★☆☆☆☆ A depraved view of human nature

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie

I read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People in the fall of 1999. I was a professor of Molecular Biology at the time and had just started business school -- a so-called Executive Master of Business Administration program, intended to allow experienced managers to get a biz degree while continuing in their current jobs. (I argued that, as a professor running a research group and responsible for bringing in research funding, I was a middle manager. Apparently they bought it, although perhaps only in the interest of diversity.) I did this for fun, and because I thought I would meet a lot of smart people whom I would not encounter in my ordinary life. And that was 100% right!

Don, one of the business men I met there extolled the virtues of How to Win Friends & Influence People, so I got it and read it. I was more than disappointed. It is, in my individual opinion (which is obviously not widely shared), a very bad book -- an evil book. Carnegie's advice can be summed up simply: you will never go wrong by expecting the worst of people. Expect them to be selfish, self-centered, and greedy, and flatter those impulses. Now, Carnegie has kissed the Blarney Stone (figuratively, if not literally). He writes plausibly and well, and knows how to disguise his views of human depravity in nice-sounding words. I suspect most people who read him listen to the sound of the nice words and don't think very hard about the theory of human nature that underlies them.

In my experience, Carnegie is wrong about human nature. Many, perhaps most people are motivated by higher things. But I found that not just Don, but most of my fellow biz students thought How to Win Friends & Influence People was a work of genius. Perhaps this is a difference between businessmen and scientists.

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