Bad Boy? Is Diddy’s life of debauchery insecurity about his past life as a devout religious?

Diddy is still trending many months after his arrest, and it has been hell-on-earth for him as he’s been denied bail and is still in detention at a notorious New York City jail.

Acquaintances have deserted him, and friends have kept mum.

Jay Z and his wife Beyoncé expressed sympathy, and they themselves became a target of FBI investigation.

Loyal friends are indeed rare, and understandably so.

Not everyone has a working work-life balance, and Diddy’s was far more skewed towards the good time.

He had more money than sense.

Diddy was obsessed with his calling as an entrepreneur but also more than found time to overindulge his appreciation for the finer things of life.

Or Did he? Did Diddy really live it up? Was Diddy one of the rare kind that could really appreciate the finer things of life? Or was he living a lie all along? Was he trying to mask up his deep-seated acquired-in-childhood insecurity as a religious in order to appear super cool in the irreverent pop culture setting?

Did he have to go to such great lengths just to fill the world in on living it up, if he really was? Why would he not keep any secrets, intelligent as he is? Why was his whole life and that of his family a circus? Why did he have to beam his whole life to the world via satellite, making baring-it-all so appealing it precipitated the need to invent social media?

Was he putting up a front to hide something, perhaps a deeply ingrained childhood insecurity caused by some trauma?

Call me a psychologist if you get the impression I’m overstepping my bounds in the world of intellectual postulation.

But this is my two cents.

Somehow, after founding Bad Boy Records, Diddy’s whole life became one of dispelling his past life as a devout religious. He never espoused atheism, but the totally hedonistic and seemingly irreligious life he lived as an adult is a clear testament that he nursed some grudge against religion. A strange grievance judging from the angle that he had been so religious as a teenager that he volunteered to be an altar boy.

The Diddy that carries guns to nightclubs is not the Diddy that the adults who knew him growing up in Brooklyn know. The Diddy that physically assaults and sexually abuses women is not the same Diddy the adults they knew growing up in Harlem and Mount Vernon know. The Diddy that gropes ex-convicts at nightclubs? Not the former altar boy who graduated from the All-Boys Roman Catholic Mount Saint Michael Academy in 1987.

Attending the ascetic all-boys Roman Catholic high school where religion was forced down the throats of students made him long for a disinhibited lifestyle as an adult. And a truly disinhibited lifestyle is what he managed to forge for himself.

There is definitely something wrong with Diddy. The world had to know why he descended into the self-destructive fiend that he has become. Diddy never told the world that. But now it is too late. Diddy is done.

As a kid growing up in Obuasi, Ghana, where Africa’s biggest goldmine was just a stone’s throw away from my home, I was encapsulated by Diddy’s disinhibited lifestyle. But as an adult, I can now see Diddy for who he truly is, that all the women and the drugs and the booze and the parties and the soirees and the crimes were just a front to conceal deep-seated childhood insecurities.

How he christened his record label tells the whole story: Bad Boy Records. I mean, is there a good boy in the US Black hip hop scene? (J. Cole may be the exception) Why was he so desperate to create that bad-boy persona?

Those who knew Diddy as a child say the Diddy the world knows is not the Diddy they know. He definitely changed. And the change was seismic. The parties, the booze, the women, the drugs, the crime – that was not the trajectory Diddy’s life should have taken.

The Diddy they know is a shy, respectful, respectable, intelligent, refined lad who made it to the pinnacle of Black educational educational excellence, Howard University. Cast your mind around the Black kids of the crime-infested neighbourhoods that Diddy lived in, and he was one in a million.

Because Diddy was not a natural at the game he was so desperately trying to play, he got caught up in the most stupid of mistakes. True bad boys don’t get caught. He was putting up a front. He was a phoney. It is that simple. Bad boys don’t trumpet to the world that they are bad boys, far from it. They don’t need to, because they see it as a pathology. They want to grow out of it.

Legit bad boys wise up as they grow; they jettison the game and grow up. After all, they had always wanted to be good guys, they had always envied the good guys who made it to college. Their tough childhood circumstances drove them into the subculture.

See real bad boys like Jay Z. He cleaned up his act. His investment portfolio keeps increasing and he keeps getting richer by the minute.50 Cent has also cleaned up his act and has learnt to wear a suit and a tie. He has kept off sex for ten years. And he is glorying in his nemesis Diddy’s ignominy.

He is actually making a documentary on Diddy’s debauched life which he is selling to Netflix for 500 million dollars.

He is cashing in on Diddy’s humiliation.

Diddy’s stupidity in his quest to overindulge bordered on insanity, a true bon-vivant would know how to avoid the bait. Smart mice never get caught by the cat. A housefly can never make a mistake by landing on a hot stove.

Diddy, being an intelligent child, would be traumatized by his father’s murder. Growing up in poverty while only three years old and spending the rest of his life In poverty. He sought solace through religion, going as far as to be an altar boy. Indeed, the adults who knew Diddy as a teen growing up in Brooklyn cannot reconcile with the Diddy they know with the Diddy that he became as an adult. The superb entrepreneur? Yes. The totally hedonistic bad boy? No.

His Black conspecifics in the music business are completely different from him: the hugely-respected 94-year-old Berry Gordy of Motown and Dr Dre are famously clean-living members of society.

As we mourn Diddy’s ignominy as another statistic in the long chain of society’s never-ending victims of the gifted, I can only reflect on the beautiful pretentious life that he lived and how, sadly, the chain will continue into the future.