Today I want to talk about personality. Your basic personality decides what is going to take control in any given situation that you attend too, your reason or your emotions. That is not to say that either are undesirable, unless of course they are used inappropriately, in the wrong situations.
This statement could lead to a big philosophical debate about morals, how to live in the world and why you believe the things you do, but that is not the purpose of this missive. I want to look at a particular aspect of the idea of personality without philosophising or moralising, to try to understand how people’s basic personality could cause them to change in a particular way over time, usually because of certain types of real, or perceived pressure.
When I was in training, we had to learn about ourselves in quite a lot of detail in order to practise safely. This was done in three ways. Firstly, we had to have two years of therapy to understand ourselves better. Secondly, we had to do the Meyers Briggs test to learn which situations we felt most comfortable and uncomfortable operating in and thirdly, a regular 360-degree feedback session once a year to see what progress we had made in tackling our “weak spots”.
It was a bit gruelling but necessary for the patients’ sake. Unfortunately, the universities don’t go into such detail anymore and will accept anyone who can pass the basic course and placements, even if it takes them umpteen goes to do it.
What my training in this area did for me, was to alert me, when I was going into certain situations or tackling certain types of problems, that I had to pay focused attention and not just respond as I went along, which is one of my natural inclinations. Putting would be politicians through something like that might mean we get a better quality of candidates, but again, that’s another issue.
However, it is with politicians in mind that I want to look at personality, and in particular, larger than life ones and ones who have attracted mythological aspects to themselves. This is easily done and the advent of the internet makes it all the more concentrated.
For instance, if Julius Caesar or Oliver Cromwell were alive today, they would probably be on “I’m celebrity get me out of here”, or at the very least, “dancing on ice” or “question time”. Can you imagine Oliver Cromwell doing “dancing on ice”? The mind boggles.
In order to develop this theme, I’m going to refer back to an article I wrote some time ago about pattern recognition. However before I do that, I want to be clear about what I mean by “personality“.
We are all born with the beginnings of one, which is usually composed of some traits inherited from our parents and inbuilt inclinations of our own. Initially, this is given its first framework by others identifying simple patterns for us. A simple example might be that a certain pattern constitutes the colour red, and another, the colour green and so on. There are also universal patterns that correlate across cultures, as identified by Jung amongst others, which describe hierarchies in groups. The hero, the antagonist etc. which is the bit I am going to focus on. This starter pack, so to speak, is the beginning of constructing our world view and how we interact with whatever is out there, apart from ourselves. When I talk about personality, that is what I’m referring to, because from birth onward, we construct out of it, whatever comes next for the rest of our lives, even if we are not always conscious of it.
To do this, we need to attend to some aspects of the changing patterns of other things out there more than others. To accomplish this, the brain seems to do two things almost at once. Firstly, create an overview of the general pattern it has formed of out there, and then, attends to particular aspects of that pattern it thinks are relevant to a particular situation, causing other aspects to retreat into the background and out of focus.
This is easily provable by doing a couple of simple tests.
One that most people have heard of is the picture of what could either be a candlestick or two profiles. You can see either, but not both together. This shows that when you attend to something, whatever else you are aware of retreats into the background. There’s also the Stroop test, where
you list numbers or words in different colours and time the subject reading first the words /numbers and then in a second timed test, the colour, not the number or word. Since reading words and numbers became a primary way of expression, there was a distinct time lag when doing this as the subject switched from what came naturally to what didn’t. They were forcing themselves to pick out aspects of the pattern that would normally be automatically relegated to the background. This only changes naturally when we assign an agreed purpose to a colour in its own right, such as red for stop or danger and green for clear or go.
The more patterns we create as we go on in life, the more we identify things that we will definitely attend to when they come up. This, in spite of any changes in the overall pattern. An example of this is people stopping at a red traffic light on an empty minor road with no one in sight. Instead of briefly attending to these familiar touch points and then taking an overview to see if they really are the key points in this particular pattern version, we often make assumptions and just plough on.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, but sometimes it is catastrophic. What you continue to attend too, often depends on how much you have invested. It takes a brave person to declare that twenty years of work has been a complete waste of time, because they have suddenly realised that they have been attending to the wrong thing when working out a thesis.
The more complex a pattern becomes, the more has to be invested in attending to various aspects of it to make sense and keep it alive. Like a lot of things, the simpler you keep your pattern focus the better.
So, to recapitulate, it is not so much the pattern, but which parts of the pattern we attend too.
Politicians and the media describe the patterns they see, and then tell us which parts to attend to, based on what they think is relevant. But this is only their view and people today seem to forget this.
When children and adults were encouraged and trained to think for themselves, the idea of examining the whole of a constructed pattern as described by someone else meant that all aspects of the pattern, or at least most of them, could be looked at and a view taken.
Now, we are presented with archetypes and known “truths”. No thinking or evaluation required.
Jung would be revolving in his grave!
It has been noted by several anthropologists that the more primitive a society is, or becomes, the more they have need for archetypes and rigid rules.
After the second world war, the people who between them made such a hash of the peace, decided that the general pattern of the world in its naturally changing state was so chaotic, that it would be best reconfigured and run by a cabal of super intelligent and superior people, taking as its model, the American version of democracy for the “forever” framework. This cabal would be shielded from the rest of the world’s population in order to create this new Eden, to avoid “pointless interference” and information passed down in a prescribed way until the new pattern was accepted as normality and fixed for the future without further change. Everything would be manageable, and conflict would be a thing of the past. History would end and change would no longer be needed.
By continually asking people to attend to only certain parts of the pattern, they were able to convince a lot of people in the west that they really did have superior knowledge and were working for the good of the world.
No one, even those that think of themselves as elite, can manage a constantly mega complex evolving world pattern into submission, whatever they claim. It isn’t the way we work, and it certainly isn’t the way out there works.
Our brains evolved to deal with whatever else apart from us was in our immediate environment and anything that came into it. We do not fly high enough to have a whole world overview, even if some people think they do. Hence, they attend to the part of the world pattern that suits their local ambitions and like a broken kaleidoscope, it consistently refuses to configure in the way expected and desired, no matter how much it is shaken up.
Please put your own examples of this in if you wish.
The continual pressure of appearing to be one thing to the majority world population, whilst at the same time actively working against individual hegemony, as well as against the natural pattern fluctuations of the world and nature in general, take its toll after a while and eventually, their thinking starts to morph into a weirdly exclusive pattern of its own.
Fourteen thousand people, or there about, cannot demand or engineer the cooperation of billions of people without taking over every aspect of their lives. Thus, we have things like Covid, climate change, green nonsense and trans ideology. These are all things tossed into the mix to see which has the most influence for change in getting people to police themselves for the good of the world via the rhetoric of the cabal. All are done under the auspices of being kind, preserving life and accepting differences in people.
In this, a Christian country, Christianity has been diluted and managed almost out of existence, because it was the main external framework for pattern development in this country and other European countries for so many centuries. You might say the post war cabal needed the faith and loyalty that people used to give the church, to be transferred to them, which is another reason patriotism is given such a hard time in western
countries.
They need all the things that have come out of such cultures in order to make the pattern for the new world, but without any real challenge from the majority as to how these are used, or who can have them.
Can you see the pattern here? They are making plans based on their own local beliefs and desires, whilst ignoring the wide variety of the rest of the world’s patterns. This is like trying to fit a cat into a hot water bottle. The cat’s tail may go in, but the rest won’t.
In order to facilitate this re-primitivism, opportunities for language, which is currently the favoured way of expressing thoughts and ideas, and education, must be reduced to the simplest possible form in order to restrict both personality development and complex pattern formation in the general public.
A way of understanding this is to look at how language is used. In English, one thing out there can have many different words to describe it, and if the words sound the same, then different spelling is used; for example “sea” and “see”, which is why English language as well as literature is important, even if it is sometimes reductionist. In eastern languages it is often the other way round, with one word doing duty for several things depending on the tone it is spoken in. Music and language are separated as forms of communication in the western world, not so much in the east, with music allowing a greater expression than the spoken word alone. In both cultures, arts and crafts are, or at least used to be, an expression of the beauty in nature and the world.
Today, the concept of beauty for its own sake is so last year and most programmes have background music to make up for a dearth of depth. Even political broadcasts and advertisements are annoying beyond redemption and everyone under forty nowadays, has a compilation of background music to their lives. New music fits into prescribed frameworks and there is not much depth or universal connection there.
The music is needed in these circumstances because the language is so impoverished that it cannot fully express how most people feel, so tone and sound are used to evoke the “right emotion”.
I often listen to “tell me another” on talking pictures, where show biz people in the sixties tell tales of their experiences. Even the ones who came up from poverty had a much more rich and expressive vocabulary than their modern counterparts do nowadays.
In the cabal, this restriction does not happen because they do not remove such opportunities for themselves.
As the majority become ever more impoverished and primitive in their outlook, these people then become special, because of their desirable differences and people mythologise them for a while, often ascribing to them almost magical abilities to lead the tribe and tend to believe whatever they say or do without question. In the end it does the cabal no good, because in setting themselves apart from the rest of humanity, they have restricted their access to the wider pattern, leading to a limitation of ideas, meaning that more and more control is needed to make people focus on aspects of a pattern they are not naturally drawn too, or would make for themselves.
It also engenders a secret panic in them the larger the myth grows, in case one day the less attractive parts of their personalities are found out and they become just like everyone else again.
Examples of this are great generals from history and great orators and philosophers, who glamorise people into following them. Initially they seem to be shining spots in the overall pattern, but eventually you are left with just another ordinary man or woman and the glamour fades.
I tried very hard to think of someone I whole heartedly admire in this sort of role, but all I could come up with were people who never existed. In my childhood I wanted to be Emma Peal, not Diana Rigg, or Robin Hood, not Richard Green. They suited my personality and would never run the risk of being reduced to an ordinary person and disappointing me. Maybe that’s the problem with modern politicians, they’re just too human to cope with being gods and it all turns to narcissism in the end!