Essential Personalities - On-line Preview

Andrew Kennedy

Essential Personalities -

and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents

A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents By Andrew Kennedy ISBN-13 978-0-9544831-4-2 copyright©2009Andrew Kennedy All rights reserved Andrew Kennedy has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Published by: Gravity Publishing, 2b Findon Road, London W12 9PP, England www.gravitypublishing.co.uk/ This book is sold under license and on the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be sold resold hired out lent copied stored reproduced transmitted or transferred in any other format form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the transferee and no portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission and acquiring a part or the whole in whatever form does not give any rights to the acquirer over it. Disclaimer: All internet site addresses and all document links to external content not under the control of the publisher and placed in this document are provided in good faith but neither the author nor publisher is responsible for any of the web site or document contents indicated by them. Cover design: Thomas Eagle Illustrations by the author Cover photo by the author depicts a 4:5, an 8:1, and an 8:6

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Table of Contents About the Author.......................................................................................................................5 About this book.........................................................................................6 Preamble about personality.......................................................................11 Imitating Steve McQueen.........................................................................16 Part 1.......................................................................................................28 How it all began........................................................................................28 Empathy.....................................................................................................................................31 Déjà vécu....................................................................................................................................35 Individuals..................................................................................................................................37 Doubles......................................................................................................................................41 The primacy of the individual.................................................................................................43 The TO8 - The Basics...............................................................................44 Sun movements and the daily rhythms of life.......................................................................47 Seasonal and daily rhythms.....................................................................................................49 The eight parameters and the four axes.................................................................................51 Merging the human and natural continuums........................................................................54 The Four Drives.......................................................................................................................................55 The drive for water: ................................................................................................................................55 The axis 4 - 8 (metaphorically The Taxonomist)..............................................................................56 The people of motion 4 --> 8.............................................................................................................57 The drive for or food:..............................................................................................................................58 The axis of 2 - 6 (metaphorically The Collector)..............................................................................59 The people of form 2 --> 6................................................................................................................60 The drive for shelter:..............................................................................................................................62 The axis of the landscape (metaphorically The Surveyor).............................................................63 The people of the landscape 1 <--> 5.................................................................................................65 The drive for expression .......................................................................................................................66 The axis of expression (metaphorically The Actor).........................................................................68 The people of expression 7 --> 3........................................................................................................69 The figure of eight..................................................................................................................................70

The TO8 Year............................................................................................................................71 Being born into the TO8 Year.................................................................................................73

The Major and Minor Cycles ................................................................................................................74 The Major............................................................................................................................................74 The Minor...........................................................................................................................................75 The interior and exterior minds............................................................................................................76 The Major and Minor 'currents'............................................................................................................78

Using the TO8..........................................................................................................................79 Why does the TO8 work?..........................................................................83 Imitation and narrative............................................................................................................83 The uniqueness of personality................................................................................................84 Defining personality.................................................................................................................86 Turning brains into personalities............................................................................................88 Language versus personality....................................................................................................89 Altruism ....................................................................................................................................92 Partner Attractiveness..............................................................................................................95 Survival and similarity..............................................................................................................96 Personality and the seasons.....................................................................................................98 The end of the beginning.........................................................................103

A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 3 Seeing the world in eights......................................................................................................103 What has astrology go to do with it all?..............................................................................107 Hemispheres and tropics.......................................................................................................110 Chronobiology and the circadian rhythms...........................................................................113 The Moon...............................................................................................................................................122

Part 2......................................................................................................131 The astronaut in the Landscape................................................................131 The best fisherman..................................................................................................................131 Heroes and heroines of the landscape..................................................................................137 The astronauts........................................................................................................................142 The sunset hero (type 5 in the TO8)....................................................................................................146 The dawn hero (type 1 in the TO8).....................................................................................................149

Tribe or gang?...........................................................................................................................151 The orthodoxy.........................................................................................................................155 The maverick...........................................................................................................................156 The right stuff..........................................................................................................................161 Monarch, dictator and president..............................................................165 A Monarch...............................................................................................................................165 The Dictator...........................................................................................................................169 Presidents................................................................................................................................170 The 42 US Presidents............................................................................................................................171

The Anatomy of Love..............................................................................176 Mating......................................................................................................................................177 Dating......................................................................................................................................184 Making children......................................................................................................................186 Love and monogamy...............................................................................................................193 Long life and grandparents...................................................................................................200 The grandparent syndrome...................................................................................................202 About the attraction of opposites........................................................................................206 Lovers, friends, rivals and allies...............................................................208 Friends.....................................................................................................................................209 Allies.........................................................................................................................................211 Lovers.......................................................................................................................................212 Rivals.........................................................................................................................................213 Community life.......................................................................................................................214 Who is a human anyway?..........................................................................221 Julia.......................................................................................................236 TO8 best partners table.........................................................................................................241 Part 3.....................................................................................................247 The personalities ...................................................................................247 To the reader,..........................................................................................................................247

Southern hemisphere.......................................................................................................................248 Changeovers and cusps.....................................................................................................................248 Births inside the tropics ..................................................................................................................249 Disclaimer:............................................................................................................................................249

Ones......................................................................................................250 The Minor One......................................................................................................................................253 Day 63 Major 1:Minor 7....................................................................................................................254 Day 64 Major 1:Minor 8 ..................................................................................................................255 Day 1 Major 1:Minor 1.......................................................................................................................257 Day 2 Major 1:Minor 2......................................................................................................................258 Day 3 Major 1:Minor 3 ....................................................................................................................259 Day 4 Major 1:Minor 4 ...................................................................................................................261 Day 5 Major 1:Minor 5......................................................................................................................262

A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 4 Day 6 Major 1:Minor 6.....................................................................................................................263

Twos......................................................................................................265 The Minor Two.....................................................................................................................................269 Day 7 Major 2:Minor 7......................................................................................................................271 Day 8 Major 2 Minor 8......................................................................................................................272 Day 9 Major 2:Minor 1 .....................................................................................................................274 Day 10 Major 2:Minor 2 ...................................................................................................................275 Day 11 Major 2:Minor 3 ...................................................................................................................276 Day 12 Major 2:Minor 4 ..................................................................................................................277 Day 13 Major 2:Minor 5 ..................................................................................................................279 Day 14 Major 2:Minor 6 .................................................................................................................280

Threes....................................................................................................282 The Minor Three...................................................................................................................................285 Day 15 Major 3:Minor 7....................................................................................................................286 Day 16 Major 3:Minor 8....................................................................................................................287 Day 17 Major 3:Minor 1.....................................................................................................................288 Day 18 Major 3:Minor 2....................................................................................................................290 Day 19 Major 3:Minor 3....................................................................................................................291 Day 20 Major 3:Minor 4...................................................................................................................292 Day 21 Major 3:Minor 5....................................................................................................................294 Day 22 Major 3:Minor 6....................................................................................................................295

Fours.....................................................................................................297 The Minor Four....................................................................................................................................300 Day 23 Major 4:Minor 7....................................................................................................................302 Day 24 Major 4:Minor 8...................................................................................................................303 Day 25 Major 4:Minor 1...................................................................................................................304 Day 26 Major 4:Minor 2...................................................................................................................306 Day 27 Major 4:Minor 3....................................................................................................................307 Day 28 Major 4:Minor 4...................................................................................................................308 Day 29 Major 4:Minor 5...................................................................................................................309 Day 30 Major 4:Minor 6....................................................................................................................311

Fives.......................................................................................................313 The Minor Five......................................................................................................................................316 Day 31 Major 5:Minor 7.....................................................................................................................317 Day 32 Major 5:Minor 8....................................................................................................................319 Day 33 Major 5:Minor 1 ..................................................................................................................320 Day 34 Major 5:Minor 2 .................................................................................................................322 Day 35 Major 5:Minor 3 ....................................................................................................................323 Day 36 Major 5:Minor 4....................................................................................................................324 Day 37 Major 5:Minor 5....................................................................................................................326 Day 38 Major 5:Minor 6 .......................................................................................................327

Sixes .....................................................................................................329 The Minor Six........................................................................................................................................333 Day 39 Major 6:Minor 7....................................................................................................................334 Day 40 Major 6:Minor 8...................................................................................................................336 Day 41 Major 6:Minor 1 .................................................................................................................337 Day 42 Major 6:Minor 2....................................................................................................................338 Day 43 Major 6:Minor 3....................................................................................................................339 Day 44 Major 6:Minor 4...................................................................................................................341 Day 45 Major 6:Minor 5 ...................................................................................................................342 Day 46 Major 6:Minor 6 ..................................................................................................................343

Sevens....................................................................................................345 The Minor Seven...................................................................................................................................348 Day 47 Major 7:Minor 7...................................................................................................................349 Day 48 Major 7:Minor 8...................................................................................................................350 Day 49 Major 7:Minor 1 ...................................................................................................................352 Day 50 Major 7:Minor 2 ...................................................................................................................353 Day 51 Major 7:Minor 3.....................................................................................................................354 Day 52 Major 7:Minor 4....................................................................................................................356 Day 53 Major 7:Minor 5.....................................................................................................................357

A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 5 Day 54 Major 7:Minor 6....................................................................................................................358

Eights....................................................................................................360 The Minor Eight...................................................................................................................................363 Day 55 Major 8:Minor 7 ..................................................................................................................365 Day 56 Major 8:Minor 8 ..................................................................................................................366 Day 57 Major 8:Minor 1 .................................................................................................................368 Day 58 Major 8:Minor 2 ..................................................................................................................370 Day 59 Major 8:Minor 3 ...................................................................................................................371 Day 60 Major 8:Minor 4 ..................................................................................................................372 Day 61 Major 8:Minor 5 ...................................................................................................................374 Day 62 Major 8:Minor 6 ..................................................................................................................375

Notes......................................................................................................377

About the Author Andrew Kennedy was born and educated in England, graduating from Edinburgh University with a B.Sc. He is married with a daughter and shares his time between a farm in the Pyrenees and Andalusia. He has worked in a variety of occupations and has travelled widely. He devised the personality theory he calls the TO8 in the 1980s. He holds a patent in a switching device, created the Taoism-inspired 3-D board game, The Game of Rat and Dragon and has published two books about Taoism, The Jade Suit, an epic poem about Chinese history, and Briefing Leaders, which contained new translations of two Chinese classics, I Ching, in which he analyses how the probabilities of the oracle affect its meanings, and Tao Tê Ching in which he incorporates the philosophy into a fictional account of Lao Tze's last days. He studied Traditional Chinese Medicine and graduated from the European School of Shiatsu as a practitioner. He maintains a shiatsu practice in Spain while he continues to consult on relationships problems. He writes regularly about science, complementary medicine and the human psyche.

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About this book This book establishes a method for looking at the human personality and presents a proof of the argument in the form of sixty four personality types. There are three parts to the book. The first part describes why I began the search for the human personality and how the method, the TO8, came about. The second part describes where my discoveries led, and in the third part, the reader will find a complete list of the personality types of the TO8 and a brief description of them. The method is a brand new way of looking at the human personality and how the monogamous mating that it implies has evolved, and with it, the reader will not only learn about himself or herself from the method, but also learn a new basis on which to judge one's likely friends, lovers, rivals and allies in life. Twenty-five years of experience using the method to examine problems in relationships have thrown new light on the mating partnership. So, I dedicate the book to a particular and rather maligned—in this day and age —social group namely, parents. While I was still puzzling over the mystery of why my system should work so well, an off-hand remark of the anthropologist, Igor de Garine, crystallised my thoughts. I had asked him, tactlessly, why he seemed happy at the thought of his brilliant young daughter wanting a child before an academic career. He shrugged and said, 'Having children is what we do'. In the hurly burly of economical, psychological, evolutionary psychological, neurological and genetic research into what makes human beings tick, we seem to have forgotten the fundamental fact about individuals: we have evolved to be parents. I didn't start out thinking about parents or even about monogamy. Originally, I invented a way of looking at personality to criticise the individual personality typing of traditional astrology. I could not easily explain why personalities described by both astrology and psychology systems and those that we find and enjoy in literature seemed so different and irreconcilable. Although my system, the TO8, was originally designed to ridicule astrological methods of looking at personality, it appeared to be successful in predicting human thoughts and attitudes. If the behaviour of people could be predicted reliably by the seasons, the question was clearly, how might that have come about? How can my method's sensible but arbitrary set of axioms about evolution and the seasons have such analytical and predictive

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power when it comes to human personality? When I pondered this question, I found myself inexorably drawn to the evolution of the parental bond. The TO8 is not an abstraction or even just a thought experiment. It produces empirical results that the reader can judge whether or not constitute evidence for the arguments. Many have thought so. Throughout the years of the 1990s, I used the system sporadically and privately, finding a relevance to human relations that was surprising. In the year 2000 I put up a perfunctory web site (theoryofeight.com) and signed on as an expert on a popular advice site and began to comment on relationships to anyone who asked using the TO8. In the years of using it successfully to help analyse people's personal problems, I have not needed to alter or reverse a single one of my original axioms. There is something true about the TO8, but how could that be? When we try to understand the puzzle of how our circumstances and self-image fit together we often fall into the arms of systems like astrology. This is curious since astrology is publicly derided at least as much as it is accepted around the world. Those who deride it generally criticise its 'success' as being due to self-selection: those who find it meaningful are already believers—the facts don't interest them. Studies have been done comparing astrologers' success in predicting an astrological type with rolling the dice. Astrologers have not done better than chance, yet people still believe astrology to work. One of the simplest experiments to explain why was made along the following lines. A lecture on astrology and its types was advertised to students. Afterwards, an astrology profile was sent to all those who attended as if it were their profile and asking them to say how like them it was. All the respondents thought the profile accurate. Only trouble was; it was the same profile for all of them. The experiment purports to show that astrology is whatever you believe it to be and is therefore false. It is difficult to explain the extraordinary connections between human behaviour and the solar year that I get with my system in quite the same way. I have never published any detailed descriptions of how I arrive at the TO8 types and no one knew how the system worked. I do not see my subjects face-to-face and I stress to them that I am not an astrologer and do not use traditional astrological techniques. So, what a subject considers valuable about what I tell them is not determined by preconceived notions or persuasion; they do not know what to expect and this makes them less ready to accept what I say and more judgemental.

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When I mistake a birth date or when a subject has given me incorrect information, the reaction is criticism. But when I have corrected the errors, their response changes: Ah, that's more like me, or Now I see what you mean. Something different and new is going on with the TO8, but what might that be? In what follows, I explain what I think is going on as well as giving readers a practical handbook on how to gain an insight into their own and other people's personalities from a birth date. I tell the story of my method from its beginnings in a series of dramatic dialogues following, informally, the classical method of introducing a new theory. By the end I hope the reader will not only be entertained by the puzzle of the TO8 personality type but also be informed about the repercussions for the parenting relationship. The system is a precise construction, built on a few axioms, easy to understand, completely transparent and accessible. With it, I have related the origins of these mysteries of personality to our home, the Earth, rather than to the heavens, and have explained them using ideas about evolution, rather than using the mysterious actions of planets and other heavenly bodies. I wanted to include the idea that some form of analysis based on natural cycles might be pertinent to who we are, and to provide a useful up-todate language for talking about ourselves and how we behave. In doing so, I found myself contemplating ideas about the purpose of human culture, the nature of love and parenthood, and speculating on the future style and tenor of the human personality that scientific progress is going to bring: changes that may be more radical than any evolutionary change up to now. I have tried to make the TO8 simple, direct and the very opposite of an impenetrable nest of metaphors and special pleadings that often characterises similar systems. What I suggest is quite testable, and the reader has in hands the very means to test it: the set of types I have discovered. Clumsy and infelicitous these brief descriptions may be but if they don't ring true then my arguments fail. A range of observations from our personal experiences might also test the basic thesis: observations like: • Marriages made from similar people (in TO8 terms) are more successful and productive than others. • People who live in the tropics may be experiencing twice as many yearly points of tension in their personalities than others. • People from the Northern hemisphere who move to the Southern hemisphere will have a greater sense of dislocation than those from the Southern who move to the north.

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• Social upheavals contribute to significantly rising birth rates. • Birth rates in the developed world should be rising after the recent period of liberalisation, whereas liberalisation periods in the developing world will cause a fall. • Fans are more likely to be in long standing relationships than not. Billions people around the world read behavioural predictions and character determinants about themselves described by some sort of astrology daily, and divination and horoscopes are big business in many countries, yet most 'educated' people—certainly in the western world—would never admit to believing that astrologers are right even though recent studies show that more than half Americans, Britons and French believe in the influence of the stars on human affairs, and that global corporations use astrology in their business and marketing policies (nor should we forget that at the end of the twentieth century the US President Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer regularly for guidance1). The popularisation of astrology has led it to be 'secularised' to some extent and has even led some astrologers to stand back from a strong causal element in their work by invoking ideas of synchronicity and underlying patterns of similarity. By following on from my first thoughts, however, my position has come to be stronger than most. Underlying the system I call the TO8 is the recognition that the seasons not only determine features of our temperament but coordinate our perceptions of personality, and thus our relationships and success in life. Biological researchers, though, are beginning to take an interest in the influence of the seasons and can show some daily and seasonal effects in the behaviour of immune and brain systems, though proving the influence of these cycles in human social behaviour has been more difficult. Even so, it has been shown that, for example, people born in the summer months appear to consider themselves luckier than average, while people born in the winter months appear to show increased schizophrenic tendencies. Light treatments help SAD sufferers, and other research appears to show that certain wavelengths of sunlight assist learning. Insomniacs suffer more in spring than in other seasons. There are definite statistical variations in mental and mood disorders due to the seasons. The results are vague and are poorly understood but point in the same direction that all readers of divination systems are looking: the seasons show us the limits to human individuality. By finding the limits, however, we can now begin to see why we have them. It is my view that the human personality is an evolved system, gener-

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al to all human beings, that blends qualities and characteristics, over and above the actions of specific traits, to a particular end—the making of the parental relationship. The expression of personality can be thought of as a relatively newly acquired 'language' of behaviour, and the TO8 is an attempt at explaining its syntax. The ancient Chinese analysed the mysteries of consciousness with similar tools, and dividing both the energies of Nature and our psychic 'spaces' into eight has a long history in Chinese thought. Even Chinese philosophy, however, has not been able to describe why this number works so well. Their reverence for a pre-determined balance in creation has led them away from finding evolution a crucial element to the making of the human mind. So I believe the themes behind the TO8 that I investigate in this book are both novel and provide us with the background to notions found in both the East and the West. To a western world raised on the notion that each one of us is not just a distinct individual but a unique one, the idea that the minds of both sexes are shaped by a federation of properties that we all share, and which is readily accessed, seems hard to accept. The TO8 looks not at what distinguishes individuals but at the foundations of the individual. It tries to explore the personality system common to us all, to see how it evolved, and to find where, for each person, the cultural and cognitive space in which we are embedded ends and the particular individual begins. It has nothing to say about luck, or upbringing, or the unpredictable events and forces that influence lives. It only examines the federation of properties that dwells more or less harmoniously in our consciousness and which influences the trends of our lives. The real function of the TO8 is to help you evaluate the personality cards you were dealt and to size up your fellow players. It cannot, in the end, tell you how to play those cards.

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A n d r e w K e n n e d y ~ E s s e n t i a l Pe r s o n a l i t i e s ~ 1 2 Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn !om the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. Douglas Adams

Imitating Steve McQueen I am always thrilled when I see a good mimicry of someone. I think to myself, 'Just how can they do that?' A person who looks nothing like someone else can still accurately convey another personality with a few deft gestures and expressions. I remember watching Sammy Davis Jr, who was short, moustachioed, of afro-American and Puerto Rican parents, and about as far from looking like anybody else as you can imagine, sit in a chair during a talk show and imitate the actor Steve McQueen. Sammy Davis became, for a second or two, the very man. A facial tick, a lift of the shoulders and for the briefest of moments Steve McQueen had replaced Sammy Davis Jr. How did he do it? By what means was he able to present an entirely different personality with just an expression, a look? And it wasn't simply that he looked liked Steve McQueen for me by appealing to just my personal set of perceptions. The whole audience was as amazed and amused as I. Sammy Davis Jr portrayed to the people around him the (presumably) complex personality of an entirely different person with some tiny gestures and movements. How? Theatre and (now) television are the arenas in which the mysteries of personality are played out endlessly before us. Imitation and deception are themes threading through all performance art. Actors say things and do things that have nothing, or very little, to do with the reality of who they are, while plots of both comedy and tragedy hinge on mistaken identity, mistaken and misjudged intentions. It seems curious that much of our artistic efforts are devoted to the difficulties of knowing people when one might expect that our evolutionary development would have kept us in close contact with and with the full knowledge of how we, as individuals of the human species, might behave. We should be able to read and understand each other naturally, yet we don't seem to. While our preoccupations with finding out who people are make the art of theatre and the skills of acting so absorbing and mysterious, they are found at all levels of culture. Not only do literature and art seek to understand why people behave the way they do, we are compelled to find humanlike reasons for everything we see. It lies behind our anthropomorphic de-

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sire to make gods of natural phenomena, to interpret curious events in terms of ghosts or beings from other planets. It is why we turn animals into pets. It defines our beliefs about life after death, whether in Heaven or as a re-incarnated soul on earth. Personality is central to advertising and public relations, and without it, politics and sport would be dry, dull affairs. We bestow personalities on inanimate objects and industrial conglomerates. We are enthusiastic fans of and are sometimes deeply committed to the intentions of star personalities we have never met, while we are open to the deceptions of confidence tricksters and salespeople that we meet face to face but whose intentions we cannot divine. Our desire to impose human characteristics on events tends to restrict the conclusions we draw about the world. We are, all of us, to some degree or other, affected by our continual need to understand events as if they are the product of or are related to something that human beings possess and cannot escape from—a personality. So what is this thing we call personality? We think of it as something that just happens because we have minds and brains. And the minds and brains of humans express themselves in this way2. As some psychologists tell the story, it is the consequences of deep mental activity that cause personality, making our personality something secondary, an after effect, of what is going on beneath our notice. It is, as Stephen Rose believes, an 'emergent property', unique to each brain3. But while psychologists talk about people having personality types, and like to group people by the ways in which they are statistically—and this is an important word4—likely to behave, there is little attempt to uncover why the idea of a personality type is even appealing to us beyond the suggestion that types merely represent category limitations in the brain. In spite of the various systems of personality typing currently in play, there are five dimensions to the human personality on which most psychologists seem to agree. They have been collectively given the acronym OCEAN: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion/introversion, antagonism/agreeableness, and neuroticism. An individual is rated according to his apparent score on each of these dimensions. These ratings are generally considered a reliable predictor of behaviour, which is to say; they are reliable predictors of how a person subsequently reacts to questionnaires. Does OCEAN, however, really help us understand real life situations? How, in fact, would OCEAN predict the self-centredness of a parent locking his or her toddlers in a room while he or she went out on the town? How would OCEAN answer this kind of question that I receive all

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the time from worried individuals: Hi, I need any help to find out why I am here on earth? Or this question: Hi, How do I find the right partner and live a normal life? These kinds of concerns are central to our conduct and yet to where on the five dimensions of OCEAN could these concerns be mapped? A number of questions spring to mind that help us try and grasp what this problem of personality is all about. In everyday life, we don't use OCEAN, so how do we read someone's personality? Do we just guess what someone is going to be like based on clues that person gives us? If so, what determines the range of our guesses—past experience? How much experience of different types of people would we have to have to be able to guess with reasonable accuracy what a new person might be like? Does success in reading people depend upon the number of people that we have already met? Would people who had lived all their lives within small families or groups of people be able to understand a new person for whom they had not seen a model? What could the result of a guess actually be? Do we compare someone with ourselves and see how far he or she departs from what we are like? But what are we like and what meaningful form of knowledge do these 'departures' take? Do we estimate what someone is going to do in a situation only when we need to, and not bother to make any kind of behavioural prediction in advance? And what about the often-disturbing fact that different members of someone's peer group can have radically different opinions about him or her, or that someone's behaviour can depend upon whom he or she is with. Personality typing should consider this, but it doesn't. These questions highlight the main problem for theories about our awareness of others and what that implies for our behaviour—the 'empathy problem'. Getting to know someone is a complex process. How can merely observing individuals lead us to understand them? How do we come to an understanding of what is going on not just in our own heads but also in other people's heads? Commentators have assumed that the 'mind-reading' ability arose in human development and gave Man the impetus to develop his complex social structures. As brain mass increased, we got to understand more people, hence allowing social complexity to increase. Others suggest something more complicated: that we became aware of ourselves precisely because we had to be aware of others in an already complex society. The difficulty with these ideas is the computing power required. If one does not accept that individuals fall into sets and believe that they are truly different from one another then the computing power needed to model

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each one's mind, cross-referring to the others, rises fantastically quickly. We simply cannot create fresh theories about people we meet; there are not enough molecules in the Universe to make a brain big enough. So the limitations of brain power might be responsible for our perceptions of the 'types' of individuals we see. Here's Steven Johnson in his book Emergence, 'The brain didn't need to invent any complicated new routines once it figured out how to read a single mind – it just needed to devote more processing power. The power came in the form of brain mass: more neurons to model the behavior of other brains, which themselves contained more neurons, for the same reason. It's a classic case of positive feedback; only it seems to have run into a ceiling of 150 people (author's italics), according to latest anthropological studies. We have a natural gift for building theories of mind as long as there aren't too many of them.' 5

Johnson suggests that we can't distinguish between more than 150 'types' and that 150 people represent an ideal community size (unless those 150 are the same type). In fact it can be better argued that boundaries are necessary for our cognitive awareness and that far from being the result of a failure of capacity, our limited range of types is designed purposefully to extract the maximum amount of usefulness from them. (We will see later how this idea makes better sense.) If individuality really exists, however, then variations in individuals are not limited, and we should always be surprised by new varieties that we hadn't experienced. The computing problem has not been solved even though the modelling of others' behaviour may explain how understanding people can be a relatively quick business; for there's no doubt we do make superficial estimates of what people are like at first meeting and sometimes within a few seconds6. But how do we account for non-superficial reactions like the intense experience of love at first sight? Even if we haven't experienced that particular feeling, most of us have experienced the sensation of meeting someone who becomes an immediate friend. Writers have referred to this sensation as a meeting of 'old souls'—friends from a past life. Does this confirm our ability to read minds? If we do have a number of personality models already programmed into our minds against which we measure people, could it be that when we find someone who fits one of them, our hearts leap? Are we always measuring new people like this? And what are we doing with people we already know, people we have already measured, when we meet them again after 'life' has changed their attitudes and altered their horizons? What could modelling people's behaviour in our heads actually mean? In the real world, we can't analyse people because we can't test them. We can't take someone we have just met into a laboratory and make them fill out standardized tests. (There's a lot to say about these tests, a whole book

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on its own. They have their drawbacks, one of which is circularity. If there are only 4 boxes to tick and you tick one, then I guess you immediately fall into one of four types7.) We can't standardize conditions in a cocktail party and check repeated responses (although many cocktail parties often seem like the same one repeated). We cannot set up control groups in a bus queue as a standard against which we can measure the stranger we are talking to. What do we do when we try to 'read' a person's potential for expression and capacity of thought and style of action? It is a conundrum. This conundrum of personality has found fresh expression in popular culture. Look at what television is currently (these years of the new millennium) preoccupied with: show after show about strangers amongst us. These are soaps with a difference. We see ordinary people, ordinary societies beset by vampires, aliens, super beings and monsters in disguise. The problem for our ordinary heroes is no longer how to get the fortune and marry well; the goal is to discover who is a human and who isn't. The enemies of the state look normal, have got the look of being human down, but they are a real threat to genuine humanity. These television fictions go beyond the Clarke Kent/Superman fantasy (given a new spin in the Harry Potter sagas), where the super-being hides his or her real capabilities simply by pretending to be someone who lacks them. It used to be a very common plot in popular entertainment. Nowadays, the television shows are depicting tales of vaster conspiracies of deception. The vampires, aliens, lizards and all the rest are trying to force themselves inside the 'skin' of humans and to become like them. We see the problem from the human side of things and it's two-sided. How do you recognise a true person from a monster and how do you let others know that you are a true person and not a monster? So, what are people really like? Once more, Television is giving us the chance, now, to think about this question more deeply. We are able to conduct our own experiments on personality with real subjects. Reality-TV shows like Big Brother and Survivor are peepholes into the secrets of personality. We, as the audience, are invited to assess each player in the closed situation created by the television companies and vote from time to time on the one we would like to see excluded from the group, the one we don't like8. These shows are just personality tests, but the key is they are about ordinary people which is to say, people who are not, in the beginning, trying to present a false account of themselves. There are 'star' versions of course, but these appear to be less popular.

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Television is right now (in the beginnings of the 21st century) conducting a love affair with ordinary people and ordinary backgrounds as if the studiocreated star personality of the past no longer serves any function in our lives. What we like to see is the ordinary person unchanged by their modest talents, remaining true to themselves and to their origins, and by doing so, throw into sharp relief the manufactured and false personalities that bear little relation to the world we know. So why should the opportunity to size up strangers on a television show be so popular? It is because sizing people up is, in its crudest evolutionary form, how we further our genes in future generations; it is how we form relationships and make and bring up our children. So how are the humans of today coping with this propensity? Not well, by many accounts. Humans seem to be having great difficulty in knowing how to make and sustain relationships. Not only do at least as many first marriages fall apart as last9, more and more re-marriages fail10. The relative ease with which people can now live together mirrors the ease with which they separate. At the same time, the desire to have children in liberal societies has been falling dramatically. The two seem to be connected, but how? The mystery of falling birth rates in developing countries follows the liberalisation pattern more than rising prosperity. The more people are able to choose to have children within their relationships, the less they choose them. The more they have a second chance at making relationships, the more they try. Relationships are taking up more and more of our time and yet are less and less productive. What can this mean? Even more curious is the emergence, in the western world at least, of the phenomenon of the militant non-parent11. What can it possibly mean in evolutionary terms to have a personality that firmly refuses to have children and rejects the pressure from others in society to have them? Of course, single childless people can have a useful role in society as carers and standins for others. But there are, no doubt, as many childless and single meanspirited, frustrated and despairing individuals who disrupt society, as there are childless and selfless educators, administrators, disinterested politicians and reformers who help it along. Not wanting children means something but what can it be? Modern cultural biases would even have us believe that the biological connection between parent and child is irrelevant, and that the children can be successfully brought up by anybody. The implicit idea is that the parental relationship is as negative to its children as positive12. That this idea is not true is irrelevant13. It is novel, and has been introduced to serve the in-

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terests of people who cannot understand their relationships and the nature of parenthood and who need somehow to be free of any of the constraints that such a relationship might impose. We are afraid of the profound meaning of parenthood and we no longer understand quite what it could mean for our lives. There is a persistent belief, too, that human beings are selfish: that we are driven by the need to satisfy our own desires and to heck with anybody else—even our own children. This belief is belied by the fact that research into markets14 has ended up with the realisation that individuals don't actually know enough about what their needs are to act in a truly selfish manner. We are hopeless at calculating what seem to be our best interests and intuitively take apparently wrong options all the time15. Not only that, many studies show people acting far more generously than they should, given their self-interest16. Why is this? It is, I suggest, because we are not cold calculating scientists considering only abstract numbers, we look for the person behind the data, the relationship behind the act. Even in this modern age, what are called pseudoscientific beliefs or borderline belief systems are, apparently, on the rise. Human beings continue to believe in the existence of paranormal entities and explanations, and continue to fall for the same old frauds exploiting these beliefs. Why should this be? Does the person in the street actually know more about the truth of the world than a sceptical scientist? No. It is surely that ordinary people are making judgements and constructing beliefs on different criteria. They are using information about human personality to judge and predict the meaning of the information they receive. What do you get when you deliberately take human personality out of the picture? You get 'science'. Questions of personality are a force in our culture. Aside from Art, the other major arena in which personality dominates is consumerism. But modern consumerism is not about materialism per se; it also has a rather more esoteric function. Consumers acquire specific things for a purpose other than their nominal function, and consequently producers try and sell things to include this extra dimension. Society has named the trappings of our success and the scope of our leisure as a lifestyle, and we, as consumers, are now absorbed in the quest for lifestyle to define ourselves as human beings. Long ago, I went to live in a remote valley among mountains. I was constantly applauded for having found a perfect lifestyle: clean, rural, and autonomous. Friends referred to the way I lived as a 'great lifestyle',

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reckoned I had it 'sussed' and wished they could do the same. In fact, few, if any, of the people I know could actually have lived the way I chose to. The truth is I have this 'lifestyle' because I am me, not because I picked this lifestyle out of a shop window. My friends have the idea that all there is to my lifestyle is finding a remote house in the mountains and moving into it. They don't seem to think that who they are matters. Lifestyle and personality: this is where we become confused. The reading of who a person is has become crucially enmeshed in what that person has. Capitalism has long made use of this confusion, and producers sell products by connecting them to personalities. Why? Why does it help the sale of products to associate them with popular athletes, beautiful models or successful actors? Product endorsement has little to do with explaining quite what is the best about an item (endorsers often do not have the skills, training or know-how associated specifically with the product they endorse17) or getting consumers to associate with winners (although there is something of that in it); it's about getting across the idea that you can have a winning or attractive personality without having to go through the messy business of winning or being attractive first. Buying a sponsored product helps you be the attractive person who is sponsoring it. If you buy Arnold Palmer's golf clubs you won't just play better golf, you will become a little like Arnold Palmer himself. It's a delightful fact that many outstanding winners and achievers have tried and failed to make good product endorsers in spite of their successes: their personalities have just not come across as attractive enough. On the other hand, people who have done nothing at all in life can still endorse products and generate interest in their activities if they can somehow be presented as attractive people with whom the general consumer can relate. (I'm thinking here of say, Paris Hilton.) This association of human personality with the content of objects, the paraphernalia of life, pervades our culture. But it isn't a modern phenomenon. Objects have always been totems for us. When my friends tell me they want my lifestyle, they are saying, in effect, that they want to be like me. It's the same process of identification found in rituals the world over. When the high priest puts on the bear skin, the tiger skin, the vestments of the gods, or even when a citizen puts on a uniform, dresses for carnival or even buys a set of Arnold Palmer's golf clubs, he or she is trying to acquire the personality of the creature or the spirit he or she admires, don the mantle of a greater personality. The person is trying to acquire different capabilities, or at least present himself or herself as someone who can access these capabilities. For a moment perhaps, the warrior wearing a tiger skin may

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become a tiger and find within himself the spirit and the cunning of the animal to use in battle. In practice, such efforts, even in the modern consumerist world, are short-lived: if it were that easy to acquire different personality characteristics, there would be no problem in making the relationships of our desires. These tactics are, for the most part, a deception. They confuse the issue rather than solve it. Another confusion is the widely marketed belief that men and women have profoundly different personalities. Much research shows they occupy slightly different ranges of similar abilities but such that it's impossible to predict which sex is which from looking at the performance figures alone. A raft of books have appeared in recent years describing the differing behaviours and traits of the sexes that underline this belief 18, John Gray's, Men are "om Mars and Women are "om Venus is one of the early ones laying out the problem territory of relating for the rest. At the heart of all these books is the struggle to make us believe that human relationships don't just fall apart; they are hardly possible in the first place. Men and women are not suited to each other, and, to get a mate, a woman requires sophisticated tactical knowledge of men's psychological weaknesses and cultural dominance. The fatuousness of such an analysis doesn't lessen the popularity of these books, even though it must be clear that if men and women were not two halves of a single strategy humans would die out pretty quickly. We don't only mate, we also bring up our offspring within a community, something which the sex-biased strategies for dating and mating of these books hardly touch upon. Nor do the dubious sociobiological discussions help us understand the formation of life-long friendships, or the love of a grandparent, or why geniuses can be stimulating but not lovable, or why dullards can be lovable but not stimulating, or what determines the choices of liars who don't lie all the time, or of misanthropes who actually like some people. Sex-biased traits do not clearly explain how we are in the full experience of the person nor do they seem to determine who we decide to like or to whom we will commit ourselves. It is clear, however, and as the picture built up from the TO8 shows, men and women, although they have sex-related biases in some areas of activity and cognition, actually share the same human personality structure, and that all the difficulties we have in using it to further our happiness is best understood by considering it in terms of a shared mechanism. Much of our social existence is spent struggling with the problems of expressing and reading the mechanism of personality19 that has arisen through evolution in order to help us further our genes, while the cultural tools to

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hand are confusing our path to success. Our artistic efforts are directed at finding solutions to the conundrum of perceiving personality, and which allow us to rehearse and refine our apparent empathic understanding of people, while a great deal of our economic behaviour runs against these efforts by allowing us to dominate and to deceive in ways unavailable in the past aeons in which Modern Man arose. Personality has become a trap for the unwary as well as a route to success and fulfilment. The most recent experiences humans have had in trying to make meaningful connections with each other using the Internet serves to underline the traps that still exist. The great hopes many had for social networking have proved just as disappointing as exciting. Certainly it can unite and even animate dispersed individuals with common aims, but web sites that exploit our innate desire for social kinship by facilitating interpersonal communications hardly escape the same old playground obsessions we experienced as children20. They readily provide outlets for the inexperienced, the obsessive and the liar to make their presence felt through abuse and misinformation21 and rather than deepen and enhance a relationship, they tend to intensify belonging22 at the expense of private spaces where conscience and character can grow. Even sites such as Friendster.com that 'vet' contacts by displaying who also links to them is much less successful at allowing strangers to become one's friends than providing a quick way to 'surf ' what your friends are thinking or where they are going in the evening. People have hopes that the Twitter fad will grow from a game of social 'tag' to a form of social 'brain' and guardian of people power, forgetting that it's owners need to make money out of the system to pay back the $55 million it raised to create it. The picture and video posting web sites like, Facebook, and YouTube successfully provide worldwide reportage and the ability to share and comment upon the mundane details of one's life with hundreds of others at the press of a button, but there is no evidence that they have made people get to know each other better. In fact, it is hard to escape the feeling that all these sites will simply target advertisements to people's preferences (the same way the on-line bookseller Amazon.com keeps track of what you bought on their site and brings you news of what other people who bought the same book also bought). They have yet to prove themselves as genuine relationship facilitators. While these tools may well be a useful counterbalance of social power for the ordinary person at street level, I do not think the situation will stay that way. At the moment, instant news is fun—a kind of social ticker-tape —but these tools are promoting the sensations of 'discovery' and the youth-

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ful desire to be present at whatever is going on hoping we will all get too hooked to realise that their purposes are rooted in commerce and the market and little to do with expressing the range of what is stable and what is possible in the social reality we immerse ourselves in. Even as I write, the social networks have been hi-jacked by commercial interests who use them to convey not just opinions and information but also manufactured gossip, rumour and 'buzz' to market their wares to the unsuspecting 23. Outside of the professionally written blogs (or ghosted 'tweats' on the Twitter system) designed to leak details of products or to emphasise commercial or political viewpoints, a trawl through blogs and chat sites shows that almost all the general public's output of opinion is banal and often very unappetising24. Individuals are beginning to bypass the propaganda in any event, preferring to establish a virtual reality presence in artificial worlds and spend real money (it's hard to believe this) trying out different versions of themselves in role playing with similarly created 'avatars', vividly expressing the search for another reality to human interaction. The practical consequences of my proposals are to illuminate this key area of our lives—the making of relationships. It is clear that humans employ methods of forming kinship-like relationships outside of our genetic dispositions to family kinship. We can readily hate our gene-related families and yet love the tribe or commit to strangers quite unrelated to us. Parents can dislike one of their offspring while preferring the others. They can often be mean to their own children while they delight in other people's children. Children prefer their friends to their siblings. We are often mean and unsympathetic to our brothers and sisters while at the same time sacrifice our lives to individuals and causes that have no genetic bias in our direction. We form friends, link up with partners and find fulfilment in work in ways that are not predicted or accounted for by our intellectual abilities or physical talents. How are these community effects explained either by traditional genetic calculation or by cultural methods of characterising personality? The cooperative eclecticism of our society, extended over time and space, is something of a puzzle to evolutionary biologists, and while few modern researchers have moved in this direction, I find myself admiring the attempts of an earlier Russian philosopher, Kropotkin, to explain it. Kropotkin tried to show that some forms of 'society', animal or human, express something collective outside of that produced by the survival-of-thefittest view of evolution. Kropotkin, a Russian prince, was also a geologist and contributed to scientific knowledge. Yet, he was taken by the need to

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find a new political direction. He renounced his title and his possessions and became a writer and thinker for the anarchist cause. He published in 1902, Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, in which he described hundreds of examples of co-operation in the animal kingdom in which mutual aid (as distinct from biological altruism or even reciprocal altruism) was the rule rather than the exception. He extrapolated from them to the human condition and tried to describe a genetic basis for co-operation, although he lacked a true understanding of any mechanism by which this co-operative impulse might be programmed into human existence. Kropotkin had a democratic political agenda and was trying to out-manoeuvre basic Darwinian selection which many philosophers used to prove that poverty and privilege were programmed into human beings through the survival of the fittest. My system of personality typing has also given me an insight into the human collective. But it is not driven by any political attitude or belief, and Darwinian selection lies at the heart of my argument. If I am right, however, then this understanding of relationships does have political repercussions. Individuals who are free to find their best partner, and who are free to love, reproduce and raise their offspring in the light of the mechanisms outlined in this book are likely to make a society more enlightened, resilient, charitable and democratic than those who are not. It is not a new idea, although my discoveries only serve to strengthen it. It is present, for example, in George Orwell's remarkable 1984, where he describes how the only antidote to perverse political theorists and tyrants is the force of natural love. Lao Tze, a Chinese philosopher of the 6th century BC (by tradition) also remarked, at a time when tyrant philosophies were gaining ground, that it is the happy relations in a family that lead to the perfect State. Gaining a correct view of the people with whom we have contact ends up being a political force, and forming a life-long loving partnership is a political act. It is an intriguing irony of the Reality TV age, that a program designed to reveal diverse individuals in their natural state forming relationships with each under the full gaze of the public should be named after Orwell's nightmare tyrant who mercilessly quashed all semblance of individuality and love—Big Brother.