The Anthroposystem and “Human Nature” (Shortened Version) - Part 2 of 2

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Personality types as elements of the anthroposystem

The anthroposystem and the social system are two aspects of the same developed human society. Both of them represent humankind as a single whole and both of them are organized and structured. But their structural and organizational elements, and consequently the objects of their attention, are different. The social system’s constructive elements are social institutions, each performing their specific functions of maintaining and regulating economic, political, legal, moral and other relations. The anthroposystem’s “cells”, the “points of references”, are informal social-psychological groups of personality types. The anthroposystem and social system are closely tangled, so these two systems influence each other, but at the same time they still remain relatively independent.

The anthroposystem can be seen as a particular fragment of the universe, arisen into the biosphere in the process of the development of animated nature and the evolution of homo sapience as its open self-developing system. (This is discussed in the full-size version of the essay.) The interrelation of seniority between the social and the anthropological systems (what appeared first, what was secondary) seems similar to the ancient problem of a hen and an egg. Nonetheless we can say that the anthroposystem was “more primary” because the first human groups of hunters and gatherers did not have any social systems.

The anthroposystem seems to have come into existence a little bit earlier than the sociosystem, together with a tribe and family. Even a modern family looks like a bridge, a connecting tissue between the social system and anthroposystem. It is incorporated in the social system by its “body”, by its “material” side (as a kind of “individual-producing enterprise”, as a means of production of “working power” and “cannon fodder” for the social system). In the anthroposystem, the family is rooted mostly by its “spiritual” side, by its “mind” and “soul”. It produces individuals “equipped” by their temperaments, characters, moral-psychological characteristics, special traits and interests, emotional proclivities, etc. (Naturally, it also gives them their individual appearances – “lucky” or “unlucky”.)

Different kinds of individuals have come into existence in the first human communities due to mutations or other occasional circumstances, and perhaps because of other reasons that we have not discovered yet. Each of them has eventually been accommodated in some niche in the tribe; each of them was regarded as a unique being and mattered in these “pre-anthroposystems”. Each of them performed their functions in their communal life in their own way during this “pre-agricultural” period. At the same time all of them, as hunters and gatherers, used to search for food and to watch a danger to the tribe, to protect the tribe against their enemies, and to take care of their offspring, etc.

The “priority” of the anthroposystem is also supported by the fact that a human being is actually a “natural-social” creature because his organism basically belongs to nature, while the social system is a “purely social”, or “supranatural” entity. (The social system deals with nature only indirectly, through the social activity.) It also has its own norms and rules, which differ from natural laws, and which govern its functioning and development. Different types of social systems replace each other stage by stage inside the anthroposystem. They have been developed in response to various factors: the increase of population within the tribes; the division of labor; the coming into existence of different groups with special functions and interests in the society. Undoubtedly, the most influential factor in this process of change was the coming into existence of private property, and with it economic inequality, the state, and political relations.

Of course, the human personality can be formed only in society; a human child can learn to speak, to read and write, to draw and to create music or the new machines and mechanisms if and only if he or she lives among people with an appropriate attitude to, and appropriate influence on, him. Nevertheless, society can create, and has always created, a personality from the natural physiological and neurophysiologic peculiarities and predispositions inherent in an individual.

From the very beginning, the social system treated people not as unique individuals, but first and foremost as commodities, as interchangeable representatives of their groups, as a “working force” and as “cannon fodder”. It brings them into play for their particular functionality, and then throws them off if and when they were no longer able to function in the necessary way.  Only in its very developed stage, and only due to strong pressure from humanistic forces, did the social system start to take direct care of those who have ceased, or have not yet begun, to make a profit for it and to enrich the society (i.e. the aged, the infirm, children).

In some cases this care extends to protecting the unborn, potential members of society, with the state or the church having the power to prohibit abortions and interfere with women’s reproductive choice. But simultaneously, the same governments and churches can risk the lives of hundreds or thousands of grown and healthy men and woman to fight perceived enemies, human beings who may be killed or mutilated under the pretense that these “enemies” threaten the wellbeing of the society, or of humanity as a whole. In other words, there are some instances in which the perspective of individual members of the society is at distinct odds with the perspective of the state, in respect of its members. For a family, a mother, father, or sister, a person lost to war is a unique and irreplaceable individual (my favorite, my only son, my brother who perished yesterday in Iraq) but for the social system, that same person is simply an anonymous, interchangeable part of the fighting force, merely “one of the casualties of the week”.

In general, we can say that in many respects social systems have been developing progressively; gradually, step by step. Through education, people’s knowledge and skills have been growing, as well as their freedoms and their feelings of worthiness, personal dignity, and self-respect. Together with the survival of offspring and additional care for the elderly people, the individual lifespan has significantly increased. The human ability to manipulate the growing volume of information due to the scientific and technological revolutions makes people much more productive in their investigative, transforming and constructive activities. In addition, social systems have become more complicated in their structure as they develop, and present more opportunity for comfortable and productive existence to an increasing number of individuals.

But we hardly can say the same about the anthroposystem: it looks much more conservative, much more rigid and “timeless”, immune to the vanities of social “disturbances”. It seems to stay basically the same through epochs. As Neil Blanford and Bruce Jones show in their book The World’s Most Evil Men (1985), in any historical epoch, and in the population of any country on any continent, we can find the same types of villains. By the same token, everywhere and in every era, we see the emergence of great thinkers and inventors, poets and artists, humanists and altruists, etc.

Due to the fact that the foundation of the anthroposystem is composed not by social institutions but by the basic personality types, we can present this system schematically as the aggregate of these types. Being arranged in a circle according to the stages of growth of their humanness (according to the stages of socialization of an individual – from a newborn baby to the creative personality, anticlockwise: Figure1), they actually create the body of an anthroposystem because of their necessity and sufficiency for the existence of the system, and because of their interconnections with other elements of the system.

Figure 1.  Basic personality types as the framework of the anthroposystem with the “strategic reserve” in the centre.

The circle in the centre of the scheme is meant to indicate the special kind of people who are “low-scorers” in all of these “basic” dimensions and characteristics. They neither are authoritarians, nor amiable and friendly; neither Machiavellians, nor altruists, etc. They can be high scorers on many of the other, less socially significant human characteristics (cholerics or sanguinics, extraverts or introverts, neurotics or emotionally stable, religious or non-believers, epicurean or ascetic, highly educated or semi-literate, brave or timid, sexually hyperactive or absolutely passive and asexual, etc.), but in these eight very important aspects they are very low-scorers. It is difficult to find psychologists who have investigated this kind of person as of yet, but simple observation leads me to suspect that most of them will prove to be rather opportunistic individuals whose social “universe” (the range of their social interests) usually does not have a very large radius.

In the descriptions of the representatives of the basic personality types, we would find that each of them has “their own” passions, inclination, goals, their own “trajectories of movement”. Consequently, they can feel influence from those who - consciously or unintentionally - try to impede their “movements” or to change their directions. As to the representatives of the central group, they surely have those primary biological, hedonistic and certain other “purely personal” wishes and goals, but they most likely do not have “their own” strong and persisting, long lasting goals or inclinations. So it may be that they feel “prevented” in their movements and developments, or sense that their trajectory has changed, only for a very short time, after which they would move in any of the new directions as if it was just “their own” goal or direction. They perhaps are much more adaptable.

Usually they are socially disinterested, and concerned most of all only with their “purely personal” problems, and the problems which directly impact on their close relatives. One cannot say with respect to these people whether they are really good or bad individuals. As members of the society, as citizens, they look rather nondescript, and potentially pluripotent, analogous to the “stem-cells” of the social organism, which is why I called them the Social Stem Cells (SSC). Deprived of their own “keel” and not having their own route or course, they float rather than swim or drive. Each of them can easily be coerced to change the direction of their movement by natural and social stimuli, by social circumstances, by political or religious winds, and especially by media manipulations. They love “bread and circuses” as other ordinary, “quite normal” people do, and their behavior can easily be - at least temporarily - transformed into that of almost any other personality types (especially in the “blue” or “cold” zone because it usually requires much less effort to increase entropy than to decrease it, to make a person worse than he or she is than to make him much better).

Only those people who try to move faster or slower than the rest of the crowd, or in the “wrong” direction, against the crowd, will feel the crowd’s influence or pressure, the “gravity of the crowd”, while those “floating with the crowd” – would not. So, philosophically, it is difficult to assess or define these people: whether they are “natural wizards” or “lazy boys”, whether they deserve to be envied or held in contempt. Or perhaps both?

What is human nature?

Many philosophers and psychologists have traditionally interpreted “human nature” as the concept dealing with the characteristics common to all people, “the shared motives, goals, and psychological mechanisms that are either universal or nearly universal”, and as “the species typical ways, in which humans make decisions, the ways in which humans respond to environmental stimuli” (Buss, 1999, p. 31). In other words, within the concept human nature they also include characteristics that are engendered in a human being by society, by the social system, by education, etc. But strictly speaking, these are not elements of nature, but rather of culture and nurture.

On the individual plane, “human nature” is actually a human’s genetics, an individual’s biology and physiology, including neurophysiology. To be precise, it is about 10 trillion (10,000,000,000,000) cells (brain, nerve, muscle and other types) plus the person’s temperament, and partly his or her intellect. But let us not forget that the organism of each one of us is unique. (Neurosurgeons used to say that even the brain is unique in each of individual.) This means, that there are more than 6.5 billion instances of “human nature” currently existing on the earth.

Distinguishing basic personality types reduces the number of “typical natures” to only eight. Now, if we take a closer look at the scheme, we can find that the types that are positioned on opposite sides on the scheme appear to have common characteristics, which makes them actually not true opposites. For instance, a sociopath and a sensation seeker both experience emotional hunger from time to time. When a powerful sociopath (a president or a prime minister) provokes a war, declares that his “beloved” country is in a great danger, and calls people “to arms”, his call would most likely be eagerly accepted first of all by many sensation seeking personalities, due to their proclivity and cravings for risk taking (as well as for medals and for fame). When the authoritarian leaders introduce “temporary” restrictions on social liberties, such as did George Bush’s “Patriotic Act” (on the pretence that their intention is to protect society from terrorist attacks, or to eliminate all the riots from the streets, and to establish “peace and tranquility”, the “law and order” in the society), these calls and actions can receive understanding, approval and the strong support first of all from the “warm” representatives of the agreeable, friendly personality type. The Machiavellian passion for acquisition, expropriation of the property of others, and the “redistribution” of valuables by manipulation, can be enthusiastically met by representatives of the altruistic type, with their passion to donate their possessions, and even to sacrifice themselves to somebody in need. In this respect, we can see that the number of the basic “typical tendencies” can be reduced down to four, since each of the original eight has its complementary partner within the schema.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, it is very difficult to find strict boundaries between these types, let alone the margins between the subtypes within each of the types. But actually, the only people who want to possess precise knowledge concerning these strict lines are representatives of the narrow circle of specialists on personality typology. Let us try and remember that ”personality type” refers simply to the dominant tendency with respect to a person’s inclinations and behavior, but people are living and ever-changing beings. They look different in different aspects.

And if we consider these types holistically and practically, we can see that they are naturally combined into three blocks, or groups of types, on the basis of the character of their influence on social life. It seems to me that these blocks can justly be called “cold”, warm, and neutral ones (Zatsepin, 2002, 2003). The ““cold”” block includes sociopaths, authoritarians and Machiavellians (the bluish on the scheme); the “warm” comprises sensation seeking, agreeable and altruistic types (the pinkish on the scheme); and the “neutral” embraces pragmatic/hoarders and creatives (together with the representatives of the central circle). The presentation of these types in such a “temperatural” envelope seems to be practically advantageous, because as long ago as 1946, Solomon Ash had unexpectedly discovered that it is exactly the “temperature” characteristics of people that matter to human minds.

Ash offered to two groups of subjects the brief and almost identical descriptions of an imaginary person who was either: a) intelligent, skilful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, cautious; or b) intelligent, skilful, industrious, “cold”, determined, practical, cautious. The subjects were then required to write down their impressions of the described persons in the form of essay. Despite the fact that the difference between the two descriptions was only of one word, the “warm” person left a much more positive impression than the “cold” one. The “warm” individual was described as one “who believes certain things to be right, wants others to see his point, would be sincere in an argument and would like to see his point won”’. The “cold” person was described as a ”rather snobbish, calculating and unsympathetic individual who feels that his success and intelligence set him apart from the run-of-the-mill person”. When, in another experiment, Ash changed this “warm“/”cold” variable into “polite” and ”blunt”, there were no such marked differences between the impressions of study participants (Hampson, 1988, p. 119-21.) This means that when attributed to a human being, the word “cold” has an “unwritten definition” that is imprinted, as a more or less settled representation, in human minds.

The scheme allows us to see what “human nature” is indeed. Each of the personality types here actually represents one or more human characteristics that dominate in some kinds of people. In this set we can find a place for both Hobbes’ “evil” and Rousseau’s “good” natures. This means that what is usually called “human nature”, or the “nature” of an abstract “average” person, actually contains all sorts of human peculiarities and qualities. The only thing we cannot and shouldn’t do is to call this “average” person of many colors either categorically “good” or “bad”, and to attribute to this “average” person the crimes of psychopaths, of the real concrete villains, criminals, or the great accomplishments of altruists and amiable people, of the real concrete heroes and humanists.

The scheme can also help us to see what the society looks like; does the so-called “national character” exist, and if yes, what it is (if and when we learn to gauge the percentage of representatives of each of the blocks in the country). Of course, the social system can influence the anthroposystem by temporarily changing the percentage of representatives of each type in the society as, for instance, Hitler, with the aid of Goebbels and Himmler, did in Nazi Germany. This change is, first of all, at the expense of the central group (the social-psychological reserve) and can, and quite often does, change the psychological climate in the society overall, and the characteristics of the people as a whole. The tyrannical, dictatorial regimes (with the voluntary help of, the “cold” conservative and reactionary groups of the population), usually decrease the “moral-psychological temperature” of society as a whole.  For instance, by their war-mongering and hysterical propaganda, the “cold” leaders encourage the suspicion of people towards each other and pit them against each other. In such a way in Nazi Germany and in the Stalinist Soviet Union during the raging of the KGB, as well as in the USA during the McCarty’s years, the number of voluntary secret police supporters (and the number of denunciations) was enormous.

And now – back to the concept of “human nature”. Distinguishing these three “temperature” blocks effectively reduces the number of basic characteristics of “human nature” down to three – “cold”, “warm” and “neutral”. Of course, we can find many other personality types in the anthroposystem besides these basic types. Hundreds of human characteristics, and incalculable numbers of their potential combinations, create the uniqueness of each person, as well as a multitude of personality types. And we can combine these types (or they can combine themselves) in various special groups (supporters of a certain football team, of a band, of a movie star etc.). And all of them are humans, and all of them add some traits to “human nature”, but the “cold” and “warm” and “neutral” blocks seem to be fundamental indeed.

Naturally, the “neutrals” (let alone the “warms”) do not create serious problems for humankind. The only challenge society can be concerned about is how to help them to realize their proclivities and abilities, to put their activities and creations into the service of society. The most “problematic” block is that of the “cold” types. All of its representatives have a biological, genetic component in their personalities, which makes them more difficult for society to cope with, since we cannot hope to override their negative tendencies through education.

We can find psychopaths and authoritarian sadists in the written history of any country of the world. They surely were in the first human tribes, from the very dawn of human history. But their crimes, even murders, made their influence felt only at the level of the individual, or of a small group. They become a problem of social and even global significance only when they are in positions of power, such as heads of empires. The division of society into classes, and the emergence of the political organizations, the states with their organs – in other words, the coming of the social system into existence - have dramatically changed the situation. An individual who occupies a commanding position in society has enormously increased personal power, because together with this position he or she obtains the opportunity to influence the state organs – army, police, juridical system, prisons, and often the church. Meant for the wellbeing of the society as a whole, for all the members of the country, these organs can also be used according to the personal inclinations and interpretations of the powerful individual.

Always and everywhere, the representatives of the “cold” block attempt to occupy just such dominating, controlling, commanding positions in a group, community and society. On the other hand, the society has always got plenty of such positions for them (on the thrones of various ranks and around them). On the surface this appears to be a beneficial situation: the society has some needs, and power hungry people are eager to fill them. But when the desire and the longing for power or possession become ends in themselves, or the measure of one’s self-worth, then it becomes dangerous for society.

The point is that whatever position they occupy, people normally cannot shed their own “skins”, their natures, their unconscious proclivities, their world-views, at least not in a short period of time. Although they may adapt to their current circumstances, including other people’s perceived opinions, they continue to behave according to their own motivations (i.e. a “statesman’s” or a “politician’s” motivations), which make them chose the corresponding tactics. (George Pompidou used to say that a statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation, while a politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service. The latter is an apt description of the typical “cold” block personality’s behavior.)

Although it might seem that representatives of the “cold” block can be considered incarnations of evil, such is not always the case. They can, and often do, bring harm to society, but many of them do so without any malicious intentions, but simply because they are acting in accord with their character - “such as they are”. They are sincerely convinced from childhood that life is a “struggle for survival” and that, indeed, other people are malicious and dangerous, and that one cannot and should not trust anybody. And throughout the whole their lives they may even involuntarily collect corresponding facts and happenings from the communal and social life to support these beliefs.

Like timid toddlers, who can see danger everywhere, and point their fingers at dark corners of the room and call to their grandmothers “Look, there is a wolf under the bed!” the “cold” politicians can spontaneously, naturally intimidate society with their own imagined fears. Sometimes their tendency to perform a protective function in society is quite appropriate and timely, and welcome. But more often than not individuals who score highly in terms of “coldness” actually only pretend that they are concerned with the interests of society, and are trying to protect their country against enemies. Rather, their main and only concern is always to protect their “own skin”, their personal and corporal interest.

It is interesting; long ago Leo Tolstoy noticed an inevitability of such kind of a people in the ruling elite, in governments. In his War and Peace, he compared Napoleon’s Marshal Davoust and the Russian Emperor Alexander’s Count Araktcheev (who “was a coward”, “devoted without flattery” to the tsar, and “capable of pulling out grenadiers’ mustaches with his own hand”), by their “inability to express their devotion otherwise than by cruelty”. Tolstoy suggests that “In the mechanism of the state organism these men are as necessary as wolves in the organism of nature. And they are always to be found in every government; they always make their appearance and hold their own, incongruous as their presence and their close relations with the head of the state may appear” (Tolstoy, 1972, p. 667).

They often give the appearance of playing a role analogous to the immune system – protecting and strengthening society and the nation. But more often than not they are actually the source of a sort of self-destructive social autoimmune disease. Indeed, normally, the immune system of the human organism is meant to “seek and destroy” invaders of the body, including infectious agents, but sometimes it attacks the body’s own tissues. In these cases our own body’s defense is turning against us, treating our cells as foreign substances, and causing in such a way diabetes mellitus type 1, or rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases.

A similar process can also occur in the body of society as a whole. Everyone is familiar with how much disaster was caused by the NKVD and the KGB, and how many innocent people suffered, and even perished, in the former Soviet Union under cover of the “cold” Stalinists’ struggle against “enemies of the state”. Even in the democratic USA the lives of thousands of people were mutilated, with some individuals even driven to suicide, during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. The senator, along with other politicians, incited a general and wide-spread paranoia about “reds under the bed”. The FBI was enlisted to route out members of the community who were “secretly” sympathetic to the notion of Communism. One result of this fear mongering was that individual members of the community were encouraged to attack each other, and to inform against neighbors, former friends, and family members suspected of harboring “red” sentiments.

Because their representatives naturally penetrate all levels of the social hierarchy, the representatives of the “cold” block obtain a wide social base for realization of their personal natures and implementation of their slogans and wishes. Establishment of a tyrannical, dictatorial, authoritarian regime with strict secrecy, and a multiplicity of restrictions for the media in the country is the secret sweet “cold” leaders’ dream. In tyranny, with absolute freedom for the tyrant, and slavery for the rest of the people, everything is completely clear in the authoritarian rulers’ slow and narrow minds: who is who, where there is order, and where there is disorder (or potential disorder). With a reliable police and secret service force in his hands, an “emperor” does not need to overload his brain searching for convincing arguments to keep his people obedient. During the second half of the 20th , thanks to the development of mass media, especially TV, these kinds of leaders have been forced to learn how to “domesticate” democracy, to tame it, and to put it into the service to their dirty goals.

John W. Dean, the former White House legal counsel to President Nixon, and an associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, convincingly demonstrates just who the real rulers of the USA were at the beginning of the 21st  century. In his books, Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004) and Conservatives Without Conscience (2007), Dean describes the events and individuals who, during the period between 2001 and 2009, brought disastrous consequences to the country.  Dean’s work represents one of the first instances of the application of concepts associated with the social-psychological structure of society to the analysis of high-visibility political events.

In Dean’s view, Bush himself was only “a mental light-weight with a strong right-wing authoritarian personality”. His “leading authorities” were “his gut and his God”. His vice president, Cheney, on the other hand, appears to have learned well “how to manipulate the president like a puppet” (Dean, 2007, p.168-169). Cheney was “the mind of this presidency” while Bush was “its salesman”. (p. 169). Dean labels George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as “prototypical conservative leaders without conscience”, whose “excessive secrecy, in particular, was apparent even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks”. The conservatives without conscience, in his view, are a particular kind of people, who can parade themselves as quite pleasant individuals, but who, “at heart” are actually “tough, cold-blooded, ruthless authoritarians” (Dean, 2007, p.xxxviii). “Bush and Cheney saw 9/11 as an excuse to indulge their natural authoritarian and conservative instincts. They have justified and rationalized their increasing use of authoritarian tactics in the name of fighting terrorism. But while the focus on terrorism was meant to convey a deep concern for the safety and protection of the US, it is not difficult to see that such a focus also includes a significant element of self-protection. In effect, Bush’s emphasis on external threats to the country helped solidify his position as President. As Dean says, “Without terrorism, George W. would have likely been a one-term president.” (p.169). In other words, they needed the 9/11 tragedy, and the discrepancy between CIA (with its NSA) and FBI in monitoring the hijackers-terrorists just before the attack on the twin tower is, most likely, yet to be comprehended.

Dick Cheney has been described by Dean as “the most powerful vice president in American history”. His attempt to run for president failed at the conception stage because he was undistinguished as secretary of defense (during the Bush I presidency), but nevertheless, he managed to rule the country from behind the scene, where “his dark view of the world and life is, in any case, better suited to working behind closed doors”. “He is the catalyst, architect, and chief proponent of Bush’s authoritarian politics. In fact, Cheney’s authoritarian vice presidency has simply swallowed the president”. (p. 160-161). He “has surrounded himself with a staff that is stronger and far more competent than the president’s personal staff’ (p 157). “Cheney is an authoritarian dominator . . . He has never been interviewed by a reporter inclined (or permitted) to ask the hard questions, so Cheney has never had to explain himself”. (p. 158).

It was Cheney who imposed blanket secrecy on the executive branch, who enforced the idea of using torture during interrogation, and favored removing the restrains on the National Security Agency against collecting intelligence on Americans. It was Cheney and his mentor, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq. This invasion was actually planned by Cheney and his associates a decade before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, during the Bush I presidency. Cheney was Secretary of Defense at that time, and Libby, one of his “cold” “behind the throne” men, together with Paul Wolfowitz, drafted a defense policy guidance paper that was calling for unilaterally preemptive war and the invasion of Iraq. The policy was withdrawn at that time by Bush I because the document had been leaked to the press. (p. 79). After 9/11 they caught the moment, and instantly proclaimed that it was not only Bin Laden, but also Saddam Hussein, who was guilty in the attack against the USA. (Libby at that time was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser) (p. 78).

Where is the concept of “evil  human nature” from?

One of the first instances of the attribution of “evil nature” to human beings we can find at the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis. In the story of the Flood, God promised to Noah: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood” (Genesis: 8; 21). But what about the actual origin of this nature? In the earlier testimonial we find: “God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him” (Genesis, 1; 27). Moreover the biblical God did not stop at the act of Adam’s creation: he nurtured this creature, its offspring, and not only by his Ten Commandments.

Let us take a look at the system of “educating” human beings. Guiding Moses, the leader of the “chosen people”, into the Promised Land, the Lord instructed him: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places. Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess. Distribute the land by lot, according to your clans. . . But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live. And then I will do to you what I plan to do to them“(Numbers, 33; 50-56.). Further instructions: “In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy, 21: 16-18).

After Moses’ death, in the “advanced courses” the Lord put the strategic direction of the chosen people’s movement while instructing Joshua (the son of Nun, and Moses’ aide): “Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon and from the great river the Euphrates – all the Hittite country – to the Great Sea (Mediterranean) on the west. No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life”. (Joshua, 1: 4; 5).

It was the Lord who had personally taught Joshua the best way of destroying Jericho, and after completing this task, according to the Bible, “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it – men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys . . .Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house” (Joshua, 6: 21; 24).

On the Lord’s command, Joshua’s people attacked Ai. “When Israel had finished all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day - all the people of Ai.  For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai.  But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of the city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua” (Joshua, 8: 24 – 26).

The same atrocities Joshua committed with the population of Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, and Debir: “Joshua subdued the whole region . . . He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel had commanded” (Joshua, 10: 29-41).

Undoubtedly, after such convincing lessons of genocides and massacres, human nature could become very evil. Many representatives of the next generations in various parts of the world, including the Crusaders, did not forget to apply these lessons quite earnestly.

In our time, directives like these would certainly be good grounds for the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague to at least condemn their author to a lengthy imprisonment. That is why they are not propagated openly for lay people. Now, instructions like this are classified “for authorized eyes only”, for the “chosen” personalities. (The sociopathic and authoritarian politicians, inspired by their “holy love” to their nations, prefer to disseminate similar instructions indirectly: by war mongering, by incorporating fear of terrorists’ attacks or foreign invaders on their countries, etc.) But the Torah and the Old Testament are viable for everybody and are regarded as Holy Texts not only for the leaders of Judaism, but for Islamists and Christians as well. So the fundamentalists, the “coldest” representatives of all these three religions can (and actually do) use them for inspiring their followers when this suits them.

To those lovely and very kind young boys and girls, the Jehovah Witnesses, who used to go from door to door in the Melbourne suburbs trying to convince people that “God is Love”, and that “He loves each and everyone of us”, all of this would most likely be surprising, and perhaps even sound blasphemous. Many “warm”, kindhearted priests, who found their priesthood as “their own” way of serving people, usually try to skip over these biblical passages and do not discuss them with other people. For those who sincerely believe that the same God is the Author of the Old and the New Covenant (and for the guides in the Jews Museums) these Biblical lines are a source of a great confusion, which is why they are not often discussed.

Some Christian writers say that these Old Testament declarations are actually due to “the scribes and Pharisees wrong interpretations” which “later were refuted in the New Covenant”. But who were the scribes and Pharisees who had misinterpreted the word of God? The scribes were considered the learned men, the experts, the most renowned teachers of the law, its interpreters. The Pharisees were commonly viewed as the most exemplary models of Judaism, they established a code of morals and rituals more rigid than that spelled out in the Law of Moses. The scribes and Pharisees were highly respected people in Judaism, its leaders, the backbone of Judaism.

So the skeptics and agnostics would rather say that these “cold” testimonials about the evilness of human nature, together with the instructions about the ways of implementing massacres and genocides, were surely inserted into the Bible, and then have been propagated, disseminated in the society by the generations of the representatives of the “cold block” for their special needs. Anyway, we can find the same picture in the Koran: the blood-thirsty declarations put together with the attractive humanistic slogans. In each religion, and especially in the ruling circles of them, (except, perhaps, “godless” Buddhism), we can find not only warm, humanistic and altruistic personalities, but also “cold”-hearted, hard-headed, narrow-minded and power-thirsty sadists who inspire and ignite inter-religious wars.

Each of the anthroposystem’s basic groups plays its own role in every religious as well as in political organization. The “warm” representatives’ words and actions, the patterns of their lives, even unintentionally, attract new supporters, believers, new followers to the religion and the church, while the hawkish “cold”-hearted and hard-headed (even if they are only the “behind the throne leaders”) “milk” these newcomers and all the rest of the flock and use them as a cannon-fodder. These hawkish leaders inspire and organize bloody crusades and intifadas, and then maliciously attribute the atrocities to “evil human nature”.

We can also find politicians and social scientists who make their contributions to the propagation of similar ideas under various dressings, like the “liberation of oppressed peoples”, “elimination of tyrants”, or “the establishment of historical justice”, etc. It is a natural duty, an obligation for a citizen of any country, for instance, to be a patriot; and it is natural for political leaders to encourage patriotism, patriotic ideas and feelings in their population, even to decree their patriotic acts. But patriotism is closely related to its controversial siblings - nationalism and chauvinism. Who can control these boundaries?

Patriotism is a kind of “national collectivism”. It begins from the feeling of belonging to “our” people, to the ethnical group, to the nation and country. It manifests in the exclusive love of one’s country, of its people, its language, its culture and traditions, to its state, as well as in the aspiration to do everything possible for the nation to prosper and to flourish. It is also the desire for the nation to be highly respected in the world community of nations and states, which encourages each individual to feel that he or she is a representative of the nation in their relations with other people. But patriotism at the same time includes respect, and a benevolent attitude to all the other countries and nations, a wish to sincerely and honestly cooperate with them for the sake of the total wellbeing of the humankind.

Nationalism, in its turn, can be characterized as a kind of national egoism of various degrees, including egotism and egocentrism. “Personal” egoism is actually a concern only for one’s own needs and interests. The egoist usually tries to “snatch” as much as possible from other people for himself, and to use other people for his interests only, ignoring the personal interests, needs, wishes and inclinations of these people. Egoism actually splits a person from society and from other people, and opposes him or her to them, encouraging him to treat others like things or machines. Accordingly, national egoism, or nationalism, can also include the love of one’s own country and its people, and its language and culture. It also can include a feeling of pride for the people and even the aspiration to do something good for the people. But the nationalist feels and propagates rather lukewarm, even negative (covert or overt) attitudes towards all other nations and their people. This manifests in the active inclination of the nationalist to “grasp” from other nations something valuable (even necessary to them) for the wellbeing of one’s own nation, rather than to help other nations, to donate something for their wellbeing.

Chauvinism can be described as a national misanthropy, which is a suspicious, contemptuous, arrogant, malevolent, hateful and even actively aggressive attitude towards other people, with the inclination to downgrade and abuse them, to cause them moral-psychological, physical or material discomfort or pain, suffering, loss, or harm. Extreme cases of misanthropy manifest in sadism. The example of such an attitude is expressed by Machiavelli in the foreword of one of the editions of his Prince, where he states that a human being is a disgusting animal, which you can understand only when you have learned to despise it. Hitler also used to say that the more he got to know people, the more he loved dogs. So misanthropy can be expressed as a feeling of total hate towards humankind. Accordingly, chauvinism can be regarded as a social feeling of unadulterated pride for one’s people, and for the nation; and an inclination to overestimate its part in, and meaning with respect to, the history of humankind, and to overrate its real achievements and their significance for humankind. It is a tendency to persistently and forcefully propagate the assumption of the superiority of his nation over and above all, and affirm its right to special status, and the highest position in the world. At the same time chauvinism expresses a negative, suspicious, arrogant, “cold”, unfriendly, hostile attitude to all other peoples, seeing them as “second-rate” and “inferior” ones who are trying to usurp the “deserved”, “lawful” privileges of the “chosen” people of the “highest race”.

It is clear with respect to the characteristics of the personality types that patriotism is a natural feeling, inclination and behavior of representatives of the “warm” block, while representatives of the “cold” block are, by their “nature”, actually unable to experience these feelings. They can maintain friendly relationships with others only on the grounds that the relationship facilitates the need to be opposed to, or “against somebody else”. So, for “cold” individuals, patriotism can only ever be nationalistic or chauvinistic, or at least strongly contaminated by this poisonous rubbish which means that they spread, introduce, and impose evil inclinations in the people’s mind, and then try to attribute evil acts to the “human nature” shared by each and every person. The “cold” “patriots” in the governments can bring only suffering and shame to their “beloved” nations and countries. These harms, such as the ones perpetrated by the Bush-Chaney duo which altered the opinion of the world community about the US, will take untold years to mend.

From Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) on, the infamous adage that “man is a wolf to his fellow-man” has become a concern of philosophy. In the 18^th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) tried to contest Hobbes’ idea,  and held that “uncorrupted morals” prevail in the “state of nature”; that a human being is by nature benign and compassionate. Rousseau proposed that it was actually the development of the concept of “private property” that caused human beings to become selfish and view others as potential enemies. As a result, humans turned against each other, and as a result, required an organized form of state government to ensure the peace, create and enforce laws, and protect citizens (and their property) from others. Nevertheless it is widely believed that it was in fact Hobbes who correctly described the foundation of social order. In his view, it was fear of mutual annihilation due to evil human nature and “the war of all against all” that forced people to agree to restrain their passions, and give up their liberty, and to enter into a social contract with their fellows to establish the state. In other words, the social contract delegated the power of each individual to professional rulers in their countries. That is why Hobbes’ motto has been established in literature, and has been continuously indoctrinated in the human minds.

Hobbes’ ideas resonate with representatives of the “cold” block simply because these ideas correspond with their own suspicious and aggressive attitude towards people, and justify their inclination to project their negative feelings, thoughts and traits onto other people. And it is this type of individual who most eagerly promulgates this slogan, in order to spread their negative characteristics and then to attribute them to the innate “nature” of all people. This helps them to mask themselves, to hide in the crowd from imminent and rightly deserved castigation. It is beneficial for the “cold” block representatives to impose mutual suspicion between people, to disunite them, to pit them against each other, in order to make it easier to “mollify”, to manipulate this people, to use and to exploit them.

Baumeister (1997) quite justly states that the “warm”, “good” people have also created a lot of evil in society. However, he has neglected to take into account the root causes of evil perpetrated by “warm” people. In fact, the evil they create is not a result of their own will, but occurs as a result of deception, strong coercion, or even overt pressure from the “cold” people, who are always trying to dehumanize them. In the psychological literature, we often encounter references to Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, which involve applying very cruel procedures to force their “subordinates” to do what their instructors want them to. Milgram himself was surprised that such a big percent – almost two third of his subjects – were able to apply such cruel measures to their “pupils” under pressure from their instructors. The usual interpretation of experiments of this sort is that they suggest that all people have the potential to engage in evil acts. But what this interpretation ignores is the fact that these acts of cruelty were literally “squeezed” out of the “normal” people by leaders, instructors, and experimenters who were pretending to exhibit “cold” characteristics. It is important to note, in this regard, that it is well-documented that experienced sadists-torturers can force others to confess to any number of evils (such as confessing to witchcraft, spying, being “enemies of the people”) in order to escape further torture; that these confessions often are used as justification for the death of the confessing party does not indicate that they are true accounts. Rather, it suggests that most people would prefer to die, rather than be subject to prolonged torture.

In addition, interpreting Milgram’s results as support for the contention that almost anyone has the potential for evil ignores the fact that in these experiments, even skillfully trained specialists could not succeed in forcing more than the third of the subjects to be cruel to their “learners”. The remaining participants simply refused to take part in the experiment rather than apply cruel measure to other human beings, even when these others were labeled dull or lazy pupils.  So clearly the dictum that human nature is universally innately evil is not supported by Milgram’s results.

We can observe the same sort of assumption at work with respect to explanations about the underlying causes of economic disasters. The great depression 1929 -1933 started with the crash of stock exchange. Traditional explanations put at least part of the blame on the greed of average consumers who rushed to borrow money to gratify their desire for their own homes, without adequate consideration about how, or whether, they were able to repay their loans. This “happiness now” hypothesis is also evident in explanations about the origins of financial crises in the USA and other countries. On the surface this explanation may look justified. But who was luring and persistently encouraging these people to this way of living; who ignored the warnings of the professional financiers? Wasn’t it the “cold” block who occupied positions of power in banks, media and politics?

Dean calls such people “conservatives without conscience”, but in fact representatives of the “cold” block can join any party or affiliation in their hunt for power, including even the most democratic and humanistic movement or religion. Their principal goal is to achieve a position in power, or as close to the source of power as possible - the space on or around the “throne”. The more cautious, or perhaps less brave, prefer political or financial institutes. They use these institutes similarly to the way burglars use highways, but with much less risks - they do not rob with the help of knife, club or gun, but with their pens, and lobbying voices. The most daring of them organize criminal activities, such as motorcycle gangs, like the “Hell-Angels” who have been terrorizing people in some countries. Being immersed in power, even in very democratic organizations, this “cold” body would inevitably start to search for ways of manipulating peoples’ minds. In such a way, they decrease the social-psychological temperature of society towards “coldness”, exactly in a manner that accords with the law of entropy.

At the same time, all of them, even psychopaths, consider themselves absolutely “normal”. They perceive themselves to be at least the equals of everyone else, but more often they consider themselves a little bit “more equal” or superior to other, and, so, destined to rule. In addition, they not only pit humans against each other, they also pit the mass of humanity against the natural world (actually, against humanity itself). Being concerned only with their own personal interests, with power and wealth, they try to convert every aspect of nature into commodities, a resource to be manufactured and wantonly merchandised. Deforestation of the earth is considered one of the factors of current climate-changing.

More and more people appear to understand this. One positive sign is that during the last decade, the number of publications discussing the part that representatives of the “cold” block play in the social life of various countries, especially in the USA, is progressively growing. The internet has been successfully spreading appropriate facts and ideas to young people in many countries, even to those in “developing” nations. So, the process of educating the public is in progress, made more efficient by the accessibility of information through the Internet. The desirable thing in this respect is to accelerate this educative process, to make it more active and practical not only in dictatorial regimes, but also and first of all in the advanced democratic countries. As Henry Stein rightly puts it:

The yearning for power over others with its inevitable, destructive abuses, has reached epidemic proportions in several major contemporary arenas: corporations, church, and government. A rash of recent headlines reflects a disease out of control: CEO’s, stock analysts, accountants, and bankers seeking excessive financial power over others; exploitive priests, supported by indifferent archbishops, seeking sexual power over others; and our president and his cabinet seeking oppressive military and political power over others. What further disasters will it take to sober us up from a dangerous orgy of power intoxication? Committing these excesses may be criminal, but allowing them to continue may be equivalent to becoming an accessory to these crimes. (Classical Adlerian Quotes: The Yearning for Power  Introduction by Henry Stein)

In 1928 Alfred Adler anticipated this crisis of misused power, writing that power intoxication is a very contagious thing, which is why it should not be considered only in respect of the individual psyche. The masses can also be guided by the goal of power, and its effect can be much more devastating in virtue of the fact that within the mass psyche, the feeling of individual personal responsibility is essentially reduced. Adler proposed that there is only one remedy for this sort of mass thirst for power. “One thing can save us: the mistrust of any form of predominance. Our strength lies in conviction, in organizing strength, in a world view, not in the violence of armament and not in emergency laws. With such means other strong forces before us have fought in vain for their existence” (Adler Institute Home Page).  Leo Tolstoy wrote long ago: “Let those join hands who care for the good cause, and let our one standard be energy and honesty. If vicious people are united and form a power, honest people must do the same. It’s so simple.” (p. 1271, 1273).

In nature, predators are a necessity: they improve the fitness of herbivores and regulate the intensity of population of the species. So under normal circumstances, we should avoid upsetting the balance of nature by intervening with the activity of the top predators. Nevertheless, we usually trying to notify, alert, and alarm each other when a huge shark is whirling close to a group of swimming people, or when a tiger has escaped from the zoo. But regrettably the same cannot be said for human predators. People are not accustomed to alerting each other when bullies like Cheney and Rumsfeld are about to take up key positions in governments, such as those of the former Presidents Bush.

We require the owners of pit-bulls to keep their dogs behind closed doors, and to muzzle them when on their walks. But we have not learned to “muzzle” sociopaths and authoritarians in power positions, despite the fact that these creatures can be much more dangerous to the community than all the sharks and pit-bulls put together. Machiavellians are, perhaps, desirable personalities in positions within foreign affairs ministries, but as members of the ruling elite, they also help powerful sociopaths and authoritarians first intoxicate their citizens, and then transform them into victims or blameworthy villains.

Associations like this within the ruling elite inspired, organized and managed the elimination of more than 50 million people during WWII. And now, with weapons of mass destruction of immeasurably power, the potential for an even more devastating loss of human life is very real. These powerful forces still succeed in anesthetizing our consciences with their promises to “keep us safe” from the “ticking nukes”. But in part they do so to fabricate support for the invasion of other countries, which not only provokes the development and spread of terrorism, but degrades the integrity and dignity of our nations - all in aid of satisfying their dirty souls. So, it should be clear that learning ways of “muzzling” these powerful people, and especially of preventing them from intoxicating people with poisonous religious or political ideas, becomes a very crucial problem.

Afterword

Let us recall that their power and influence has grown enormously due to the creation of the social system, which means that we should learn to effectively use the mechanisms of the social system to restrict the possibility of the “cold” individuals becoming too irritating and too dangerous for the humankind. In other words, we have to learn to incapacitate them, to prevent them from using the power of the social system for their own “corporative” antihuman interests and actions.

As the experience of the USA during the Bush-Cheney epoch, as well as that of “post-communist” Russia illustrates, representatives of the “cold” block can skillfully use the state organs, democratic institutes against democracy. They can create (or at least allow the development of) a situation in a country that motivates the people themselves to vote against democratic institutes, such as restrictions of personal freedom or group activities.

We can see that the same media can be used both for people’s political and moral education, and for the indoctrination of antihuman ideas, for instance through the psychological contamination that accompanies stirring up religious and cultural hatred or introducing fear into society through war-mongering. Vocal “cold” official and unofficial supporters help the political hawks to intoxicate the “politically unstable” central group of the anthroposystem, and in such a way an appropriate “public opinion” has been created. Parliaments, senates, congresses, governments make according decisions – and thousands young people go to the slaughter houses.

This is actually not a new problem, and in fact a number of individuals recognized it long ago, which is how anti-state notions and movements associated with many types and traditions of anarchism first came to be introduced. But anarchists could not overcome the state because, first of all, although they could easily come together in the struggle against their current circumstances, they were instantly separated, dissipated and opposed to each other on the issue of objectives for the amalgamation. There is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, but its versions can be categorized in two large groups: individualist anarchism and collectivist (“communitarian”, “mutualist”, “socialist”) anarchism. Modelling the future organization of society, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 -1865) proposed the notion of a spontaneous social order that would be produced as a result of business transactions alone, whereby organization emerges without central authority, when everybody does “what he wishes and only what he wishes”. Collectivist Mikhail Bakunin (1814 -1876), together with his associates, joined the First International in 1868 in order to work with the Marxists to push the International “in a more revolutionary socialist direction”. But he considered Marx’s ideas too “centralist’, and prophetically predicted that, if a Marxist party came to power, its leaders would simply take the place of the ruling class they had fought against. In 1872, Bakunin and several of his faction were expelled for supposedly maintaining a secret organization within the International.

Another Russian anarchist-communist was “the Anarchist Prince” Peter Kropotkin (1842 - 1921). Contemporaries saw him as leading a near perfect life (Oscar Wilde described him as “a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia”). Kropotkin proclaimed the State – in fact any state at all – “a blood-sucker” who represses personality, suppresses individual and local life, captures all aspects of human activity, and brings wars and internal struggles for power. That is why, he thought, it should be abolished and a communist society free from central government be established in its place. He did not accept even the socialist idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In his article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) he wrote that anarchism is “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being”. (Kropotkin: Anarchism: its philosophy)

Employing the Marxist idea of the necessity of proletarian dictatorship during the transition from capitalism to communism, Lenin contemplated the establishment of this sort of dictatorship in Russia in the form of the Soviet (councils) Power. (The first “soviets” were actually invented in Russia by working men in 1905, during the first revolution, to serve as a form of management). On the basis of this, Lenin took the view that in each village or town, region, district or province there should be Soviets of working men, peasants and soldiers represented. At the centre was supposed to be the Supreme Soviet of the USSR – as a legislative power, with the Soviet of Peoples Commissars as an executive power. The local soviets were meant to manage all the activity of their districts, areas. Lenin’s explanation was that it was not necessary to be a highly educated or politically experienced person in order to find the right solution for a small, practical, local problem in a village or in a factory. That is why Lenin proclaimed that with respect to soviet power; even a woman-cook will make politics and rule the state. The sum total of all such solutions and actions would comprise the economic, social and cultural policy of the government. The general control in the country – on behalf of working class – was to be carried out by the “elite” of the working class, the Communist party, which he regarded at that time as “the intellect, the honour and the consciousness of our epoch”. The salary of the state officials, even of the people’s commissars of the highest rank, was not supposed to exceed that of the highly qualified worker – in order to prevent careerism. In such a way, step by step, in his opinion, the social activity of people would rise, the political experience would be accumulated, and all of this would bring about the dying out of the State in the traditional sense.

But from the very beginning of the socialist transformation of Russia, Lenin was frustrated by the fact of the growth of bureaucracy in the country, which he considered as the “enemy number one” for socialism. And soon he died. The authoritarian, intolerant and power thirsty tyrant, Stalin imposed strict centralization in the country, eliminated the old honest and strong communists, created a new cast of rulers “in his own image”, and pushed aside the vast majority of people from involvement in the control of their own country. The soviets were saved only in form and in name, but the content of the soviet movement was transformed radically, so that Soviet Power, as it was meant to be in the country, was virtually eliminated. The state had in fact become even more strong and bureaucratic, rigid than it was under tsarist rule, the Russian Empire.

On the other hand, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the USA, in the circumstances of traditional democracy, the ice-”cold” Chaney-Bush duo managed to achieve great success in the transformation of this democratic country into a kind of neo-empire. In such a way, the problem of protection of a society from the atrocities of its own state under “cold” leaders has been revived.

As we can remember, a young mouse from the Aesop’s fable seemed to find the right theoretical solution to the problem of protecting mice from their enemy, the cat, when he proposed tying a little bell to the cat’s neck. But he could not find the answer to the old mouse’s practical question: “Who of you will tie the bell on the cat’s neck?”

We know that we can achieve our goals through the mechanisms of democracy. More and more people recognize that the laws of the economic and social development are objective, that is, they are independent from human minds and intentions. But the process of development within society is determined by human activities. In other words, these objective laws can manifest themselves only through (conscious or spontaneous) people’s activities.

So it looks like the American people have just found the answer to this question and made a right step in this direction. Due to the Bush-Cheney team’s “hard work” and very hard legacy, they managed to accomplish an unimaginable, historic feat when they elected - without any scientific support, psychological testing - the first non-white President of the calibre of their best statesmen, Barak Obama. His personal profile can, most likely, be spiked somewhere in the area of altruistic and creative personality types. Despite the awful financial, economic and political situation in the country he inherited from the extremely “cold” duo, as a genuinely great patriot, he managed, during the very first one hundred days of his running the government, to show the rest of the world that America can not only be an extremely egoistic, greedy, corrupt and bullying world policeman, but also a responsible, patient, competent and strong leader. His election seems to be just that “little bell on the cat’s neck” and perhaps even a little bit more than that.

There is no doubt that people of such a kind can be found in any country of the world, and sometimes even in the most unexpected positions. Obama’s successes would surely be a good incentive for others like him to reveal themselves. (Even in Russia, on the dark background of universal corruption among the ruling elite, we can find a few individuals who became the leaders of some regions, and in a short time transformed these regions into oases of more or less normal life for their people.) It would be marvellous to see that people can find several hundred of such “Obamas” for the rest of the countries of the world, and then help them to implement their ideas, wishes and programs.

Undoubtedly, President Obama’s achievements will inspire the representatives of the “cold” block in the USA, and many other counties, to mobilize all their resources for discrediting his actions and preventing the triumph of the “warm” block. In their struggle for life, it is to be expected that they will try to do everything possible to sabotage his innovations, to prevent him from the realization of his dreams concerning the harmonization of relations between the countries and the peoples of the world, and perhaps even incapacitate him physically. Anyway, we are witnessing the most interesting case of a new grandiose attempt at the humanization of world relations, which is now the only way to ensure humankind’s survival.

But one of the necessary steps on the way to the long awaited prevailing of good over evil, and the achievement of the wellbeing of the majority of people on the earth, seems to be rejection of the notion of attributing the insulting label of “evil from childhood” to each and every person, to human beings in general, and refusing to call human nature inherently evil. We can see that the representatives of the “warm” block should definitely be immediately mislabelled. Most of the representatives of the “neutral” block, including the central group of the “strategic reserve”, are also not inherently evil people. We all are different, and some circumstances can ignite aggressive inclinations in each of us, but it does make sense, as Jesus recommended, to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”.

 

 

Acknowledgements

The founder of Russian classical music, Mikhail Glinka, used to say that “It is the people who create music. We, composers, have only been arranging it”. And we can find indeed the traces of many folk melodies in the symphonies, sonatas, concerts and suites by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Chopin, and other great composers of the world. So the difference between the creative processes of an artist or composer, on the one hand, and scientist or philosopher, on the other, is not very big indeed. Anyway, it is difficult to say whose works - voluminous or short, quoted or verbatimized, mentioned or only hinted at, or simply swallowed long ago, digested and kept deep in mind – help a researcher, myself included, to come to his or her conclusions. Precisely, I did not carry out clinical or laboratory researches of personality types and, naturally, I cannot own the descriptions of the types I’ve been talking about in this work. They are described by other researchers, and other psychologists. As a “composer”, I am busying myself first and foremost with their interpretation and “arrangement”.

But to all of my “involuntary” contributors, the researchers listed further in the References, I am indebted and greatly thankful. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to freely and generously serve others by any our invention. This is just what my intention was. My special thanks to my dear granddaughters – Tais and Nadia – for helping me with language and with the picture.

 

 

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