Abstract for Creative Genius and the Egoist Anarchist Personality
A Summary of What I Want to Accomplish with this Blog
This blog, Creative Genius and the Egoist Anarchist Personality, is my attempt to synthesize the ideas expressed by Dr. Bruce G. Charlton in his blog, Intelligence, Personality and Genius, with the ideas expressed in the book Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought.
Charlton’s blog is basically his attempt to explain the personality of creative geniuses by drawing upon the research of the trait theorist Hans J. Eysenck and by utilizing the results of the Big Five trait theory of personality. Charlton is primarily concerned with three major personality traits, namely, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Psychoticism. To create each trait, various different measurement scales are employed. The process reminds me of measuring latent variables using the statistical approach called Structural Equation Modeling. To illustrate, the trait of Psychoticism is broken down into nine different characteristics. Each scale is measured from left to right with high Psychoticism on the left and low Psychoticism on the right:
Interpersonally spontaneous and natural versus conventional, polite, careful and diplomatic
Aggressive versus submissive
Egocentric versus follows the group’s expectations
Unempathic versus sympathetic, feels the emotions of others
Tough-minded (i.e., impervious to events) versus tender-minded, strongly affected by experience
Antisocial versus gregarious, needs other people
Impersonal versus life consists of intense, direct relationships
Impulsive (behavior dominated by current emotions) versus behavior dominated by predictions or weaker emotions
Creative versus applies peer-approved, learned rules and traditions1
The book, Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought, is a collection of articles by individualist anarchists and egoist anarchists. One major theme of this book is distinguishing the egoist anarchist from the social anarchist. Both want to abolish the state (obviously), but they differ on what they would like to do in some future stateless world. The social anarchist wants to replace the state with some new ideal “society,” but the egoist anarchist rejects this vision because the egoist anarchist sees “society” as another form of oppression and tyranny over the individual. In fact, some of them boldly argue that “society” is even more oppressive than the state!
In the eyes of an individualist society is as tyrannical, if not more so, than the state. Society, in fact, is nothing else but the mass of social ties of all kinds (opinions, mores, usages, conventions, mutual surveillance, more or less discreet espionage of the conduct of others, moral approval and disapproval, etc.) Society thus understood constitutes a closely-knit fabric of petty and great tyrannies, exigent, inevitable, incessant, harassing, and pitiless, which penetrates into the details of individual life more profoundly and continuously than statist constraints can.2
This brings me now to the thesis of this blog, namely, that egoist and individualist anarchists display the personality traits of creative geniuses. A more precise way of stating my thesis is to say that I will attempt to prove that egoist and individualist anarchists tend to display low levels of Conscientiousness, low levels of Agreeableness, and high levels of Psychoticism. This triad of traits — low Conscientiousness, low Agreeableness, and high Psychoticism — is, by Bruce Charlton’s definition, creative genius.
Bruce G. Charlton, “Eysenck’s Personality Trait of Psychoticism as the Primary Underlying Disposition, Underpinning Most Other Traits,” Intelligence, Personality and Genius, entry posted June 24, 2013, https://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2013/06/eysencks-personality-trait-of.html (accessed July 30, 2022).
Georges Palante, “Anarchism and Individualism,” in Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought (Berkeley, CA: Ardent Press, 2011), 197-198.