Duality of human nature. Good & Evil.
NOTE: Tola’s note is a journal about some activities I engaged in during the week(Month). Let's dive in!
Code.
I don't have a project to show this week. I'll also be cutting down on this aspect of this newsletter because for the rest of the year, I want to work on a creative piece with my friend towards the 2023 elections for Peter Obi. It’s going to be time consuming but we believe it’s going to be worth it. I’ll share here when we are done. Therefore, this newsletter would focus mainly on book reviews and thoughts.
Books.
I started the book, 12 rules for life by Jordan Peterson. I've been a big fan of Dr Peterson for sometime now, so one day, when I was mindlessly scrolling through YouTube shorts, a video of Dr Peterson popped up where he referenced a section of the book. I am not yet done with the book so I'll speak on the ten rules I have finished.
1. Stand up with your back straight.
The idea is to assume a posture that shows you have some self-confidence. Standing with your back straight makes you appear bigger and puts doubts in the minds of anyone trying to bully you. You also get a good boost of serotonin(Serotonin is a hormone that influences mood in the body) and this influences how you see yourself relative to society.
Dr Peterson illustrated this phenomenon with a lobster colony. Lobsters engage in a fierce competition for the best space to hide from predators and also enjoy an abundance of food. When two lobsters engage in physical combat, the victor gets the best space, has access to the best female because they see him as strong and can protect them when they are breeding, thereby getting a chance to transcend his generation. While the defeated male moves in the shadow, avoiding any direct confrontation with other lobsters. The hormonal difference between the Victorious and vanquished lobster is- the victor produced more serotonin in the brain that portrayed his state of success. Success attracts good things, thereby the females and better feeding grounds. The vanquished lobster produces octopamine(a hormone that reminds the lobster it’s a failure).
It's the same in humans. If we are engaged in a battle with another human, or with life, successful individuals attract the best things in life.They get the best men and women, land high paying jobs, and generally have a positive outlook to life, which makes them walk with their backs straight.
On the flip side, people who seem defeated by life or other humans crouch and avoid direct confrontations. They get things at the low rungs of life and end up being miserable. They invite the judging eyes of others so they are vulnerable to physical or mental forms to bully because human beings can sniff a weak human spirit at the sight of one.
The mere ability to walk straight gives you the appearance of a successful person or someone who is killing it. This is especially useful if you are starting a new career path and you aren't quite sure of yourself and people are likely to sense that weakness and want to talk you out of it. Appearing confident can keep off bad energy for sometime as you figure out things.
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
People have a tendency to treat lower animals better than they would treat themselves. If your dog falls ill and you're responsible to give the dog its medication at certain periods of the day, you are more likely to keep to time and would not miss a day. Meanwhile, if you fell ill, even if it's a kidney transplant that you've waited years to get, it doesn't guarantee that you would stick to your medications that would nurse you back to health.
This attitude extends beyond sickness to other areas of our lives. If we are faced with circumstances that would make us better but we are reluctant to engage in, we should ask ourselves how would we come through for others if they were in our situation? Wherever you lack, fix yourself like you would encourage others to.
3. Make friends with people who want the best for helping.
For people who have been lucky enough to be in quality friendships, they would understand this. If you are in a quality relationship and you're slacking, your friends would call you out. They would also be there to psyche you when you’re putting in your best.
Bonus: From what I have learned so far, if you are male and you’re just starting out like myself, make more male friends than females. You are more likely to lucky hanging out with guys that you can hustle together so it’s easier climbing up the ladder of success.
This isn’t to say you don’t have female friends or girlfriends. Women have a very quick and different path from ours. Even if we will make all the money to impress the women, atleast, initially, have more guys in your corner. For the women reading this, I have no advice for you. I believe you are better survivors than men and you would be best to understand how you are going to survive. I have arguments for this, but this is not the focus of this article.
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.
Before the advent of social media, people could enjoy the process of getting good at a craft at their own pace. They couldn’t see the person who’s better skilled than they are but is located halfway across the world. They enjoyed the adulation of people around them, and that created a positive feedback mechanism for them to get better. This rule encourages us to shut out the noise on the web and measure us against us.
5. Do not let your children do anything that would make you dislike them. (I won't write this because it's not relevant to my reality).
6. Pursue what's meaningful (not what is expedient).
Life is hard. The default state of life is suffering. To make sense of all the suffering in the world, we need to organize our suffering so that we can view them as obstacles standing between us and our goals. We would rise to achieve our goals, not in the absence of obstacles, but in spite of the obstacles(suffering) we face. When suffering has meaning, humans have been able to endure pain for very long periods of time.
7. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
This is very obvious for people who act like hypocrites. I find it funny when people point fingers at others for doing something wrong, when they are guilty as well.
8. Tell the truth-or atleast, don't lie.
Telling the truth reinforces an identity of who we are. If we lie for long, we assume the identity too. If we are in situations where we can't say the truth, it's best to describe the situation of how something is or we keep quiet.
9. Assume that the person you are listening to knows something that you don't.
This is very important for people that engage in conversations or consider themselves knowledgeable. I used to err at this rule when I was younger. Because I believed I was widely read, I assumed I could tell people one or two things about what they want to talk about. As I grew older, I became humbled at the fact that I knew far less than 1% of the world’s knowledge. I'd know even less than this % before I die because the world’s knowledge base would have expanded even more!
10. Be precise in your speech.
To be precise in your speech is to describe things to the extent to which they are. No more, no less. You don’t want to leave room for insinuations when you speak. For example, If you have problems with your partner because they are always on their phone when they are around you so you can’t spend quality time together. One day, you decided to speak up, so instead of complaining about the phone, you told them that they are not always available. This can cause a lot of confusion to your partner because they can argue that they left what they were doing to come and visit you and yet you are complaining about their non-availability. Availability is an ambiguous word to describe the attention they give to their phones rather than you, so in many circumstances, identify the root cause of your discomfort before opening your mouth. This will make your issue easier to process for people around you.
The last two rules are :
11. Do not bother kids when they are skateboarding.
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
I’ll write about them as a continuation in my next article.
Thoughts.
Duality of human nature.
"To be human is to human is to have the capacity for great good and great evil".
I heard this phrase from Israel Adesanya during his interview with Mike Tyson. If you have been following this newsletter for some time, you would notice that I have a lot of regard for Israel because he is a perfect human. He embraces the fact that he can extend a hand of compassion to people that deserve it and at the same time, wreak havoc on his enemies. To be a perfect human is to admit a flaw in design. This “Flaw” isn’t a flaw because we are humans because of our limitations, but for the sake of clarity, I would engage the evil or dark sides as a necessary flaw in humans.
I am attracted to combat sports for some weird reasons. It is a space where you can legalize what you would characterize barbaric. For example, fighting is a legal way of killing someone and you won't be sent to jail for it provided you do so in line with the rules, a place where an opponent to lick off the blood of another opponent and people would cheer him on, instead of feeling disgusted as they would normally behave outside the fighting arena, and you would not be sued. Okay, let me pause a bit because if you don’t know much about combat sports, I might be doing a bad job at painting the beautiful sport. some of you are already cringing. There is a fine art to how people fight in the ring that sweetens the soul, such as a fighter’s defensive skills, footworks, jabs, and other things that I can’t explain but watching the fight between Anthony Johsua vs Wladimir Klitschko would describe better than any words I can conjure up to fit your imagination. Professional fighters are the perfect specimens of how humans can embody both good and evil in unison.
For example, Kamaru Usman, the welterweight champion in the UFC is a sweet loving father to his daughter and honestly cares about people in his life but when he steps into the octagon, Kamaru Usman is replaced by his ring name, the Nigerian Nightmare. He literally gives his opponents nightmares. You watch his fight and you literally see the human-beast transformation unfold before your eyes. He would not hold back from hurting his opponent, nor would he flinch when he spills his opponent's blood in the course of the fight. Now, if a human is capable of this destruction in a controlled environment such as the ring, what do you expect in the real world? Well, look no further than the echoes of wars, kidnappings, rapes, child trafficking, theft, suicide missions, embezzelment, and other crimes ravaging our world. That’s the dark side of humans displayed in full glory.
I’ve always been intrigued by how good and evil a person can be at the same time. More importantly, what induces people to make a switch from good or equilibrium to the dark sides. Why? No one is complaining about how there is too much good in the world, it’s the dark sides of human nature that causes all the chaos we experience today.
The 12 rules of life by Dr Peterson made me reflect on human's ability for evil and how it is present in every single one of us (except people who have completely killed theirs, which makes them easy targets to people who revel in theirs).
I was confronted with my capacity for evil when I left home at 17 to fend for myself. My parents were alive and together, but for some reason, I sought independence. Facing the burden of providing my shelter, feeding and caring for myself in Lagos was a burden I wasn't prepared for. The uncertainty of how I would get my next meal made it very difficult to think clearly, or be rational. There was this hyper alertness that came to the mind in such states that every corner you turn towards, you are seeking every opportunity to survive. If humans ever went wild without going mad, that was the state that I was in. I am happy I did not last too in this condition because I went back home after four months to three square meals a day and shelter that I got for free. If I did not have the luxury of going back home, I would have been an easy target to do things I would not have been proud of if I ever got the chance to become rational.
"Never say you can't do something, only pray you are not exposed to the same circumstances that made them capable of committing such crimes." Maya Angelou to Alex Banayan in his book, the third door.
I believe people that got exposed to those kind of conditions for far too long become the street thugs that we know, become murders, pick pocketers, Kidnappers, etc. They are still the same humans that were once capable of being good but situations changed, and they embraced their darker sides and remained there.
There are various contexts that can expose people’s dark sides. For example, being too comfortable in a position of power can make you blind to others suffering so you are likely to treat them badly. Childhood trauma that has congealed into a living, breading anger, can also be a recipe for exposing this dark side. Disappointment could also be a reason why people can go dark. When people don't achieve their goals in life, they can go dark. These are the kind of people that go into schools to shoot children, knowing fully well that they would be killed or sent to a lifetime in jail. I can not possibly state all the contexts that could possibly cause one to deviate from the median of good, but I believe you get the point: the dark side is very present in humans, and there are so many stimulants that would make people switch.
This is why I believe, the truly good people aren't those that think they are good because they haven’t intentionally hurt anyone, but those that are aware of their ability to, but chose not to, deciding to do more good than evil. The self righteous person may be in denial of this existence, maybe due to religious beliefs. Even Dr Peterson believes that, when God cast the devil from heaven, he came to reside in the hearts of men. To be born is to be born with the capacity for evil , and to grow isn’t to kill it off, but to put it under control because you need to unleash it when a bully comes around to hurt you or someone you love. It's better to be a lion in the garden, than a sheep in the garden.
The duality of human nature is why that responsible man in your area could also be beating up his wife quietly at home. The sweet and humble guy in your area could also be a menace to his siblings. The hearty woman you know could also be ripping guys of their hard earned money. Same people, same body, same person where good and evil co-exists. Even you, that is, if you aren't totally incapable of slapping a mosquito off your arm, observe yourself when in situations where you feel very dark, compared to when you are clear headed. You seem to be a different person.
To round this up, I don’t have a solution for people that have gone completely dark, because they are aware of it. Humans are different from other animals because we can do bad, be aware we are doing bad, and continue to do bad, and vice versa in the case of good. But for me, I’ve been able to seek my balance by reading and applying what I read to improve my mind. I don’t know if this will be enough for the rest of my life, but I’ll do my best to be in control at all times.
GOODNEWS
One of the stories I wrote for an international anthology is going to be published soon. 🤩🤩. This will be the second proof that I was kinda good at writing fiction. We are currently fundraising to launch the project. I’m not sure if the fundraising targets would have been met before this article goes live, but you can check it out and chip in what you have, thank you! Also, please share with fiction lovers that you know, they would appreciate it.
Love this 💯