The moment you wonder whether the room likes you, you stop being able to see anyone in it.
Walk into a room full of strangers and, before anyone speaks, part of you is already running calculations. Am I welcome here? Do they respect me? Am I above or below these people? Most of us think we read others reasonably well, and that when we misjudge someone it is because we lacked information. Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature starts from a less flattering explanation.
Being around people stirs up our anxieties and insecurities about how others perceive us. Once we feel such emotions, it becomes very hard to observe people, because we are drawn into our own feelings and evaluate what people say and do in personal terms: do they like me or dislike me? The calculations in that room take up so much attention that what you see are mostly reflections of your own anxiety. Irrationality, on this account, is not a failure of intelligence. It is built into how we take in other people.
The self we protect
Why should the question “do they like me?” be so loud? Because each of us maintains a self-image, and other people are constantly confirming or threatening it. Greene says we are all narcissists, some deeper on the spectrum than others. We build a self-image that accentuates positive qualities and explains away flaws, and that is normal and necessary.
The trouble begins with deep narcissists, the territory of narcissistic personality disorder, who have no self to retreat to and no foundation for self-esteem, so they depend completely on others’ attention to feel alive. They see others as self-objects: extensions of themselves, instruments for attention and validation, to be controlled like limbs. When challenged, they react with rage, thirsting for vengeance and full of righteousness, because the challenge threatens the only self they have. They also cannot learn, since learning implies criticism.
Most people in the room are not deep narcissists. But the same machinery runs in milder form in everyone, including you as you stand at the door counting who has noticed you.
What the mask hides
If the self-image has to be protected, then whatever threatens it gets pushed out of sight. Greene’s law of repression says the pushed-down material does not disappear. It comes back in disguise. Behind any vehement hatred is often a secret and unpalatable envy.
The clearest disguise is the Fanatic, who has massive insecurities from early life and covers doubt with intense conviction. It is not the particular belief that matters but the intense conviction, because the conviction supplies a self-worth the person never established. That is why arguing with a fanatic about the content of their belief rarely works: you are attacking the floor they stand on, not an opinion they hold.
Machinery, not malice
Read quickly, all this sounds like a manual for distrust. The better reading is that the laws are not descriptions of human evil but of human machinery — the automatic programs that run below awareness, shaped by childhood, reinforced by habit, and invisible to the person running them. Seeing the machinery is not cynicism. It is what makes connection possible, because you cannot meet a person while their machinery, or yours, is running the conversation.
The limit is that the machinery is easiest to see in others. We all have dreams and a sense of our own potential, and if we have drifted, we feel the gap between those dreams and our lives. We cover this up with an air of certainty and strong opinions, or moral superiority, but the underlying insecurity cannot be shaken. So the next time you notice yourself unusually certain in a room full of people, the useful question is which of Greene’s laws is doing the talking.
References:
- Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature