Personality Cultures
August 27, 2021
By AHNZ
Personality Cultures (ie Victimhood Culture and Honour Culture) are cognitively wired to perceive problems in the world in terms of social hierarchy. For at least half the time in New Zealand history such people as these are the mainstream.
For example, for Victimhood Culture, concepts like ‘race’ and ‘colonise’ and ‘apartheid’ can only be apprehended as a function of what one group does to another group. All is Identitarian. Everything has meaning only within the personal/social space.
The philosophy of this is Social Constructivism. Also explains how archetypical women think. If there’s a problem then the man wants to solve it but the woman is vexed- she just wanted to talk about the feelings and balance out the social calculus.
Personality Cultures are dedicated to taking everything personally, it’s always about them and reflects on their standing in their social hierarchy. Female hypergamy and male dominance hierarchies – two sides of the same coin, the Personality Culture coin. For example, they are hyper-sensitive to sight and ready to stoop to revenge to make sure their social standing is in credit.
It follows that, for Personality Cultures, what matters is Feels over Reals. What matters is not the content of an idea but the identity of the person speaking. So Identitarian are they that in order to figure out if something qualifies as apartheid or colonial or racist they first need to know the identity affiliations of those involved. They care for the personality, not the act. Reality is not Objective but ‘situated in social reality’. Ref. Derivation of Moral Cultures, AHNZ (2021)
A member of a Personality Culture feels persecuted if they are contradicted. After all, if they are correcting or contradicting someone else then they most certainly are doing that. They also associate an apology with surrender, with submission. It’s very easy for someone of Institutional Culture (the complimentary, opposite, way of perceiving problems) and someone of Personality Culture to talk past one another because they use the same words to mean very different concepts. This doesn’t mean that Institutional Culture folk should surrender institutions like the apology or constructive criticism to appease the Personality Culture. What it means, for example is that an IC should never apologise to a PC because it will only be recognised as a form of submission.
Common thing between Honour Culture and Victimhood Culture
Both HC and VC try to manipulate other people to get their way.
The VC says- “Do as I say or you’ll upset me. I’m offended. You’ll hurt me.”
The HC says- “Do as I say or I’ll upset you. I’ll offend you. I’ll hurt you.”
Both get their needs met through threats or acts of harm. The distinction is that, of course, one relies upon abstract hypotheticals and the other relies upon concrete in-your-face existential harm.
I realised this when I saw an advert for a cop show. Policeman was saying something like..
“You’re making me jumpy. When I get jumpy I don’t know WHAT I might do!” ie a threat that he might go nuclear and pull his gun and unleash some police brutality on the person he pulled over
I didn’t realise this earlier in life when I always sought to convince others with reason and evidence. Only Institutional Culture folk respond to facts and principles and it doesn’t matter how much you learn or how well you present your arguments to someone who sees everything as plays in dominance and submission. Due to the Fallacy of Consensus, everyone tends to assume others think about the world the same way as themselves. It turns out that you can’t reason someone out of something they were never reasoned into in the first place.
Eg. Years back I once work a cruise ship and our team was unloading luggage. There was no leadership and the corridors became a crazy jumble of many bodies and bags colliding or brushing up coming to a stop short of colliding with one another. I reasoned that I couldn’t spare myself from the blame I felt toward this jumble of silly people unless I behaved differently to them. In my big voice I said, “We are crashing into each other. Everybody keep to the left side, whichever way you’re coming or going!” This improved the problem a bit but not entirely because one of my peers, a Maori girl, used her own big voice to say “Don’t tell us what to do. You’re *not* the boss!”
I didn’t think I needed any hierarchical status to share a good idea or that doing so was telling anybody what to do. Common Sense, I thought, was its own recommendation. Within certain groups, Institutional Culture groups, that is true but they’re an endangered species in the current era. To Personality Culture it’s not what you know but who you know, or who you are, that counts. They are not thinkers per se, they are proxy thinkers. Followers. Slogans, jingles, computers, lab coats, special effects, makeup, fashion clothing and cars recommend to them what’s truthy and what’s not.
“In traditional Maori thought survivors from calamities were not seen as fortunate, inasmuch as they were considered to be tragic figures in themselves. In all cases of Ngai Tahu traditions that tell of survivors from failed campaigns returning to their kin, the lives of the survivors are endangered by the host people.” Te Maire Tau (2011); 1834: The Harriet Affair, AHNZ
“It’s the epistemology of Personality Cultures (Honour Culture and Victimhood Culture.) There is no clear abstract understanding of what makes things work. Money, technology, culture, productivity, achievement…they’re considered to be wished into or out of existence rather than built accomplishments.” – Cargo Cult, NZB3
Some people are so deep into Personality Culture they think what happens to them is a matter of their own personal luck. As such, old time Maoris who perceived that someone’s luck had run out were fair game for pillaging. It’s easy to see how superstition is born of such thinking. If someone thinks human can make it ran or improve a harvest or bring earthquakes they will be willing to perform all sorts of non-empirical rituals, even human sacrifice, to influence the desired results.
Mix-And-Match-Barbie
In our own day the major Personality Culture fallacy is one I call Mix-And-Match-Barbie. Also known as a Cargo Cult. The Personality Culture observes there are big gaps between rich and poor and ‘reasons’ that closing the gaps will involve taking stuff from one group and giving it to the other. Anyone can be a fairy tale princess Barbie doll, all they need is the right accessories..right?
So, facilitated by opportunistic Closing the Gaps politicians the Personality Culture masses start taking from the rich and giving to the poor. They see Intelligent Barbie has a university degree so they use tax and debt to educate the unintelligent. They see good Student Barbie has good grades so they abolish grades and hand out participation certificates to everybody. They see Rich Barbie has shoes and school lunches so they give shoes, lunches, and school milk to the poor kids (who simply refuse to wear the shoes or consume the lunches anyway because it’s unfashionable.) They see rich people have houses so they create State Houses in competition with the marketplace and give the houses to Homeless Barbie. They see that Rich Barbie takes holidays so they create more public holidays. They see that Rich Barbie is paid more so they raise the minimum wage to help poor Barbie. They see that Mother Barbie has a husband earning money so they give Solo-Mother Barbie a Domestic Purposes Benefit. They see that Rich Barbie has doctors and dentists so they socialise those things and give them to poor Barbie. Insurance, libraries, transport, gambling, mail, hotels, old age pensions,…it’s endless. Government grows by playing along with the Personality Culture’s fallacy that it can redistribute its way to prosperity. The politicians know it’s rubbish but in serving these idiots they become powerful and wealthy so why not?
The rich do not pay tax. They have the lawyers, accountants, and trust funds to ensure it. So all these endless Mix-And-Match dress-up designed to “close the gaps” actually come at the cost of the Middle Class. In other words, they make New Zealand more polarised between rich and poor. The gap is widened more than ever.
Anyone whose dominant affiliation is to Institutional Culture can be forgiven for being aghast to realise the disasters we bring upon ourselves by having Personality Culture folk in our society. Yet the problem is not that we have them in our midst at all but that we are out of equilibrium. Personality Culture folk are a valuable part of society who are not going anywhere. We don’t have to put them in charge of our homes or workplaces or our governments though.
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Cross posted from NZB3 (2019)
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