From Diversities of Personality to Diversities of Ethnicity

Growth of Ethnicities

Not much of what I wrote in the last article about my personality do I really believe is true. I certainly fall into the bold personality type, in that I have seemingly little fear of strangers and that I frequently struck out on my own, but the research shows that under each of the major personality types there are sub-types, variances between types and that the simple classifications, like all efforts at classifying anything is essentially vague.  But such classifications also relare to general tendencies and patterns and  so no one is necessarily of only one personality type.  As research into earlier communities also indicates the need for diverse personality types, those personality types that enabled the culture that enabled the human species to survive, and yet modern studies are showing those variances in personality still exist. And research of earlier communities does indicate the need for diverse personality types. Until the rise of kingdoms and civilization there was little or no attempt to suppress the individual's divergent personality differences that  were welcomed and needed for the community's survival. But there may have been one personality type, or personal traits, that were unwelcome, however, and  the suppression of such types were first tried to be conquered by culture, then by ostracization or extradition, and finally, perhaps, some suggest by putting them to death.

There is new evidence that genetic blendings occurred in both pre-sapien humanoids and then by sapiens with the other humanoid predecessors, and certainly afterwards when sapien humanoids seem to dominate and remained the last species standing, so to speak, and that up until the Neolithic age they continue to meet mate and mix freely.  Some would like to view these inta-community mating from a modern lens and say they were forced by one group upon another.  And it may be true.  But so far there has been little discovered evidence that shows that to be definitely established and more than likely hominid meetings were opportunities of mixing genes of the communities that met to create a more diverse genetic pool of personality traits.

 The personality type that would have been rejected, however, at least until the neolithic age, was the dominant personality who tried to be more important or to be more influential and subdue the other humans in the community to himself. We see this tendency to suppress this dominant personality in cultures that remained more basic, communities that continued to parallel development  with the “civilized” communities led by dominant leaders.  One method was to practice a type of ridicule upon members who tried to impress their own abilities as superior, and such braggerts  could be repressed by saying “oh you did that all by yourself did you?” and laugh at such boasts that tended to make the boaster realize his behavior of exceptionalism was unacceptable.  Another way in which communities might have accomplished this was by eliminating the word “I” from the lexicon of the language, they simply never conceived of a personal pronounl apart from the community. This can be seen in the languages of some Native-American speakers as well in some of the central African languages. This prevented anyone from speaking of what he was capable of accomplishing and the leadership role would have been from the admiration of others who alone could speak of the accomplishments another might have achieved.

 If this seems, to Modern sensitivities, as a diminishing of the individual, it was actually the opposite. The community survived not by singular individuals who could dominate the entire particular community, but the whole community needing and respecting the individual personalities that comprised the whole community. 

This can be seen again, when one reflects on the communities that continued to develop along the big man leadership mold.  The big man needed to rule not by fiat, but by illustrating his understanding of the individuals within the community.  So that for the big man to ascend he needed to form alliances with the individuals in the community, he could not achieve power by attempting to dominate the community, but by how much he gave to his community, and to give to the community you have to recognize the necessary importance of each individual within the community so that they allied to support his leadership.

And this freedom of importance to the community has become the prime subject subjugation of freedom in the modern community.  We still have a genetic need to be vital to the community and when this is taken from us we feel, inwardly “unfree”. So when the individuals  significance to the community as a whole is suborned by dominance by some over his necessity, then his personality, no matter the type of his own personality, will still need to have a relevance to the community, and the  person lessened by being dominated will need to reinforce his own individualism by dominating over someone else who he is capable of dominating over. Man over woman, white over black, one ethnic affiliation over another ethnic community

In migratory communities such dominance could never have arisen, it would have been unacceptable to the community’s survival.  Every individual, including the leaders were subdued by the need to survive commonly and as we’ve pointed out the one who might try to acheive an unwanted dominance of others would have been in some manner prevented from exerting his exceptionalism over the community.

But the environment began to alter the landscape that made more permanent settling into certain locales an option for the human migrants.  They can now remain in certain locales and capably survive within a certain section of the environment.  This created a new type of community to a certain extent. Communities began to develop different needs that required certain needs of storage and transport.  Settling into a particular locale demanded the community to also develop rituals around maintaining that environment to continue to support the community.  The needs of the community’s leaders also began to develop as the rituals of survival developed.  And differing environments would demand leaders in those environments to need to develop different approaches to leadership as suited the environment in which the community was now existing within.  

But this also created a new challenge.  Previously, humanoids had more than likely needed to mix with other communities and blend themselves into new groupings.  But now, the environment of a settled community required not overtaxing that community so there had to be a method of population control that did not overtax the environment and making the environment unsustainable. So migration would continue, but the reasons, and the consequences of these migrations began to alter.  But our genetic need, both for being a necessary part of the community and our genetic need to align ourselves in a community in order to survive, I do not believe “evolved”.  The evolution that occurred was in the environment that surrounded us and that humans survived within and not in our genetic development of having become “smart’ enough to successfully advance from being hunter-gatherers, but because of our trait of communitarian individualism, a kind of group-think effort that made us more capable on worjking together, and therefore, more capable of adapting successfully.  The intelligence was not the intelligence of individual geniuses, but of the community of individuals who could jointly work together and solve problems to advance the adaptability of the community.

This more permanent development of communities created an ethnic of community solidarity, defined by the culture that developed around the environment, and the culture needed to be focused on methods to survive within that environment.  And we can see in groups that migrated out of one environment and into another carrying some of their rituals with them, and much of their linguistic patterns of thought, but also required a radical development of a new culture that made survival in the new environment possible.  A few really obvious examples are when the central Europeans moved into the far north and developed a “viking culture”, the Navajos had to develop a new culture when they moved from Canada to the southwest, and yet retained much of the language and organization of the Athabascans that separated from.  Another example of course is the migrations to the south pacific which presumably were carried out by different cultures, but there is a lot of dispute about where these cultures might have originated from.

But the development of such cultural, or ethnic identities did  begin to develop and different types of migrations began to occur.  One type was the “familial” or ethnically bound communities expanding somewhat close by and either loosely or more formally associating them with the other more kin-related communities.  And of course, the communities who migrated at greater distances.  Those migrations can be more difficult to trace—we might be able to determine the original communities and the final destinations where they began to develop as a new culture.  Often the intermediary journeys, and sometimes the reasons for the migration are more difficult to discern.  Some might have joined other communities along the journey and become assimilated within them.  And sometimes the migrants themselves could have splintered on the path into other eventual ethnicities, such as the Navajo and Apaches, or many of the variations of western Indian tribes that had had common roots in the southern Canadian-Minnesota area and whose sojourn west transformed them from more settled farming communities to an environment that favored more migratory patterns and a reestablishment of a more hunter-gatherer existence.  

But these migrations of course, began to create not only ethnic identies and alliances within similar environments but could also possibly, even in the more localized kin-developed alliances that did not necessarily remove them into a vastly new environment, cause a conflict with other settled communities.  Clashes between communities, now identifying themselves as ethnicities could now become efforts to either exterminate or totally consume one ethnicity into another, or it could result in an existing culture being forced to migrate out of their own environment and thus create a new conflict with other ethnicities or cultures they encountered and might themselves attempt to displace.

There is plenty of evidence to illustrate the first cause of these continued migrations was an environmental need to keep communities limited in size.  But there was also probably just as great a need to keep the importance of the individuals within the community relevant and slavery might have begun to develop when communities did expand into new areas, but overall, no matter the communitarian structure of any etnicicity and how the new leaders were able to lead, we were not yet in the era of kingdoms and/or centralized governmental organization.  Individuals had an important role to the community and an important role in shaping the cultural society and there were some who might have thought  that the survival of the community needed different types of leaders to enable survival.  Community discussion and community consensus became extremely relevant to the individuals within communities and our inherited genetic requirement of freedom within the community to be diverse and important and essential began to transfer into early communities of democratic discussion.  But without governments requiring a majority or a mandated power to enforce conformity, ethnicities could divide and evolve new cultures, if enough believed that a communal consensus was unobtainable.

And therein lies both our allegiance to freedom and “democratic” ideals, and also our susceptibility to departing from those democratic principles when we feel  unfilled by those ideals.  

The problem democracy faces is in the concept of majority rule, or more people want…whatever.

It does not matter  if the majority prefer x, if a significant amount prefer y, those who prefer a minority option become excluded from the larger majority and lose their significant voice to prefer a different method when a majority can mandate an option of the majority.  A conflict of current confusion has been more towards the significant minority trying to grasp onto power and mandate minority positions.  Both ways are tyrannical over the other when leaders become divisive to extend their own power rather than attempting to sacrifice individual power and work together to seek to find  a common consensus that is workable and acceptable.  If power becomes maintaining power, rather than seeking a just consensus to meet today’s needs it becomes contentious and leads to individual feelings of displacement within the community. Such individuals who feel displaced feel cheated, feel elections are irrelevant and are easily persuaded that their community ethnicity is  being denied or absorbed.

This becomes a problem when we see ethnic solidarity as more relevant than individual diversity, and align ourselves within groups of power that mislead us into thinking our emotional non-fullfillment is due to ethnic challenges and we ally ourselves with groups of what we suppose are our ethnic identities, because we see our individual oppression of non-relevance as ethnic repression of our “group”.  And so, as we mentioned at the top of this article, when a person feels oppressed he tends to desire to oppress, and a leader can easily assume power by using these feelings of despair to challenge any ethnicity to align with him to suppress other ethnicities as a means to secure their own feelings of acceptance to be due to other ethnicities. 

Chasten Buttigieg has said that though he is part of the “LGBTQ”  community, he doesn’t really personally understand or comprehend the meaning or desires or cultures of “trans” people.  Because he may be “gay” does not mean his personality is either of necessity to be aligned as LGBTQ or confined only to identifying himself as part of that ethnicity (and unfortunately it seems that it has become an identifying ethnicity).  The problem, Chasten Buttigieg says, is identifying exclusively within one ethnicity that prevents our understanding of other ethnicities.  I find in his comments support that diversity is not about belonging to a particular group, but about the diversity of individuals that consist within the group that enables individual’s to have an importance to the whole.  Belief in ethnicities becomes a ploy of those who are the type of personality that early man ostracized from its community,and  that allows unscrupulous personalities that want to align power to themselves by collecting supporters who are primed to see their deficient feelings due to ethnic division that don’t, in reality, exist as genetic properties of humanity.  Ethnicities subvert the individual into identifiable groupings that can then be utilized to support unsuitable personalities for leadership, to become leaders.  Civilization, as we call it, is the cult of such unsuitable leaders utilizing ethnic identification as a means to obtain power.  But that power, itself, demands an allegiance to a particular ethnicity, and can be maintained only by continuing to subdue individuals to a cult of identifying with that leader who promises their own exaltation over other ethnicities.  

This, of course, does not grant those who follow by ethnic idenification with a leader, a path to their own individual importance and history shows us, leads to the eventual unrest, and sometimes, the downfall, of those leaders. 

So my suggestion is to look well beyond ethnic cultures as being genetically relevant and begin to dialogue on the importance of diverse personalities that a society needs to survive.

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