Society Is A Rowboat

ESSAY

Studying personality psychology is as useful as it is annoying. It’s useful because it allows you to realize that people actually differ in how they view and experience the world. It’s annoying because it requires you to reconsider that the chatty Kathies of the world who claim to enjoy horrid things like corporate Christmas parties and small talk aren't full of shit. Somehow, in a way that I can never fully understand, the Kathies are telling the truth.

That’s because the world manifests itself differently for people with different personalities—same world, different worldviews. To an extrovert, it's a place of social opportunity and novel experiences. To a disagreeable person, it's a place to compete for what you want. Creative people see it as a place to make new things, even if it requires breaking the old ones. Conservative people disagree, seeing it as a place to maintain what we’ve been given. All of them are right—some of the time.

It seems to me that a functioning community is built of opposing personalities. Introverts oppose extroverts. Creatives square off with conservatives. Optimists have pessimists. Leaders have followers—and so on. However, instead of this oppositional nature justifying endless in-fighting and calamity though, it can have a balancing effect on society as a whole. The problem is when it becomes imbalanced.

SOCIETY AS A ROWBOAT:

Human beings are both individually conscious and social creatures, which means we exist at two levels simultaneously. We are singular entities, completely separate from other people, as well as members of a community. As a result of this, we have to learn to cycle between the individual and the collective—something that we rarely do well. More often, we find ourselves pegging the needle to either extreme. It can take decades for a person to learn to how do this well. It takes a community longer still but how long does a society take to get the balance right? Centuries? Millennia? A better question might be how long does it take for a society that has by some miracle managed to balance the individual and the collective to devolve into something akin to a dysfunctional rowboat—the crew working against one another, lacking a shared destination, and destined to sink?