MyGiftedLife.org

Without applied ethics and intelligence, i.e. social justice, life is all too frequently nasty, brutish and short. Although many in the gifted community realize this at an early age, for millennia past, those who would stand for social justice have been forced to battle not only indifferent "natural disasters," but also indifference and socioeconomic evil at the hands of our own kind. But even in highly competitive, ruthlessly capitalistic societies, some realize that principles such as "May the better man win," and "Laissez faire," are insufficient (as well as inefficient) strategies for long-term survival of the social many.

[To be continued...]

There are times when being communal is more advantageous and other times when being a unique individual is advantageous. The trick is, to willingly, and without guilt, be able to modify your personality duty cycle to adapt temporarily to environmental circumstances if it is necessary for your survival, or for society's (depending on what's more at risk). You then identify what accommodations you need for your homebase personality to thrive again, and then to modify your environment to suit, which may, at the last resort mean relocation. Social withdrawal is self-imposed exile in order to avoid confrontation.

The ugliness of the current situation is that this last resort has been removed from our list of options: where in a fully-claimed world, can you relocate to? Homesteading is restricted to those who have the wherewithal to buy land, but it still has laws for the commons imposed on it.

Answer: the Internet (but only as a temporary measure while we still have physical bodies). Introverts are losing viable habitat. We are endangered by the overgrowth of an extroverted majority. It's nobody's fault, but it's a problem that must be resolved, because introverts, ironically, are the very architects of society and the Internet, being insubstantial, is no permanent solution.

I fear the only acceptable solution (assuming it can be found) for both introverts and extroverts will become permanent uploading of introverted minds to the Net. There's no tolerance in a physical world for the bodily maintenance of a funnel, except as a "controlable" servant. Machines are never 100% efficient - they all cost more to run than natural systems in the long run. Yet pulling the plug (the ultimate control over a machine) will end in their own demise as well. Better they should realize our interdependancy now and ante up for the cost of service which needs be paid in the appropriate currency of respect and care rather than coinage. But how do a few funnels explain this alien concept to the masses of cylinders under recessions or depressions when the material currency rules self-centred minds? This introversion issue isn't given explicit note in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps it should be, even if the document is nothing more than an insubstantial and unenforceable ideal.

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Communal behaviour strengthens the species by interlinking individuals. Individualistic behaviour strengthens the species by strengthening the individual links. Both are necessary. This is obvious to us, but not to the average person.

Society is engineered around the average, but to maximise conformity it operates at the lowest common denominator in most respects. Driving licenses do not require evidence of good driving, merely a minimum competency. Education provides a minimum standard. Work appraisals are satisfactory. The lowest common denominator makes itself evident.

Dabrowski had a note about where even the average might fall in terms of personality development and how society would follow it.

Dabrowski maintained that the more individuals on the borderline of the average person and neurotics/ psychoneurotics, the healthier the society and the better the chances that its most creative and developmentally advanced members will be recognized and appreciated for the universal human values they embody in their lives.
The more so-called ‘normal’ individuals bordering psychopathy, the greater possibilities of serious social maladies, since a society structured around low level values, represented most vividly in actions of prominent psychopaths, will create and foster “suffering, mass terror, violent oppression, genocide and the decay of civilization.” (Dabrowski et al. 1973, p.40)

Mika, E. Psychopathy and Average Person. 2002
www.positivedisintegration.com/Primary.htm


To my mind, we very much need a new frontier, so that society has room for individuals to operate at higher levels. It is the exceptional individuals that compensate for lowering the average to the LCD, and without a frontier those individuals cannot by society's rules be permitted room to be different. If they cannot be different, their growth will be suppressed and they will possibly be made mentally ill. Therefore instead of producing individuals who raise the curve, society will be producing stunted beings who can't perform at the average level because they've been beaten into the wrong shape.

Dabrowski's first paragraph leads me to believe he would agree with the idea of Optimal Intelligence.

The second paragraph speaks volumes to me when I consider the amount of delusion out there, the current unrest and general bad feelings. Arts media and videogaming inadvertently may be fostering that delusional tendency by artificially creating wants and raising the bar as to what one should feel entitled to.

Since Dabrowski believed the average person was still in primary integration, stuck between the psychopaths who will never disintegrate and the psychoneurotics who would reach multilevel disintegration, I think it's a bit of scientific fatalism. With a small degree of difference, the sheer numbers of the average could push the entire balance of society towards utopia or an apocalyptic horror. It's the individuals who determine the peaks and pits of society, but the average determines the overall direction. So if they're going to be in primary integration anyway, we'd better hope there are more borderline psychoneurotics among them than there are borderline psychopaths.

iconoclast wrote:
...we'd better hope there are more borderline psychoneurotics among them than there are borderline psychopaths.

In prosperous times, there tend to be more people with "good" intentions than those with "bad" ones, the funding is there to keep crime at bay and higher education going, and the neurotics have a little less to fear.

In troubled times, almost everyone is dragged down a notch or two on the morality scale, the police are overworked and underfunded, the jails get too expensive and criminals are pardoned, "soft" political issues like education and health experience funding cuts while "hard" political issues like military take what funding is available, men get angry, women get depressed, psychotics get put out to the streets for mental hospital cuts, and the neurotics seek psychiatric help, resulting in them being drugged into pseudonormalacy or incarcerated in hospitals, effectively rendering them useless. Of the psychoneurotics who choose to remain free and undrugged, some may reach a tipping point and go "postal." Psychopaths excel at manipulating people, including crowds. It only takes one in a crowd to set the whole to group think. Sports turn to violence and marginalized and disabled people become victims of bully behaviour as the proverbial "canaries in the coalmine" for the health of a civilization. Want to know where we are now? Watch for reductions in funding for "soft" issues and the mistreatment of obvious canaries, particularly homosexuals, animals, children, foreigners, and the blind in your area.

Humanity oscillates to avoid oblivion (no change = no life), like the girl:

There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.
~ a Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme

If we are to survive the downfall of our species, the last minute will require monumental feats of angelic heroism - the stuff that saints are made of, in order to push back the curtain call on ourselves.