As you may know, I am a big fan of personality studies. The system that has been researched the most by academics in psychology is the Big 5, and that’s where one who is interested in the most cutting-edge, fact-based research should look, but there are others that have taken off in popularity. Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, and HBDI are just a few that are used by individuals to improve their lives, and consulting groups all over North America to revamp businesses. Despite what little formal, scientific research has been done to confirm the cogency of these systems, the results generally speak for themselves. They have all had reasonable success in boosting employee satisfaction and productivity, and they have increased profit for those businesses too. Regardless of whether or not you “believe in” personality, there is something to it, and to explain these systems away because they may not “have all of their facts straight” is to overlook the utility they provide in personal development.
It’s not that the facts don’t matter, but what constitutes ‘fact’ isn’t easy to determine. The average half-life of a scientific fact is only seven years, and that is an average across all scientific fields. As we know, facts in physics tend to hold out longer than those in the social sciences, but when a fact in physics turns out to be wrong, it is often much more broadly and profoundly wrong and thus more difficult to accept because so much has been built on that foundation.
There is nothing that people hate more than an idea which compromises the integrity of their foundation, but when truth happens, we must be willing to change accordingly. This is where science can become its own worst enemy, because after all, it takes humans with subjective goals and motivations to interpret numbers and to make something useful out of those findings. Remember, science is a tool, not a belief system. But, that’s a discussion for another time. This is especially important today for social issues in the universities. I think that moving forward, personality research will play a crucial role in creating a stronger foundation for the humanities and social sciences (which are currently corrupt by neo-Marxism) and for better understanding how to sort out this massive mess which was made very real to me just the other night in the pub.
I was out for some beers, having an argument with a couple of old grad school friends. They were debating each other why women are underrepresented in philosophy departments when they are overrepresented in the other humanities. Their disagreements seemed to be between narrow social issues, as one might expect from two young, impressionable minds who’s opinions haven’t yet been optimized to think outside the social constructionist box of academia. One (the female) argued that direct oppression of women was the cause, and the other (the male) argued that systematic corruption was the problem, which, unbeknownst to them, is more or less the same thing, so their disagreements were fundamentally semantic. When I brought up differences in male and female personalities as a solution, leaving open for discussion what those differences might be (even though I already knew), they seemed to reject it without giving it any serious consideration. Shocker. They didn’t want to accept that people might actually be innately different (as a philosopher type, why wouldn’t you want to be different, I thought?). That is not to say, as I tried to explain, that nurture doesn’t play some crucial role, but they insisted on sticking to the nurture side of the debate while rejecting altogether the nature side. I was even being more centrist about the issue than I should have been because I wanted to facilitate good discussion, but that didn’t work as it was two versus one.
There were a couple of ironies in their rejection of my ideas. The first is that they were clearly embodying their natural male-female differences in the specific positions they originally took. Generally speaking, women are more agreeable and are more interested in people, while men are more interested in ideas and systems, so it’s no wonder my female friend was defending the group-identity-based female oppression position, and my male friend was defending the politico-systematic corruption position. I dared not point that out but they became more aggressive once they began to realize that their positions were more or less the same and only founded on semantic disagreement. From that point, their team approach in attempting to defeat me brought up the second irony — that in agreeing with each other in the fashion that they did, they were acting out the group identity role that is so characteristic of people who take the far-left position on social issues, which is something that they had admitted to. They oriented their arguments onto a foundation of equality, kindness, and compassion rather than on a desire to get to the truth, or to let truth present itself through three-way discussion. When I explained what a Pareto distribution is, the phenomenon where, if given equal opportunity, people’s natural differences will manifest thereby causing a necessary unequal distribution of success, they simply got mad (to make a short story shorter). In my male friend’s defense, he unknowingly proved that his constructionist position was at least somewhat justified by virtue of the simple fact that he is from Seattle. He is a slave of his own cunty-liberal reasoning, after all. My female friend, on the other hand, comes from a conservative family in Georgia, and she carries a gun in her purse, so, what the hell is her excuse?
Anyway, it seemed that the further we went down the rabbit hole, the more we started to talk past one another, for we were operating at different levels of analysis. They thought I was flat out wrong, and I thought they were missing the point, so we were going nowhere fast. They first disagreed with each other about which of the narrow social issues was the cause of the lack of women in philosophy, but they both agreed on the broader presupposition that social constructionism was correct. When I questioned that point, they got angry. This is what we’re supposed to do in philosophy, though – broaden an issue as much as we possibly can in order to find the most reasonable general perspective on which we can ground the known facts. If you can’t think that broadly, or at least keep your emotions in check while others are doing so, then philosophy is not for you. As we are all graduate-level philosophizers, I thought that would have been fun. Well, it was, but it was just a bit dirtier than any of us would have liked!
Looking back, a crucial distinction arose that I now see should have been dealt with from the beginning. That is the distinction between personality and character. Personality is what I consider to be one’s innate, baseline temperament. This is obviously difficult to control for scientifically because there are so many layers of environmental, social, and cultural influence accrued over a lifetime and stacked on top. But, there is still the personality which is your default mode of temperament that goes largely unchanged throughout your life. This is why two or more siblings raised under identical conditions will turn out so different – it’s because they are different. They require different sorts and degrees of attention. How that personality is cultivated, though, encompasses one’s character (which is more or less the same concept as Aristotle’s “State of Character” that he describes in his Nicomachean Ethics). This is where free moral will comes in. One habituates himself into making the right moral decisions to cultivate his virtues, and that forms the character. Perhaps I should call personality temperament, and character personality. Perhaps this semantic point is where my friends didn’t get it. Whatever. Semantics. I’ll be clear from here on.
What the social constructionist has more right than the radical materialist personality advocate (Eric Braverman, for example) is that, at the end of the day one’s character is what is important, and that we can habituate ourselves into projecting a certain image that can lead us to a successful and fulfilling life. What they get wrong is that we are a slave to societal norms, that we’re all the same, and to push back against the patriarchy is the only thing we can do about that. Funny, this view can be explained from a personality perspective. Social constructionists are liberal in their political views, which implies that they are generally low in Big 5 trait conscientiousness which deals with orderliness, industriousness, organization, etc., so they wouldn’t want to put in the necessary work to make positive changes in their lives to begin with. By this logic, they’re simply not allowed to deny the existence of personality. What the materialists correctly presuppose, probably without knowing, is that we should come to understand our baseline temperament, and when cultivating our personality into character, we should not stray from that default mode of being, or else we will live a dishonest and unfulfilling life. What they get wrong, ironically, is that life has no purpose and that we are nothing more than our biology. Pragmatically speaking, this can’t work either. I challenge a materialist to go out into the world and actually attempt to live as though his life has no purpose – as though his thoughts and actions are predetermined by brain functions because he has no free will. One will necessarily fall into a nihilistic, self-deprecating philosophy which would lead to a quick and painful demise, not only for him, but for everyone around him for whom he is a purpose.
Our personality/temperament is our default mode that we should strip from our societal influence to properly understand our potential, that is, if we are individual enough to manage that. Allow Terence McKenna to give you some advice: psychedelic drugs can help. Our character is what we have made of that potential, and it is only a good character if we have taken the time to understand what lies beneath it. Those are both good and evil things. Our character — our being — is the ever-evolving vessel we use to navigate the world that only we have the power to control. We cannot wholly exist apart from our environment. Our being is not our nature or our nurture, but it is precisely the abstract interplay between the two, and how we choose to act accordingly, without regret.
Overthought Consulting 