Today’s passage, “You take two strangers and put ‘em in random predicaments Give 'em a soul so they can make their own choices and live with it.”

Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 2017 album, “DAMN.” It was the first non-classical or jazz album to win a Pulitzer for “A virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”

On the surface, this prolific album was filled with songs that could be described as, and I am dating myself here, “summer joints.” However, when you dig a bit deeper into the meaning of the lyrics, you recognize this album is densely spiritual.

The last song on this album “Duckworth” is by far and large my favorite because it deals with questions around cause and effect, the randomness or perhaps predetermined events that happen in our in correlation with whether or not we have free will.

Kendrick Lamar also references a book in the Bible, Deuteronomy, when he raps that “wickedness” was broken through submission to God, and as a result, karma brought about redemption and ultimately world-wide success for himself.

In the song, “Duckworth” Kendrick Lamar’s Dad, Ducky, and Anthony “Top Dawg” , the founder of Top Dawg Entertainment, which produces Kendrick’s music albums have a past encounter that is told through the unveiling of the song. It so happens that many years before Anthony founded “Top Dog” he nearly could have killed Kendrick Lamar’s Father, Ducky. Instead, Anthony spared Ducky’s life. It is amazing to me the series of events that would have never unfolded if Ducky had been killed that day. never have realized what would become of it.

The backstory is this... In 1984, Anthony robbed the chicken restaurant where Ducky, Kendrick Lamar’s Father, worked.  Anthony liked Ducky and let him live.  Had he shot him, Anthony wouldn’t have founded the music label Top Dawg that would later produce Ducky’s son’s music. Obviously, Anthony would be in prison and Kendrick would have grown up without a Father figure role model and would have perhaps never made music as a result. 
It’s funny how the worst of times and the best of times always land us exactly where we need to be.

Song lyrics go: “pay attention
That one decision changed both of they lives, one curse at a time
Reverse the manifest and good karma, and I'll tell you why
You take two strangers and put 'em in random predicaments
Give 'em a soul, so they can make their own choices and live with it
Twenty years later, them same strangers, you make 'em meet again
Inside recording studios where they reapin' their benefits
Then you start remindin' them about that chicken incident
Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence?
Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin' life
While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight”

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Brain scans show1 that when a person hears information that disproves a belief of theirs, instead of their brain's cognitive centres lighting up (like you might expect), the emotional centres become active instead.
So, perhaps disappointingly, our first instinct on hearing information that disproves our own beliefs is to rally our defences against that new information.
This, for me, explains so much about human behaviour that we put together a video discussing the nature of beli