The Laws of the Universe
How do you know what you ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ do? It would make sense to start with ‘The Laws of the Universe.’ No, I’m not talking about laws like ‘the law of divide oneness,’ or ‘the law of attraction.’ I’m talking about physical (Newton’s laws) and scientific laws that mustn’t be ignored, otherwise you could expect to die all but immediately. These are things like gravity, speed, size, force and oxygen, just to name a few. And since failing to adhere to them would end your life, you have no choice but to respect them. Here are some of the obvious ones for humans (and most mammals);
-
- You can’t jump off a tall building without wings. (You might get away with it as a cat, but not as a human, dog, or bear)
- You can’t live entirely underwater because you have to breath oxygen.
- You can’t win a fight with a hungry tiger unless you have some kind of a weapon. (Why did God create a planet where a 600lb animal with huge teeth and razor sharp claws can also run faster than most animals who are smaller and don’t possess such weaponary? Who knows? But we have to respect it).
- You’re fucked if; 1) you’re standing on a beach that is about to be hit by a huge tsunami, 2) you’re sitting on your back porch drinking a beer, and your house is one minute from being struck by a giant mediorite, 3) another country drops a nuke on you. (And by the way, it doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, or how many kind and noble things you’ve done in your life. You’re still fucked.)
- You have to get out of the way if a bus, truck or rhinoceros is coming full speed right at you.
Of course these are all just common sense, but since turning a blind eye to them would be deadly, they have to take precident over any rules or laws that could be dictated by society, or deemed morally ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ If you fall out of a helicopter, right into the middle of an erupting volcano, it’s not going to matter whether or not you’ve got your corona mask on, or got vaccinated for the sixth time.
Okay. So all of those are crystal clear, because they all have to do with physical pain that even a 4-year old would be a fool to ignore. But what if they aren’t so plain to see?
The Laws of Human Nature
Although they’re still miles ahead of societal rules and laws that are governed by most modern civilizations, the laws of human nature are light years behind the laws of the universe, because it’s possible to get away with breaking them.
Unlike the laws above that apply to most animals, these are the ones that are more unique to humans, and those who make a habit of refusing to abide by them typically do not fair well over the long haul.
In Robert Greene’s famous book, The Laws of Human Nature, he writes about many of the strategies people often employ in the struggle for power, status, resources, and the seduction of romantic partners. Many human traits, such as envy and narcissism, are not so pretty, and yet they’re common to nearly all of us.
Even without any of the laws that are enforced by our local police or government, it would make sense that humans would be able to co-exist simply by relying on something called empathy. This is what allows one to consider, ‘How would I feel if that guy did this to me?’ Or, on an even larger scale, ‘If everyone in the world did what I’m about to do right now, would it be okay?’
Here are a few examples of some basic ones that most people should understand;
-
- If I steal some kid’s bike, he’s going to be pissed. He’s not just coming to take his bike back if he finds out. He’s probably going to want to steal something of mine, and might even throw a rock through my window.
- If I kill another man’s dog, I should expect him to kill my dog out of revenge.
- If I sleep with another man’s wife, and he’s highly aggressive with little self-control, it’s reasonable to expect him to kill me or my new lover, or both of us.
- If I screw someone over in an exchange of goods and services, I should expect them to rob me in the future, or do something out of revenge to take back what they feel is theirs. Or, maybe kill me.
- If I throw trash on the ground, or let my dog poo in the elevator of my apartment building – and everyone else did that, too – the entire world be a landfill that nobody wants to live in.
Most of these seem sensible, but my suspicion is that some of them are even more likely to happen today than they were 5000 years ago, before there were any kind of formal rules to follow when it came to regulating human behavior.
Consider this; I could steal a man’s car, sleep with his wife, burn his house down, and kidnap his son, but if he killed me, he would do more time than I would for doing all four of those things combined. Centuries ago, if someone had the audacity to do all of that to you, I’m sure it would have been perfectly acceptable to kill them. In fact, homicide was probably a resonable solution to much smaller acts of malfeasance.
“Hey. Why did Joe kill Mike?” someone might ask. “Well, first Mike got him fired from his job. Then he told Joe’s wife he was cheating on her, eventhough he wasn’t. And last I heard, Joe saw his wife getting onto the back of Mike’s motorcycle to go somewhere. So I guess he just shot him when they got back.”
Does Mike deserve to die at the end of this story? It depends who you are. Aparantly he does to Joe. To Mike’s mom, probably not. Technically, he didn’t do anything ‘illegal,’ and yet by putting yourself in Joe’s shoes, you can easily imagine how overtaken by anger and jealousy he would become.
As civilizations formed and higher bodies of power were able to establish laws to govern the actions and behavior of their people, why do you think ‘no murder’ was one of the steadfast rules they came up with? The same reason EVERY law probably gets enacted; there is always some asshole that ruins it for everyone else.
“Why did Joe kill Mike?” again one might ask. “I guess Mike’s son was chipping golf balls in their front yard, and one bounced across the street and dented Joe’s car.” He killed him for THAT?
I’d hazard a guess that 7 or 8 out of 10 people who were killed did something REALLY bad, but then, every so often, a guy killed a lady on the bus just because he didn’t like the sound of her chewing her gum (this has actually crossed my mind, too). Did that guy really just kill that lady for chewing her gum? And voila. Next thing you know, society has a new rule.
Can we live in a world where you get shot for stealing somebody’s seat on the subway, or accidentally denting your neighbors car? No. But every new law that gets put into place comes with a few hiccups, and not even ‘no murder’ is immune. Now when my brother and I are chipping balls in the front yard and he says to me, “Careful not to hit any across the street, Nick. You don’t want to hit Joe’s car,” I can say, “What’s he going to do? Kill me?”
Now all of a sudden, I can start to take advantage of societal rules and ignore the laws of human nature, if I chose to do so, because I know that – at least to some extend – I’m going to get away with it.
-
- My dog can take a shit on my neighbor’s lawn every morning.
- I can watch youtube videos or play a game on the bus with the volume turned high, or call my friend and talk with my phone on speaker
- When I inadvertently hit a golf ball into the wrong fairway and nearly hit the golfers on an adjacent hole, they think they can step on my ball (or sometimes even take it) to ‘get back at me.’
- If my friends and I are in 5th grade and you’re in 3rd grade, the soccer field is ours when we show up to play on a random Saturday morning. We don’t care if you’re in the middle of a game. We’re bigger than you, so what are you going to do about it?
- Say, that’s a nice bike right there, and looks like somebody forgot to lock it. Finders keepers. Yoink!
- Lastly, millions of women don’t seem to care whether or not a man is married, so long as he 1) proves to be resourceful, and 2) shows interest in them. Married doesn’t mean he’s ‘taken.’ To them, it just means they’re not the only one who likes him. Zero respect is shown to the man’s wife in attempt to poach her husband. This behavior is slightly more digestable when the two women are complete strangers, but they often already know each other – and sometimes quite well.
There are hundreds of things we do – with complete disregard for other people – that we know we can get away with, because society has rules to protect us.
Still, ‘no murder’ has some practicality to it, since not having it would result in too many ‘innocent’ people being killed by the hands of another man, and you probably shouldn’t be strangled for chewing your gum too loudly on the bus.
But what happens when an entire country or culture starts to get carried away, and tries to add a few tweaks or ‘improvements?’
No Punching
Korea has a ‘no punching’ rule for adults. If you punch someone in the face, you get arrested, and automatically sent to jail if someone can prove to police that you’ve punched them. This has people flopping like Lebron James when they get punched, or pathetically taking selfies or videos of their face and leaving tiny drops of blood on their lip until the authorities arrive.
There are several reasons for this rule, and a few of them seem justified. Here they are;
1) Most fights or would be fights occur after hours and are related to drinking, and heavy, late night drinking is common in Korea. 95% of conflicts would have been resolved without having to resort to violence had both parties been unintoxicated.
2) Some Koreans know taekwondo, and thus could potentially be considered a lethal weapon like Jean Claude Van Damme when left to their own defences. (This is true for probably less than 1 out of 10,000 Koreans. Many taekwondo ‘black belts’ received their belts as kids within months of joining a dojo, and sometimes only because their mother complained that other kids in the class have higher belt rankings).
3) If nobody fights, nobody ever has to call the cops, and everyone is happy – in theory.
But what are some of the indirect pitfalls of this one-size-fits-all rule, where you’re just not allowed to punch anyone, no matter what? Well first of all, now I can say just about anything I want, knowing that there will be no immediate repercussions for the words that come out of my mouth. I can call you fat, stupid or ugly, anything I feel like that might hurt your feelings, and there’s nothing you can do about it. What are you going to do? Tell the teacher? Now you’re a crybaby that can’t stand up for himself, plus you’re still all those other things I just said.
This is why, probably from the beginning of time, there has always been an imminent threat of violence when one man decides to talk to another in a derogatory way. It’s what keeps us in check. The consequences of an inappropriate insult might be a few stitches, or at least a bloody nose. When you take that away – with a ‘no punching’ rule (as well-intended as it may be) – you remove an essential part of what it means to be human.
Every time I’ve been punched, I deserve it.
With the exception of sparring in my friend’s basement with boxing gloves on, I’ve punched five people in the face, and been punched in the face a total of four times, by four different people. Every time I was punched it was immediately after saying or doing something I shouldn’t have. Those incidents were all as a kid, but not all of them were just full-blown playground fights. One time I thought it would be funny to knock a bag of popcorn out of my friend’s hands while he was eating, so he just punched me right in the eye. And I said to myself, ‘Yep. That’s what’s supposed to happen when you do that.’
And that was the last punch I’ve been a part of. I was 13 years old. None of those punches resulted in me or anyone else ‘telling the teacher,’ or an authority figure, because we knew the punishment already fit the crime. By being ‘allowed’ to fight, we learned what we could and couldn’t say and do.
The more rules there are, the farther removed we get from human nature, and the less ‘human’ we become.
No more self autonomy
An overabundance of rules – especially when there are some ridiculous ones – remove any and all decision making. When you’re not allowed to use your own descretion, and decide for yourself whether what you’re doing is inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful to yourself or other people, you turn into a dear in headlights. The default setting will always be to play it safe, make the conservative play, and never be willing to take a risk.
But if you’ve ever watched all your friends get on a roller coaster – when you were the only one who chickened out – you know that a fulfilling life doesn’t work that way.
Rules might be suitable for keeping your 4-year old out of harms way, but as we continue to grow and develop our own identities, we have to; a) get used to making decisions, and b) get used to accepting ourselves when we make ‘bad’ ones.
Self autonomy is the capacity to decide for oneself and pursue a course of action in life, often regardless of any specific moral content. One day, we all have to decide things like whether or not to drink or do drugs, go to university, find a job, invest our money, buy a car, get married, or have kids. These are important decisions, but we’re not going to get all of them right – at least not on the first try.
How can we have the confidence to make difficult choices – and also have the fortitude to get back up and dust ourselves off when we make the ‘wrong’ ones – when we weren’t allowed to swim at the beach because the waves were two feet high, or make our own campfire because 12 years ago some guy started a forest fire that burned down a few trees?
I’m not trying to suggest that surfing at the beach or making a campfire are two of the safest things in the world. I’m merely suggesting that we must be given the self automony to DECIDE for ourselves whether or not we can. Good luck choosing a spouse or a house when you weren’t allowed to choose a tree to climb.
How to know if it’s cool?
Put the laws of the universe first. You can’t win an underwater breath holding competition with an octopus, or wrestle a gorilla and get it to tap out by putting it in a headlock. Alright. Those ones are pretty self-explanatory. Now what?
Well, now it starts to get iffy, since many things that are ‘against the law’ are completely fine, while others that are totally legal have the potential to get you killed.
And there is also a third subset of those, in which you could do something that ‘looks’ really bad, but only to those who are programmed to function on lower levels of thinking. For instance, I could be stood at a bus stop eating an apple, and before my bus arrives, I turn and throw my apple core deep into the forest behind me. “Hey! That’s littering!” the lady next to me might say. But she doesn’t see what I see, which is a mother raccoon scavenging amongst the trees for something to feed her young. This seemingly ignorant apple core toss is done out of kindness. It provides nourishment for a family of raccoons, so it could be my one-way ticket to heaven.
Ask yourself;
1) Am I putting myself at risk of being seriously injured?
2) Is what I’m about to do hurtful or harmful to anyone else or the environment, either directly or indirectly? Is someone going to have to clean up after my mess? (The apple core is going be fine, even if the raccoon babies are picky eaters and ask their mother for something else.)
3) Do I REALLY need someone to help me solve this problem, or can I solve it myself? If I catch a 12-year old kid trying to steal my bike, I’m not taking a video of him in the act of doing it to show the police. Hopefully the ‘no punching’ rule won’t have to be broken to prevent my bike from being stolen, but I’m not unecessarily delegating a task I can take care of myself.
4) How would I feel if this person did to me what I’m about to do to them? Think hard about this one. It’s not for the purpose of getting everyone to pretend to be nice to each other. Sometimes, it’s just the opposite. Can I throw a snowball at those two random kids standing in front of that coffee shop? Yes, because if they threw one at me, it would just start a fun and playful snowball fight. Can Roger Clemens throw a snowball at the old lady with the cane walking out of the bank? No, because his 97mph snowball is going to leave a mess he’s not going to want to clean up.
5) How does this behavior make me feel about myself? Admirable actions that are kind or brave tend to make us feel proud of ourselves, whereas lazy, dishonable behavior leaves us feeling guilty and depressed. And this is true even when nobody else is there to see it. YOU still see it. You’re there when you push yourself to run that last mile in the rain, and you’re also there when you skip the gym to go to Dunkin’ Donuts.
6) Finally, my favorite one; if everyone on earth did what I’m doing, would it be alright? Can everyone buy a pack of cigarettes, walk out the door, and tear the wrapper off and toss it on the ground right there in front of the store? Can everyone cut in line at Mcdonald’s to order? Can everyone eat 6000 calories/day, and then get two seats on an airplane (one for free) because they weigh 400 lbs? Can everyone pretend to have a disability to avoid going to work, and get the government to pay for their rent and groceries? (That one might seem like it works when the country has 40 million people. But does it work when the country has 40 people?)
Of course, nobody’s perfect. And we can’t expect to get the best of ourselves all the time. But I’m not a fan of the word ‘moral,’ or the idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ In any given situation, there is a cognitive process and as many as 40 different factors that need to be taken into account when deeming whether or not a behavior is acceptable.
Can you walk across the street when the crosswalk is red? How about when your baby is about to be kidnapped or eaten by a clan of hyenas on the other side? Certainly now it’s okay, right? What about when you’re going to miss the bus on the way to the airport if you don’t cross, and the next one doesn’t come for 45 minutes? Feel free to think of 700 more.
Is it cool, or not? Here’s the answer;
Use your brain.