Articles by Veniamin Zatsepin

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.

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Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 1:

Preface

Creation of the concept of the social system

The social system in Marxist philosophy

Post-Marxist concepts of the social systems

Testing the social system theories

Into the fabric of social institutes

The basic personality types

Psychopath (sociopath)

Authoritarian personality

Machiavellian personality

“Technocratic”, “practical” or “hoarding” personality

Amiable, friendly or agreeable personality

Altruistic personality

Creative personality

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

Preface

It has always made me feel uneasy reading or hearing someone trying to explain people’s inhumane acts, and even brutish violence, by recourse to the concept of “human nature”. On this explanation, there are really only two possibilities: either one is a criminal (or at least a potential criminal) or one is simply not a human being. At the same time, I still find it bewildering that our primeval ancestors, the illiterate people of the stone and bronze ages (and our contemporaries, the Aborigines of Australia and the Americas), while poorly versed in the theory of nature’s laws, knew and expressed in their everyday lives closer kinship with nature than do even the most educated of us today. Their attitude to each and every part of nature was more humane and respectful than that of the majority of our contemporaries, despite the fact that these people burned trees for fire and killed animals for food. So what has happened to modern people, to society? Does civilization, indeed, spoil us? Why have we been breaking our contracts or mutual understanding with the animate natural world? What has been pitting us against each other and why do we degrade and eliminate other people? Is it true that mankind is a malignant tumor of the body that is earth? Are we, human beings, indeed evil from our very childhood? And who and what exactly are ‘we’?

These are the questions that the following discussion is concerned with.

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