“Make your victims feel smart—and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.”
The 48 Laws of Power, Law 21, Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker—Seem Dumber Than Your Mark
Quote
“Make your victims feel smart—and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.” — Robert Greene
Explanation
By downplaying your own intelligence and overstating your target’s intelligence, you will come across as innocent and harmless.
Your target will be convinced that you are incapable of any kind of threatening tactics or behaviour.
In light of this, you will be free to discretely influence and manoeuvre your target’s current and future actions without him or her suspecting a thing.
Such discrete control, combined with effective planning and execution, will allow you to gain whatever it is that you wish right from under this individual’s nose.
Use Case
Let us say that you are looking to be promoted at work, but there’s a stubborn superior above you who is adamant to hold onto his or her position.
By “playing dumb” around this individual, he or she will instantly dismiss you as not being a threat.
With your target seeing you as unintelligent, and even slightly irrelevant, you will be free to collect as much information from him or her without any suspicion arising.
The target will refrain from putting obstacles in your way; will not hide any potentially exploitable weaknesses or worries from you; and may even confide in you with crucial information that makes influencing his or her behaviour even easier.
Carefully, patiently and without disturbance, resistance or suspicion, you can plot your unique, information-driven strategy.
Slowly but surely, so long as the correct strategy has been implemented to exploit your target’s innate weaknesses, and whilst managing to maintain your disguise of “playing dumb”, you will succeed in over-throwing this individual, taking his or her position.
The target will be caught totally off-guard, not expecting such intricate and decisive planning and execution from someone they see as intellectually inferior.
In a best case scenario, even after you have achieved your mission your target will still be convinced that you are “too stupid” to execute such a clever plan—the target will suspect that it was his or her under-performance that lead to the demotion, not your perfectly and discretely formulated vendetta.