"I avoid self help books like the plague, they have never appealed to my sensibilities. But I wanted to give Robert Green a try, and I don’t regret it. Instead of giving self help advice as postulates, he presents them as lessons from history, which I loved. His narration style is very engaging, there is some life to it.
This book was really worthwhile.

“Learn to question yourself: Why this anger or resentment? Where does this incessant need for attention come from? Under such scrutiny, your emotions will lose their hold on you. You will begin to think for yourself instead of reacting to what others give you.�

“If you are observing someone you naturally dislike, or who reminds you of someone unpleasant in your past, you will tend to see almost any cue as unfriendly or hostile. You will do the opposite for people you like. In these exercises you must strive to subtract your personal preferences and prejudices about people.�"

"My fav quotes (not a review):
-Page 29 |
"In his conception, the human mind has to worship something, has to have its attention directed to something it values above all else. For most people, it is their ego; for some it is their family, their clan, their god, or their nation. For Pericles it would be nous, the ancient Greek word for “mind� or “intelligence.� Nous is a force that permeates the universe, creating meaning and order. The human mind is naturally attracted to this order; this is the source of our intelligence."
-Page 40 |
"And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Our thoughts almost inevitably revolve around this desire; we simply recoil from entertaining ideas that are unpleasant or painful to us. We imagine we are looking for the truth, or being realistic, when in fact we are holding on to ideas that bring a release from tension and soothe our egos, make us feel superior."
-Page 49 |
"Be aware of demagogues who exploit the group effect and stimulate outbreaks of irrationality. They inevitably resort to certain devices. In a group setting, they begin by warming up the crowd, talking about ideas and values that everyone shares, creating a pleasant feeling of agreement. They rely on vague but loaded words full of emotive quality such as justice or truth or patriotism. They talk of abstract, noble goals rather than the solving of specific problems with concrete action. Demagogues in politics or the media try to stir a continual sense of panic, urgency, and outrage. They must keep the emotional levels high."
-Page 53 |
"In his stories and plays, he found it immensely therapeutic to get inside his characters and make sense of even the worst types. In this way, he could forgive anybody, even his father. His approach in these cases was to imagine that each person, no matter how twisted, has a reason for what they’ve become, a logic that makes sense to them. In their own way, they are striving for fulfillment, but irrationally. By stepping back and imagining their story from the inside, Chekhov demythologized the brutes and aggressors; he cut them down to human size. They no longer elicited hatred but rather pity. You must think more like a writer in approaching the people you deal with, even the worst sorts."
-Page 69 |
"As Abraham Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.�"
-Page 93 |
"I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. . . . I myself become the wounded person. —Walt Whitman"
-Page 97 |
"Erickson instead focused mostly on people’s physical presence as an entrée into their mental life and unconscious. Words are often used as a cover-up, a way to conceal what is really going on. Making his patients completely comfortable, he would detect signs of hidden tension and unmet desires that came through in their face, voice, and posture. As he did this, he explored in greater depth the world of nonverbal communication. His motto was “observe, observe, observe.� For this purpose he kept a notebook, writing down all of his observations. One element that particularly fascinated him was the walking styles of people, perhaps a reflection of his own difficulties in relearning how to use his legs. He would watch people walking in every part of the city. He paid attention to the heaviness of the step—there was the emphatic walk of those who were persistent and full of resolve; the light step"
-Page 101
"He had to see the tension in their necks and register it physically as tension within himself to understand why they were suddenly uncomfortable in his presence. What he discovered is that nonverbal communication cannot be experienced simply through thinking and translating thoughts into words but must be felt physically as one engages with the facial expressions or locked positions of other people. It is a different form of knowledge, one that connects with the animal part of our nature and involves our mirror neurons."
-Page 104
"Developed over so much time, before the invention of language, that is how the human face became so expressive, and gestures so elaborate. This is bred deep within us. We have a continual desire to communicate our feelings and yet at the same time the need to conceal them for proper social functioning. With these counterforces battling inside us, we cannot completely control what we communicate."
-Page 109
"Related to this is what is known as Othello’s error. In the play Othello by Shakespeare, the main character, Othello, assumes that his wife, Desdemona, is guilty of adultery based on her nervous response when questioned about some evidence. In truth Desdemona is innocent, but the aggressive, paranoid nature of Othello and his intimidating questions make her nervous, which he interprets as a sign of guilt. What happens in such cases is that we pick up certain emotional cues from the other person—nervousness, for instance—and we assume they come from a certain source. We rush to the first explanation that fits what we want to see. But the nervousness could have several explanations, could be a temporary reaction to our questioning or the overall circumstances. The error is not in the observing but in the decoding."
-Page 116
"In the course of a conversation there is an equal level of banter, with the pace quickening, indicating increasing rapport."
-Page 123
"Looking at this from the other side, as a character in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot advised, “When you are lying, if you skillfully put in something not quite ordinary, something eccentric, something, you know, that never has happened, or very rarely, it makes the lie sound much more probable.�"
-Page 127
"A relaxed smile, however, and looking people in the eye in these first encounters can do wonders for lowering their natural resistance."
-Page 128
"If dirty work must be done, get others to do it. Your hands are clean. Never overtly play the Machiavellian leader—that only works well on television."
-Page 127
"Use dramatic effects. This mostly involves mastering the art of presence/absence. If you are too present, if people see you too often or can predict exactly what you will do next, they will quickly grow bored with you. You must know how to selectively absent yourself, to regulate how often and when you appear before others, making them want to see more of you, not less. Cloak yourself in some mystery, displaying some subtly contradictory qualities. People don’t need to know everything about you. Learn to withhold information. In general, make your appearances and your behavior less predictable."
-Page 187
"It is advisable to let everyone of your acquaintance—whether man or woman—feel now and then that you could very well dispense with their company. This will consolidate friendship. Nay, with most people there will be no harm in occasionally mixing a grain of disdain with your treatment of them; that will make them value your friendship all the more. . . . But if we really think very highly of a person, we should conceal it from him like a crime. This is not a very gratifying thing to do, but it is right. Why, a dog will not bear being treated too kindly, let alone a man! —Arthur Schopenhauer"
-Page 203
"In nineteenth-century India, under British colonial rule, authorities decided there were too many venomous cobras in the streets of Delhi, making life uncomfortable for the British residents and their families. To solve this they offered a reward for every dead cobra residents would bring in. Soon enterprising locals began to breed cobras in order to make a living from the bounty. The government caught on to this and canceled the program. The breeders, resentful of the rulers and angered by their actions, decided to release their cobras back on the streets, thereby tripling the population from before the government program."
-Page 232
"Instead you must work from within their self-opinion, empathizing with the injustices in their life and the difficulties they have faced. Now, with them feeling validated and mirrored, you have some latitude to make gentle corrections and even apply some reverse psychology (see the section below). Finally, the greatest obstacle you will face in developing these powers comes from a cultural prejudice against the very idea of influence: “Why can’t we all just be honest and transparent with one another, and simply ask for what we want? Why can’t we just let people be who they are and not try to change them? Being strategic is ugly and manipulative."
-Page 249
"One night, to totally disconcert his literal-minded monks, he showed up to a talk completely drunk. He never apologized or repeated it, but the lesson was simple: such rules are merely guidelines, and to demonstrate our freedom we must violate them from time to time."
-Page 264
"Jung illustrates this idea in the following way: Imagine that on a hike people come upon a brook that must be crossed to continue the journey. One person, without much thought, will simply leap across, touching a stone or two, not worried at all about possibly falling. He loves the sheer physical pleasure of the jump and doesn’t care if he fails. Another person is excited as well, but it has less to do with the physical joy than with the mental challenge the brook represents. She will quickly calculate the most effective means of crossing and will gain satisfaction from figuring this out. Another person, of a cautious nature, will take more time to think it through. He takes no pleasure in the crossing; he is irritated by the obstruction, but he wants to continue the hike and he will do his best to safely cross. A fourth will simply turn back. She will see no need for crossing and will rationalize her fears by saying the hike has been long enough."
-Page 264
"No one simply sees or hears the rushing of water over rocks. Our minds do not perceive just what is there. Each person sees and responds to the same brook differently, according to their particular attitude—adventurous, fearful, et cetera."
-Page 275
"Most of us have depressive tendencies and moments. The best way to handle them is to be aware of their necessity—they are our body’s and mind’s way of compelling us to slow down, to lower our energies and withdraw."
-Page 275
"The best way to handle recurrent depression is to channel your energies into work, especially the arts."
-Page 275
"Never try to lift up depressive people by preaching to them about the wonderfulness of life."
-Page 281
"When Chekhov had the epiphany about the ultimate freedom he could create for himself, he had what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience.� These are moments in which you are lifted out of the daily grind and you sense that there is something larger and more sublime in life that you have been missing."
-Page 298
"What we glimpse in these moments is the dark side of their character, what the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the Shadow. The Shadow consists of all the qualities people try to deny about themselves and repress."
-Page 338
"The root of the Latin word for envy, invidia, means “to look through, to probe with the eyes like a dagger.�"
-Page 340
"And gossip is a frequent cover for envy, a convenient way to vent it by sharing malicious rumors and stories. When they talk about others behind their backs, you will see their eyes light up and their voice become animated—it gives them a joy comparable to schadenfreude."
-Page 349
"As Hesiod noted in the eighth century BC, “The potter envies the potter, the craftsman the craftsman, the writer the writer.�"
-Page 356
"But it would be wise to practice instead the opposite, what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Mitfreude—“joying with.� As he wrote, “The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals.�"
-Page 359
"To do so, a film had to begin with a great concept, one that was original, easy to summarize, and dramatic. Executives could hire the most expensive writers, directors, and actors for a film, but if the underlying concept was weak, all the money in the world would be wasted. Films with a strong concept, however, would market themselves. A studio could churn these relatively inexpensive films out in volume, and even if they were only moderate hits, they would ensure a steady flow of income. This thinking went against the grain of the blockbuster mentality of the late 1970s, but who could argue with the undeniable profits Eisner had generated for Paramount? Eisner immortalized this formula in a memo that soon spread around Hollywood and became gospel."
-Page 402
"Caterina had foreseen the maneuver with the children and had calculated that the assassins were weak and indecisive—they should have killed her and her family on that first day, amid the mayhem. Now they would not dare to kill them in cold blood: the assassins knew that the Sforzas, on their way to Forlì, would take terrible revenge on them if they ever did such a deed. And if she surrendered now, she and her children would all be imprisoned, and some poison would find its way into their food. She didn’t care what they thought of her as a mother. She had to keep stalling. To emphasize her resolve, after refusing to surrender, she had the cannons of the castle fire at the Orsi palace."
-Page 410
"It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned in our brain—the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess. —Marcel Proust""

"See if you can spot the flaw with this: The law of aggression is universal. Everyone has aggression. Those who don’t admit to their own aggression are frustrated. The frustrated are angry and therefore become aggressive. Obviously, it’s tautological (the conclusion is within the premise), it’s pseudo-scientific (there is no way to refute the assertion), it sounds so wise and meaningful until one considers it says nothing of substance and there is no way to refute such nonsense unless one removes oneself from the epistemological closure inherent within the tacit paradigm. Those italicized sentences sum up one of the ‘real human laws of nature� as presented in this book. This book as a whole reads as if it was written in 1973 at the full swing of the Jungian/Freudian psychological mumbo jumbo meaningless way of describing the world. I had thought we were out of that false paradigmatic way of wrongheaded thinking; the obvious success of this book and the high ratings most people give this book show me that I was wrong.

Archetypes are a dangerous thing. This author loves simplifying the complex and making them part of his narrative as if a universal type should be obvious and as if archetypes are real. All of his vignettes would follow the same simplistic pattern and then he would say ‘let’s interpret� what we heard. Almost all of the stories were ‘interpreted� (that’s his word, btw) in such a way that the person’s father was too domineering, or too lenient, or the mother was smothering or distant, or that their childhood was with too many hardships or not enough and that explains why they were the way they were as illustrated by his vignettes. That kind of thinking lead to autism being blamed on ‘refrigerator moms� in the 60s and 70s, moms who were told to blame themselves for something they should never have been blamed for at all. He would take a complex person, say Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Coco Channel or Mao Zedong, and summarize that person’s live to illustrate a neurosis of some kind such as envy, pride, anger, or narcissism, or an imaginary power that we don’t possess and interpret that in terms of his false narrative and make them archetypal to a greater whole, and then say that each of us have that characteristic within us but usually not to such an extreme degree as laid out in the vignette and for which we all deny and need to accept in order to solve the problem that we all have thus making the denial itself worthy of a solution too.

I mentioned autism above because I wanted to illustrate how I saw the first half of this book. The author was writing a handbook for neurologically typical people (i.e., people w/o aspergers, w/o autism), the masses of people who can be characterized as having an unhealthy preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and an obsession with conformity at least that’s how a neurologically diverse person sees the behavior of neuro-typicals. Or in other words the author was writing a handbook for conformists who always play mind games while interacting with other conformists and tries to use non-verbal cues to manipulate and mind read another person and the author was rationalizing that kind of behavior and asserting that it was the more proper way to function in the world while never realizing just because most people already behave in that typical fashion doesn’t necessarily mean it is the correct way to behave. The author had a section on ‘mirror neurons� and alluded to ‘theory of mind� in one of his many self help sections, and was really advocating for a person to learn mind reading, use their intuition and fake sincerity when it would serve them. For example, instead of letting people be ‘envious�, one should not necessarily tell the truth about their good fortune; the author recommend the person lie in order to avoid jealousy from others. Don’t get me started on how he wanted people to flatter those around them as if they were dealing with King Louis XVI, and he suggested one should do it in such a way that it was not alienating to the King or threatening to fellow flattering courtiers. Flattery is ‘thought without content�, and as Immanuel Kant said ‘thought without content is empty�, and I tend to agree with that, and I would have a hard time with recommending empty gestures for their own sake as this self help book explicitly advocates.

This book is not void of worth, but even when he was onto something, he would lose me with nonsense such as ‘the Jazz music captured the spirit of the 1920s and the young people who returned from the Great War were participating in the zeitgeist of the times and needed to tap into that�. The author was correctly getting at we are thrown into a world not of our own making and the culture that surrounds us contributes to who we become and that our culture, way of thinking, history we come from and the hopes we hold for the future we get from our caring determines how we experience the world. But, this author muddled his own points with Jungian spiritual archetypes leading to silliness bordering on incoherence by invoking a Jungian spirit and a collective consciousness that is as unreal as the .

The author wants us to reclaim pride back in to ourselves. Pride is a one of the seven deadly sins and I’ll note that Dante made it foundational to all the other deadly sins within purgatory. The author wants us to take credit and be arrogant when time, chance, and circumstances favor us and luck breaks our way (in contradiction to his advice on envy, btw). Pride can lead to exclusive patriotism that morphs into tribalism that excludes others from our empathic zone when we see the world principally and prideful from our own vantage point and through our own priors. Oddly, I seemed to remember that the author was warning against an over reliance on our own vantage point and warning the reader correctly that we often over-estimate our own self nature. But, whatever, if one feels pride is a good thing, one should just go ahead and indulge; it’s your epistemic bubble that you’ll be trapped in.

One last criticism on something else the author said. He thinks that meaning is apparent in this world beyond ourselves and that there is a purpose and a meaning not from ourselves but outside of ourselves. Oddly, the author had a lot of good quotes from Nietzsche scattered throughout this book, but I don’t think he understood Nietzsche on nihilism. To cut to the quick, Nietzsche would really say that our meaning must be discovered by ourselves and for us as individuals and that an outsourced meaning beyond ourselves is no meaning at all. Hence ‘the death of God� or the death of outsourcing our meaning is the only way for us to overcome the angst of nihilism and lead a potentially meaningful life here on earth.

Oops, one more last criticism, as I reading this book I kept on thinking that at least this author was not going full on Ernst Becker ‘The Denial of Death� on me. I should have waited until the end of the book before I thought that, because by Jiminy he did. Note that book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and that’s why I said this book reminded me of 1973. This author (as well as Becker) thinks that there is a death drive and in order for us to lead a full authentic life we need to always be conscious of our own immortality. This author illustrated his point by sketching out a biographical vignette of Flannery O’Connor and then interpreting her life into his archetypal narrative ‘proving� his law of human nature and the necessity for all of us to be aware of our own impending doom.

Double plus oops, my final-final criticism and I mean it this time: His discussion on personality and character was deceptively misleading, and his conscious and unconscious discussions just lead him into more of his tautological never-never land where he’d put his ‘human nature� within an inaccessible spot while suggesting we all have something that needs fixing but aren’t aware of it so therefore we are in a denial of it therefore proving it needs to be fixed. The author will confound personality and character, and Ideals and Values in unhelpful ways and put them through a conscious unconscious mumbo jumbo loop and thinks he’s giving great insights while actually giving the reader misdirection. I suffered living through the 1970s already with this kind of existential psychoanalytical Jungian/Freudian mumbo jumbo world view and I really don’t feel the need to go back to those substance free days in order to explain human nature and read a useless self help book in the process.

In general, I seldom like self help books. Not only is this book at its core a self help book it also enters into the realm of pseudo-science (non-falsifiable hypothesis) for explaining the world, advocates relying on one’s feelings, intuition and one’s ability for ‘theory of mind� or what I prefer to say ‘mind reading� instead of one’s reason or logic; the book thinks faking one’s sincerity is required for success (‘sincerity is the easiest thing in the world to fake� � Oscar Wilde); deals with Jungian Archetypes as if they were real things and always saw the world in terms of false dichotomies interpreted within a blame the childhood for ones current set of imaginary problems. I could go on, but why bother. This book would have won accolades if he wrote it in 1973, but he didn’t. For those who learned things from this book, more power to you. Get your meaning and purpose any way you can."