IntegralJournal

On Personality Types

Worth repeating:

...I once posed this question about the human factor in social change to Pierre Rinfret, who was an economist and quite knowledgeable with regard to worldly things like politics.  He  thought that there is always a mixture of personality types in any culture.  The culture rewards and promotes certain types at various times, and this often moves in cycles.  These types can obtain power and wield quite an influence on the rest of their society in terms of policy and values, and popular thought.  

He believed that the same type of people who had risen to prominence in the 1920's were back at it again in the 1990's, and that we would pass through a similar cycle.  We differed quite a bit on the potential outcomes, but I resonated heavily to this thought, based on some early exposure to cycle theory I had obtained from the work of  Pitirim Sorokin and of personal observations after 25 years in a Fortune 100 corporation.  

People are mostly the same around the world, but certain cultures reward and emphasize certain types, so that the culture takes on a different flavor from one to another, and from this time to that time.  Japan and the US are quite different, but I would submit that the distribution of natural personality types are roughly the same.  They are just trained and restrained differently, and people with dampen or encourage their own mixed tendencies and preferences in accord with social norms.

Quite simply, this cycle will continue until things get bad enough, and then it will change or be changed. [ Source ]

Update:

The site of the above-quoted interviewee:

Jesse's Café Américain

I found the following Wikipedia link when looking up -- for at least the second time in recent years -- Felix Adler, who is quoted at the above site.

Religious Naturalism

Biologist Ursula Goodenough states: {{quote|I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation. And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation [sic]

Ready or Not Austerity Comes

From this article:

"If only we had faced up to this problem a generation ago. The choices then would not have been easy, but they would have been less draconian than the sudden, nonnegotiable demands we now face. Americans would have come to rely less on government and more on themselves, and so would be better prepared today."

Demand Will Grow

I was struck by the first few paragraphs of this piece. While I don't believe that Canada will be immune to the woes currently experienced by the US, I found someone who is seeking the same thing that I have sought for some time. While I think that I have a way to accomplish what Ethan outlines to his father, the demand has to grow a bit yet. But Ethan is a start.

Here is the germane portion of the article:

“When I’m older, I want to travel around the world,” your editor’s 12-year old son, Ethan, declared recently.

“That’s a great idea!” his dad replied. “I think that would be a great experience, Ethan.”

“Yeah,” Ethan continued, “I think it would be really sick [i.e., cool] to live in different places all around the world.”

“Absolutely!” his dad agreed. “You could get one of those around-the-world tickets that all the major airlines sell…and then figure out where you’d want to go. The tickets are usually good for a year of travel.”

“That sounds fine, too,” Ethan replied. “But that’s not what I have in mind. I don’t want to travel around the world, I want to live around the world. I want this to be, like, my career.”

“A career world traveler?” his confused father asked. “How would that work, exactly?”

“Well I would just live in one place for a while, then move on to the next place. That would be sick to say, ‘Yeah, I used to live in Viet Nam, but now I live in Brazil.’”

“True,” his father agreed. “But how would you support yourself?”

“I would just get a job wherever I was living,” Ethan explained. “Then when I moved to a new country, I would get a job there.”

“Ummm…okay,” his father replied, “but that just means that you would probably live in poverty all around the world. Because in most cases, you’d only be able to earn the local minimum wage, which would not support a very appealing lifestyle. You might be better off earning money here in the States, then traveling for a while. You could do that over and over again, at least for a while.”

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Ethan insisted. “I want to live around the world…as a career. I’ll figure it out.”

“Okay. Go for it, Eth.”

Usually, relocating to an overseas locale is the unintended result of a given career choice, not the objective. But Ethan’s plan turns the traditional relationship between cause and effect on its head.

 

The Progressive and Conservative Paradoxes

In my opinion, Charles Hugh Smith has nailed the hypocrisy of both so-called progressives and conservatives.

Education, etc.

Some worthwhile thoughts on education and innovation here.

Education excerpt:

- I've been getting more and more skeptical of education in general over the years. Most adults I run into seem to have basically a third grade education. They can read, if it's nothing complicated or subtle. They can write, if all you want is simple sentences and don't care about grammar or spelling. Forget about getting a coherent essay out of most people! And they can do basic arithmetic, although I'm not sure about long division.

The rest of their education, even for the college educated, is never used, so it's forgotten. None of the high school math or science or history is retained, from what I can tell.

So although going from uneducated 19th century to third-grade 20th century might be worth a lot, I'm not convinced that we've maxed out on education. I think the current school systems actually destroy the desire to learn for a high percentage of the population. They come out of school hating lectures, study and tests. They feel it's all been a complete waste. The average adult never reads for pleasure, and I assume, never reads anything non-fiction. Some percentage of the population is out there taking night classes, but I think the average person avoids classrooms for the rest of their lives.

Innovation excerpt:

What we need even more desperately than some new techno-wonder is institutional innovation. The Ratchet Effect (costs and payrolls go up without friction but only decline with great force) has caused the cost of the largest institutions such as "healthcare" and the Pentagon to skyrocket with little visible performance improvements. Medicare/Medicaid and the Pentagon spending alone are dooming the nation's finances to implosion.

The machinery of governance is still operating in the 1940s, if not the 1840s. Technology has made incremental improvements (i.e. electronic voting machines, heh) where it has the potential to revolutionize the machinery of government.

What we have is a bloated network of fiefdoms and cartels, all of whom are hoping that some new technology will enable their continued siphoning of the nation's wealth and income stream.