The Rawness

Nothing to add for now. This guy’s stuff is great.

I’m going to be doing a post expanding on some of these ideas next week.

Recommended Reading From Alain De Botton:

Last year I did a series of posts about a social maneuver call the Rearden that you can use against passive aggressive pricks. It was generally well-received, but there was one installment of it that got mixed reviews, and that’s the part where I gave a specific example where I used it myself. The anecdote was about an exchange with a passive-aggressive Eurodouche.

It got some good feedback but also some negative feedback from commenters like

I don’t know man…

I see where you are coming from, and I agree with the analyses of conversational dynamics you post here, but something about the way you handled this rubbed me the wrong way. Felt too defensive. I would have handled it in one of two ways:

1) Early in the conversation you could have opened up an interesting discussion comparing the relative merits of the more isolated, atomic nature of American life versus the more friendly vibe you felt in AMS (you do agree that there is a qualitative difference, right? I myself found the open vibe in AMS to be refreshing).

2) If you you honestly felt the guy was trying to ho you up, better to go for the throat right away instead of psychoanalyzing and nitpicking. If it’s a “fight”, go on the offensive and start talking trash about what you think about the Dutch. That’s fun. But squirming around about what you think his motives are strikes me as ever so slightly bitchassed.

I like the idea of The Rearden in theory, but I don’t like this example.

All IMHO, of course.

Mu’Min/Obsidian also chimed in with:

Hey T,
Been awhile since we last chatted. So, I see I have some reading to do! I like “The Rearden” but I’m w/TC on this one: in any situation, Mu prefers the North/South approach, straightup, straight line, let’s have it.

Now, if I had been in your shoes w/dude, I would have cut him right off at the knees, cut the ring off on him and made him duke it rhetorically right there. I would have put him back on his heels in a very dominant way, because that’s my nature anyhow. And he would either have to bring it, or stand down. Kinda what you’ve been saying about drawing them out into the open.

On the other hand, people who have been to Europe or other cultures where confrontation tends to be indirect like Japan all agreed with me to some degree. Wade Nichols said:

Good post!

I’ve had a few experiences similar to yours when dealing with Europeans and/or Brits.

One was when I was in New Zealand, hiking the Kepler Track, during Christmas/New Years. In one of the huts, 2 Brits basically started ganging up on my wife and I when they learned we were Americans. They played many of the same games you described, as they were bitching about Iraq, how Tony Blair’s “basically a poodle of the U.S.”, etc. etc. They tried to cast the U.S. as hypocrites since there’s a photo of Dick Cheney with Sadaam Hussein from the 1980’s, and that was somehow indicative that the U.S. was once cozy with him. I didn’t think of it at the time, but later on realized I should have mentioned to these 2 clowns that Britain also once went to war with a certain bunch of people, and that Britain is now friends with the descendents of those people. Today we’re called Americans!

Another time I’ve experienced the same also with a Dutchman. This guy was playing the not-too-subtle “Americans are idiots” game by asking me, “How come you Americans always go to McDonald’s when you’re overseas?” I should have countered him by asking him about the stereotype of Europeans all being a bunch of wimps that “swing both ways”, and ask him how many guys he’s slept with!

Joshua Herring wrote:

What a great post! I spent 6 years abroad, one of which was in Germany, so this sort of thing happened to me all the time. I disagree with other commenters that going for the jugular early on is the right approach. That was always my initial instinct too, but it doesn’t work because (as this encounter demonstrates) they can easily fall back on the faux “OH, I didn’t mean to offend.” It’s true that Rawness calls him on it eventually, but first you have to give the guy enough rope to hang himself. Sitting there and calmly letting him build up a bit belies any impression that you’re easily offended or closed-minded, or simplistic or whatever. Love the Rearden and will definitely plan on using it next time I’m in one of these situations.

Several blogs also linked to it favorably, but the blog articles were always written by someone who actually experienced what I was talking about firsthand. But I had a nagging curiosity about why the reaction was so mixed, and in particular why only people who experienced it firsthand supported my prescription of how to respond. But after a while, I just moved on to new topics.

The other day I came across the old post and suddenly it hit me. It was so obvious. When I was recalling the encounter the first time around, the memory was incredibly fresh in my mind. So mentally, I added all the necessary accompanying details like the vibrant vocal inflection, smiling facial expressions, soothing intonation and friendly body language. But in writing it down I left all those extra details out and related almost nothing but the text of the discussion. And when all you see is the pure text without all those other details that tend to soften the impact, the insults look much more direct to readers than it seemed to me at the time I was experiencing it. Similarly, the readers who visited or lived in Europe and had similar experiences with the people there when reading the text, thanks to their own experiences, were probably able to totally fill in those extra details and put the words more into the context needed to understand why going nuclear in response would have come off badly.

Realizing this gave me some more insight on passive aggressors. People who are really good at passive aggression have a talent of making their behavior, body language and voices so incongruous with the insulting nature of their words that you experience a slightly disorienting cognitive dissonance that causes you to doubt your own instincts. However just focusing on the words alone totally makes the insulting intention jump out at you clear as day, just like the Eurodouche’s insulting nature was much more apparent to those readers who were strictly focused on the content of his dialogue as opposed to the other readers who filled in a more vivid total picture of the encounter.

So in the future if you have what you think may have been an encounter with a passive aggressor laced with veiled insults and are doubting your instincts, focus on just the words and nothing else. Write it out if you have to and read it to yourself. Better yet, have someone else who wasn’t there and can’t fill in the extra details of the encounter themselves read it to give you their impression of what’s going on. Chances are that regardless of how the person was acting, if it looks like a blatant insult on paper, it was meant to be insulting.

Part 1 of this series

Part 2

In this part, I’m going to talk about a related concept, immortality by proxy. Immortality by proxy is what people usually refer whether they know it or not when they tell you about the importance of being part of something “bigger than yourself.”

Immortality by proxy has to do when people try to gain immortality by being a part of something bigger and closer to immortality than themselves, like a person, event, or movement.

Proxy Immortality Through People

Proxy immortality through a person involves either helping someone else satisfy their immortality drive or becoming someone’s follower because they promise to be your gateway to personal immortality. Cult leaders and religious figures derive much of their power over followers via this phenomenon. They promise to be the middleman in your relationship with God, the person who will relay God’s messages to you and let you know what you must do to gain access to spiritual afterlife. You are basically entrusting this person with your very soul. Think of the power that gives a person. The most reputable churches as well as the most dangerous and loyal cult followings have always been the ones surrounding a charismatic leader who convinced his flock he could give them access to eternal life.

There also is a certain joy that people feel when they help someone else achieve a level of immortality that they themselves will never be able to reach. It’s pretty cool to meet a famous person, but it’s even cooler when you’re able to help someone rise and get that much closer to immortality, especially if you yourself usually feel powerless and voiceless. This usually accounts for the nameless, faceless masses that get incredibly obsessed and personally involved with helping another person rise to power.

Think of those young, broke and eager college students who go crazy to get a grassroots politician elected or the masses of peasants through history that rallied behind charismatic revolutionaries. This is especially true when the person can be considered “one of your own,” like someone from your own hometown, socioeconomic level or race. Helping someone very similar to you achieve immortality affirms to a person, even if subconsciously, that immortality may be also possible for him or his children one day as well.

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Then of course there is celebrity worship, probably the most obvious form of this phenomenon.

It doesn’t have to just involve following one individual, though. The same concept can involve a group of individuals, an organization. Sports fans who define themselves by their obsessive support of their favorite team fall into this category for example. I’m not talking about fans who are really into the strategy involved and the teamwork and the quality of the play. I mean the fans who primarily want to root for a uniform and team, regardless of who the team members are in a particular season or if they are any good.

Suspend your disbelief and imagine, for example, right before the Boston Red Sox went on the field to play the Yankees some miracle last-minute trade happened where both teams exchanged every last one of their members so that all the players who were just Yankees were now Red Sox and vice versa. The Red Sox fans who were filled with hatred toward the Yankees players all season will suddenly start rooting for them and loving them the moment they switch uniforms. It’s the uniforms and what they represent that they’re cheering. It’s the immortal organization they love more than anything.

Same goes for people who identify themselves throughout their lives by their participation in the military; they enjoy having been a part of an immortal organization that existed before they were born and will exist long after their physical bodies expire. No matter what happens to their bodies, no one will ever be able to take away the role they played in such an organization, however small it may be.

At the largest scale, this type of proxy immortality manifests itself as nationalism or cultural or racial pride.

Proxy Immortality Through Event Participation

People love being part of an event that will live on forever in the minds of future generations. By taking part in such an immortal event, they feel a little more immortal themselves. Every time someone celebrates that event, in a small way the participant feels like they’re being celebrated too, even if not explicitly. Take for example the WWII generation, and the pride they have in being called that. They are basically defined by their participation in an immortal event.

I think this is another big reason why the Obama phenomenon was so powerful and cultlike. It was not only proxy immortality through a person but it was also proxy immortality through event participation, and in this case it was the historical event of the election of the first black US President, which made the power of his candidacy even more potent. For the rest of their lives, people alive during 2008 can tell the story of where they were when the first black US President was elected. And if they voted for him or volunteered to help his campaign, they have even more of a tie to the immortal event.

Proxy Immortality Through Participation in Scenes/Movements

Ever notice how people who were in on the ground floor of an important immortalized movement always try to remind people of their involvement in that movement throughout their lives. There are many Baby Boomers who still take pride in having been hippies and try to make sure the movement is remembered and lionized by future generations. The same goes for people who marched in the civil rights movement, people who went to CBGB’s to see the first NY punk bands play before they became famous, ex-Black Panthers, and people who partied at Studio 54 in its disco heyday (a hedonistic movement).

People who were part of a major movement always try their hardest to keep the memory of said movement alive, since the more famous, and in turn immortal, they can make the movement become, the more immortal they will feel for having partaken in it. This of course often leads to a lot of self-aggrandizement and exaggeration about the impact and profundity of said movement, but I digress.

The Wrap-Up

The thing to note about proxy immortality: people who rack up their own personal accomplishments and achieve social mobility are less likely to engage in it, because they’re actively chasing their own individual immortality and don’t feel the need to get it through association. For example an average joe may take a lot of pride in having been a part of a fraternity in college and may brag about it until the end of his life, but to a world-famous self-made billionaire, his membership in that exact same fraternity is probably a much smaller deal.

Also see Basking in Reflected Glory.

Next: Immortality, Self-Awareness and Woody Allen

In Part 1, I discussed the theory that all things tie into how the fear of death and urge for any type of immortality shapes just about everything we do. Previously I’ve said humans are ruled by two drives, the drive to survive and the drive to reproduce, but I think the drive for immortality is an umbrella concept that successfully covers both the drive to reproduce and the drive to survive, and it also explains other strange aspects of human nature. In the next few installments I’ll give some examples. In this installment, we’ll talk about fame.

Fame

The urge to be famous has always been a part of human nature. But it’s become worse than ever in our modern society? Why?

I think the first reason fame obsession has gotten worse has to do with how secular our society has become as we become increasingly scientifically enlightened. As each generation become less religious, the sincere belief in an afterlife also probably decreases, meaning that people have to focus on alternative ways of satisfying their drive for immortality. This causes us to focus more of our energy on wealth accumulation, power, status and of course fame. Fame is a way to at least ensure your name and image will endure forever, even if your body won’t.

Another reason for the increased fame obsession is the advancement of technology. Imagine the days before there was an international media. Before the invention of the telegraph, information could not travel faster or farther than people. And before the invention of the railroad and steam engine, people had severe limitations in how far and fast they could convey verbal and visual information. What technology has done is increase the speed with which information travels and the geographic range that information can reach.  The game really changed with the invention of the telegraph.  The telegraph was the first time in history that information could travel faster than people could.  Then came radio, telephone, television and the Internet, all of which helped increase the speed with which information could be spread as well as the types of information that could be spread.

Technology also changed the types of feats for which one could get famous.  Take acting for example. No matter how charismatic an actor was in the days before modern technology, his impact was severely limited to who could see him in person. Before radio and television, he could travel with his production but was limited to how fast his transportation was and how extensively his production toured. And he only had an impact when he was actually physically acting. He couldn’t be visually or orally recorded for later viewing or listening by people who didn’t see his performance in person. He performance couldn’t be broadcast to other places around the globe. He couldn’t even be photographed. The writer was more likely to achieve immortality through fame because his contribution was more fully captured than the actor’s. More eyes through the ages could be exposed to his written words through the ages than to the actors performing his works. This is why actors in Shakespeare’s day were considered extremely low status and today are little know, but Shakespeare himself is the most immortalized contributor to his plays.

Fast forward several hundred years and through modern technology, especially in the form of moving pictures, suddenly the actor is the most visible and transmitted part of a performed story. Out of everyone involved in the collaborative moviemaking process, actors were now the ones most likely to achieve enduring fame, thereby making them the closest to achieving immortality. These technological advances have turned acting from one of the lowest status jobs to one of the highest status jobs, as it became the best gateway for a human being to achieve immortality through fame.

And it’s not just people aspiring to be actors, models and writers that try to be famous. Think of the philanthropists, endowment donors and powerful people who like to name things after themselves, like the wing of a university or hospital, or the way Donald Trump names buildings after himself and tries to become a star. This is a way to make their name and image memorable even though their body will expire.

What all these traditional routes to fame have in common, though, is that they require some natural gifts, guts, wealth or talent. Conqueror, politician, matinee idol, tycoon…all of these are out of the realm of possibility for most people. But now the route to immortality through fame has been democratized even further with the Internet (for  example Youtube and blogs) and reality TV.  The bar has been lowered even more and fame now seems more attainable to the masses than ever before. Talent, good looks, guts, money, none of that is a prerequisite anymore to fame. All you need is an exhibitionist streak and a total lack of shame. The desire to becoming immortal through fame is nothing new, except now it doesn’t seem quite as delusional as before given current technology and media options.

The third reason for this increased fame obsession is the rising narcissism that comes from our modern culture’s self-esteem focused style of parenting. No one wants to disillusion or discourage children at all, no matter how unrealistic their goals or how much talent they lack. Everyone gets a gold star, everyone is equal, no one is a loser and everyone is a winner, everyone is a special, unique snowflake. Take a look at the American Idol audition process, where we see legions of untalented people deluded about their own abilities because no one in their lives ever wanted to criticize them and hurt their self-esteem.

Consider this passage from the book Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction:

In her book, [Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before] (2006), Twenge argues that this rise in self-esteem is the direct result of programs in our school systems, which have increasingly promoted the idea that kids need to feel good about themselves in order to reach their potential. During the 1970s and 1980s, she notes, the number of articles about self-esteem psychology and education journals doubled, and during the 1990s thatr number rose by another 50 percent or so. Eventually scores of children’s books on self-esteem made their way into classrooms. According to Twenge, once classic in this genre is The Loveables in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem (1991). It begins: “I AM LOVEABLE. Hi, loveable friend! My name is Mona Monkey. I live in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem along with my friends the Loveable Team.” A page or so later kids learn that they can enter the kingdom only if they “say these words three times with pride: I’m loveable! I’m loveable! I’m loveable!” Over time, Twenge says, our commitment to teaching self-esteem in the schools has been institutionalized in programs and entire curricula. One popular program, called Magic Circle, requires that one child a day be given a badge reading, “I’m great.” The other children take turns praising the “great” child, and their compliments are written up and given to the child to keep. The ritual comes to an end when the chosen child is asked to say something good about himself or herself to the group.

Twenge concludes that our efforts to boost self-esteem in the classroom have fueled an epidemic of self-importance and narcissism…

There is other evidence that narcissism is growing among young people. The psychologist Harrison Gough, for example, found that college students in the 1990s were far more likely than those in the 1960s to support narcissistic statements like “I have often met people who were supposed to be experts who were no better than I.” Twenge has done a study on narcissism, too. In 2002 she and two other researchers analyzed the results from 3,445 people who had completed the Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI). The NPI asks subjects to rate the accuracy of statements such as “I can live my life anyway I want to” and “If I ruled the world it would be a better place.” Unfortunately, the NPI has been in use only since 1988, so Twenge and her colleagues were unable to compare their results with much earlier ones. They did find, however, that narcissism scores were significantly higher among people thirty-five or younger. This led Twenge to two conclusions: that younger people are probably more narcissistic, and that everyone born after 1970 has been thoroughly indoctrinated by the self-esteem curricula of thw 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In Generation Me, Twenge theorizes that American schools are essentially “training an army of little narcissists instead of raising kids’ self-esteem.”

If, in fact, our school systems are inadvertently bolstering narcissism, aren’t they also inadvertently encouraging kids to seek the accolades of fame?

In summation, the immortality drive is the major driving force behind human nature. Fame is one of the most enduring and potent form of immortality humans can actually achieve, but because it used to be so hard for the average person to achieve people focused their energy into satisfying the drive for immortality in other ways, like religion and reproduction. But now, thanks to increased secularism, less barriers to fame, and a stark rise in narcissism, the average joe’s obsession with it has hit new heights.

Next installment, Immortality by Proxy.

Recommended Reading:

One example of inductive reasoning is this post I did, where I came to the conclusion that all the problems that plague people invariably fall into the categories of either a deficiency in vision or a deficiency in discipline.

Another example is this post where I talk about how all of our motivations and actions boil down to trying to satisfy two drives, the for survival and the drive to reproduce. Survival and reproduction directly and indirectly explain our motivations for doing just about everything we’re driven to do. I was satisfied with this for a while, but something felt incomplete about this analysis, and it gnawed at me. I felt the analysis could be taken one step further to create a single, broad umbrella category, one all-encompassing drive of which the drives to survive and reproduce were just subcategories.

And then it hit me: immortality. The drives to survive and reproduce are subcategories of the drive for immortality. Everything we do, including the drives to survive and reproduce, is to satisfy our drive for immortality.

The beauty of the broader Immortality Model is that it helps explain some aspects of human nature that don’t neatly fit into the survival and reproduction catergories, such as the need for religion and the drive to be famous. Religion offers immortality in the form of an afterlife. Fame offers immortality in the form of having your name and image and exploits live on long after your physical body expires. This is why all the logic and reasoning in the world will never be able to eliminate organized religion from humanity. It’s humanity’s last ditch-effort to achieve immortality, especially the closer one gets to the expiration of their physical body as they age.

The Immortality Drive plays itself out through three urges: (1) the urge to achieve literal immortality by extending your physical life and its impact on the world as much as you can, (2) the urge to distract yourself from thinking about the fact you are physically going to die and may not have a spiritual afterlife or reincarnation awaiting you, and (3) the urge to ensure figurative immortality after physical expiration through religion or fame.

People usually exercise these three urges as follows:

(1) distracting themselves from thinking about the inevitable reality of physical death with the possibility of no afterlife while

(2) maximizing their physical impact on the world by trying to keep their bodies alive as long as possible while spreading their genes into the next generation and chasing status, power and fame, all to ensure that their name and genes survive their physical expiration, and finally

(3) engaging in some sort of religious belief to hedge their bets just in case and to give themselves hope that spiritual immortality actually is achievable or becoming so famous that your name and reputation continue to live even after you’re long gone from the physical plane.

An excess of one urge in a person or society though can lead to a deficit of the other urges, or vice versa. For example, secular and athiestic people and societies have little to no faith in the existence of immortality through an afterlife or reincarnation, so instead they channel all their energy into the urge to distract themselves from death with no afterlife, often through excessive hedonism, substance abuse or chasing as much power, status, sex and fame as they can during their lifetimes. Since religion is a lie and this physical life is all they have, they need to maximize it. At the other end of the spectrum, the extremely religious are so confident of the existence of an afterlife that they don’t feel the same need to engage in hedonism, substance abuse and materialism as others. For these people, there is no possibility of no afterlife, so these distractions are unnecessary.

Look at suicide bombers to see this dynamic taken to even scarier extremes. Suicide bombers have so satisfied the immortality drive through religion and are so sure that a spiritual afterlife is achievable that they are able to totally disregard the first urge of physical self-preservation and largely disregard the second urge of status-seeking.

To Be Continued…

For all the flak Paris Hilton gets, deserved and undeserved, I give her credit for one thing; she has basically created a new type of celebrity: the tabloid star. The tabloid star is not the old model of stardom where someone appears in the tabloids because of movie, music, television or fashion stardom. This type of celebrity is always primarily considered an actor, musician or fashion designer. They just happen to appear in the papers a lot. No, the tabloid star is a new model where someone gets work in movies, television or fashion because they appeared regularly in tabloids first. Instead of being entertainers and fashionistas that end up as constant tabloid stories, they start off as constant tabloid stories and parlay that exposure into entertainment and fashion work. And the patron saint of this new category of stardom is Paris Hilton. For better or worse, she’s basically changed the nature of the fame game more than anyone else in recent history.

Sure there were people who got well-known off reality shows in the past, like in the early seasons of The Real World, but they would never become regular tabloid fodder. They just earned more appearances on Real World followup shows. After Paris Hilton hit the scene though, people realized that it was possible to get constant tabloid exposure and greatly increase public awareness of yourself without having any notable accomplishments beforehand. And then the floodgates opened up as tons of wannabes and used-to-bes went out of their way to appear and be photographed at any major event where paparazzi would be and aspiring socialites even started hiring publicists.

The reason for this is simple: there are simply too many outlets out there devoted to celebrities. We have a ton of channels now thanks to cable. Hundreds of channels. A lot of those channels have a celebrity gossip show. One channel, E!, is solely devoted to celebrities. Two if you count the current incarnation of VH1. Then there’s the rise of celebrity gossip magazines. Then there’s the blogosphere, where celebrity blogs are proliferating and are among the most popular blogs. Anyone with a celeb obsession, a PC and too much time on their hands can create a popular celeb blog with an immediate following. So when you have this many outlets to cover celebrities, how do you fill up all that space with content? By generating celebrities! This is why we have the rise of the B-lister and C-lister and why the fame and accomplishment threshold for appearing in tabloids has been lowered so drastically: there simply aren’t enough A-list notable celebrities to fill up all those shows, magazines and blogs. You need to start scraping the bottom and getting people from The Bachelor. Paris Hilton took advantage of this media climate and staked her claim to fame.

These seem to be the main routes to becoming a tabloid star:

1. Be born obscenely rich or be related to a famous icon. (Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie)
2. Be a nobody who gained notoriety on a “storyline” reality show (Omarosa or anyone from The Hills or Laguna Beach)
3. Be a relatively new entertainer trying to catapult their fledgling entertainment career into mainstream success (Lindsey Lohan, Jessica Simpson, anyone from Making the Band)
4. Be a formerly huge entertainer trying to resuscitate a flagging career (Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, anyone who has appeared on Dancing with the Stars)
5. Any combination of the above four categories (Brooke Hogan)

The major drawback to being a tabloid star though is that once you become one, it’s extremely hard to be taken seriously as anything else. This is the big folly of anyone who tries to become a successful entertainer through appearing on storyline reality shows and continual tabloid appearances. They become pigeonholed as tabloid stars and end up stuck going back and forth between tabloid appearances and reality shows and never get a foothold into the A-list arena. Sure they may get occasional cameo appearances on TV shows or a small role in a cheesy movie, but they’re always that reality or tabloid person that just happens to be in a TV show or movie. Paris Hilton will never be truly considered an actress or a pop star, no matter how many movies and songs does; it will always be about the novelty of a tabloid star doing a movie or a song. Lauren Conrad will never really be taken seriously as a fashionista either. Winners of America’s Next Top Model will never actually be taken seriously by anyone in the modeling industry except for the judges. Winners often complained that after the show, when they got sent on castings, people kept telling them “Oh, you’re that reality girl” rather than treating them as a bona fide fashion model.

The winners of American Idol get bona fide success as artists, but keep in mind that (1) American Idol isn’t a storyline reality show and (2) they don’t usually go out of their way to appear on the tabloids, Page 6 or the blogosphere every minute of every day after winning. If anything, I have a feeling that their handlers try to keep them from getting overexposed after they win and instead rush them to the studios to start recording.

Jessica Simpson, after the success of her reality show Newlyweds, tried to keep the fame game going by becoming daily tabloid fodder like Paris Hilton. She appeared everywhere she could. As her exposure grew and she became a household name, she really seemed to believe that she was on the path to music stardom. Yet people still don’t flock to buy her albums. Instead they keep flocking to the magazine stands to read her latest personal exploits. Tabloid stardom, instead of becoming a means to an end, has just become an end.

Similarly Lindsey Lohan and her publicists, seeking to help her make the jump from niche Disney teen queen to household name A-list movie actress launched a tabloid barrage. She appeared on every red carpet, hot nightclub, awards show and celebrity event…basically any place where paparazzi were guaranteed to be. She did outrageous things to guarantee she’d receive salacious reports in the tabloid press. And as far as increasing her fame, it’s totally worked. But how long will it take you to name the last three movies she was in? And did you see them? Now try to name her last three tabloid scandals. I’m sure that’s much easier. Her tabloid career ended up overshadowing her legitimate career. Sometimes people even forget she’s supposed to be an actress.

Brooke Hogan is another good example. It’s easier to remember her last tabloid buzz (her dad applying suntan lotion to her) than it is to remember the name of any of her singles. If she wants to get legitimate pop success, she’s going about it the wrong way. She’s more likely to just end up with a string of VH-1 reality shows and a bullshit fashion line for tweens. Britney Spears and Whitney Houston crossed the threshold from legitimate pop stars to tabloid stars and are now trapped in that role. Brintey can sell papers much easier than she can sell albums now, as opposed to Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, who don’t generate as much nonstop tabloid fodder and therefore can still be primarily known for legitimate pop careers. The acting career limbo of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes right now shows you how much their media barrage a few years ago helped their careers. Katie Holmes ended up with tabloid stardom instead of movie stardom while Tom Cruise’s box office pull has plummeted. Amy Winehouse is currently a music industry darling, but if she keeps up the tabloid exploits I’m sure her music career will eventually suffer and be replaced by tabloid stardom.

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are two actors who endangered their blockbuster acting careers by courting the tabloids too much. If you notice, they’ve both seriously scaled back their publicity hounding considerably and have done their best to get their past tabloid notoriety to die down. Both their careers are still suffering from that tabloid period.

What’s the human nature lesson here? Repeating someone else’s actions will earn you the same results and reputation as that person. People thought they could take the publicity route of a Paris Hilton by acting like airheads, seeking out and posing for every paparazzi in site like an obvious publicity whore and constantly generate salacious fodder for tabloids by appearing drunk in public, partying, drinking, drugging and making sex tapes, yet somehow avoid the loss of respect and the bad reputation that comes along with it. People do this all the time in their everyday lives. They adopt the questionable behavior of others because they want the benefits that come with that behavior, but for some reason they are surprised when they also get the same negative side-effects that come with that behavior. Similarly, in the case of rising stars, washed-up celebrities and nobodies trying to duplicate Paris Hilton’s lifestyle and publicity whoring, they got the positives (increased buzz), but also got the negatives that come with it (worse reputation and the inability to be appreciated for anything but appearing in tabloids and reality shows).

In your life, whenever you see a person benefitting from a certain behavior and you want to model that behavior and receive the same benefits, make sure you also understand all the negatives that person receives from that certain behavior because you’re sure to receive those too. Too many of us suffer from what’s calld optimistic bias: we perceive ourselves to be invulnerable and unique and therefore immune to the same risks as others. Surveys consistently show that people always believe they can chain smoke but be less likely than the average chain smoker to receive cancer, that they can try highly addictive drugs but be less likely than the average drug user to get addicted, that they can drink and drive regularly but be less likely to get into an accident than the average drunk driver, that they can engage in high-risk sex behavior but somehow be less likely than others to get pregnant or get VD, that their marriage is immune to the possibility of divorce, even after hearing sobering divorce statistics…the list goes on and on and on.

Optimistic bias is why there will always be another Eliot Spitzer scandal with politicians, even after tons of earlier politicians have been taken down by sex scandals. Or why people will still engage in pyramid scheme behaviors despite all the evidence that they are scams that bankrupt the average participant. Or why rock stars will do the fast life of drugs, sex and booze that is the foundation of every Behind the Music special yet still think they’re immune to the eventual downward spiral and rehab stint that happened to everyone else. Or why a woman thinks she has that “magic pussy” that will allow her to be the exception when she marries a guy who has cheated on and left every woman he’s been with before her. Or why women date pro athletes and expect to be the only athlete wife whose husband remains faithful and avoids groupies. These are people who all repeat the behavior of their predecessors to get the same benefits, yet believe they’ll be immune to the same negative effects.

Always remember that you’re not as special as you think you are.

Related Recommended Reading:

One of my favorite books of all time for gaining insight on human nature is the The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley. It’s got some great insightful quotes, and I’ve decided to phone one in take this time to share some of them. What follows are Malcolm’s views on various issues.

On getting what you want:

I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked my why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.?

On competitive strategy:

Mr. Gohannas was close cronies with some other men who, some Saturdays, would take me and Big Boy with them hunting rabbits. I had my father’s .22 caliber rifle; my mother had said it was all right for me to take it with me. The old men had a set rabbit-hunting strategy that they had always used. Usually when a dog jumps a rabbit, and the rabbit gets away, that rabbit will always somehow instinctively run in a circle and return sooner or later past the very spot where he originally was jumped. Well, the old men would just sit and wait in hiding somewhere for the rabbit to come back, then get their shots at him. I got to thinking about it, and finally I thought of a plan. I would separate from them and Big Boy and I would go to a point where I figured that the rabbit, returning, would have to pass me first.

It worked like magic. I began to get three and four rabbits before they got one. The astonishing thing was that none of the old men ever figured out why. They outdid themselves exclaiming what a sure shot I was. I was about twelve, then. All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life, that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business, you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

On Women:

In Harlem, years later, a friend of mine called Sammy the Pimp taught me something I wish I had know then to look for in Laura’s face. It was what Sammy declared was his infallible clue for determining the “unconscious, true personality” of women. Considering all the women he had picked out of crowds and turned into prostitutes, Sammy qualified as an expert. Anyway, he swore that if a woman, any woman, really gets carried away while dancing, what she truly is at least potentially will surface and show on her face.

On Your Woman’s Exes:

Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.

On Wives And Prostitutes:

Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early [client rush to the brothel]. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their man so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.
The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don?t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a man?s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That?s why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men…?

I mean, I’d had so much experience. I had talked to too many prostitutes and mistresses. They knew more about a whole lot of husbands than the wives of those husbands did. The wives always filled their husband’s ears so full of wife complaints that it wasn?t the wives, it was the prostitutes and mistresses who heard the husbands? innermost problems and secrets. They thought of him, and comforted him, and that included listening to him, and so he would tell them everything.

On Pimps vs. Husbands:

Most men, the prostitutes felt, were too easy to push around. Every day these prostitutes heard their customers complaining that they never heard anything but griping from women who were being taken care of and given everything. The prostitutes said that most men needed to know what the pimps knew. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.?

On Black Men And White Women:

From time to time, Sophia [his white girlfriend] would come over to see me from Boston. Even among Harlem Negroes, her looks gave me status. They were just like the Negroes everywhere else. That was why the white prostitutes made so much money. It didn’t make any difference if you were in Lansing, Boston, or New York, what the white racist said, and still says, was right in those days! All you had to do was put a white girl anywhere close to the average black man, and he would respond. The black woman also made the white man’s eyes light up but he was slick enough to hide it.

On Numbers Runners:

West Indian Archie had finished time in Sing Sing not long before I came to Harlem. But my boss’ wife had hired him not just because she knew him from the old days. West Indian Archie had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never wrote down your number; even in the case of combination plays, he would just nod. He was able to file all the numbers in his head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting slips.

I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black.

On Jews vs. Blacks:

‘Red, I’m a Jew and you’re black,’ [Hymie] would say. ‘These Gentiles don’t like either one of us. If the Jew wasn’t smarter than the Gentile, he’d get treated worse than your people.’

On “Brand Chumps” (vodka anyone?):

‘Another fellow and I would drive out to Long Island where a big bootleg whisky outfit operated. We’d take with us cartons of empty bonded whisky bottles that were saved illegally by bars we supplied. We would buy five-gallon containers of bootleg, funnel it into the bottles, then deliver, according to Hymie’s instructions, this or that many crates back to the bars.

Many people claiming they drank only such-and-such a brand couldn?t tell their only brand apart from pure week-old Long Island bootleg. Most ordinary whisky drinkers are ‘brand’ chumps like this.

More on Women:

I never in my life have seen a black man that loved white women as sincerely as Shorty did. Since I had known him, he had several. He had never been able to keep a white woman any length of time, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any women, white or black, seems to get bored with that.

On Mastery:

In every organization, someone must be the boss. If it?s even just one person, you?ve got to be the boss of yourself.

On Prison:

Any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars, caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t. I’ve talked with numerous former convicts. It has been very interesting to me to find that all of our minds have blotted away many details of years in prison. But in every case, he will tell you that he can?t forget those bars.

On Sin and Redemption:

I have since learned, helping me to understand what then began to happen within me, that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus would not help were the Pharisees; they didn’t feel they needed any help.

The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth.

On Self-doubt:

[Elijah Muhammed] wrote, ‘If you once believed in the truth, and now you are beginning to doubt the truth, you didn’t believe the truth in the first place. What could make you doubt the truth other than your own weak self?

On Persuasion:

One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammed put a clean glass of water beside it. ‘You want to know how to spread my teachings?’ he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. ‘Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,’ he said, ‘just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.’

On the Importance of Dependability:

I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.

On White Liberals:

The Deep South white press generally blacked me out. But they front-paged what I felt about Northern white and black Freedom Riders going South to ‘demonstrate.’ I called it ‘ridiculous’; their own Northern ghettoes, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy. I said that ultra-liberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi. If the Northern Freedom Riders wanted more to do, they could work on the roots of such ghetto evils as the little children out in the streets at midnight, with apartment keys on strings around their necks to let themselves in, and their mothers and fathers drunk, drug addicts, thieves, prostitutes. Or the Northern Freedom Riders could light some fires under the Northern city halls, unions, and major industries to give more jobs to Negroes to remove so many of them from the relief and welfare rolls, which created laziness, and which deteriorated the ghettoes into steadily worse places for humans to live. It was all, it is all, the absolute truth; but what did I want to say it for? Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal.
Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends much time cultivating! The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.

On Muslim Violence:

I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that?s what Allah wanted him to do.

On Northern Blacks vs. Southern Blacks:

There is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they have seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabys sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom?long before it happened in the North.

On Punctuality:

I have less patience with someone who doesn’t wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious. In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

On Fear of Failure:

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

On Regrets About Separatist Views:

Well, I’ve come to regret that incident [where he rebuked the offers of a white college girl to assist the Negro cause, a scene shown in Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie]. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then – like all Muslims – I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me twelve years

Also, concerning the white girl he insulted:

I regret that I told her she could do ‘nothing.’ I wish now that I knew her name, or where I could telephone her, and tell her what I tell white people now when they present themselves as being sincere, and ask me, one way or another, the same thing that she asked.

To learn more about the incident with the little blonde co-ed, click here.

Recommended Reading:

This one is long, but if I may toot my own horn, it’s so damn good and important that I suggest you take the time and read it all.

This is the final part of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here. And here’s part 2.

This series has been all about compliance, or getting people to do the shit you want. Earlier I discussed the first two parts of the three part formula: believable authority and Earn-Reward Method. Now for the third and most powerful element: intermittent rewards. Intermittent reward strategy is just some crazy ass shit. It’s probably the second most powerful motivator out there next to avoidance of death. And out of the three elements of compliance, it’s also the most manipulative.

You see, the first two steps in gaining compliance, which were believable authority and Earn-Reward method, can get great results on their own. But when you add in intermittent rewards, the compliance gets taken to higher, more extreme levels. It can escalate the compliance to obsessive, even self-destructive levels.

Continuing from this post.

The 3 steps to building compliance, as mentioned before, are:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

To get compliance, you first need to establish cred, which is short for credibility, or more specifically, credible authority.  There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to just have an authoritative title and position. Owner. President. CEO. Of course that’s not always enough. If you have an authoritative position and title but are known as a pushover, for example, you still lack credible authority because no one believes you will follow through on your threats. It’s the equivalent of pulling out a gun on the streets when everyone knows you’re too much of a pussy to actually use it. People end up testing and challenging you even worse than if you didn’t have the gun at all.

You see this all the time in toxic organizations that have weak management. The subordinates will test and challenge the weak management constantly and you’ll end up with the inmates running the asylum. On the flip side, if you lack any official status or authoritative title yet exude a ton of confidence and charisma, you can still convey credible authority just by the way you carry yourself. Even a violent criminal can exude credible authority just by showing a reckless disregard for rules and societal norms and displaying a willingness to fight or kill you. (This type of credibility is called street cred).  Credible authority boils down to displaying confidence, having the ability to punish and demonstrating a willingness to follow through on said punishment. Punishment can range from anything from simple social snubbing to employment termination to outright violence.

Once you have established some cred, then you have to move on to step 2, which is the Earn-Reward method. I got the term from Tariq Nasheed’s The Mack Within book. What it basically boils down to is that you make someone earn ever reward before you give it to them. The opposite would be Reward-Earn, where you reward someone first in hopes that they’ll work to earn the reward afterwards.

It seems like a ridiculously common sense principle, and we all practice it to a degree, but thanks to compartmentalized thinking we often forget to transfer this principle into every area of our lives and end up getting frustrated. For example, with a child most of us know not to reward the child first and hope for good behavior later because what you end up with is a spoiled, uncooperative child with a sense of entitlement who views such rewards as a birthright. They don’t even feel they need to earn the reward anymore. Same with training dogs, if you reward the dog with a ton of treats first and then try to get it to do tricks and behave afterwards, it’s not going to work. With both children and dogs, good parents and trainers practice Earn-Reward.

Yet many of the same people who grasp this principle when applied to kids and animals won’t transfer this principle elsewhere. For example a guy will buy a girl a drink when they first meet and wonder why he’s not getting the instant cooperation he expected. Or a woman will give a guy sex way too soon and wonder why she’s not getting wined and dined and romanced afterward in the way she expected. Some hippie teacher will give ever kid in class a gold star and give them all an A to boost their self-esteem, then wonder why they aren’t motivated to excel.

A good illustration of Earn-Reward is federal entitlements. Regardless of how you feel about entitlements in general, most people, both liberal and conservative, can at least agree that older entitlements from the New Deal era like the G.I. Bill, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance have been more successful than Lydon Johnson’s Great Society welfare entitlements that came about in the ’60s. What was the difference between the two sets of entitlements? The first set were in accordance with the Earn-Reward method. G.I. Bill: you serve in the army first (earn) and you get money for school later (reward). Social Security: you work at a job for years and pay a small part of your salary (earn) and you get retirement money later (reward). Unemployment insurance: you have a job first and pay a portion of your salary regularly (earn) and you get money during periods of unemployment later (reward). Later benefits were created in accordance with the Reward-Earn method. We’ll give you a welfare check now (reward) and expect you to look for work later (earn). We’ll give you housing for next to nothing now (reward) and expect you to value and improve the property later (earn). And so forth. The problem with Reward-Earn is that it’s in our human nature to both devalue and feel entitled to things that we get without earning, and as a result, we’re less motivated to alter our behavior and try to prove ourselves worthy of said reward. If anything, we start demanding more rewards.

I touched on this principle during pimp week, when I described how a pimp won’t have sex with one of his prostitutes unless she pays him first. It’s a cardinal rule of pimping. If he breaks it, he’s moved into the Reward-Earn method and the whole dynamic will begin to slowly unravel. If you want any type of compliance in any relationship, whether it’s boss/employee, boyfriend/girlfriend, parent/child, donor/beneficiary or just plain friends, you have to demand the correct behavior first and only then can you reward. If you get in the habit of rewarding first and expecting compliance later, you are screwed. In fact, once you set a reward-earn dynamic, it’s almost impossible to reverse the sense of entitlement you’ve created, and your chances of fixing the damage are close to zero. At that point you’re better off just terminating the old relationship and establishing a fresh one under the right dynamic.

Another crucial element to the Earn-Reward method is to punish disrespect. It’s not enough to just reward cooperation, you also have to clearly punish lack of cooperation and disrespect. Otherwise you send a message to the person that such behavior is tolerable. Avoiding negative results is an even more powerful motivator to people than gaining positive rewards, so it’s crucial that you punish bad behavior as well as reward good behavior. Even if the punishment is something small in response to a trivial transgression, you have to do something and not just let it slide. If you get stood up on a date for example, don’t just pick up the phone and act business as usual the next day like nothing happened. Avoid the person for a while, or briefly, but clearly, mention that you didn’t appreciate being stood up, and then move on to another topic. Maybe make the person work a little harder to get you back out again. Or if it was done in an extremely disrespectful or cavalier way, never go out with them again. Just always do something. Never let any form of disrespect go unchecked. It sends a subconscious signal to the transgressor, to obsevers, and most importantly to yourself that it is okay to disrespect you. And that’s a message you do not want to internalize.

Next time is the final component of the compliance recipe, intermittent rewards.

Recommended Reading:

One of the things I like to encourage people to do when analyzing human nature is to avoid compartmentalizing their insights. To compartmentalize an insight means that you have learned a specific insight but are only able to understand and apply it in the original context in which it was taught to you.

For example, let’s take a guy who is good at his career and knows how to advance. He may understand how to knock out job interviews perfectly. He takes care in his presentation. He researches the company thoroughly before approaching it. He anticipates every question he’s likely to hear and has a prepared response. He projects confidence, tries not to seem too eager to please, knows and communicates his value and shows just enough of his fun side to seem enjoyable but not so much as to communicate that he’s a clown. This is a result of specific job interview advice he’s solicited and received. This exact same guy may go to a club or bar that night and try to pick up a woman by doing all the exact opposite behaviors: approaching meekly, showing eagerness by offering to buy things, displaying low value and messing up the humor by joking too hard (thereby becoming an entertainment monkey) or too little (boring).

Why does he do all the right social techniques in one setting, the job interview, yet doesn’t transfer the same social techniques into the other setting, the bar pickup? Because he’s a compartmentalized thinker and need someone to explicitly tell him to use those same social techniques in the new setting. On his own, he can’t pull back, see the bigger picture and notice the general, transferable principles that link seemingly different scenarios. He needs every specific scenario and piece of advice specifically laid out for him. He may be great at memorizing, but he’s horrible as improvising and innovating because his mind is lazy or untrained. He is incapable of great leaps in logic.

You need to be a big picture thinker and not a compartmentalizer. I think that is my great gift, actually. Not the amount that I know, which really isn’t that much, but rather the common threads that I see in seemingly unrelated things and my ability to find unifying principles behind them. I see connections.

Which leads to this post about compliance. I see tons of articles about getting compliance in different areas of one’s life: getting cooperative kids, winning over a mate, motivating employees, etc. Instead of being compartmentalized and focusing on teaching how to get compliance in one specific situation, I’m going to show the basic elements of building compliance that apply to every situation one may encounter.

The ultimate recipe for compliance comes down to just three ingredients:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

I’ll break down each element in the next two parts. Click here to move on to part 2.

Every now and then I come across something that I wish I wrote. This piece from Craiglist’s “Best Of” section is a perfect example. It’s called “Myths and Truths,” and I’ve reproduced it in full below. I’m sure a few people will call it jaded and cynical, and it probably is, but that in no way negates how astute and accurate it is:

Myths and Truths

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Date: 2006-04-18, 11:09PM PDT

Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.

MYTH: Women want love and affection. Women want to be treated well. If you treat a woman well, she’ll treat you well.