Robert Greene | Irrationality

well hello everybody thank you for joining me today today i'm going to talk about a subject that is very important to me so important that i made it the topic of the first chapter of the laws of human nature namely human rationality or actually the opposite human irrationality what makes us human beings such damned irrational creatures and it is my opinion that obviously we're now going through a pandemic of a corona virus something physical something very real but i also believe that we're going through a pandemic of irrationality and the psychological and the physical are feeding off each other the pandemic is making us more irrational the more irrational we become we're actually making the pandemic worse on and on and on and on so i'm going to get to this a little later but first i want to discuss a common misconception that people have about human rationality one that i often get myself the people think comes from my books which it doesn't and basically this misconception is that rationality involves the suppression or the repression of emotions in other words if you're feeling fear or anger or love or hatred you have to tamp down those emotions you have to get rid of them in order to be emotional and in that way in this view rationality isn't something very fun or very exciting it's kind of like health food it's good for you but it doesn't taste very good but i want to tell you that this is actually quite wrong it's actually the opposite rationality involves some very important emotions that if you're not experiencing you can't begin to think rationally and neuroscience has demonstrated this with studies of people who've had damage to the emotional centers in their brain and after that they are not capable of making rational decisions or rational thinking but i think i can illustrate my idea with perhaps some examples from your own life so let's say you have a plan something you want to accomplish in life there's a book you want to write you want to lose weight or something and normally you're feeling very frustrated and impatient with the course of your life and so you decide i'm going to stop this i'm going to actually get this project done i'm going to create this business or whatever it is and you think about it and you make you take steps one by one by one to get there or let's say you're dealing with a nasty divorce situation and um the person you're dealing with you're having cus fighting over custody over your child whom you love very much and it's getting so nasty that you realize if it keeps going this way the child will actually be damaged by this process and so at some point you take a step back and you go what's really important is the long-term health of my child and so i'm not going to get involved in this process i'm actually going to back off and i'm going to think of what's best for him or her or let us say finally in the third example there's a very toxic person involved in your life some kind of raging narcissist for instance that's getting you enmeshed and all of this drama that's making you miserable and at some point you tell yourself damn it i've had enough of this person i'm going to figure out a way to get them to get rid of them in my life but it's not easy because they're entwined in all of these relationships etc so you step back and you get control of yourself and you think how can i get rid of this person and then you do it and then finally they're gone and you feel a tremendous sense of relief so let us look at these three examples so in the first one you're kind of fed up with the fact that you're overweight or that you haven't been able to accomplish any of your dreams or desires in life and that frustration that emotion impels you to take action which is to go through the steps of thinking rationally of how to get out of this and then when it's over when you finally have realized the project you feel a tremendous sense of relief and pride let's say in the case of the child you're impelled by the sense of empathy and love for the child and you're worried about it and that love makes you go through this rational process and when it's over you feel so much better about yourself or with that toxic person in your life you finally reach a point where you say damn it i've had enough this can't go on you're angry you're full of anger you step back you take rational steps you get rid of them and you feel joy and relief so if you didn't feel these emotions at first you would never be able to take the action that will lead you to some kind of rational decision and if you did not feel the rewards of pride of empathy and love of accomplishing something you would never be motivated to go through the rational process again and again and again so rationality involves emotions and thinking but the problem is you need to create a balance between them and i like to compare this to the metaphor of the rider and the horse the rider is your rational thinking your mind and the horse is your emotions your energy your power the animal part of your nature if the writer is too dominated too dominating if you're afraid and you want to control that horse and make sure it does everything you want you hold the reins really tight you squeeze your thighs really hard into the sides of the horse the horse won't respond or do anything because it picks up that you're trying to control it too much but if out of fear of trying to work with the horse you just let it go and do whatever it does it can become very dangerous the horse can ride wherever at very fast speeds what you need is a balance between the two a harmony between the two so you the intelligent part of the of the equation understands the animal knows that it has to control it to some degree but can't over control it and then working in harmony you can channel that powerful energy that comes from the animal part of our nature that actually act makes us accomplish things and do things you can channel it for productive purposes so please keep this in mind rationality is not about tamping down your emotions it's about creating this beautiful harmony this balance between the thinking process and the emotional animal parts of our nature okay now i want to discuss what is rationality or what is my theory of rationality and i say that basically it is our bridge to reality and i like to think of these realities as kind of these circles that begin from inside of us and that widen out wider and wider and wider to encompass the entire world and the entire universe what do i mean by that well first you begin with yourself and the idea is you don't know yourself you don't know who you are you don't know why you behave the way you do you don't know why you have certain emotions why you have certain ideas why you make certain decisions you're basically a mystery a puzzle to yourself the next layer is the people around you your family your friends the people you interact with every day you think you know them but you don't know them at all you're projecting your own emotions onto them your own thoughts and wishes you're locked inside of your head and you're not really understanding at the core of the people that you're dealing with widen that out even further to the groups that you interact with perhaps your office or your community as i talk about in the laws of human nature any group of people have a kind of culture a kind of group mentality you're not understanding that culture you're not thinking about it you're not entering into that spirit and because of that you make all kinds of mistakes and misjudgments why not even out even further to the entire globe to what is going on in the world politically and economically what we call the zeitgeist the spirit of the times by not understanding what is really going on in the world by being locked in your own head with your own desires and wishes you have no actual conception of what is really happening in the world right now now these realities have two essential qualities first they're contingent they depend on you as an individual so my reality as to who i am and the people i deal with isn't the same as yours i have to treat it as is something special to me and i have to try and pierce that and the second thing is these realities are hidden from our view if i just simply look at people i don't understand them if i just simply look at myself in the mirror i don't know who i am you have to make effort to try and figure out what's really going on underneath the appearances but then there are three realities that we have to deal with that are not hidden that are very obvious and they're not individual or contingent they are universal the first one is death we all have to die as jim morrison said no one here gets out alive there's nobody else there's nobody in the world who's going to escape this basic reality that we all have to deal with the second reality is that life involves pain and suffering and difficulties and setbacks and failures some of that are things we can't help some of it's physical and some of it comes from the people that we have to interact with but this pain is inevitable in life and the third reality is we humans can never ever know anything for certain our knowledge our brains are limited the best that we can ever do in science is back this up with like quantum mechanics the best that we can ever do is to get the probabilities this is probably who i am this is probably what people are like you can never ever know anything for certain now with this laid down as a foundation we can make a very clear dividing line to the degree that you understand who you are that you make an effort to do that that you make an effort to get outside of your brain and understand the people you deal with that you try to understand the zeitgeist what is going on in the world you are becoming a rational person and the decisions that you make will be powerful and effective as a result of that but to the degree that you stay inside yourself and you lock and you don't try and understand these realities you don't understand yourself people what's going on the world you deny the reality that you're going to die soon or any day now that there's pain and suffering in the world that you don't know anything for certain to that degree you are detaching yourself from reality and you're not aware of this but as you detach yourself from reality you start making bad decisions in life you create your own drama you create your own misery you create your own bad decisions and you lead a very unhappy and life full of tragedies that don't need to be there and so and in a world like ours today where things are moving and changing so quickly and so fast this divorce from reality that so many people out there are suffering from is extremely dangerous you're not aware of it but it is the source of so many of the problems in your life okay now that we've defined what rationality is what is the process how do we go through a mental process to actually be rational well in fact it's remarkably simple let us say we have some kind of plan like i mentioned before we want to get into good shape or we want to write a book or start a business or let's say we want to sell something we want to persuade people to fund our movie or we're selling a product or let us say we have a problem to solve we naturally begin with an idea in our heads right we have a theory we have an idea about what we need to do and what is the best way to go and this theory that we inevitably begin with because we are thinking creatures is also inevitably subjective it has a large amount of wishes and emotions and desires mixed in with it but there's nothing wrong with that even scientists even albert einstein begins his theory with ideas that aren't necessarily connected to anything real but then we go the next step and the next step is perhaps we do some research about our book or project or about the regimen we want to go through we do some research about the people we're trying to sell to we do some research about the problem and with that research we get evidence we get feedback and we realize hmm my original idea it needs some fixing or i was really off base i need to really change my idea so we go through a mental process and we adapt that original theory or idea and then we go further we launch our book we write the book and we launch it or we launch the product or we actually try to persuade that other person or we do an experiment and we see results we get actual real-time feedback and that feedback tells us robert your idea really sucked you had no idea what you were totally divorced from reality you need now to really really adapt your idea okay and you go through that on and on and on cycling through this process continually thinking reacting to what reality tells you adapting your thoughts constantly going through this process as far as you can take it i compare this to like a drill going through a piece of wood and each time you think and get feedback it goes further and then you do it again it goes further deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into that piece of wood getting to the reality the core of who people are the core of the problem you're trying to solve the core of your plan and how to sell it okay but to the degree that you suddenly stop you you simply stay there with your own idea and you don't actually respond to the evidence this is that little it's drill it's short circuits and it's not working anymore or the the moment you stay locked into just looking at the data and you stop thinking about what it means which a lot of people do nowadays this is short circuits again and it stops working the drill stops and you're divorcing and you're detaching yourself from reality slowly by surely okay now this is an incredibly beautiful powerful process that you must adapt immediately in your life i can't say it often enough but this process requires that you have three emotional strengths three essential attitudes okay the first attitude is that your mind is open you have a free spirit you're willing to let the doors open and all kinds of ideas and evidence come in that you now look at and the main thing that's going to stop you from that is that you have an ego that you have insecurity that you feel that you have to be right that your intelligence is at stake and when that evidence comes in that shows you that maybe you were wrong your ego stop no i don't want to go any further instead you have to keep your mind really open very flexible and and that's what you're going to do you people listening to me you're going to adapt this open mind and take whatever the world shows you and adapt your ideas to it the second quality that you must have is patience you must be an incredi a saint of patience because inevitably as you go through that drilling process that i mentioned you're going to have problems you're going to have setbacks you're going to have criticisms you're going to have things that don't quite match what you thought were going to happen and you're going to get impatient and when you get impatient you're going to stop that process you're going to block yourself off and you're going to say no i'm already i've already got it all figured out and you won't continue on drilling going deeper and deeper so you you're promising me now you out there you're going to maintain this patience that'll see you out through that through the entire process the third quality that you must have is fearlessness and this is the absolute most important one and what i mean by this is the following we human beings tend to be incredibly conventional animals we get ideas from our parents from our schooling from the people around us and that becomes how we think about everything in the world we stop thinking for ourselves and with social media this has become much worse all right and we're afraid to think of ourselves i think the classic example of this cowardice in thinking comes from academics the people who were supposed to be the most brilliant thinkers of all they have been submerged in this particular way of looking at the world filled with jargon filled with things you know deconstructivism blah blah blah this is what the world is like and they can never get outside of it everything they write everything they see everything they think about is in that little bubble that they have been inundated with in their academic training you need to be fearless you need to be able to get rid of everything you've ever believed in before you to get rid of all the strategies you've used all the conventional ideas and think for yourself and not be tied to what other people have told you is reality okay with your fearlessness with your patience and with your open spirit you can't help but make that process work for you but then we have to ask ourselves a question robert that process is so simple why are there so many goddamn irrational people in the world why are people so stupid why are they making so many bad decisions why am i so irrational and in that i say me robert green as well why do i make so many stupid decisions why do i act on impulses why i'm not not capable of thinking before i react you know why can't i go through that process you just enumerated well the answer is simple i talked earlier about the rider and the horse you don't have the proper balance the horse the animal is running rampant and you're not in control and the problem is you're not to blame i'm not trying to fix glam guilt on this we are irrational creatures because of the way our brains are wired let me explain that for a second go a little bit into the neuroscience of that because it's very important if you look at the human brain you can almost see it in a vertical kind of alignment on the top is the neocortex which is the rational part of our brains it's the ex what was called the executive function it's what kind of controls our thinking and what what we rely upon for our decisions the further down you go in the actual literal alignment of this brain you come upon systems that are more and more primitive that neocortex that we humans have was really only developed in the last 150 000 years with language and consciousness where it became much more sophisticated but these older parts of the brain that you go further down are extremely primitive and you arrive at systems like the limbic system that controls our emotion which is extremely ancient perhaps the most ancient of all we find it in reptiles in the fear response in fight or flight this goes back hundreds of millions of years okay but the thing about these two systems is the neocortex is actually very weak it has these little nervous signals these electrical signals that we that we respond to but are actually weak a lot weaker compared to the emotions that are driven by the limbic system when we feel an emotion powerful hormones are injected into our blood we've all felt for instance adrenaline when we feel fear or frightened we also feel dopamine and serotonin and all kinds of other things like that these emotions these chemicals in our bloodstream grab our attention they are much more powerful than those weak little electrical signals that are coming from the neocortex so we are paying so much more attention to those feelings of excitement or fear or whatever and we can't help it and the other thing to know is the neocortex here and the limbic system here they come from two different parts of the brain that are not really very well connected they develop in two different periods of history okay so what that means is you have no conscious access to what your limbic system is turning up you have no conscious access to those feelings and those emotions you have you don't understand them they're not the part of your brain that is used to language thinking in terms of words is not connecting to those emotions so you can't understand why you're afraid or why you're feeling excited or why you're angry because you have no conscious access to those emotions you can begin to think about them but you don't really understand where they come from or what triggered them you don't have the words this is often something we all experience you're depressed but you don't know why and you don't really have the words to explain why that's because these two parts of our brain are divorced from each other now from this divorce stems all of the misery in the world all of the turmoil the bloodshed the madness that insanity that we humans have injected over five six thousand years of our history and how that and what that means is for instance let us say that we have a plan or an idea or a strategy we're not aware we think that we're being rational and strategic i'm going to do this i'm going to do that we're not aware of how those emotions are infecting our plans in a very insidious fashion so think of the brain as almost being on this kind of slope and our thoughts naturally veer towards what our emotions tell us they naturally veer away from pain and towards what is pleasurable towards what we want to hear towards what is what we want to see in people to what our desires and wishes and what we find pleasant our brain naturally goes down that slope to what we want to see is pleasant and good and this infects our ideas our strategies and how we look at the world i call this the rosie scenario so that when we're thinking of our screenplay or of our project that we're going to create or of our plan to sell something we naturally imagine that everyone's going to love it that we're going to have brilliant success that money is just going to flow in that we know exactly what we're going to do that if we evade iraq people are going to be greeting us with flowers or if we show our screenplay to some producer he's going to shower us with millions of dollars okay so that's how the brain naturally veers towards it some people their brains naturally veer towards the negative i'd say the minority of people where they're always thinking nothing's going to work everyone's going to hate me this is bad bad bad but that's also part of an emotional response it's not governed by a relationship to reality so that's the first part of the equation emotions infect our decisions our strategies and all of our actions in life and we can't see it the second thing that happens is because of that we select the evidence that comes in remember i talked about that second part of the process which is getting feedback as evidence comes in as reality floods our brain we select what we want to see we select the things that are pleasant to us we select the things we had already predetermined to believe in i know this happened to me you know when i was even writing my book the loss of human nature i have a particular predisposition towards thinking something kind of negative about human nature i can't help it it was part of the 48 laws of power and everybody who reads my books knows that and i started realizing i'm only looking at books that kind of emphasize that negative aspect robert you're being irrational you're selecting evidence so i had to go in and force myself to read books that emphasize that other aspect of human nature books that i normally hate to read the books by stephen pinker for example about our better natures and enlightenment now i had to read them to force myself to not go down that slope okay because what happens when you go down that when you select your evidence right the reason you do that is if evidence comes in that you were wrong if evidence came in that you voted for a a president for instance who is incompetent stupid and irrational to admit that to admit that you were wrong means that you have to admit that you were perhaps a little bit stupid a little bit foolish which is nothing wrong with because we're all stupid and we're all foolish at times but as the great philosopher arthur schopenhauer said we humans would rather believe that we're ugly we would rather believe that we are evil but we will never ever believe that we're stupid to believe that we're stupid goes down the level that we can never admit to ourselves even the person who is the least educated and there's nothing wrong with that never wants to believe that they're wrong they believe that they're intelligent in what they do and so because of that we convince ourselves that our original idea even though evidence shows the opposite is actually the right idea this is known as cognitive dissonance we will feel we get evidence that shows that perhaps we made a mistake or that we were wrong in our assessment but rather than admit that we will double down on our original idea and believe it even more firmly than ever before we will yell and scream and be even more louder that we made the right decision okay and this is what you see in all the people around you that i call it the conviction bias if i believe in it loud enough if i'm filled with enough anger and vitriol and hatred if i show so much sincerity in what i express how could i be wrong because my sincerity proves that i'm that i'm right this is why there are so many goddamn irrational people in the world the evidence comes in they absolutely refuse to see it they only see what they want to see and then they double down on their original stupid unrealistic irrational assessment by being more angry and more cert of themselves so now i want to talk about what we're going through in the world today but strangely enough i want to first direct our attention to 2500 years ago approximately to a story that i relate in the laws of human nature the story that opens the book and it's the story of ancient athens you know sometimes in history there occurs something that's kind of a paradigm that sort of shows throughout history the paradigm of certain of something very human and this story is the absolute most superb paradigm of human irrationality that exists and it's the story of pericles pericles is the great leader of what is called the golden age of ancient athens in the 5th century bc he has led ancient athens through its most glorious period of arts of architecture of science etc but then in the year 432 bc athens arch enemy sparta comes and with its representative says look athens in order to have peace with us here are our terms if you don't agree to these terms we're going to go to war with you and we're going to destroy you and this the people the athenians are all of in an uproar they don't want to go to war but they're very afraid some people are hawks no let's go fight the spartans others are doves let's agree to their peace terms and then pericles himself gives a very powerful speech which he kind of cuts the middle line and he says we are going to go to war with sparta people are surprised because pericles never likes war but we're going to do it in a very strange way we're going to bring all of these citizens into the city of athens we're not going to fight spartans very powerful army as they try to invade us we're going to stay inside of our walls and while they try and destroy us there'll be no enemy to fight they'll get very frustrated we're going to go on our ships because athens is a naval power and we're going to go raid their cities that they've left behind undefended and we're going to irritate the hell out of them causing these little pinpricks that are going to weaken them in the meantime not fighting them directly and even though this strategy involves some pain and suffering and that we're going to watch the spartans kind of destroy the countryside around athens in the end they will be so weakened by our brilliant kind of retreat strategy that they will come to terms on our peace terms they will have to meet us what we want it will work the athenians aren't so sure but finally they agree to it and so the war begins and as pericles predicted there you know people are a little bit grumbling because they're not fighting and the spartans are destroying the countryside but then in the year 430 bc suddenly a plague breaks out in athens the most plague anyone has ever seen people are dying left right and center in the most horrific fashion and as pericles if we're seen people are suddenly freaking out and are really doubting his strategy and i want to read to you what then happens from perhaps people often ask me robert what's your favorite book one of my favorite books of all time happens to be this the city thucydides history of the peloponnesian war it is perhaps the greatest history book it is so dramatic is so brilliant please if you don't read this you're not really educated in history i had to read it when i first studied ancient greek in ancient greek and it's one of the hardest things i ever had to do in my life anyway i want to read to you some passages from the book at this moment so understand the plague is broken out in 4 30. the athenians are freaking out so i quote from thucydides now they began to blame pericles for having persuaded them to go to war and to hold him responsible for all the misfortunes which had overtaken them they became eager to make peace with sparta and actually sent ambassadors there who failed to achieve anything they were then in a state of utter hopelessness and all their angry feelings turned against pericles and so pericles himself gave a speech to buttress up the athenians and he said is it not wrong to act as you are doing now for you have been so dismayed by disaster in your homes that were that you are losing your grip on the common safety on reality you are attacking me for having spoken in favor of war and yourselves for having voted for it he goes on it is a policy which entails suffering and each one of you already knows what this suffering is he's referring to his strategy but its ultimate benefits are still far away and not yet clear for all to see so now that a great and sudden disaster has fallen on you meaning the plague you have weakened in carrying out to the end the resolves which you made when things happen suddenly unexpectedly and against all calculation it takes out the heart of a man and this certainly has happened to you we all look with distaste on people who arrogantly pretend to a reputation to which they are not entitled but equally to be condemned are those who through lack of moral fiber fail to live up to the reputation which is theirs already each of you therefore must try to stifle his own particular sorrow as he joins with the rest and working for the safety of us all he then concludes this was the old athenian way do not let any act active yours prevent it from still being so remember too that the reason why athens has the greatest name in all the world is because she has never given in to adversity hatred does not last for long but the brilliance of the present is the glory of the future stored up forever in the memory of man to face calamity with a mind as unclouded as may be and quickly to react against it that in a city an individual is real strength and real power okay and then you probably know the tragedy that ensued pericles himself died of the plague and then all kind of all hell broke loose in athens all of the demagogues all of the con artists all of the populists started rising up and coming up with their own incredibly irrational ideas about what athens could do and then a businessman named cleon who thought he was so great who was the most demagogic and populist of them all he rose to power he hated pericles he started trying to do everything the opposite of what cara pericles promulgated and then the hawks rose to power and they decided we're going to go to war with sparta and they came up with a strategy that they would have thought was brilliant their strategy was that they were going to evade the city of syracuse on the island of sicily syracuse was a key ally of sparta it supplied it with much of its resources if they knocked out syracuse not only would athens become an even more glorious empire but they would really knock out the pillar of spartan strength well the war begins they do it everyone thought this is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened certain of success and it turned in an incredible disaster the brilliant athenian navy was completely wiped out and essentially after many years of struggle athens had to surrender and in surrendering that golden era of periclean golden era the ancient athens that we knew and that we celebrate was destroyed it ended forever the athenian empire was over and in the ensuing century an incredible outbreak of irrationality took over the ancient athenians okay now you might ask yourself robert do you see some parallels between what is happening now between ancient athens and america yes i do obviously i do okay so to go through that first of all the athenians before this happened obviously had some pre-existing irrationality that the plague only accentuated well we in the world not just americans but in the world we had a pre-existing condition and namely i believe that we were going through a period of incredible irrationality spurred by social media i think there were many causes for this but i believe in social media kind of triggered send human irrationality into a warp speed social media is actually a brilliant tool for human communication but it's not very good for rational discourse it's a medium that plays on our most base emotions it plays on our envy it plays on our tribal spirits we glom onto that little group on the internet that has the same opinions of us and everybody outside that bubble is evil and awful just like the ancient athenians thought if you were a hawk or a dove the other side was evil was corrupt was an elite as a snob and so on and on and on our fear our envy our anger our hatred our tribalism all of these are deeply deeply accentuated by social media try and think of how many times you've come away from your interactions with instagram or facebook or tick tock or whatever it is feeling wow i really learned something i really feel calm and i really feel like i've made myself more rational i bet you it's pretty damn rare okay so then the coronavirus occurs and this pre-existing irrationality suddenly is exploded all right now i talked earlier about reality rationality is our bridge to reality all right well let's for a second let's just get a goddamn grip on what the reality is here okay it's very simple it is a virus a virus is not a living organism there's some debate on it it's kind of in a gray area but it's not really truly a living organism it's something that exists by a rigorous mathematical logic if it can when it infects someone that then person if that person can then infect one person more than one person in other words if over a thousand people in the group if they can infect 1.1 person more than one then this virus can spread itself more and more and more out of control you can never get control of it but if you can bring that down below one if it if it infects less than one person then you can bring slowly those numbers down the other thing is that there's a lag so when people are first infected we don't really right have a total sense of what's going to happen in the weeks and months to come because that process of infecting more than one person has an exponential factor so it's not just simply that it increases but it increases by powers of two by three by four and it can explode across the population that is the reality now who studies this reality it is not tv commentators it is not economists it is not politicians it is epidemiologists scientists immunologists that's their specialty and when they look at a virus like this which is new they don't know what it is it's a new virus so they're learning as much as we're learning and the evidence remember evidence comes in they reassess their original idea yeah masks will do this more evidence comes in they realize what really makes people immune etc slowly slowly they bore into the reality of that virus they come up with a vaccine and they figured it out and they save lives okay that's the simple process that occurs all right but there's something about this virus that and of course i'm sorry and they come up with a strategy the strategy that we're all very familiar with that strategy is like pericles you have to take a step back you have to do some pain and some sacrifice the equivalent of not doing battle with sparta of bringing everybody in you have to go through some sacrifice and eventually after two or three months you get control of it and then you can advance right but the problem that we're facing here is the coronavirus feeds all of our most irrational tendencies number one it's hidden we can't see it we don't know where we're getting it there's no like enemy it's not like sparta we can say that's the enemy we can't see it it's not a living thing second of all it has that lag between here's the actual disease and here are the effects the consequences of it and in that lag we can think that things are under control when they're not and then it increases in exponential degrees and as a neuroscientist demonstrated the human brain isn't geared for understanding exponential factors we can only think in terms of simple math we don't understand the concept that things can suddenly explode all right so if that is the landscape that we're dealing with the pre-existing social media rationality and then bang this coronavirus in our face i can see and we can see signs all around us of this incredibly spreading pandemic of human stupidity and human irrationality evidence number one is the belief that it's a hoax now i've studied several plagues in my encountering in my reading of history but i can never think of anybody saying that the death the plague itself is a hoax and the reason is when you're in athens in 430 bc or you're in london in 1665 you're seeing people dying left right and center on on the street with the most horrifying pustules on their body but their bodies exploding they're going literally insane nobody would think that's a hoax it's so real but we in our industrialized modern world people are dying locked away in hospitals we never have to see it we never have to deal with it as a reality and so we can imagine this isn't really happening this is just a conspiracy of blah blah blah blah blah blah this is the utter outer limits of human stupidity and human rationality if you could just put these people inside the hospitals and see them they would be bitch-slapped by the reality and they would drop their incredibly stupid ideas but the other thing is are they the plethora of conspiracy theories that are sprouting up like mushrooms everywhere now conspiracy theories are normal in a plague time even people in athens thought that the plague was infiltrated by the spartans which isn't the case and people would always like blame jews for starting the plague that was a common trope it's understandable because conspiracies give us a very simple explanation of what's going on we don't have to think very hard we have this little tight neat little narrative this is what's really going on but if we're talking about that drill drilling into reality the moment you think well it's bill gates that started it's short circuits and we don't drill anymore or it's 5g it stops pouring into reality or you see pandemic uh or it's george soros you're not dealing with reality anymore you're stopping the process you're living in your delusional fantasies and you're selecting evidence if you look at any of these conspiracy theories you see a little narrow thing of evidence that actually does kind of confirm their idea but they're ignoring the huge wide circle of evidence that completely disconfirms it and if you hone in on just those three or four facts that seem to indicate that this is a hoax started by democrats or bill gates or 5g you can believe whatever you want but you ignore the huge wider picture of reality so this is irrationally irrationality par excellent evidence number one the other element of is you know a virus isn't democrat or republican or liberal or conservative it's this nefarious little thing that has this mathematical logic but in times of incredible partisanship we can actually begin to see it as actually through the lens of politics as opposed to the lens of science so wearing a mask now becomes a sign of whether you're a liberal or a conservative a trump supporter or a buying supporter it's not a sign of science telling you what to do it's now something that's incredibly partisan this is what happened in ancient athens and led to its downfall it was a belief that you're either a hawk or a dove and either side is evil and the other side is right in this case one side usually is sort of based on the side of science and this can transcend party lines because there's certainly people on the right republicans who understand the science but the divide is between people who believe in science and who don't believe in science and the kind of ultimate irony of this is representative louis gomer of texas a republican in the united states congress who thought that it was essentially a hoax and believed masks were completely not necessary at all and what happens louis gohmert himself contracts the coronavirus and he blames it on the fact that he actually wore a mask because because nancy pelosi had mandated that it was the mask that brought him the coronavirus speaking of cognitive dissonance and part of this sort of anti-science idea that seems to spread we can sort of see it earlier on people dealing with ideas of global warming warming because nobody wants to believe in global warming it means you know we have to suffer we have to sacrifice so people were denying that but now we have people and i find it insanely hypocritical so for instance rand paul who himself contracted the coronavirus when he was questioning anthony fauci in a senate hearing he went on to get a rant against experts saying how can we trust experts you had gotten this wrong in the beginning when you said about masks and blah blah blah how do we know that you're actually right well that's how science works mr paul people get evidence and they alter their opinions but what i find here in this decrying of experts is how hypocritical it is so when rand paul contracted the coronavirus did he entrust his health to a television commentator or to a fellow politician no he entrusted his health to a doctor right all of us are dealing with science every day even this this interview that i'm doing over an iphone obviously depends on elaborate amounts of technology and algorithms so every day all of these people who are suddenly against science and experts they choose very selectively which science they like they love their smartphones they love their technology they love the ease of their car they love flying on airplanes with a pilot who's an expert in flying they love having doctors that can help them deal if they come down with cancer but if some expert comes on who has an opinion that maybe isn't so lovely isn't so nice to what they want to believe suddenly that expert is partisan is is a is on one side or the other and is no longer a scientist that is incredibly irrational that's another evidence of it i'm also seeing signs of incredible impatience so if we go back to the periclean strategy it was all about having to to have some sacrifice so that eventually we can move forward but people can't wait two months three months which is incredible right i understand the pain the jobs that are lost the children that are home etc but it's only a couple months of getting something under control no we have to go out to our nail salons we have to go to our tattoo parlors we have to go to our bards and damn it you're not going to stop it because that's the american way there's absolutely no you know that's kind of a weakness think of the incredible patience of our ancestors dealing with wars and all kinds of other problems of world war ii but we can't put up with two or three months of sacrifice to get this under control okay so massive amounts of impatience but finally um oh and one other thing is all of the kind of happy talk that i see on the internet all kinds of little advice you know you get these quotes that people have they put it on instagram or facebook with all kinds of you know things about how to be optimistic and cheerful and everything's going to be all right and it's kind of the sort of happy talk that i see filtering all the way through social media and i think what we really need is kind of reality talk no things are not happy things aren't good we're in dire situation we're facing a psychological and physical pandemic and we need to confront reality now finally people are going to be criticizing me and i know they're going to be little comments on youtube saying robert is just being political here this is not ria he's being subjective that's something that people say a lot they said that on my last couple of videos he's just being subjective here whereas in the 48 laws of power blah blah blah robert was being objective here he's just being political now that's not the case at all i can admit that the left-wing the left or people who are liberals can be extremely irrational with their identity politics with a social justice warrior with their virtue signaling there's plenty of irrationality to spread around the globe but what these people are trying to say which to me is so nefarious is that there are no standards in this world it's all partisan so in other words when it comes to saying that somebody is a bad strategist or a stupid strategist or someone is a good leader or a bad leader oh you're just being subjective no we have standards we have four thousand years of human history we know that pericles rises to the level of smart rational leadership and that cleon was a demagogue and relative to bad leadership causing all kinds of problems we have examples of abraham lincoln of other leaders who led to disasters we have standards that we can say this is good leadership this is smart this is intelligence this is rational this is irrational so it has nothing to do with my personal political beliefs now i've been discussing the kind of macro issues that we see all in front of the sort of the obvious dramatic stuff right the the hoaxes the conspiracies etc but there's more of a micro level that i'm worried about i see it in people today i see it in myself levels of frustration and anger and rage i'm riding my bicycle and my mask isn't on it's down here because for whatever reason i'm drinking water whatever and some guy passes me by and he literally yells at me with such rage but why aren't you wearing your mask you feel it in the supermarket this kind of bottled anger that could explode right but i'm feeling i'm thinking that it's even more deeper that something is happening to us almost physically that is infecting us with kind of physical things that are going to make us irrational and that we're going to pay for a price a price for this three or four or five months down the road and when i'm thinking of this physical component to our the rationality now i'm reminded of a scientist who i really really like who i first became acquainted with through a film in 1980 by the film director alan renee a film called mononcle d'amatique and the scientist his name is anri labourri laborie and this film was based on his theories now library library parliament he did experiments on mice and one of his experiments he put mice in this situation in this kind of labyrinth in which to get out they could not get out of this labyrinth they couldn't find a way out by fleeing and they couldn't fight their way they couldn't fight other mice they couldn't fight through some kind of obstacle to get out and so they were certainly trapped and he studied what happened to them and he noticed that certain strange chemicals were released into their body certain hormones very powerful hormones and he determined that this was part of what he discovered as the brain inhibition system normally our brains are structured and organized to help us take action in the world to take make to have certain behaviors but when we can't act when we're in a situation where we can't fight our way out or we can't flee too common responses the brain inhibition system goes into action and it releases these hormones and he noticed that with the mice weeks later they had all kinds of problems they were confused they couldn't do sort of simple simple problems or puzzles something had degraded in them to these powerful hormones that were released in the body now i can't say this for certain but i think lavery's idea has some has some impact some import here and what we're going through we're dealing with something we can't fight we can't flee that's surrounding us and it's causing all kinds of physical reactions we're not aware of that are infecting us psychologically that are making this virus situation worse and worse and worse so i want to come up with a solution a simple solution for you out there listening to this as i come to the end of my talk here and the solution is for you to grasp onto rationality as like a lifesaver that's going to help you get through these times and it's going to literally save your life and save your brain from the psychological pandemic that we're all going through and a lot of it is what i've talked about you're going to go through that you're going to see it as a bridge to reality and you're going to make sure that you're going to you're going to go through the process that i mentioned you're going to have the attitude that i mentioned but most important you're going to develop the balance that i brought up with my metaphor of the rider and the horse so although i in this situation can't fight or flee there is something actually you can fight and what you can fight is you can't fight the irrational people in this world there's too many of them you'll never it'll never succeed but you can fight your own irrationality you can say i'm going to stop the irrational tendencies within me it is something that i have gone through in writing my books etc you begin with some a very simple premise you begin with the premise of humility you say to yourself robert i am irrational emotions infect my decisions they infect my plans i tend to see in people what i want to see i tend to see in the world what i want to see i'm aware of that problem and i'm going to try and combat it also instead of reacting to the fear or anger or hatred that i feel in the moment i'm going to step back and instead of giving into it i'm going to try and analyze where it comes from so i can create some space between what happens to me and how i react to it by going through these two steps of realizing how you're irrational how your decisions are infiltrated with emotions and how you can get more intelligence and awareness of your emotions you can begin to create that balance between the rider and the horse and you can use that animal energy for productive purposes instead of for believing in all kinds of irrational things the second part of the equation is you can flee you can flee for instance social media i'm not saying to get rid of social media in your life it's it's too much even i'm not going to do that but you can cut off your access to it you don't need to be spending so much time on it you don't need to be spending time on sites or with people who are kind of churning up your emotions who are making you feel envy who are playing on your fear and your anger and your tribal instincts you can create some space so they have less presence in your life and you can flee those horrible horrible people in the world the demagogues the con artists the politicians who play on our most base emotions our basest instincts and they're trying to actually make us more irrational so that they in the end can have power over us you want to flee from them like the plague finally the last thing you need to do is you need to surmount your brain over this moment okay so imagine a year from now the coronavirus is mostly in the rearview mirror we have a vaccine life is sort of returning back to normal relatively so but as we return to this new normal we see a landscape that is devastated that has totally changed businesses and business models that exist before the virus they're gone they're wiped out right it's a whole new world out there jobs and careers that we relied upon they're no longer there and we're frightened and we're afraid and we don't know where to go we're facing uncertainty okay and my worry is that those five or six or eight months of being locked in of not being able to fight or flee of being like those kind of laboratory mice that we're gonna carry that irrationality with us a year from now when the circumstances are no longer there we're going to be habituated with all kinds of fear responses and anxiety and we're not going to be able to rationally assess what the world is like you want to get your brain out of that right now you want to put yourself a year from now and imagine what is this world going to be like what is the business landscape going to be like how can i get myself out of this cycle of these emotions and these fears and these anxieties and how can i surmount the present moment and think longer term and think of where i will be in a year and calm myself down with some key rational plans so you can begin to use that rational power that i've described rather thoroughly in this video thank you so much for your patience i'm sorry it was so long hold on for next next whenever it happens the next podcast which i will be dissecting human narcissism which i believe there's another kind of epidemic i won't quite say a pandemic or maybe a pandemic the roots of narcissism and what we can do about it so thank you very much and uh [Music]

Channel: Robert Greene

Views: 182,702

Keywords: RobertGreene, 48Laws, 48lawsofpower, mastery, 33strategiesofwar, artofseduction, 50thlaw, Art of seduction, Business, Politics, Subscribe, like, youtuber, books, author, Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

Id: SY2D_x-AMfw

Length: 61min 19sec (3679 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Cult_of_Strategos]

Where is the United States headed a year from now, 3 years, 5 years, or 7, or 10 after Coronavirus, occupations, protests, riots, and political shootings?