Human Nature

Human nature is something we talk about as if affected only other people – but not us!

Robert Greene is one of these authors – like Alain de Botton – many people are reluctant to admit to reading. They write well and often thoughtfully – but they’re popular damn it!

You can read Greene for yourself via this post from a couple of years ago about his book on the “48 Laws of Power”.

He does, admittedly, use a basic formulae for all his books – find some historical characters to illustrate your theme; select one incident and/or characteristic; generalize; and draw out some lessons for the reader’s own behavior. In that sense his books can be placed in the “Self-help” category – never a serious one! But they come beautifully designed with red text in the margin summarizing the basic incidents and lessons.

His latest book, The Laws of Human Nature, (he offers 18) notes how often we are disappointed and undermined by the behaviour of colleagues and bosses; offers us early warning signs to identify – as well as tactics for dealing with perverse behavior. It starts with a typical story about Pericles to illustrate a point about irrationality and ends with a couple of important explorations of generational differences and the fear of death which I’ve excluded from this table. And I've now discovered the full book here 

The Behaviour	Historical example	Lesson
Narcissim Many people tend to focus on and admire themselves more than others. This hinders their success when interacting with others	Stalin	You need to transform self-love into empathy. This will make you more successful in your group
Role playing People tend to wear the mask that shows them in the best possible light. They hide their true personality.	Milton Erickson — an American psychiatrist and psychologist of 20th century — was paralysed when he was young and became a master reader of people;s body language.	Master the body language by transforming yourself into a superior reader of men and women. At the same time you must learn how to present the best front
Compulsive behavior People never do something just once. They will inevitably repeat their bad behavior	Howard Hughes Jr.	Train yourself to look deep within people and see their character. Always gravitate toward those who display signs of strength, and avoid the many toxic types out there.
Covetousness	Coco Chanel — a French fashion designer and business woman — became so successful by understanding that people desire what they don’t have and creating an air of mystery around her work.	Become an elusive object of desire
Myopia People tend to overreact to present circumstances	The South Sea Company — a British joint-stock company founded in 1711 — became known as the South Sea Bubble.	Think both near and long-term future
Defensiveness People don’t like when someone is trying to change their opinion.	Lyndon Johnson — the 36th president of the United States — gained his influence and power by focusing on others, letting them do the talking, letting them be the stars of the show.	Soften people’s resistance by confirming their self-opinion. .
Self Sabotage Our attitude determines much of what happens in our life.	Anton Chekhov — a Russian playwright and short-story writer — had a tough childhood but in spite of that was able to change his life by changing his view of the world from negative to positive.	Change your attitude
Repression People are rarely who they seem to be. Lurking beneath their polite, affable exterior is inevitably a dark, shadow side consisting of insecurities and aggressive, selfish impulses	Richard Nixon had a positive image in the public. Everything changed after the Watergate scandal which revealed his hidden personality.	Be aware of your dark side
Envy	Mary Shelley — author of the novel Frankenstein — was betrayed by her close friend who envied her.	Learn to deflect envy by drawing attention away from yourself. Develop your sense of self-worth from internal standards and not incessant comparisons.
Grandiosity Even a small measure of success can give us an unrealistic sense of superiority. This can make us lose contact with reality and make irrational decisions.	Michael Eisner had to resign from the CEO position of The Walt Disney Company. In the author’s opinion the cause is Eisner’s grandiosity elevated by previous successes.	Counteract the pull of grandiosity by maintaining a realistic assessment of yourself and your limits. Tie any feelings of greatness to your work, your achievements, and your contributions to society.
Gender rigidity	Caterina Sforza was a powerful an Italian noblewoman whose masculine qualities helped her to achieve her influence.	You must become aware of lost masculine or feminine traits and slowly reconnect to them,
Aimlessness People become most successful when they have a sense of purpose in their life	Martin Luther King Jr. is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience. His calling directed his actions and helped him go through many failures in his life.
Conformity In the group setting, we unconsciously imitate what others are saying and doing. We feel different emotions, infected by the group mood. We are more prone to taking risks, to acting irrationally, because everyone else is.	Mao’s Cultural revolution Gao Yuan tells a story in his book Born Red showed that people in groups behave emotional and excited. They don’t engage in nuanced thinking and deep analysis.	Develop self-awareness and a superior understanding of the changes that occur in us in groups. With such intelligence, we can become superior social actors, able to outwardly fit in and cooperate with others on a high level, while retaining our independence and rationality.
Fickleness People are always ambivalent about rulers	Elizabeth I — Queen of England and Ireland in 16th century — had to constantly prove herself as the leader of the country. She never relied on her royal blood for this.	Authority is the delicate art of creating the appearance of power, legitimacy, and fairness while getting people to identify with you as a leader who is in their service. If you want to lead, you must master this art from early on in your life.
Aggression	John D. Rockefeller — American oil industry business magnate — used aggressive strategies to gain power and control.	The dangerous types depend on making you emotional — afraid, angry — and unable to think straight. Do not give them this power. When it comes to your own aggressive energy, learn to tame and channel it for productive purposes

Generational Myopia

You are born into a generation that defines who you are more than you can imagine. Your generation wants to separate itself from the previous one and set a new tone for the world. In the process, it forms certain tastes, values, and ways of thinking that you as an individual internalize. As you get older, these generational values and ideas tend to close you off from other points of view, constraining your mind.

Awareness of this will free your mind from the mental constraints placed on you by your generation, and you will become more of the individual you imagine yourself to be, with all the power that freedom will bring you.

Fear of Death

The inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks, separations, and crises in life. It gives us a sense of proportion, of what really matters in this brief existence of ours. Most people continually look for ways to separate themselves from others and feel superior. Instead, we must see the mortality in everyone, how it equalizes and connects us all. By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.

By way of comparison here’s a very short little article on “the 10 essential virtues”

Reviews

https://qz.com/quartzy/1440945/book-review-the-laws-of-human-nature-by-robert-greene/

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/laws-human-nature

https://dailystoic.com/robert-greene/

Memorable Messages

I’ve set myself a rather challenging task – to sift through the 200 plus books which have popped up on my blogposts over the past eight years which relate to what we, rather egocentrically, call “the global crisis”; and to identify those which I would recommend to those members of the younger generation struggling tomake sense of the mess….

It’s challenging because I’m finding that I was too hasty in my reading the first time round – or, if I’m totally frank, that I was too lazy or distracted to do much more than flick the pages….But a trawl like this offers the great advantage of ……."compare and contrast"…

Plus .....I now know (or think I know!) what I’m looking for. A previous post set out some of the prerequisites I now look for in any book and, the more I skim the material I’ve collected, the more ruthless I feel about exploring the question of whether a book has the qualities required to change the way the reader looks at the world…..  

Bear in mind that I bring to the task no fewer than 60 years of quite intensive reading while trying to make sense of (those bits of) the world (I feel I should be making an effort to understand)…..When we do these lists of the century’s “key books”, I often wonder how many the compilers have included from a sense of duty – rather than from a sense of its felt impact…..
And so I did a little test – I asked myself which books had actually so impressed me that I had given them as presents to others or used in my project work of the past 25 years …..The common factor in the resulting list was "typologies" - the books all had a way of simplifying the complexity which faces us...

The typology	Author; source	Further detail
3 incentive types	Etzioni (1971)	Carrots, sticks, norm compliance
8 Roles in any effective team	Belbin (1981) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Role_Inventories	Plant, resource investigator, coordinator, shaper, monitor, teamworker, implementer, finisher, specialist
10 Rules to stifle innovation	Rosabeth Kantor (in her 1983 book “The Change Masters” http://nomadron.blogspot.bg/2010/04/lists.html	See later
7 Habits of Effective People	Stephen Covey (1989) http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/espiritualismo/Covey,Habits%20of%20highly%20effective%20people.pdf	See later Full book available on internet
4 Gods of Management	Charles Handy/Roger Harrison in Gods of Management (1984)	Zeus (boss culture); Appollo ((hierarchy - role culture); Athena (task culture); Dionysus (individual professional)
4 basic interpretive stances	Mary Douglas grid-group theory (1970s); Chris Hood’s “The State of the State”  (2000)	Hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian, fatalist
48 ways to gain power	Robert Greene in “The 48 Laws of Power” (1998)	Link gives access to entire book
6 global threats to capitalism	Susan George in “The Lugano Report – on preserving capitalism in the 21st century” (1999) – a powerful critique in the form of a spoof report produced by consultants for the global elite	Strongly recommend the new Introduction she wrote – accessible on the googlebook link

When I was working in Central Europe in the 1990s I used to buy multiple copies of the Covey book in the local language - Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian – since it was one of the few books I knew in English which was also available in the local language and was useful as a means of professional conversation. I know that the book is rather frowned upon in intellectual circles but I still think it's got something.....including the famous sketch of a woman which demonstrates so powerfully our disparate perceptions.....
The principles were/are -
- be proactive
- begin with the end in mind
- put first things first
- think win/win
- seek first to understand : then to be understood
- synergise
- "sharpen the saw" - ie keep mentally and physically fit

When I moved to Central Asia and Caucasus in 1999, I found that presentation of Rosabeth Kanter’s “Ten rules for stifling innovation” was a marvellous way to liven up a workshop with middle-ranking officials. She had concocted this prescription as a satiric comment on the way she discovered from her research that senior executives in US commercial giants like IBM, General Motors were continuing to act in the old centralised ways despite changed structures and rhetoric.

1. regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new, and it's from below
2. insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals (That saves you the job of deciding : you just pick the survivor)
4. Express your criticisms freely - and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area is not working
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps them on their toes)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given to managers freely
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

“Any of this strike you as similar?” I would cheekily ask my Uzbek and Azeri officials.

Robert Greene’s 24 ways to seduce; 33 ways to conduct war; and 48 Laws of power are, also, tongue in cheek. The first to hit the market was the 48 Laws of power and I enjoyed partly because it so thoroughly challenged in its spirit the gung-ho (and unrealistic) naivety of the preaching which characterised so many of the management books of the time – and partly for the way historical examples are woven into the text. I’ve selected a few to give the reader a sense of the spirit of the book
• Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies
• Conceal your intentions
• always say less than necessary
• Guard your reputation with your life
• Court attention at all costs
• Get others to do the work, but always take the credit
• Make other people come to you
• Win through your actions, never through argument
• Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victims

I found a Russian translation of the book in Baku and gave it as a leaving gift to the Azeri lawyer in the Presidential Office with whom I had worked closely for 2 years on the project to help implement the Civil Service Law. He obviouly made good use of it as 3 months later he was appointed as Head(Ministerial level)of the new Civil Service Agency my work had helped inspire!

Luther’s 95 theses on the wall of the Wittenberg church may seem excessive – but, given the success of his mission, perhaps contain a lesson for the media advisers who tell us that the public can absorb a limited number of messages only!

Sarah Bakewell suggests in How to Live – or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty attempts at an Answer that Montaigne’s life can usefully be encapsulated in 20 injunctions –
• Don’t worry about death
• Read a lot, forget most of it – and be slow-witted
• Survive love and loss
• Use little tricks
• Question everything
• Keep a private room behind the shop
• Be convivial; live with others
• Wake from the sleep of habit
• Do something no one has done before
• Do a good job – but not too good a job
• Reflect on everything; regret nothing
• Give up control

At the very least, when I see such lists, it suggests we're in for some fun!