“Stop Assuming that Everything You Feel or Think Is Right”—An Interview with Robert Greene
https://quillette.com/2019/01/01/st...ink-is-right-an-interview-with-robert-greene/
Robert Greene is the author of
The 48 Laws of Power and most recently,
The Laws of Human Nature. His books, which are popular with many world leaders, celebrities, professional athletes and hip hop stars like Drake, have sold more than 5 million copies and have been translated into over 30 languages. Robert’s raw, “amoral” look at history and the dynamics of power, seduction, and warfare have always been controversial—indeed, his books are banned in many prisons across the United States. This interview about political correctness, the bloody cost of the denial of human nature, and the inner-work required for rational thought was conducted for
Quillette by Ryan Holiday, his former apprentice, over the phone from Austin, Texas while Robert recovers in Los Angeles from a near-fatal stroke he suffered in August, 2018. The text has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Ryan Holiday: I thought we’d start with this idea of human nature itself. There are certain people who have almost come to believe that there’s no such thing as human nature. Maybe it makes them uncomfortable or they don’t like the idea. Why do you think it’s something that we need to look at with open eyes?
Robert Greene: Well, because looking at reality is always better. The people who don’t believe that human nature is something real, who believe that humans are malleable and that we make our own nature, generally want to believe that we are perfectible by some kind of government or system. It has traditionally been a kind of a communist socialist revolutionary idea. And the idea is that by creating the right kind of system or government, you can alter what corrupted us (which they maintain was done by social injustice, the rise of large civilizations, and the oppression and the accumulation of capital, et cetera.) They believe that if we go back and alter this system, we can return to that kind of pure human being. This is what I wrote about the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong—Mao wanted to recreate human nature. That’s always been the belief and it’s kind of a mix of wishes that humans were really this kind of angelic creature in the beginning and that we can return to that.
And what I’m trying to say is humans can change, we can alter, we could become something superior, but only by really coming to terms with who we are and getting over this myth of the Garden of Eden—of the fallen human being who was once so angelic just 5,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago. But I think the evidence is clear looking at our chimpanzee ancestors and the record of early homo sapiens that we do have aggressive, violent impulses, that we are pretty much irrational by nature, and that the kinds of qualities that we value can only come about through personal work, through conquest, through overcoming our tendencies that are kind of animal-like. And that rather than some government that’s going to perfect us, it’s the work of individuals being conscious and aware of who they are as opposed to being in denial. There’s a quote from Angela Carter that I’ve used in several books: “We want to believe that we’re descended from angels instead of primates.”
RH: You mentioned Mao. The track record of people who have tried to either deny that human nature exists or who have tried to change it by brute force—they’ve left a lot of bodies in their wake. haven’t they?
RG: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.
RH: So, that being said, why do people keep trying? Why is it so hard for us to accept it?
RG: Well, it’s really coming to terms with some harsh realities. We want to believe [certain things and] we have a certain opinion of ourselves that persists to this day. You see it in newspaper articles about us and about how people respond to my book, and to writers like Steven Pinker. Pinker, who’s very well respected, will accumulate a lot of research material and statistics to try to show that we are perfecting ourselves. There is some truth to this idea. He’s not linking it to a return to the Garden of Eden, he’s linking it to this sort of progression that we’re going through and we’re becoming enlightened in technology and science and rationality and getting over religion. So we can debate his research and his statistics and his studies forever, and there will always be people who support it. But the reason people keep returning to it is that it’s extremely seductive. It holds up this sort of idealized mirror of who we are as if it’s not a matter of effort, of coming to terms with our shadow, or coming to terms with our ugly aspects of our nature, but rather through a new government or technological progress and beauties of science that we’ve all just naturally become progressive.
This is a huge part of human nature. Always wanting to take the path of least resistance. We want shortcuts to believe that there’s an easy route to something that we want. Almost like you take a pill or you just sign up to take this course, or you have a communist revolution where it federates. That’s a childlike belief, and I think it’s very dangerous and it leaves the body count, as you say, very high.
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