Liberty's Torch: personality

Showing posts with label personality. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Who Is He Really? Part 2

Yes, I’m back to this theme. Why? Because of the passing parade, the human tragicomedy, and the living detritus it scatters across the face of reality. Also, because I’m utterly weary of political commentary, of speaking in categories and imperatives (and categorical imperatives). This allows me a break from the routine. Anyway, the other Esteemed Co-Conspirators of Liberty’s Torch will surely fill the sociopolitical gap...if a gap there be.

NOTE: The rules as stated in Part 1 still apply.

This person seems to “live at the office.” You could easily get the impression that he’d spend his entire life there, if it were made possible. For him, home is mostly a place to store his clothes.

Or maybe not. Maybe he spends all his time on a pastime. It could be a sport, a craft, video games, coin collecting, the Internet...it really doesn’t matter. It absorbs him too completely for any other sort of involvement, possibly including gainful employment.

Or maybe not that either. Maybe his life is consumed by his bank balance. Or by a search for sexual conquests. Or by fanatic devotion to some sports figure, or franchise, or musical icon. Or by the adoration of some political figure, or Cause, or popular guru. Whatever it is, it leaves no space in his day, week, month, or year for any competing interest.

In these United States of America, in this year of Our Lord 2017, it’s very likely that you know such a person.

Let’s call him the Monochromist.

We have it on pretty good authority that the immense variety and richness of life, especially contemporary American life, should make us happy as kings. Some of us are. Maybe even most of us. But appearances to the contrary, that’s unlikely to include the Monochromist.

Obsession isn’t good for anyone. Moreover, it’s odds-on that the Monochromist knows that. Nevertheless, he prefers it to broader engagement with the people and the world around him.

To marry oneself to a single interest, forsaking all others, is seldom due to the decision that that interest is all that matters. Far more often it’s a reaction born of pain: a withdrawal into a “safe space,” stemming from emotional damage sustained during a flirtation with the possibilities of the wider world.

The Monochromist is frequently found in works of fiction. He’s almost always a pitiable figure. He’s employed to illustrate the emotional seductiveness of closure around a single, all-consuming pursuit.

Considering how many Monochromists inhabit the real world, it’s fairly easy to “create” one for use in a story. But he and his fellows are also a warning to the rest of us.

A world “so full of a number of things” will occasionally inflict pain, disappointment, or failure on each of us. It’s inherent in our wanting natures. The more we see, the more we want: things, people, skills, achievements, stature, novelty, diversion, what-have-you. It’s inherent in the nature of reality that some of those wants will not be fulfilled, or that pursuing them will exact a price we’d prefer not to pay, whether or not we get what we’ve sought.

He who is unable to endure pain, disappointment, and failure is ill-prepared for life. It’s not that life is inherently and unremittingly painful, but rather that we are limited creatures with limited powers and limited resources. If our wants could be limited in like fashion, life could be free of all sorrow...but apparently that’s not possible to the overwhelming majority of us. We call the exceptions saints. Some of them deserve it.

The Monochromist has created a refuge for himself, in which he hopes to escape further sorrow. In fact what he’s done is to wall himself up with his sorrows, such that they’re always hovering around him at the slightest of removes. His fanatic concentration on his single interest is the sole barrier that keeps those sorrows at bay.

“A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself.” – Robert A. Heinlein

What’s true of the slave is also true of the Monochromist. The walls around him are of his own design and construction. Only he can tear them down. Nevertheless, a huge number of persons of a “helping” disposition will attempt it. Their efforts are seldom rewarded with anything but frustration and bruises.

Motivation, as Robert C. Townsend has noted, is a door locked from within. It’s pointless to try to force new motives onto someone, especially a Monochromist. He’s far more likely to reinforce his barriers than to lower them at your suggestion.

Many are the parents whose adolescent children have wound themselves around some obsession. The condition is becoming ever more commonplace in our time. However, relief usually comes as they mature. He who elects to care about an adult Monochromist has a tougher row to hoe.

Do you know any such, Gentle Reader? I’d lay odds on it. What responses have they inspired in you?

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Who Is He Really? Part 1

The above title is a bit misleading, but I couldn't think of one that isn't at least somewhat misleading. The one I originally intended was “What does he really want?” However, the one above has more resonance.

I intend to examine a few personality types. No, not Myers-Briggs classifications; those are all too easily understood – and misunderstood. My pigeonholes are more about dominant inclinations: how a member of the category wants to see himself, and how that might be expressed in his occupation, his pastimes, or his associations.

What will result, of course, are generalizations. They won’t be absolutely precise or confining. There will be gray zones around the edges of each one. Some persons will stubbornly, maddeningly refuse to “stay in their box.” But even though they will be inexact, they will be useful as a predictor of tendencies in behavior, which is about all one can ask of a classification scheme for human personalities.

Let’s see if you can deduce the label I’m thinking of for the first one. Please be aware that whatever the gender of the pronoun I use, the person being described could be of either sex.

He’s fairly young, perhaps no more than thirty-five. He might be married, but probably isn’t. He’s very unlikely to have children. If he’s employed, he probably works in an office, at a trade that doesn’t require him to exert himself too greatly or to get his hands dirty. Whatever the working conditions and demands his job imposes on him, he feels unappreciated, ill-treated, and underpaid.

If he’s unmarried, he pours a lot of his time and energy into seeking sexual contact. However, he’s not terribly successful in that realm; few members of the opposite sex find him attractive. More, those that do find him attractive are unlikely to elicit his interest.

His central passion is for politics. His opinions in that sphere are many, firm, and often expressed at the top of his lungs. Chances are that his positions are left-of-center, possibly very much so. But the defining characteristic of his politics is that he must be right. He must prevail in every argument. He cannot abide dissent; if you differ with him, it indicates a characterological deficit in you...and he’ll probably tell you so.

In summary, he is dissatisfied with The Way Things Are. He sees politics as both the reason and the remedy. He wants sweeping changes in law and public policy. However, he’s not interested in making those changes himself; that’s hard work. The changes he has in mind would upset quite a lot of people. They’d take it badly. He could accumulate bruises. No, he’ll confine himself to screaming for others to effect the changes he demands.

It pleases him more than he’ll admit that he’s “out of the mainstream.” He takes that as an indicator of superior wisdom and virtue.

When he’s not working, not engaged with in some sort of political activism, and not seeking a sexual partner, he’s likely to be wholly idle, perhaps sitting before a television or some other form of passive entertainment. Like as not his sleeping hours are irregular.

Do you know him?

Over the century behind us, quite a lot of Americans have passed through a phase of the sort described above. The central thread is politics and political immersion to the point of obsession. The most salient fact of such immersion in the American political order is the underlying, unarticulated conviction that the way to get what one wants is to vote for it.

Don’t bother asking him whether Robinson Crusoe could have voted himself a mansion, a banquet, and a beautiful girl. He’ll only scowl and wave you aside. He might mutter “get real,” as if the survival challenge Crusoe faced, and its implications for his thinking, planning, and conduct, has no relation to the trials of the “real world.”

And there is this: he’s not necessarily on the left politically. There are persons to the right, particularly among self-described libertarians, who fit the profile described here. Their political immersion can be as complete as any Cause Person. They can be quite as unpleasant company as any crusading left-liberal.

Politics, specifically the conviction that politics is the route to all good things, is the key to this category.

One of my favorite posters from Despair, Inc. is this one:

It’s not inconceivable that some persons’ de facto function in this life is exactly that: a bellow to the rest of Mankind not to be like that. But no man is inescapably assigned to such duties. All of us are capable of improvement.

But as Albert Jay Nock has told us, that means self-improvement. The political obsessive isn’t thinking of that. He wants to improve others, to drag them closer to the standards he holds, whether they like it or not (and whether he meets them or not). The desire to improve others leaves no room for a candid examination of one’s own sins and shortcomings.

Let’s call this person the Armchair Rebel.

As I wrote earlier, many Americans have experienced a phase of this sort. The explosion of political activism in the early Twentieth Century, while it wasn’t the birth of the A.R., indicates what occurs when large numbers of persons are taught that the way to get what you want is to vote for it.

Fortunately, obsessive political activism is neither chronic nor fatal. After fifteen or twenty years of ineffective shouting and gesticulating, it usually fades away. However, the sense of dissatisfaction can last a lifetime, permeating all one’s relationships and dividing him from others.

Reality lies almost entirely outside the political sphere. The earlier the A.R. learns this, the better off he’s likely to be.