Leadership Quote by Chanakya

A line like this lands today as either viciously elitist or brutally practical, and it’s meant to be the latter. Chanakya wasn’t dispensing self-help; he was writing statecraft in an era where “friendship” routinely doubled as alliance, liability, and leverage. In a rigidly stratified society, intimacy across status lines wasn’t just socially awkward, it was politically dangerous. The warning reads less like a moral judgment than a risk assessment: relationships are shaped by power, and power rarely stays politely offstage.

The phrase “above or below” is doing surgical work. Befriend someone “above” you and you enter a world of dependence: your access is conditional, your dignity negotiable, your position vulnerable to their whims. Befriend someone “below” you and the dynamic flips: you’re cast as patron, protector, or wallet, with gratitude expected to substitute for equality. Either way, the friendship becomes an instrument, not a refuge.

Chanakya’s real subtext is about asymmetry. Unequal stakes produce unequal honesty. You can’t speak freely to a superior without fear, and you can’t trust a subordinate to disagree without calculating what it costs them. “Happiness” here isn’t joy in the modern sense; it’s the calm of stability, the security of a bond that won’t be turned into obligation, resentment, or scandal.

Read in context, it’s a cold-eyed defense of social parity as the precondition for genuine trust. It’s also a reminder that in highly hierarchical systems, even affection gets audited.