The 50th Law

Think of it this way: dependency is a habit that is so easy to acquire. We live in a culture that offers you all kinds of crutches—experts to turn to, drugs to cure any psychological unease, mild pleasures to help pass or kill time, jobs to keep you just above water.

For this purpose he devised the following strategy: He would act like a free man while surrounded by walls.

Understand: you are one of a kind. Your character traits are a kind of chemical mix that will never be repeated in history. There are ideas unique to you, a specific rhythm and perspective that are your strengths, not your weaknesses. You must not be afraid of your uniqueness and you must care less and less what people think of you.

Finally he arrived at what he believed to be the root cause—dependency. As it stood, African Americans couldn’t do things completely on their own—they depended on the government, on liberals, on their leaders, on everybody but themselves.

It is a law of power, however, that the further and deeper we contemplate the future, the greater our capacity to shape it according to our desires.

The greatest danger we face, he told Curtis, is not the police or some nasty rival. It’s the mind going soft.

“For Napoleon’s army, there shall be no Alps.”

In war or any competitive game, you don’t pay attention to people’s good or bad intentions. They don’t matter. It should be the same in the game of life. Everyone is playing to win, and some people will use moral justifications to advance their side. All you look at are people’s maneuvers—their actions in the past and what you might expect in the f

Truth’s words apply to you as much as to Fifty: the greatest danger you face is your mind growing soft and your eye getting dull.