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Episode 210: Well meaning organization getting off course, Personality cancer
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I belong to a professional organization that has been working to root out genuine problems with racism al Viet in fits and starts but lately it feels as though the tone has devolved from one of problem-solving to grievance seeking and grievance magnification the communications have been hijacked by highly disagreeable or highly neurotic individuals plus those who are gaining status as lead torch bearer a few have said that they'd rather destroy the organization than be part of one which hasn't achieved their goals for diversity even if said organization was doing good advocacy work for others is there any coming back from this all the police for mutual respect and professionalism are decried as tone policing and their originators are called enablers and bigots anything that I can do besides keeping my tongue tucked and eyes on my own work thank you for your thoughts and I'm grateful for giving some psychological distance from this ongoing shit show oh this is an amazing question this really sounds like a question that I could have written in a variety of contexts over the last several years of my professional life and academic life I mean this was my experience completely in the nonprofit sector working in government and and in academia all three of those areas that I spent years each in this was what I witnessed and of course you know people who are following along at home know that this is largely what I wrote my dissertation about involved a lot of these themes so you know there's there's a lot to say about this and why it's happening and you know it's unpack various components of this but the just to give away the answer right at the beginning here there is there is no coming back from this in your immediate life experience so the the ultimate takeaway from this question for the the person who's actually asking it and trying to optimize their life circumstances is that you are in a situation that is not going to change there are so many incentives and and those incentives are interacting with toxic personalities in a way that is going to create a very stable work environment for you that you cannot expect to significantly alter or change in any way that's going to improve your work experience so if you if you have the kind of personality that can just keep your head down and your tongue tied and deal with it and complain about it when you get home that's fine like continue to do that I hope they're paying you well if you are not that kind of personality and this is causing you a lot of stress and you're you're like actively wondering what the hell is going on and you're trying to change the culture and you're just hitting your head against the wall and it's making you miserable it's really time to think about getting out of this particular job and if you're if you're gonna stay within the same kind of work to at least migrate somewhere where it's a little less extreme in these ways that you're describing but generally if you're involved in any kind of advocacy work like this you're going to find this kind of environment because this is the this is the hegemonic environment that you're going to find in anti racism organizations any kind of advocacy organization this just is what it is right now because of the the culture and the incentives that have emerged and that are firmly in place and that's that's not anything that's going to change anytime soon so for your own life for your own happiness for your own experience which are all the things that we want to be elevating into the center of how we are making choices and going about living our lives you got to get out you got it you can't sit there and expect it to to change on you and you you are not going to change it by convincing anybody so that's the that's the takeaway the larger picture here is that you know you've got it you've got to step back and look at this from the point of view of of what people are really up to and what their what's incentivizing their behavior and if there's anything that you can count on in this world it's that people are people are doing two things above all else they are they're maniacally pursuing status you know they're they're they're pursuing status they're pursuing displays to confirm their status they're trying to do it as cheaply and with as many shortcuts as possible so in this kind of situation where you've got you've got all of the status dynamics that are always going to be present in any kind of I'm assuming this is some sort of nonprofit not a governmental job although I guess it could be it could be both you've got you've got people that are trying to achieve status and therefore create a display that is the most righteous display possible because you were engaged in righteous work and and it is you know it's anti racism you're rooting out these grievances so the the incentives for the display is you know the person who is the sort of most upset and the most righteous wins the whole game so this is a race for people to engage in those displays that reflect that situation both within the organization and external to it so that that fundamental truth is also not going to change about this particular place and then you also have people with the conservation of energy they're they're seeking that display they're seeking that status but they're trying to be as short cutting and lazy about it as possible so they're relying on you know the the easiest most conventional scripts and the the the most accessible ways to do this which are you know all of these things that we see that are shared across this world so these there are particular little scripts that you will see followed by actors and all of these different sectors and they all kind of look the same and they're all similarly off-putting to to people who are in this position who are looking at the dynamics from the perspective that you are so I just I I don't know what to tell you other than you've got to look at your life and how you're using your hours we are always coming back to the hundred thousand our role you have a short life you have limited time on this planet you you only get to use your time once as far as we know even those of us with the mystic chip have to hold our our reincarnation beliefs you have to keep those at bay while we're thinking about how we actually want to live the life that we are experiencing this moment and for my hours I would not want to be wasting any of my time and energy in an environment where my and my contributions and my insights and my work in general are generally just going to be wasted so that's that's what I would generally say but we can dig further into it if you want yeah this is this is a really really interesting way to describe what's going on and the first thing that I that I thought of like when you when you you know concluded this whole thing is that this this question this listener obviously you know I don't know for sure but it sounds like the solving these issues in displaying this type of righteousness feels like the best use of her energy for her particular personality traits or his particular trip personality traits mm-hmm and so from from what it sounds like is you're saying in this time of the world in this particular case that this this these people in these organizations that do this are I don't know what I'm trying to say I guess I guess yeah yeah I'm picking up what you put men like I I have lived this life where I have been authentically genuinely motivated you know from politics personal politics and personal commitments to social justice and to social ideals that for lack of a better word we could call progressive or leftist you know my personal politics have shifted toward a more libertarian zone as I have become more of a hard-boiled evolutionary psychologist because just VII so I so cherish the idea of personal liberty filtered through the idea of of evolutionary psychology once you really start to embrace the psychology of it I think the politics inevitably follows so there are actually a lot of that that's another thing I would say to this questioner is that I talked to a lot of clients and there are a lot of people who are experiencing exactly this situation so I lived through it I I know many people I have talked to have lived through it who are currently in situations just like this where they have strong commitments to social justice or something that we might call social justice they want to improve the world they want to help the most vulnerable people they want to create more equitable conditions for people who are genuinely struggling like this is all really laudable beautiful goals in the world but then they run into these bureaucratic nightmares and these situations where they are in some kind of unholy status Derby with a bunch of assholes who are elbowing each other out of the way to prove how righteous they are compared to how righteous someone else is how they're a better Ally mission yeah at the cost of the mission right it becomes it becomes a personal status contest that is is masked by a mission of an organization and this is just I have I started to see this shift begin to occur like as early as the late 1990s with a lot of sort of you know undoing institutional racism and the diversity programs and all of these things that began with the just the best of intentions just you know absolutely where these places were trying to even within organizations that had a different kind of agenda they were they were they were addressing valid concerns of representation and equity and and you know equal access and all of these things that are absolutely important to address and that needed to be dealt with in some manner but the it has it has become a runaway status process where the the you know people are going to be people personalities are going to be personalities and you cannot stop the status seeking and the institutional equilibrium that emerges from relentless shortcutting status seeking is one of this kind of as as the questioner uses one of my favorite words it's a shit show it really is and I have not it has been probably over a decade since I have run into any kind of nonprofit advocacy environment that is not afflicted by this and there are a lot of long term institutional reasons for this Jordan Peterson who we've talked about on the podcast before a psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto he speaks much more eloquently about this than I ever could he really traces the history of the the emergence of the idea of post-modernism this academic idea that was the spawn of marxism and how it was born in the Academy and you had this whole generation of particularly academics and the humanities embracing this doctrine of post-modernism and how how that Dogma and post-modernism for anybody who's not heard about it or heard of it it's essentially it's neo Marxism there are oppressed and oppressors and you were one or the other there's really nothing in between and and and therefore every institution every organization every every act every every the way that you look at somebody the way that you talk to somebody is either oppressive or you were being oppressed and there are a lot of you know postmodern specialists who would who would attack me for being too simplistic about that but I really would stand behind that analysis that is really what it comes down to and so that becomes that that starts to inform all academic thinking about these kinds of problems and over the course of about two decades it infects bureaucracies advocacy organizations and government government itself pulp just policymaking in general and so this is ubiquitous it is it is the water that we are swimming in if you were concerned about social justice questions and it's why you see a huge amount of pushback on on the other side of the question with people who are becoming progressively alienated and disgusted by this kind of environment and feeling like they don't know how they can they can apply their talents and help without being labeled in a press or which is you know a very disincentivizing kind of kind of place to find yourself if you've devoted your life to trying to root out and address these problems from a very authentic place in your heart and soul it's really like I have so much sympathy for this question because this is exactly the process that I went through and so yeah you advise you know your advice is is to essentially get out get out of this situation because there's no turning back you know I guess there's implications for this because you know the person may have spent an entire career or so years you know essentially getting the tools and skills that they thought they needed to do this is what would be a song term solution for somebody who still wants to stay in this type of field but but may not want to be in the shit show yeah yeah I mean I think it is becoming it is hitting this critical tipping point where there are enough career specialists and bureaucrats and organizers who are in the situation that they're just like you have the so-called intellectual dark web which is the is the the place where academics who are in the situation are congregating so academics are in the same situation if you're an academic and you are not buying into this worldview and you're struggling with it in the way that this questioner and that I have you either you have two choices you you you get completely out of academia which is what I've done or you find some kind of place you find like-minded people you you build your personal utopia in a way that allows you to speak the truth about these issues and to and to find like-minded Souls and so the short cut term for that which describes a very amorphous thing this is not an actual website or place that you can go but it's the idea that there is a parallel intellectual space on the internet and occasional discussions about actually creating universities and and mimicking new institutional processes that are free of these kinds of dynamics but none of that has happened as far as I know but that that's what I would advise this person to look into I don't I don't know specifically for the the issue area that they're working in if that exists I would assume that it does though just based on my perception of how many people I've talked to who feel this way and who are are experiencing exactly that that feeling of oh my god I went to college for this I spent you know decade or more building my career and now I feel like an outsider looking in I feel rejected by my own my own organization and what I'm trying to do and my work is completely devalued and that's a terrible place to try to live your life and try to fight your way through that and you know some like just going back to the personality question that it's it's workable for certain personalities if you're an extremely conscientious person who is essentially just leaving your work at the office and you keep your head down and you do your do your business and you do your little chunk of the job and you can go home and leave it alone that's fine but that's not true for most people who are drawn to this kind of work most people who are drawn to social justice type work or people who want to change the world they they want to improve things they want to really make a difference and they're living that at every level of their life both at work and at home and in their private life so it becomes inescapable and it sucks it really does but this you can't you can't fall into the sunk cost fallacy with the idea that oh I've invested so much time and so I got to stick it out and and I can't I can't just dump it now because I've put so much time into it for the same reason that you can't do that with a shitty relationship if you're in a bad relationship oh we have so much history together it is a can be a very convincing argument like oh I don't want to give up on it but the fact is you've got to take life on its terms in the moment and if things have changed and if the Seabee has changed and it is no longer a situation where you're optimizing your time and energy and living the best possible life you can in the limited time that you have then you got a you've got to cut your losses and if you don't then you're paying the costs you'reyou're just living a compromised life and we don't want to be in that situation if we can help it but I recognize that there's going to be a lot of personality variation there's going to be a lot of variation about how extreme these situations are some people are going to be in an environment where it's so relentless and they they they are just not able to say anything without being sent to re-education camp and then other people who are their perspective is still somewhat valued and it's a little more balanced so if there's going to be variation and all I would say is that you've got to try to find the best possible place that you can find it doesn't sound like you currently are in that organization though I can see how people can be pretty discouraged you know after finding this out but I can also see how they can be pretty uplifted after hearing your explanation on it because I know that I've met people who are discouraged in this manner and the nice people that they are they start thinking well what is it that I'm not doing correctly or what why am i doing that shit what can I do better sure well and I think even before you get there it's it's you know because this is the water everybody's swimming in you don't without having the external view of the larger dynamics of what's going on it does feel you you start to the to internalize it's it's ironic because post-modernism talks a lot about the idea of internalized oppression so a lot of these power structures that were dealing with in terms of people who are more vulnerable and the oppressed they don't even realize how oppressed they are because the language itself and all the microaggressions and everything else are conferring this this power hierarchy in invisible and invisible ways and so the irony of this is that the these these people who are committed to trying to improve the world who are working in these organizations it's like a frog and a pot of boiling water where they're just they're being told again and again and again that they are you know their tone policing or their enabling or that they have instantly they have internalized racism that they need to undo themselves and they need to go to yet another training to understand that and to recognize how they're exercising their privilege in ways that they don't they don't understand and so it becomes if you are a conscientious person and an especially a conscientious agreeable person who has these kind of commitments it's almost invisible to you the the broader process that is happening because you are going to blame yourself you are going to say oh well god if everybody's telling me this then then you know they must be right and I I really do need to re-examine my privilege and re-examine all of my microaggressions and in all of the ways that I am contributing to the problem and and yeah this is just it really is a total runaway process where it's it's it's a the disagreeable you know highly unstable people like I think is pointed out in the question those are the people that rise in this kind of status hierarchy it is a it is a terrible ironic bizarre weird situation but that's who you find at the head of these organizations these organizations is unstable disagreeable z' and who are just tyrannical and have armies of conscientious people trying to do the right thing by them and trying to do the right thing by the cause and by the mission but really it is it has become the Empire of these disagreeable people who are inflicting their worldview on everybody so yeah I just you got a you got to live your life you've got to get out yeah it sounds like they're exploiting a loophole in human psychology exactly a couple of different label yeah yeah yeah and there ends with a bell curve people exactly and I I think they don't know that that's what they're doing they're just you know operating under basic human scripts to seize status and to into conserve energy and to express personality in the most accurate display possible so if you're a disagreeable unstable person no better display than being at the top of some you know big advocacy organization that's really upset about all of the grievances and all of the in justices in the world like what-what just way to stagger it exactly exactly and it's it's like that that is of course where those people are gonna land if that funnel exists for them but the problem is that it becomes contaminated by this social justice mission that attracts people who are trying to effect some kind of major change in the world and so you run into this circle of disagreeableness and it's it's just it's a terrible place to wind up and I it took me a long time to separate out these broader processes and evolutionary psychology was in val invaluable and actually detecting what was going on and getting myself out of that whole web both both in academia in the nonprofit world so I wish this person great luck i I don't know offhand you know of organizations that might be less shitty that they could that they could move into but I don't doubt that they do exist because I do you think I don't think that the tide is truly turning and that you're gonna see a huge pendulum shift on this but I do think you're gonna see pockets of you know normalcy and and people who are just bell curve lies less disagreeable less unstable who are still trying to affect some change in the world and do some good and so just seek those people out and try to live your life accordingly or start your long contracts right yeah no definitely not and don't be afraid to break a long contract I mean again like check your conscientiousness these conscientious people who have to be have to be aware that they are you know especially if you've got the full sucker triad going on that just because you're in some kind of contract if you're in a contract in this kind of situation with with terrible people and you're hating your life and you're hating your job you've got to beat your genes you've got to beat those conscientious genes and you know as a lawyer friend of mine used to say contracts are made to be broken leases are made to be broken it's like that's why they exist and so if you need help navigating that you can talk to us or talk to a lawyer or just find your way out but there's always a way out it just might come at some cost but you know you've got it accurately way that cost against the cost of flushing days and weeks and years of your life down the toilet in service to some disagreeable tyrant who is running an organization that you don't believe in anymore and in the same way that that some some medical interventions out there don't really increase survival advantage or don't exactly don't don't really have the the stated goal or the they don't really change much right on it's like some of these organizations don't really change much anyway we ever find a way to measure objectively whether or not that actually happens yeah they don't change anything they exist to justify themselves and so they exist to justify themselves they exist to you know maintain the position and the status of the people in charge and the members and there they are self-perpetuating displays for disagreeable unstable maniacs largely I don't want to completely throw the nonprofit sector under the bus but this this is what it largely is I've worked for wonderful nonprofits with with really good people in charge really great board of directors people who are doing really important work everybody who's there for the right reasons but more often I've worked for exactly the kind of dynamic that's being described in this question and it took me a long time to build enough of a correlational analysis where I started to see the writing on the wall early enough to either stay entirely away from those organizations or certainly to avoid getting myself too dependent on them you know more than a contract you want to be making sure that you're just not in a position of weakness so you want to be sure that you can you can get out of there you can you can do something else I mean I I really think for for people who are truly making themselves miserable in a situation like this it's better to go work at Starbucks then than to keep punching the clock even if you're taking a huge pay cut you know your your time is your time it's all you've got and better to have a crappy minimum-wage job that you can leave at work and actually go home and enjoy your existence then something that is just poisoning every minute of your day and undermining your happiness so profoundly so but that's my egocentric bias talking so you know everybody is in their own position with their own personality mm-hmm yeah and dr. Lila said before that that happiness is earned by that you want to earn a steam from the people from the people yes the people the right way it yes the right kind of the same in the right way from the people who matter so that's always you want to be running your esteem seeking against that metric because conscientious people I mean I it you know I'm one of you I I am in this I've been in this trap so many times and I've been in a trap where I've been just desperate beating my head against the wall seeking esteem from some from from some authoritarian tyrant at the at the head of some organization that I don't actually want to be devoting my life to and it's never they're never going to give it they're never gonna give you the status that you want they may give you they make yes yeah this is the situation where you're a conscientious nutcase for whom you never feel like what you're doing is good enough just because that's how you're wired that's what conscientiousness is you never feel like you've done enough you never feel like you've you've given your best and your internal audience this is chirping away at you that you need to do more you need to work harder you need to stay later you need to examine your privilege more accurately and then you're in a dynamic where you're working for some asshole for whom nothing is ever good enough so this is a perfect storm of personalities where it's just like what what a nightmare well it's you're you it is set up for misery and this is why these places are able to sustain themselves for so long the conscientiousness conscientious person just dogged Leigh continues you know plug plotting away trying to do the right thing and the disagreeable person at the top just continues to take advantage of that and exploit them until finally the the conscientious person has just had enough or is presented with some kind of low-cost alternative that they can jump to but this is this is why we call the show beat your jeans so you like once you know what's going on with a dynamic you you just have to really look at it and really run the cost on defection and there will be a cost but it's it's going to be in many cases less than stayin just like it would be in a relationship I mean this is a relationship it's it's it's a relationship with the boss its relationship with coworkers and you know defection is always an option they can't they can't really stop you as Harry Brown says nobody potentially really stopped you yeah dr. Hawk that'll be one of your quotes people in the the Facebook group once in a while will put a quote up from you or dr. Lyle uh-huh rarely me but the year in doctor pilot I think defection is always an option quote yeah yeah we've been talking we've been talking about making t-shirts and that could be one of them the other one that we want to do is like it's a it's a the word process with a line over so process over outcomes so we'll get some t-shirts going get some esteem dynamics where for all the cool kids to you know calibrate their display properly be a little nudge that we're all in the intellectual darkweb together little like a fifth column you know that's right exactly exactly yeah all right our next question dr. Lyle has mentioned the concept of internal ugliness a couple of times in previous shows how does one go about identifying their own internal ugliness and then mitigating or correcting it internal ugliness is I'm not sure I have heard him mention that but I have been on the road for the past couple of months and I'm not totally caught up in all the shows I haven't been on so did you did he mention that recently what is what is that referring to you know I'm not sure either I couldn't remember that exact term but I suspected when I saw this question that it maybe it had something to do with he mentioned a few shows back where he said that dr. Hawk likes to talk about likes to stage personality she calls it personality cancer yeah how you like to stage it so so I'm not sure but I thought it had something to do with that so but yeah maybe we can hear your thoughts in person yeah yeah the only other thing that comes to mind is the yeah the myth of inner beauty but it doesn't sound like that's what it's about so yeah personality cancer I do like to assign stages and say things like personality cancers you know it's it's it can't it can't be cured it can only be managed so especially when you start getting into the later stages so yeah well personality as you know I'm always trying to drive home is fixed it is genetic it is immutable it is you you are kind of stuck with the personality that you have and so is everybody else this does not mean that your personality cannot express itself differently under different constraints and incentives so this is where people tend to get really confused because people will people will observe their own history and their own existence and they feel like they have and that they don't they're not as disagreeable as they used to be or they're more conscientious than they used to be or they're more introverted than they used to be and all of these things are true to the degree that you have you've gone through your life process and you've you've had certain personality attributes that place you at certain points in the bell curve that you have gained experience and you have forms increasingly fine-tuned correlations about how the world works so if X then Y you know you you go out into the world so introversion take introversion as an example this is one that I've experienced and is very common with people that I talk to or they say I used to be so much more outgoing I used to really enjoy going out more and meeting people and now I'm just a shut-in and I'm so isolated and and people feel like this is a problem and they go to some psychodynamic therapist who tells them that that it's a problem and that they need to change and they need to open themselves up to more more interactions and go go out and experience the world again but this is not what's happening this is not a pathology what is happening is that you are at baseline pretty introverted but in your in your younger years you were gathering information about how the world worked and so whatever extraversion you did have and your personality was was taking you out and and seeking to build correlations about how worth it it was to have interactions with other people and the more interactions you had with people the better you got at anticipating how any given interaction was going to go earlier in the experience so you got to a point at some at some point where you're like yeah there's only so many kinds of people in the world and you can kind of start to get the cues about two minutes into any given conversation with any of them about whether it's going to be worthwhile or not you don't have that knowledge when you're first starting out in life so it's just there's a lot more noise in the data so you're gonna invest more time and energy less accurately than you will as you go through and you you accumulate the correlations which is just another way of describing wisdom you're getting wiser over time so your personality doesn't change just the sloppiness of your use of your time and energy changes your sloppier with it when you're younger because you you know less about what to expect and this works both ways so so the only cost-benefit analysis that you're making on any given use of your time and energy is not omniscient you or never you never actually know the true nature of reality all you know is the information that you're working under and that information usually tends toward accuracy over time as people have more experiences and they meet more people and they do more things the the general direction of the process is that you get better calibrated you get wiser you get older and wiser swear that axiom comes from but it can work in the in the reverse where you get distorted you get some kind of distorted information and then you confirm that bias over and over and over again and you get progressively more confused and and there's more noise in your analysis and your cost-benefit analysis gets sort of worse and worse and worse and you continue to misuse your time and energy that's that's usually that's gonna happen because somebody has had some very unusual experience or set of experiences that has contributed to that kind of misinformation that is buffered for that long a period of time much more often people are just getting older and wiser and recalibrating so the personality does not change you you get the genetic allocation that you get of the big five when you're born that is written into your genetic code and everybody's got some level of you know unpleasantness in there nobody has a perfect personality when we talk about a perfect personality we're always following that up with a well a perfect personality for what because you could be a super agreeable highly conscientious extroverted open to experience but not too open to experience really highly stable person and that sounds like a pretty perfect personality pretty ideal person but that kind of person is gonna get themselves into a sucker triad situation they're gonna get exploited by a shitty boss they might be in a little bit of trouble with a pleasure trap like there are pitfalls for any personality no matter how ideal it might look on paper so there is an you know an ecological niche for every personality Distortion like every extreme on any bell curve of the big five is gonna find a happy little home with regard to any particular problems so that's why we're trying to control the environment not not change the individual and so when we talk about personality cancer I'm usually talking about extreme distortions and personality distortions on the bell curve that are putting you at a point where you are finding it systematically very difficult to beat the genes because you were so beholden to that distortion this is most common with people who are extremely conscientious so hyper hyper conscientious in that cases it's almost impossible for them to step back from that conscientiousness and and do do the quote right thing for their happiness instead of serving the interests of their conscientiousness because the pole of a conscientiousness is so unbelievably strong so I I am lucky enough my genes put me right at like the 90th percentile for conscientiousness which is very high but not so high that I fall all the time into that trap I fall into it often but I've got enough flakiness thanks dad that I can I can like step back from a really bad such as a gym II yeah he's like an addict Jimmy some guitar playing organ playing you know total total gave me wonderfully flaky genes my mom is super conscientious super like on the ball like it's yeah I got I got the best of both worlds though that the flakiness saves me and so you got to so the conscious super conscientious if people fall into this trap super disagreeable people also fall into a personality cancer trap where it's like they cannot step back far enough to reflect on how distorted their worldview really is they can't see the forest for the trees you know they are they are stuck in this worldview of how unfair things are and how discontented they are and how they're getting a raw deal and they're getting chiseled and it's just totally unfair and if you're if you're so extreme on one of these curves it becomes progressively more and more difficult to beat the genes so that's what we're talking if you're if you're so far out especially with some connectional process of like disagreeableness and instability for example that's gonna be what we're gonna call personality cancer because it's it's really that is a tough thing to have to deal with you can be aware that it exists but actually mitigating it in the moment and making a different choice than your CBS is trying to produce behind those personality distortions is incredibly difficult if you are a person with that kind of personality cancer who listens to this podcast you're in a better position than most because you've got the IQ to to take a larger view of it and to develop that discernment and what we might call mindfulness for lack of a better word - to be less reactive and less beholden to your personality distortion in the moment but really when we're talking about personality cancer we're talking about like the earlier question where this person who's working in this work environment is dealing with unreflective people with extreme personality distortion who who not only can't can't change their CV on that behavior but have no interest in it have no self reflection in them at all maybe don't have the IQ to even think about having that self-reflection so if you're in a situation where urine is particularly a position of weakness with somebody who has some kind of extreme personality distortion and at utter lack of reflectiveness about it and unwillingness to you know not to change because they're not going to change but to talk about how the environment might be altered to express that personality differently bad is a situation where you're dealing with somebody with stage four personality cancer and it's best just to give them a wide berth and make different choices for your life mm-hmm now someone can identify that they have that high disagreeable high unstable personality cancer should they then start a political organization are you asking for a friend's name no no no I don't think I'm that disagreeable yeah I'm dr. lone said I was like fifty five forty to sixty forty I think you're totally not disagreeable but yeah no but I'm just making a joke about our previous question no it's a it's actually it's totally totally valid they should go start some kind of cult because that's where they're getting that's their niche that's where they belong is you know being a little the little tyrant the little king in their own captive audience and that is what those people will naturally do I mean you'll see them do that you know commensurate with their IQ if they have a higher IQ they are gonna have their own little political organization they're a little nonprofit they're gonna run for office if they have less IQ they're gonna be the the you know shitty assistant manager at the store that they work at you know where they run the place like their own little they're a little prison camp and it's just this this happens all the way up and down the bell curve no matter where people wind up personality cancer does not discriminate by SES you know it is all over the place so yeah you just always have to have your eyes open and be you know picking your we call it your personal utopia your personal utopia is determined above all by the people that you're spending your time with and so you want to be spending time with people who are good for your personality and if you were an agreeable that means you know giving giving disagreeable 'he's plenty of disagreeable distance if you're conscientious it means you know also staying away from disagreeable 'he's who are gonna try to exploit you particularly low conscientious disagreeable it just totally depends on your particular ecology and where where you're at and what your goals are but you got to know who you are and where you have some extremes in your personality because if you don't you're flying blind and you're you're gonna systematically make the wrong kinds of choices and and find yourself in environments where you think you can improve them or you can change people or you can somehow change other people's Seabee by convincing them and none of those things are possible you're you just everything is all of these environmental dynamics are incredibly stable because the personalities that have created those environmental dynamics are incredibly stable and that just is the way that it is so the sooner people can accept that about themselves and about the people that they're spending their time with the better their lives are going their lives are going to be in the long run absolutely brilliant dr. Hawk thank you so much you know we probably offended all of the disagreeable and unstable people which I'm totally fine with I there is there is a place in everyone's life for disagreeable unstable is like a free ride on disagreeable people all the time I as a hyper agreeable person I need disagreeable people in my life to do the dirty work for me and I value them highly for that so you know you're one of them mate you know I've been in situations before I like I don't have the balls to complain about something and so I'll just text you and be like Nate can you call the airline for me and so this is I never want to I never want to imply for one minute that there is any particular personality attribute that is out of bounds there is there's a place for every every point on the bell curve every every particular interaction there's there's always a you know a place where that belongs and can be very productive and useful so it's just about finding what those are and finding compliments to your own deficiencies and and your own liabilities and and partnering and and spending time with the people who most compliment and best optimize what is best about you
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