The 50th Law - 50 Cent [63]
When we are confronted with people or individuals who have different values and belief systems, we feel threatened. Our first move is not to understand them but to demonize them—that shadowy Other. Alternatively, we may choose to look at them through the prism of our own values and assume they share them. We mentally convert the Other into something familiar—“they may come from a completely different culture, but after all, they must want the same things we do.” This is a failure of our minds to move outward and understand, to be sensitive to nuance. Everything must be white or black, clean or unclean.
Understand: the opposite approach is the way to power in this world. It begins with a fundamental fearlessness—you do not feel afraid or affronted by people who have different ways of thinking or acting. You do not feel superior to those on the outside. In fact, you are excited by such diversity. Your first move is to open up your spirit to these differences, to understand what makes the Other tick, to gain a feel for people’s inner lives, how they see the world. In this way, you continually expose yourself to wider and wider circles of people, building connections to these various networks. The source of your power is your sensitivity and closeness to this social environment. You can detect trends and changes in people’s tastes well before anyone else.
In the hood, conditions are more crowded than elsewhere; people with all kinds of different psychologies are constantly in your face. Any power you have depends on your ability to know everything that is going on around you, to be sensitive to changes, aware of the power structures that are imposed from without and within. There is no time or room to escape to some inner dreamland. You have a sense of urgency to stay connected to the environment and the people around you—your life depends on it.
We now live in similar conditions—all kinds of people of divergent cultures and psychologies are thrown together. But because we live in a society of more apparent abundance and ease, we lack that sense of urgency to connect to other people. This is dangerous. In such a melting pot as the modern world, with people’s tastes changing at a faster pace than ever before, our success depends on our ability to move outside ourselves and connect to other social networks. At all costs, you need to continually force yourself outward. You must reach a point where any sense of losing this connection to your environment translates into a feeling of vulnerability and peril.
In the end this primal fear of ours translates into a mental infirmity—the closing of the mind to any ideas that are new and unfamiliar. The fearless types in history learn to develop the opposite: an open spirit, a mind that is constantly learning from experience. Look at the example of the great British primatologist Jane Goodall, whose field research revolutionized our ideas on chimpanzees and primates.
Prior to Goodall’s work, scientists had established certain accepted ideas on how to do research on animals such as chimpanzees. They were mostly to be studied in cages under very controlled circumstances. On occasion, primatologists would research them in the wild; they would come up with various tricks to lure the chimpanzees closer to them, while remaining hidden behind some kind of protective screen. They would conduct experiments by manipulating the animals and noting their responses. The goal was to come up with general truths about chimpanzee behavior. Only by keeping their distance from the animals could the scientists