Saturday Letters
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Oct 11 • 2 min read
Humans’ Suffocated Strength - Saturday Letter #10
Humans’ Suffocated Strength - SL#10 During a lecture on his Predictive History YouTube channel, Professor Jiang Xueqin asked his students: “What makes us happy?” The students replied, intrigued:
But when the students ran out of answers, the professor challenged them: What you will discover about this list is this: you’re thinking about individual happiness. And this is actually unique in human history. If you go back 5,000 years and ask people, "How can you be happy?" they would focus more on collective happiness. In other words, if the community were not happy, you could not be happy. This story can be understood under another interesting lens: Oswald Spengler’s theory of a “civilizational life cycle,” which argues that society, civilization, and culture are like a living organism. They go through a life cycle. They grow, they mature, and they die. Here’s what a civilizational life cycle looks like: In the beginning, you are in a village; then you grow into a town, develop into a city, and expand into a megacity. Obviously, not all civilizations go through this cycle, but the “successful” ones do. And what he argues is that at its peak, a civilization must then die. In a village, life is simple: people work hard, are very close to each other, and have tons of children because they are free labor. But as you mature as a civilization, what happens is you get increased abstraction. You become removed from reality. In a village, you understand everything: the food you eat comes from the seeds you or your neighbor plant. But when you are in a city, you don’t even know where your food comes from (or even what it is). It’s all abstract to you and, as a result, cohesion fades. Unfortunately, in the West, we’ve reached a point of near civilizational collapse, and we are so deprived of cohesion that we live glued to screens, baited by the illusion of it. So we are faced with a question: how can we use our human cooperative strength in an environment that suffocates it? But there is a simple mental model I heard from the investor Mohnish Pabrai. He shared it in a recent episode of The Diary Of A CEO podcast: I always bring up Adam Grant’s book Give and Take.
I don’t know if you’ve seen that. All humans on the planet fall into one of three categories. They are either a giver, a taker, or a matcher.
There are no other categories of humans, just these three.
The matchers are relatively simple to understand. Their mental framework is: if Steven does me a favor, I’m going to try to do something similar for him. One-to-one. They can do the matching in their heads.
The takers, who you don’t want anything to do with, are always trying to scam and screw everyone. They always take and never give. The takers basically go nowhere. And if you have any takers in your life, get rid of them.
Now, the givers are not focused on what comes back to them. They just want to help you; they want to help humanity. And what ends up happening is the universe conspires to help them.
So the givers become the most successful. Everyone is trying to give to them even though they’re not asking for it.
It’s one of the great mental models to have: be a giver. Don’t play math games. Always try to make sure the other guy gets the better end of the deal and just keep going through life that way. That goodwill will compound and take care of itself.
And the key: you’re not doing any mathematics, you’re not calculating “I’ll do this so X happens.” You’re just doing it. End of story.
Don’t wait for a village to form around you. Give, and the village will form. Only then will you truly realize the power of perhaps our greatest strength as human beings: Cohesion. All the best, Hugo Ares, |
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