The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: The story of the rise to power of John D. Rockefeller
has to be considered one of the most remarkable in history. In a
relatively short period of time (some twenty years), he rose from the
bottom of society (his family had suffered periods of poverty) to
become the founder and owner of the largest corporation in America,
and shortly after that to emerge as the wealthiest man in the world. In
the process, as so often happens in such cases, his story became
shrouded in all kinds of myths. He was either a demon or a god of
capitalism. But lost in all of these emotional responses is the answer to
a simple question: how did one man—with little help—accumulate so
much power in so little time?
If we examine him closely, we must conclude that it wasn’t through
supreme intelligence or some particular talent or creative vision. He
had some of those qualities, but nothing strong enough to account for
his outrageous success. In truth, what we can attribute it to more than
anything is the sheer relentless force of will that he possessed to utterly
dominate every situation and rival he encountered, and to exploit every
opportunity that crossed his path. We shall call this aggressive energy.
Such energy can have productive purposes (see the last section in the
chapter for more on this), and certainly Rockefeller had some
achievements that benefited the society of his time. But as so often
happens with highly aggressive people, this energy pushed him to
monopolize virtually all power in a complex industry. It made him
wipe out all rivals and any possible competition, bend laws to his
benefit, standardize all practices according to his desires, and in the
end, depress innovation in the field.
Let us divorce Rockefeller’s story from the usual emotional
responses and simply look at him dispassionately, as a kind of
specimen to help us understand the nature of highly aggressive
individuals and what makes large numbers of people submit to their
will. In this way we can also learn some valuable lessons about human

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nature and how we can begin to counter those who continually work to
monopolize power, often to the detriment of the rest of us.
Rockefeller grew up in peculiar circumstances. His father, William,
was a notorious con artist. And from the very beginning, the father set
a rather unpleasant pattern for the family: He would leave his wife,
Eliza, and four children (John being the eldest) for months on end in
their flimsy cabin in western New York and travel the region plying his
various con games. During this time, the family would have barely
enough money to survive. Eliza had to find a way to make every penny
count. Then the father would reappear with wads of cash and gifts for
the family. He was amusing (a great storyteller) but at times rather
cruel and even violent. Then he would leave again, and the pattern
would reset. It was impossible to predict when he would return, and
the members of the family were continually on edge when he was there
and when he was not.
As a teenager, John had to go to work to help bring some stability to
the family’s finances. And as he advanced in his career, he could not
escape the anxieties that had plagued him in his childhood. He had a
desperate need to make everything orderly and predictable in his
environment. He immersed himself deeply in his accounting books—
nothing was more predictable than the pluses and minuses on a ledger
sheet. At the same time, he had great ambitions for making a fortune;
his father had instilled in him an almost visceral love of money.
And so, when he first learned of what could be accomplished with
an oil refinery, he saw his great opportunity. But his attraction to the
oil business may seem at first glance rather strange. It was a Wild West
environment, totally anarchic; fortunes could be made or lost in a
matter of months. In many ways, the oil business was like his father—
exciting, promising sudden riches, but treacherously unpredictable.
Unconsciously he was drawn to it for those very reasons—he could
relive his worst fears from childhood and surmount them by
establishing rigorous control over the oil industry. It would be like
conquering the father himself. The chaos would only spur him to
greater heights, as he would have to work doubly hard to tame its
wildness.
And so, in these first years of business, we can see the motivating
factor that would drive all his subsequent actions—the overwhelming
need for control. The more complicated and difficult this task, the

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more relentless the energy he would summon to achieve such a goal.
And out of this need came a second one, almost as important—to
justify his aggressive actions to the world and to himself. Rockefeller
was a deeply religious man. He could not live with the thought that
what drove his actions was a desire to control people and acquire the
vast sums of money necessary for such a purpose. That would have
been to see himself in too ugly and soulless a light.
To repress such a thought, he constructed what we shall call the