Understanding human nature

Understanding human behavior is as easy as understanding Yin and Yang, black and white, in and out or Burger King.

Human beings will do anything to gain pleasure and avoid pain.

Theoretically, that would make the Earth a heaven of joy and happiness where pain and suffering would not exist.

Practically, the reality is quite different. The world is a rather harsh place, where pain and misery are a daily fare.

Why is that?

If we all want only positive things in our life how come there are so many negative things happening?

Who are the assholes turning this wonderful world upside-down?

Well, to put it succinctly; we are.

How do you react in front of adversity?

How do you react when you are bullied, abused and victimized?

When under attack we have two basic way of responding; flight or fight.

We run away from our attacker or from our problems, we cower and collapse or we hit back, we respond to the violence with more violence.

The nature of our response is encrypted in our genes and the equation is very simple.

If you are attacked by a superior force you ran, if you are attacked by an inferior power, you fight.

It is this balance of power or the perception of the balance of power that dictates our response.

There are no born victims or aggressors. It all depends on the circumstances.

People that have been victimized will become aggressors, and aggressors will become victims in the right circumstances.

We all seek pleasure.

The problem is that many times that pleasure comes at the expenses of somebody else’s pain.

We all have fantasized to take revenge on somebody that has abused us: A bad unfair boss, a cheating partner, an unprofessional colleague, an annoying neighbor or a rude driver, the list goes on.

We all seek to avoid pain.

Many times we do not turn our violent fantasy into reality, mainly because there are laws and law enforcers that keep us from doing it, and because we realize there is a price to pay and the idea of the pain that comes with that will keep us from acting out.

To truly understand this power balance play we have to understand the concept of power.

Power is defined in many ways and many times is confused with force, strength, violence, might, authority and influence.

Power is the ability of act. Power doesn’t have to act with force and its actions don’t have to be necessarily violent. It also doesn’t have to be used always to exercise authority and influence.

A truly powerful person, group or nation doesn’t have to attack a less powerful one in order to show superiority or dominate.

In a person, to person aggression, the aggressor is always power hungry not power full.

By attacking a less powerful one he or she seeks to increase its dominance, its perceived power.

We have wrongly learned that the way to gain power is by aggression by domination of others.

True power can only come from inside. It cannot be gained by aggression.