The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Understand: Just like Chanel, you need to reverse your
perspective. Instead of focusing on what you want and covet in the
world, you must train yourself to focus on others, on their repressed
desires and unmet fantasies. You must train yourself to see how they
perceive you and the objects you make, as if you were looking at
yourself and your work from the outside. This will give you the almost
limitless power to shape people’s perceptions about these objects and
excite them. People do not want truth and honesty, no matter how
much we hear such nonsense endlessly repeated. They want their
imaginations to be stimulated and to be taken beyond their banal
circumstances. They want fantasy and objects of desire to covet and
grope after. Create an air of mystery around you and your work.
Associate it with something new, unfamiliar, exotic, progressive, and
taboo. Do not define your message but leave it vague. Create an illusion
of ubiquity—your object is seen everywhere and desired by others.
Then let the covetousness so latent in all humans do the rest, setting
off a chain reaction of desire.
At last I have what I wanted. Am I happy? Not really. But what’s missing?
My soul no longer has that piquant activity conferred by desire. . . . Oh, we
shouldn’t delude ourselves—pleasure isn’t in the fulfillment, but in the
pursuit.
—Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Keys to Human Nature
By nature, we humans are not easily contented with our circumstances.
By some perverse force within us, the moment we possess something
or get what we want, our minds begin to drift toward something new
and different, to imagine we can have better. The more distant and
unattainable this new object, the greater is our desire to have it. We
can call this the grass-is-always-greener syndrome, the psychological

---

equivalent of an optical illusion—if we get too close to the grass, to that
new object, we see that is not really so green after all.
This syndrome has very deep roots in our nature. The earliest
recorded example can be found in the Old Testament, in the story of
the exodus from Egypt. Chosen by God to bring the Hebrews to the
Promised Land, Moses led them into the wilderness, where they would
wander for forty years. In Egypt the Hebrews had served as slaves and
their lives had been difficult. Once they suffered hardships in the
desert, however, they suddenly grew nostalgic for their previous life.
Facing starvation, God provided them with manna from heaven, but
they could only compare it unfavorably to the delicious melons and
cucumbers and meats they had known in Egypt. Not sufficiently
excited by God’s other miracles (the parting of the Red Sea, for
example), they decided to forge and worship a golden calf, but once
Moses punished them for this, they quickly dropped their interest in
this new idol.
All along the way they griped and complained, giving Moses endless
headaches. The men lusted after foreign women; the people kept
looking for some new cult to follow. God himself was so irritated by
their endless discontent that he barred this entire generation,
including Moses, from ever entering the Promised Land. But even after
the next generation established itself in the land of milk and honey, the
grumbling continued unabated. Whatever they had, they dreamed of
something better over the horizon.
Closer to home, we can see this syndrome at work in our daily lives.
We continually look at other people who seem to have it better than us
—their parents were more loving, their careers more exciting, their
lives easier. We may be in a perfectly satisfying relationship, but our
minds continually wander toward a new person, someone who doesn’t
have the very real flaws of our partner, or so we think. We dream of
being taken out of our boring life by traveling to some culture that is
exotic and where people are just happier than in the grimy city where
we live. The moment we have a job, we imagine something better. On a
political level, our government is corrupt and we need some real
change, perhaps a revolution. In this revolution, we imagine a veritable
utopia that replaces the imperfect world we live in. We don’t think of
the vast majority of revolutions in history in which the results were
more of the same, or something worse.

---

In all these cases, if we got closer to the people we envy, to that
supposed happy family, to the other man or woman we covet, to the
exotic natives in a culture we wish to know, to that better job, to that
utopia, we would see through the illusion. And often when we act on
these desires, we realize this in our disappointment, but it doesn’t
change our behavior. The next object glittering in the distance, the next
exotic cult or get-rich-quick scheme will inevitably seduce us.
One of the most striking examples of this syndrome is the view we
take of our childhood as it recedes into the past. Most of us remember
a golden time of play and excitement. As we get older, it becomes even
more golden in our memory. Of course, we conveniently forget the
anxieties, insecurities, and hurts that plagued us in childhood and
more than likely consumed more of our mental space than the fleeting
pleasures we remember. But because our youth is an object that grows
more distant as we age, we are able to idealize it and see it as greener
than green.
Such a syndrome can be explained by three qualities of the human
brain. The first is known as induction, how something positive
generates a contrasting negative image in our mind. This is most
obvious in our visual system. When we see some color—red or black,
for instance—it tends to intensify our perception of the opposite color
around us, in this case green or white. As we look at the red object, we
often can see a green halo forming around it. In general, the mind
operates by contrasts. We are able to formulate concepts about
something by becoming aware of its opposite. The brain is continually
dredging up these contrasts.
What this means is that whenever we see or imagine something, our
minds cannot help but see or imagine the opposite. If we are forbidden
by our culture to think a particular thought or entertain a particular
desire, that taboo instantly brings to mind the very thing we are
forbidden. Every no sparks a corresponding yes. (It was the outlawing
of pornography in Victorian times that created the first pornographic
industry.) We cannot control this vacillation in the mind between
contrasts. This predisposes us to think about and then desire exactly
what we do not have.
Second, complacency would be a dangerous evolutionary trait for a
conscious animal such as humans. If our early ancestors had been
prone to feeling content with present circumstances, they would not

---

have been sensitive enough to possible dangers that lurked in the most
apparently safe environments. We survived and thrived through our
continual conscious alertness, which predisposed us to thinking and
imagining the possible negative in any circumstance. We no longer live
in savannas or forests teeming with life-threatening predators and
natural dangers, but our brains are wired as if we were. We are
inclined therefore toward a continual negative bias, which often
consciously is expressed through complaining and griping.
Finally, what is real and what is imagined are both experienced
similarly in the brain. This has been demonstrated through various
experiments in which subjects who imagine something produce
electrical and chemical activity in their brains that is remarkably
similar to when they actually live out what they are imagining, all of
this shown through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Reality can be quite harsh and is full of limits and problems. We all
must die. Every day we get older and less strong. To become successful
requires sacrifice and hard work. But in our imagination we can voyage
beyond these limits and entertain all kinds of possibilities. Our
imagination is essentially limitless. And what we imagine has almost
the force of what we actually experience. And so we become creatures
who are continually prone to imagining something better than present
circumstances and feeling some pleasure in the release from reality
that our imagination brings us.
All of this makes the grass-is-always-greener syndrome inevitable in
our psychological makeup. We should not moralize or complain about
this possible flaw in human nature. It is a part of the mental life of each
one of us, and it has many benefits. It is the source of our ability to
think of new possibilities and innovate. It is what has made our
imagination such a powerful instrument. And on the flip side it is the
material out of which we can move, excite, and seduce people.
Knowing how to work on people’s natural covetousness is a timeless
art that we depend on for all forms of persuasion. The problem we face
today is not that people have suddenly stopped coveting but quite the
opposite: that we are losing our connection to this art and the power
that goes with it.
We see evidence of this in our culture. We live in an age of
bombardment and saturation. Advertisers blanket us with their
messages and brand presence, directing us here or there to click and

---

buy. Movies bludgeon us over the head, attacking our senses.
Politicians are masters at stirring up and exploiting our discontent
with present circumstances, but they have no sense of how to spark our
imagination about the future. In all of these cases subtlety is sacrificed,
and all of this has an overall hardening effect on our imaginations,
which secretly crave something else.
We see evidence of this in personal relationships as well. More and
more people have come to believe that others should simply desire
them for who they are. This means revealing as much as they can about
themselves, exposing all of their likes and dislikes, and making
themselves as familiar as possible. They leave no room for imagination
or fantasy, and when the man or woman they want loses interest in
them, they go online to rant at the superficiality of men or the
fecklessness of women. Increasingly self-absorbed (see chapter 2), we
find it harder than ever to get into the psychology of the other person,
to imagine what they want from us instead of what we want from them.