCRATIC TIMES, YOU MUST PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH.
The Hustler King
NO MAN CAN PROPERLY COMMAND AN ARMY FROM THE REAR. HE MUST BE AT THE FRONT…AT THE VERY HEAD OF THE ARMY. HE MUST BE SEEN THERE, AND THE EFFECT OF HIS MIND AND PERSONAL ENERGY MUST BE FELT BY EVERY OFFICER AND MAN PRESENT WITH IT….
—General William T. Sherman
By the spring of 1991, young Curtis Jackson had proved himself to be one of the savviest hustlers in the neighborhood. His pool of repeat customers had increased to a point where he had to hire his own crew to keep up with their demand. But as he knew, nothing good ever lasts too long in the hood. Just as Curtis was making plans to expand his business, an older hustler named Wayne began to make threatening gestures towards him. Wayne had recently returned to the streets from prison; he was determined to make as much money as fast as possible and then dominate the local drug trade. Curtis, it seemed, was his main rival. He tried to intimidate the younger hustler, warning him that he better curtail his operations or pay a price. Curtis ignored him. Then Wayne decided to up the ante: he sent out word on the street that he was going to have Curtis killed.
Curtis had seen this happen before and he knew what would happen next. Wayne would never do the job himself—he could not risk a return to prison. Instead he was banking on the fact that some young kid would hear of his desire to kill Curtis and, eager to gain some street credibility, would take it upon himself to do the dirty work. Sure enough, a few days after hearing of Wayne’s intentions, Curtis noticed a young kid named Nitty trailing him on the streets. He felt certain that Nitty was the one planning to do the hit, and it would happen soon.
This was the depressing dynamic of hustling in the hood: the more success a hustler had, the more he attracted the wrong kind of attention. Unless he inspired some fear and terror, rivals would keep coming at him,
trying to take what he had and continually threatening his position on the streets. Once that started to happen, the once successful dealer would find himself drawn into a cycle of violence, reprisals, and time in the pen.
There were a few hustlers, however, who had somehow managed to rise above this dynamic. In the hood, they were like kings—just hearing their names or seeing them on the street would elicit a gut reaction, a mix of fright and admiration. What elevated them above others was a series of actions they had taken in the past that demonstrated they were fearless and smart. Their maneuvers would be unpredictable and all the more terrifying for it. If people thought of challenging them, they would quickly remember what these types had done in other circumstances and back off. All of this would give them an aura of power and mystery. Instead of challengers on all sides, they would have disciples ready to follow them as far as they wanted. If Curtis saw himself as the kingly type, it was time now to show it to others, as dramatically as possible.
With death staring him in the face, he worked to control his emotions and thought long and hard about the dilemma that Wayne had posed. If he came after Wayne to kill him first, Wayne would be ready and would have the perfect excuse to kill Curtis in self-defense. If instead he went after Nitty and killed him, the police would catch Curtis and he would end up in prison for a long time, an equally fortunate result for Wayne. And if he did nothing, Nitty would finish him off. But Wayne’s strategy had a fatal flaw—his fear of doing the job with his own hands. He was no king himself, but just another frightened hustler pretending to be tough. Curtis would come after him from an unexpected angle and turn everything around.