The Laws of Human Nature | Robert Greene

This episode of Books for Men features The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. An entertaining, engaging yet well-researched tome about our innate human tendencies, and what to do about them. This is a reread, for sure. Listen for more!

Listen to the episode:

*Subscribe to The Books for Men Newsletter, a monthly round-up of the episodes w/ links, full book and author info, all the best quotes, and newsletter-only book recommendations!

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back, the Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. And so this week we are moving into a non-fiction book, and it's one that I think you're really going to enjoy. It's one that I liked a lot when I read it, and it's a book that I wanted to reread and I've been wanting to reread for a while now. I read it when it first came out back in 2018. It's called The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. And it's a big book. It's probably 600, 700 pages, something of that nature. So it's large, and that's one of the reasons why I haven't reread it yet. But I would say that one of the advantages of this book is that you could read the chapters or the passages in isolation. So even though it's a large book, it's not one that needs to be consumed in order or from start to finish.

(01:04)

And if I only had one book that I had to read over and over and over again, it would probably be this one just because of how impactful and entertaining, and educational it is in understanding who we are as humans. And I can't think of anything that is more important given the fact that we live in an extremely social society and we are social creatures. And so, I think this is a good point for me to pivot into who the author is, right, Robert Greene. So he has a pretty cool backstory. I've listened to him on several podcasts over the years, and basically, he took a long time for him to find his calling. He's had, or he claims to have had 60 jobs or something of that nature, and he stuck with it. And finally, he had a breakthrough in The 48 Laws of Power.

(01:54)

It's another book that I've read. It's another really good book. Some people react negatively to it because of the connotation or the content of it in that it's basically telling people how they could, or strategies on how they could embrace power and power dynamics. And on the surface, I understand that, but I think all great authors, what their objective is, is the truth. And so he doesn't worry about what the implications of it are. It's a matter of finding the truth and depicting that through the lens or the perspective that you have, and this book is very much the same. And so there are other books to The Art of Seduction and Mastery, which is a great book on finding your purpose. This book is formatted in the same way that all those other books are. And I think that there's a very Greene-style format, I would call it.

(02:50)

And that's throughout the book. You will get not just the actual text, but you'll get all these little quotes from all kinds of people and how they apply directly to whatever he's writing about. And I always like this because I thought it was super novel. Nobody else really does it. There are always footnotes. But to have actual quotes in the side note lining of each page, it's very unique. In addition to that, there is another component that makes it very green and there's very little amount of data that is in the actual book. And it more relies on research of past, present, and future and reading biographies and autobiographies and whatever really to learn about how we interact with each other as opposed to being in a lab and taking surveys or reviewing research and reporting back on the data. And in previous Books for Men episodes, I talked a little bit about the different types of nonfiction books.

(03:56)

And I think that on the whole, it's more interesting to read about case studies and stories than it is to read about research and data. With that being said, books try to fuse these together. This book, like all Greene books, are very reliant on stories, and that's very laborious for the author, especially if you're creating a book of this magnitude. And all of his books are of this magnitude. And by magnitude I literally mean size. That means that you're doing a lot of research and you're doing a lot of reading. It's very demanding on the author, and nobody does it quite like Greene does. There are a few people that do this style, most notably Ryan Holiday, who is someone who mentored under Greene, but it's significantly more reduced in its scope and in actual length and passage length and everything. So it's not as big.

(04:53)

And while that might be attractive for a lot of people, I think one of the benefits of Robert Greene is that even though it's big and there's a lot, it's really entertaining and it's really unique. He does a lot of the work for you, and he goes out on a limb and will really give you tips and strategies, and he puts his opinion inside of this style. And it's attractive and it's fun to read because it is showing strength and confidence and backbone as an author to really say, this is what I believe, or this is what you should do based on what I've learned. And you could tell that the research and everything is extremely thorough. Nobody seems to be in my mind more thorough than Robert Greene when it comes to this style of book. Now with that being said, I think it's important to note that this book isn't solely about irrationality, because yes, that is one of the laws, the Law of Irrationality, but that's just one component of our human nature.

(06:04)

And that irrationality relies on human emotion and all that. But it would be very easy for this book to just fall right in line and talk about our irrationality and labor on that. And there are many books that do, but this book goes a lot deeper than just that, it goes a lot deeper into aspects of who we are that might not be flattering. And so the way that the chapters break out is in what Robert Greene calls laws, which makes sense, obviously given the title. And some of those laws are things like the Law of Compulsive Behavior. And this is really just a passage on character and the importance of character and what character actually is. Or as Greene would say in the book, “You must always keep in mind the primary corollary of this law; people never do something just once.” And so then in the chapter or in the section, he'll use a series of stories to depict why this is true or potentially true and get you to potentially see that people's actions are not isolated incidents, but they're part of a compulsive pattern.

(07:16)

And then if you ignore that pattern, it's really your own fault because people will do this, and no pun intended, I guess, over and over and over again. And so, some of the other laws that are in the book, and some of my favorite ones to read about were Desire, which is the Law of Covetousness or the Dark Side, the Law of Repression, or the Law of Role-playing. Now, that was a really, really good one. It kind of ties into group dynamics, which there's a whole other law around the Law of Conformity or fragile ego, which is the Law of Envy. And he goes through all of these laws in a similar fashion, and it's just really entertaining, I guess, and eye-opening in a lot of ways. It makes you reflect on your own life a lot. And I don't know, I just loved it and I really loved this book, and probably more so that it doesn't tackle the same things over and over and over again.

(08:17)

It really hits on what we feel and how we act as humans in a practical manner. And I think that that's probably the best way that I could describe this book. It's very high in practicality, and that is really, really appealing, especially when a lot of books of this nature don't tend to be very practical. They kind of dance around the real issues or the real things that we feel as humans in social society. And a lot of those things, as I've already mentioned, aren't flattering, but they are definitely true because we are imperfect beings who have imperfect lives, who do imperfect things, and who have tons of flaws, and why wouldn't there be patterns to that? And things that happen over and over and over again and are consistent in our human nature. And so I think that this is a good place to end this.

(09:12)

I have a lot more that I could say about this book. I have so many quotes both from Robert Greene and from others who are featured in the book, but we'll have to save those for another time. Maybe I'll include 'me in the newsletter this month. I'm looking at ways of evolving that. But what I do want to do is keep tight on time. And so thank you so much for listening. I appreciate everybody who continues to share this podcast with friends, family members, and people who they think might like it. The power of word of mouth is so important to spreading awareness. And again, the goal of this podcast is to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. And if you want to double down on support for that initiative, then you could do so by rating, reviewing, subscribing, and following on whatever podcast platform you'll listen to this on. And always remember for more information, you could visit BooksforMen.org where you can also sign up for the monthly newsletter, which is just a roundup of all the books and authors that you hear on the podcast, as well as additional book recommendations, quotes, excerpts, links to each episode. And we are continuing to evolve the newsletter issue after issue. So, if you have any interest in it, again, you can subscribe at BooksforMen.org.