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Monday, March 8, 2010

Personalities are Genetic:

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-anatomy-of-melancholy/

An interesting article up at alternative right reveals that essentially all important personality traits are over 50% inherited. That is, determined at birth, with no choice for the people who live them. Therefore, it is unconscionable to hold these traits against people, or the behavior that derives from it.

The five personality types and their levels of heritability are:
Openness: 57%
Conscientiousness: 49%
Extroversion: 54%
Agreeableness: 42%
Neuroticism: 48%

Obviously, all of these traits evolved because they had some use for a human being to have. Under various circumstances, any of these traits is the one natural or sexual selection selects for. If these traits had no value, they'd have been weeded out of the gene pool long ago. One of the problems with evolution is it is constantly gambling, however. For instance, if you have one copy of a gene, it gives you a perfect level of neuroticism that has high survival value, but if you get a copy from both parents you go insane. Blaming people who get the short end of the stick in these genetic roulettes instead of evolution itself is stupid. Everyone who ends up with bad personalities is like a casualty in war. They died that you might live and prosper. IE, they soaked up all the bad gene combinations while you were just lucky enough to get the good ones -- the ability for you to inherit good gene combinations required that these bad gene combinations existed all around you. For people to stomp on and demean the very people who made their lives possible is all the more monstrous.

Simply for the service these people provided of soaking up the bad gene combinations, they should be honored and taken care of as though they were normal.

But that's not all. Each of these gene combinations is better or worse given the current environment. Who's to say any of these personality combinations is actually objectively worse than any other? It could be that people aren't insane, instead the world is in which they live. How do you take into account a just accounting of someone's worth when they are born in to a world only ideally suited for one suite of personality traits, that is kept forcibly in place by that very clique of personality trait holders? Why must people live under law codes, under economies, under systems designed for one set of personality traits and not another -- more suited to their own? After all, for every personality there is an environment perfect for it to thrive. But the legal hold countries have over all habitable territory makes it impossible for people with alternate personality types to construct law codes and moral systems more suited for them, where they can live among each other free of the overlord-ship of separate personality profiles.

Only by abolishing all nations that exist today and reforming political boundaries to the consent of the governed, ie a complete unanimous agreement on how a society will be run and every law in it, can people really be called 'winners' or 'losers.' Until then there are just 'rulers' and 'ruled.' 'Free men' and 'slaves.' Obviously someone will lose in a competition of extroversion if they inherited less extroversion than another. It's like calling a shorter person a loser, or a person with blue eyes a loser simply because society only rewards tall people or those with brown eyes. Any arbitrary personality type can be elevated over any other, if the system is set up in a way that rewards said type. And any group can become a winner, or a loser, based on personalities they cannot change and have no choice in being. Suppose an inherently non-extroverted person tries his best and becomes twice as extroverted as he would normally be. What does it matter? A person with inherited genes for extroversion could also try hard, and end up even more extroverted. Therefore there is no way for a non-extrovert to ever make up the lost ground. Telling people to just overcome their weaknesses is meaningless. No matter how hard they try, others can still rise above them due to how much easier their path is.

If you are not willing to let non-extroverts live in a society designed for non-extroverts -- for instance a place where hiring isn't determined by interview skills and people skills, but test scores and work that doesn't rely on human interaction -- then you must take responsibility for the fact that non-extroverts will never fit in to an extrovert society. Instead of calling them losers, isn't it more appropriate to call them hostages? Hostages to a society they never wanted to be in, never fit into, and can never succeed in, no matter how qualified they are in other areas. Due to this, proper honor should be paid to people who don't succeed in life due to their genetic personality profile, and a minimum standard of living should be paid to them as a continuous redress for the just grievance they have against society -- ie the laws are not suited for them but instead someone else, but they have no escape from said laws. The citizen's dividend is the answer to all social injustice. Either mirror republics or a citizen's dividend plus a respectful attitude towards people who don't fit in to the tyranny of the majority. There are no just alternatives.

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