i be naija

Ever since my introduction to the philosophy of the human nature in Dr. Lichtenbert’s class, I have generally sided with Jean Jacques Rousseau (pictured). Rousseau contended that man (i.e. the human species) is inherently good; that it is society’s crassness that corrupts and imbues us with a propensity toward evil. In effect, the argument was that, left to his devices, man would comport himself.

In spite of my inclination toward Rousseau, I saw merit in Thomas Hobbes’ assessment of man as brutish, base, and essentially evil.(Hobbes was Rousseau’s major antagonist on the issue of the essential human nature). Every day, I saw evidence in favor of the argument that man is evil, rather than good, by default; and that it in fact takes concerted effort to be good. Hobbes’ evaluation of man, though bleak, seemed to correlate more closely with my daily observations of the human species. Nonetheless, perhaps because I wanted man to be essentially good, I sided with Rousseau.

Allow me then to tell you about the singular incident that caused me to rethink my position on the subject of the human nature.

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For as long as I could remember, my buddy Ben had been raving about one of the clubs in the Wrigleyville cluster around Clark and Addison streets, so I agreed to go with him to John Barleycorn one Friday evening. While I doubt that Barleycorn qualifies as the best thing in the Wrigleyville area, I will affirm that you probably will never find better tasting Long Islands elsewhere.

Anyhow, after the obligatory round of drinks and a few overtures at some of the girls around the bar, we proceeded upstairs to the dance floor. It appeared that we were relatively early; we were still able to move from one end of the floor to the other with relative ease. Invariably, the room’s temperature began to rise as more people crammed into it, as the evening wore on.

Ben and I were standing at the bar, drinks in hand, surveying the environment much the same way a lion in search of prey would. I was wearing this incredible, Morpheus-ish leather jacket (à la The Matrix) that never failed to inspire me with an increased sense of confidence. Succinctly, I loved that jacket.

By midnight though, the dance floor on that upper level had become so crammed with party revelers drinking and gyrating to assorted contemporary urban music, that the temperature in the room had risen dramatically since when we first arrived. I had to take the jacket off.

At the other end of the room, there were a set of wall hooks that were meant, ostensibly, to hold jackets. I told Ben I’d be right back and squeezed my way through the throng of people towards the wall bearing the cloth hooks. When I got there, I took the jacket off to reveal the hunk of masculinity that lay beneath, and hung it on one of hooks. I removed my wallet and cell phone, but not wanting the latter, a rather bulky contraption (this was 2003) bulging out of my pant pockets, I returned it into the jacket’s flank pocket. Bah, I thought to myself, no one’s gonna steal your jacket… Man is essentially good.

I went back to meet up with Ben, and we did what two buddies out for a night on the town do: we grabbed a few more drinks, bumped-n-ground with a couple of babes, took a few telephones numbers (a good number of them bogus, it would turn out), and generally tried to have a good time. By the end of the night, exhausted, sleepy, and slightly inebriated, I returned to the wall to get my jacket. It was gone.

Worse yet, by the next day, the jacket thief (who serendipitously found my cell phone in the jacket pocket) had placed numerous international calls to Ecuador and Peru. My phone bill that month was over $350!

So, with that incident I lost my last shred of faith in man, and defected from Rousseau’s school of thought.

Man, as far as I am now concerned, is base, base, base!

Initial: 12 June 2003; Revised: 29 June 2006.

If there were one kind of person that I couldn’t stand for too long, it would be the kind that I call, for want of another term, stressors. A stressor, to put it colloquially, makes a big deal out of everything. This person possesses attributes that might generally be considered positives (such as attention to detail, punctuality, etc.), but the problem is that, in general, the stressor does not know where to draw the line. The stressor creates a sense of urgency where there is no rational reason for one, over-dramatizes simple issues until they become conundra (I prefer “conundra” to “conundrums”, thank you), and in general will belabor an issue until everyone around him or her has a literal headache!

Yesterday, while awaiting my flight back to Chicago from St. Louis, I noticed that I had missed a call from my Project Manager. I called him back immediately, only to be barraged with insinuations that if we didn’t submit the documents we were working on to the clients by tomorrow, the world would positively end. My reaction was, wait a minute… the documents are not due tomorrow!!! Well, that didn’t matter. The PM had his mind set on submitting the documents tomorrow (never mind that the documents weren’t ready yet), and nothing, nothing, would dissuade him. Would I then, he asked, (nay, ordered) see to it that the documents were good to go tomorrow? And, while I was at it, would I reschedule my return flight (i.e. back to St. Louis) from Tuesday to Monday, so that I could get back to the office (on a holiday at the client) to get more stuff done?

To be sure, it was highly unlikely that the clients would receive the document by midday Friday and review it same day, or over the weekend. Given that Monday was a holiday; it was more likely that they’d look at the documents on Tuesday—or Wednesday, even. But here we were, on Friday, frantically sending files back and forth between St. Louis and Chicago, engaging in telephone conversations every ten minutes or so, and getting generally stressed-out. It would have taken me two hours, tops, to get all that stuff done on-site, on Monday or early Tuesday.

The stressor, I tell you, always creates urgency where there is no rational reason for one.

p.s.: I love you Voom; no hard feelings.