Definition of Agreeableness, Entry 1

Using Definitions of Agreeableness from the Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology

The purpose of this article is to come up with a definitive definition of Agreeableness that will always be used on this blog, Creative Genius and the Egoist Anarchist Personality. This article will be useful for not only future readers of this blog but also the author of this blog. For future readers, they will know exactly what I mean by the term Agreeableness. They will not be forced to read multiple blog entries in order to piece together a definition of Agreeableness for themselves. For the author of this blog, I think that having this article will make my future blog entries succinct. Without the existence of this particular blog article, I will be supremely tempted to write detailed definitions into all of my future blog articles because I know that I will worry about whether my future readers will understand my arguments correctly or not. Therefore, to make life easier for future readers and for myself, I am writing this article, Definition of Agreeableness.

Method

To come up with a definition of Agreeableness, I am first going to consult a number of psychology books, websites, and academic journal articles. Next, I am going to consult the works of Bruce Charlton. Charlton’s works merit special treatment because they are so vitally important to the primary thesis of this blog. In fact, Charlton’s works motivated me to create this blog. Finally, I will attempt to synthesize all of the various definitions of Agreeableness into my final and definitive definition.

In order to make this discussion manageable for my readers, I plan to publish this article as multiple Substack entries. I will label them as Entry 1, Entry 2, Entry 3, and so on. The problem that I have encountered is that the article is too long for Substack to email as one gigantic entry. Moreover, I fear that most people will not have the time to read one very long article. So therefore, breaking this one article up into multiple Substack entries makes a lot of sense.

Books, Websites, and Journal Articles

Definitions from the Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology

“Personality and Emotion”

Agreeableness is usually defined as a behavioral disposition that contrasts a prosocial, communal orientation toward others with an antagonistic attitude. However, some of the best markers of agreeableness actually refer to emotional dispositions toward other people (e.g., “affectionate,” “soft-hearted” versus “cold”); and empirically too, agreeableness has been found to correlate positively with the tendency to experience empathic emotions (i.e., emotional reactions to the fate of others), as well as the tendency to experience love and compassion, and negatively with trait anger (agreeable people are less anger-prone).¹

A couple of things jump out at me when I read this definition for the first time. The first thing that catches my attention is the use of the word “communal.” Egoist anarchists are willing to go it alone in the pursuit of their goals, and they feel no obligation to participate in communal activities or to share communal goals:

Anarchy is freedom, and this most assuredly includes the freedom not to be a socialist or to live like one, and the freedom not to limit one’s identity to any social role—especially that of worker. It’s the freedom not to participate in communal activities or to share communal goals, or to pray before the idol of Solidarity. It’s freedom not only from the rule of the State but also from that of the tribe, village, commune, or production syndicate. It’s the freedom to choose one’s own path to one’s own goals, to map out one’s own campaign against Authority, and, if desired, to go it alone.²

The second thing that catches my attention when I read this definition for the first time is that the definition of Agreeableness is identical to Nietzsche’s description of slave morality. Synonyms of the term “soft-hearted” include kind, sympathetic, friendly, and warmhearted. All of these synonyms appear in Nietzsche’s description of slave morality:

On the other hand, those qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded with light; it is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to honour; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence. Slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility.³

“Personality Neuroscience”

Agreeableness appears to reflect the set of traits necessary for cooperation and altruism, reflecting variation in a general tendency to be interested in and considerate of others’ needs, desires and feelings and to refrain from exploiting, hurting or imposing one’s will on others. Such tendencies are of particular importance for social species, which must maintain some level of cooperative stability in their social groups, and traits resembling Agreeableness are found consistently in social mammals.

Agreeableness can be decomposed into two aspects, Compassion and Politeness. Whereas Politeness reflects a tendency toward conforming to social norms and refraining from aggression, Compassion encompasses traits related to empathy, sympathy and concern for the needs and feelings of others.⁴

Three things jump out at me when I read this definition for the first time. All three things suggest to me that egoist anarchists are likely to score low on Agreeableness.

The first item that catches my attention is the use of the term “altruism.” Egoist anarchists are unlikely to be high in Agreeableness because Agreeableness involves altruism and altruism is a self-serving strategy that parasitical people use in order to live off other people:

The individual puts himself on guard against attempts of theft and assassination by the band of “altruists,” “philanthropists,” and “humanitarians” who take an interest in his fate . . . to assure their own.

In sum:

The egoist—natural being—satisfies himself with passion. The individualist, the irreligious.

The altruist—artificial being—sacrifices himself to duty. The sacrificed, the religious.

The will to sacrifice does not exist in man in his natural state; the need to create it is born among individuals who want to live as parasites, living on the work of others.⁵

Similarly, altruists are a race of slaves; egoists are a race of freemen:

Nietzsche’s valorization of the strong individual, while scorned by some such as Chesterton, found approval in other quarters, such as the journal the Eagle and the Serpent (named after Zarathustra’s companions), which ran intermittently from 1899 to 1902. This was edited by J. B. Barnhill, writing under the pseudonym Erwin McCall. Its subtitle was “A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy and Sociology” and it announced that it was “Dedicated to the Philosophy of Life Enunciated by Nietzsche, Emerson, Stirner, Thoreau, and Goethe.” Egoism—of the Stirnerian kind—was indeed its central motivating tenet, as is made clear in an editorial from the first issue: “A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of freemen is necessarily a race of egoists.”⁶

Therefore, I think it is safe to say that egoist anarchists are unlikely to be fans of altruism.

The second item that catches my attention is the claim that humans are a “social species.” Egoist anarchist literature also objects to the commonly held idea that man is a social animal:

Man bears very little resemblance to the social animals, like the ants or the bees, who live in highly-centralized, closely-knit social organisms. The earliest men were more like wolves or elephants: they were only moderately gregarious, living in loosely organized packs. And, as we have seen, it’s only very recently—since the Industrial Revolution—that man has in fact become “sociate.” Of all the animals, man is actually the least suited to live in a closely-knit social organism, like a hive or an ant-heap. For human beings display a greater degree of individual diversity than do the members of any other species, and individual diversity, obviously, is the last thing that is wanted in a social organism.⁷

The third item that catches my attention is the definition of Politeness as conforming to social norms. Egoist anarchists are unlikely to conform to social norms. They want to live dangerously away from the protection of norms or social customs because they live a bohemian lifestyle:

Among the German Stirner enthusiasts we find the leading figures of the bohemia. And that should not come as a surprise, argues Julius Bab, the chronographer of the Berlin bohemia, since Stirner himself, the theoretician, as he puts it, of “true anarchism,” was one of them. Stirner was a habitué of the radical coffee house culture. He had his “Stammtisch” (regulars’ table) at Hippel pub (on Friedrichstrasse), where the Young Hegelians met. It was this milieu that inspired and helped him develop his ideas, Bab argues, because, in Bab’s opinion, the bohemia is nothing but a peaceful attempt at practical anarchism, and the creation of a disobedient and self-governing group of people outside of the organized society. . . .

That which constitutes the bohemian, Erich Mühsam explains, is, negatively, the result of a revolted and revolting spirit. Positively, it is the impulse to live dangerously, away from the protection of norms or social customs.⁸

As an aside, I should say something about the use of the term “impulse.” Impulsivity is another term used in psychology, and people living impulsively are likely to score low in Conscientiousness.

TO BE CONTINUED IN ENTRY 2

1. Rainer Reisenzein, Andrea Hildebrandt, and Hannelore Weber, “Personality and Emotion,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology, 2nd ed., ed. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 87.

2. Meme, Myself and I [pseud.], “Drawing First Blood,” in Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought (Berkeley, CA: Ardent Press, 2011), xi.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 4th ed., trans. Helen Zimmern (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 230-231.

4. Colin G. DeYoung and Scott D. Blain, “Personality Neuroscience,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology, 2nd ed., ed. Philip J. Corr and Gerald Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 279-280.

5. Manuel Devaldès, “Reflections on Individualism,” in Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism, trans. and ed. Vincent Stone (Berkeley, CA: Ardent Press, 2014), 198.

6. Sam Slote, Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11.

7. Francis Ellingham, “Anarchism, Society and the Socialized Mind,” in Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought (Berkeley, CA: Ardent Press, 2011), 212-213.

8. Constantin Parvulescu, The Individualist Anarchist Discourse of Early Interwar Germany (Cluj-Napoca: Universitară Clujeană, 2018), 41.