Imagine a Kanye without porn.

Imagine Kanye without porn.

I recently read “Primal Leadership.” It’s an interesting book that applies standard business ideas to the inner workings of the brain. This marriage of science and business is fascinating to me. One of the theories they explore is the idea that every great person needs both tremendous Self Awareness and tremendous Self Management.

It reasons to serve that if you don’t know who you are, you can’t control yourself in situations. For instance, if you don’t have your anger in check, it’s easy to get “emotionally hijacked” in situations. Your anger triggers the release of hormones that take hours to dissolve in your body and before you know it, your entire day is shot.

You can’t have self management without self awareness, but Kanye West proves that the theory can work the other way. You can be incredibly self aware and yet suffer with your self management.

Here’s something he was quoted as saying in a British newspaper:
“I think I have a sexual problem, a sexual addiction. My only drug is porn. I have porn with me all the time. Whenever I go to the porn store, I call it the crack house.”

The guy has a porn problem. Good for him for recognizing that it’s not a hobby, or “just something guys do.” He gets that buckets of dopamine in his body are released every time he looks at porn. He apparently knows that it’s hyper easy to form a chemical addiction to porn.

He’s incredibly self aware.

But then, this week before his new album is released, this is how Rolling Stone magazine opens their article on West:

“It’s the wee hours of a Monday night in London, and inside Stringfellows strip club, about a dozen scantily clad women form a rough semicircle around Kanye West and his small entourage.”

For someone that confesses sex issues that’s a pretty dangerous sentence, but it’s just a description of what was going. It’s factual. But then Rolling Stone offers one of the saddest and best put assessments of addiction.

“Over the next few hours, he hardly moves an inch. The strip-club environment seems to have tranquilized him. For someone who travels through life at hyperspeed and talks a mile a minute, West is unusually still and silent.”

“Tranquilized” is such a powerful way to describe the trance addicts enter when they’re exposed to their drug of choice. And that the author of the article has the insight to notice that when faced with porn, Kanye becomes someone else, silent and still, is pretty damning too.

I like Kanye West. I’m sure his new album is good, but I promise that it’s not as good as it could have been. Drugs don’t work that way. Addictions never bring out the best in anyone. An addiction will never be a muse. They only steal. The relationship is always harmful, never helpful. Who can say what amount of time and energy, or maybe even creative genius, Kanye West wasted in his pursuit of porn.

Just imagine a Kanye without porn.