IT’S ALL TRANSACTIONAL

By Akin Ojumu

Our world is a marketplace full of buyers and sellers looking for the best deal they can get at the expense of others. Human relationships are purely high stake commercial transactions where every party involved wants to come up on top as a winner.

We live in a world where nobody relates with you on the basis of your worth. Rather, everybody relates with you on the basis of what you are worth to them. The moment you are appraised as being worthless, they’ll turn their back and walk away.

It isn’t your need that attracts people to you. Instead, what makes them gravitate to you is what they need. Once you are assessed to be incapable or unable to offer what they need, they’ll leave you in the lurch without as much as a second thought.

This truth about human interactions is even expressed in the widely popular proverb: “Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.”

Human penchant for self-love manifests in different degrees in different people. Whereas some folks are better at concealing or controlling their love-of-self nature than others, this evil rules the soul of everyone. Nothing we do is motivated purely by selflessness.

In everything and in anything, we always put self first...even at our best altruistic action and in our most charitable deeds. With us, there is no free lunch. There’s never a time when we do anything for free without the expectation of deriving some sort of a reward to feed our own selfish desire.

Our actions are induced either by what we want to gain or by what we want to avoid. Just as we carry out charitable deeds when we want adulation, we also do the same in order to avoid condemnation. At any given moment, we tend to do things based on what we think is best for us. Consciously or unconsciously, using people to feed the insatiable cravings of our selfish need is what we all do. I know that’s something we don’t like to admit.

That this is the reality of human relationships should come as no surprise. It is the seed of the rebellion of Lucifer against YAHWEH (Isaiah 14:12-14). That evil seed of selfishness and self-centeredness got encoded into the human DNA at the fall of man.

“How you have fallen from heaven,

O star of the morning, son of the dawn!

You have been cut down to the earth,

You who have weakened the nations!

“But you said in your heart,

‘I will ascend to heaven;

I will raise my throne above the stars of God,

And I will sit on the mount of assembly

In the recesses of the north.

‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;

I will make myself like the Most High.’”

Till this day, mankind continues to be defined by the “I” mindset. This is the cold reality of all human relationships that people don’t want to talk about. It is the “If you scratch my back, I’ll have my itch relieved” dynamic underpinning all human interactions that people won’t admit exists.