It’s not what they literally sound like, it’s whether you as the reader take them literally or not. The day you start thinking for yourself and stop relying on everything to be soon fed to you, you’ll start seeing things like this book much differently.
What you’ve quoted is only an instruction manual if you take it literally. And the world is far too complicated a place for everything to be taken literally. We still have agency over what we do with the information we take in.
I remember reading this book on a plane years ago and the person next to me had the same misgivings as you. You’re reading about power? So that must mean you want more power? Why would you want more power? Who do you want power over? Etc.
It never occurred to this person that perhaps other people have had power over me, I got taken advantage of, and I wanted to understand how that happened. It’s not paranoia to want to understand how humans are wired a little bit better.
I always find it amusing that people think The 48 Laws of Power is an instruction manual. I’ve read that book several times, and I never once got that impression. The book is amoral, it doesn’t take a stand for or against anything. Most of what people find objectionable about the book, they find objectionable in actual people who have used these tactics to do terrible things. Which definitely has happened, for thousands of years, long before that book came into existence.
You don’t realize it yet, but we agree more than we don’t. I said it’s not an instruction manual, but it can be, if your intention is to have more power over other people. Decent people don’t find a lot of inspiration in these laws. But they can still ring true, because the world is a very imperfect place and people with pathological personalities exist.
There’s a reason Lord Acton said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Power is a nasty business, and if you’re not knowledgable about its machinations, you can fall victim to it. But power can mean many things, including the power to do good, or even to stop other people from having power over you.