Manual of use of power, according to Don Vito Corleone

In one of the most memorable moments of the animated series Family Guy, the Griffins are about to die and Peter, the disgruntled patriarch, decides to make his family one last confidence: "I didn't like The Godfather." His wife and children remind him that it is a masterpiece, a visual poem, "the great American tragedy." Peter ends the discussion with a cavalier phrase: "I'm sorry, but I'm more of This house is a ruin."

If the joke works, it's because (almost) everyone likes The Godfather. Coppola's trilogy is one of those cultural artifacts that generate a rare consensus, a popular classic that is both fodder for cinephilia, an instant success that retains its reputation intact five decades later. Alberto Mayol, sociologist, political scientist and writer (Santiago de Chile, 47 years old), has also found in both the films and Mario Puzo's novel that they serve as a substrate a tool for reflection and learning. The Godfather is "a crash course in power: how it is achieved, preserved, increased, and exercised." How do professionals of the amoral and unprejudiced prowess of Vito Corleone and the heir of his emporium, his son Michael.

Mayol presents these days the edition in Spain of The 50 laws of power in TheGodfather (Arpa Editores), a user manual that may be useful for pocket satraps, but that will mean, above all, an illumination for that silent majority that has never reflected on the nature of power and, therefore, is condemned to suffer it. Looking back, the author recalls that he came into contact with the film saga in 1990, when the third installment was released in Chile: "My uncle insisted that we go see it, even if I was a minor. His argument, scandalous to the child of order that I was at the time, was that to really enjoy such a film you must, first of all, break some law." Years later, Mayol would be surprised to return again and again to sequences as shocking as the horse's head between the silky sheets of a Hollywood producer and find in them "a very deep reflection, not at all trivial, on that mythological god we call power and is behind almost all social relationships. not just in the realm of politics." From that intuition was born a popular seminar cycle on The Godfather and an even more popular podcast, La Cosa Nostra, which grew and spread its tentacles during the pandemic. And that's where the book came from.

During the opening day of his seminar, Mayol often says, in a joking tone, that his is "an essentially right-wing analytical method, because it starts from the most stark pragmatism." Citing again and again concrete examples, he unravels the inexorable logic Corleone and reaches very revealing conclusions: "Don Vito always exercised power without inhibitions, but with wisdom and moderation." His best students should be sought, saving the distances, in the conservative spectrum, in Winston Churchill, Giulio Andreotti or Angela Merkel. Also in the back room of nuclei of power as formidable and opaque "as the CIA, the Vatican or the boards of directors of multinationals." The Western left, in his opinion, "does not generate leaders, because it has been stuck in a discourse of resistance to power that condemns it to inefficiency." The same could be said of the bulk of the citizens of the European Community, "herbivores in a world of carnivores", some of them as voracious as Vladimir Putin, "who not only poisons his opponents, but wants them to be known".

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