Anarchism, Buddhism, the God of Spinoza and Einstein, and the Enneagram
Anti-authoritarians tend to resist the dogmas of both secular and religious authorities. There are, however, lenses to view the world that can be attractive for anti-authoritarians. Rather than offering an encyclopedia of such lenses, I will present those that I have been drawn to and have found most useful for anti-authoritarians whom I’ve known.
Anarchism, Buddhism, the God of Spinoza and Einstein, and the Enneagram are each book-length topics, but I have tried to provide a sense of them. With each of these lenses, an anti-authoritarian can feel at home questioning, challenging, and resisting illegitimate authority. With each, there are no hierarchies and no coercions, and compassion is valued while badges are not. Within each of these lenses, there are different schools of thought, interpretations, and emphases; thus, there are choices within these choices.
Anarchism
In one sense, anarchism is a political philosophy, but in another sense, it is a belief about human nature, a faith in the goodness of human beings.
Anarchism rejects not only state control but also the hierarchical organization of human beings in which people have unequal power. Anarchism believes that people can best achieve autonomy, freedom, and cooperation within egalitarian organizations. Anarchism is positively impassioned by a thirst for freedom in all spheres of life, and it is negatively impassioned by a resentment with coercion. For critics of anarchism, those passions make anarchism immature and dangerous. But for advocates of anarchism, those passions make it highly mature and benevolent.
What’s most radical about anarchism, for me, is its faith that human beings can organize themselves without fear. This is a radical notion, because people are so accustomed to being controlled by fear that they don’t even notice it The state, whatever ideology it claims, keeps people in line using policing authorities and prisons. Orthodox religions keep congregants in line using the fear of God, clergy, and hell. Standard schools keep students in line using grades, suspensions, expulsions, and threats to withhold diplomas. And employees are kept in line by their fear of being fired and falling into poverty.
Authoritarians routinely smear anarchism as advocating chaos and violence. Some of these authoritarians are ignorant of anarchism, while others are not. It is true some anarchists have used violence to achieve their aims, but anarchists don’t seek a violent and chaotic society. Informed authoritarians who spread falsehoods about anarchism fear that should people actually grasp the truth of anarchism, many would be attracted to it.
“Anarchism,” according to Alexander Berkman, “means that you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you. It means that you should be free to do the things you want to do; and that you should not be compelled to do what you don’t want to do. It means that you should have a chance to choose the kind of a life you want to live, and live it without anybody interfering. It means that the next fellow should have the same freedom as you, that everyone should have the same rights and liberties. It means that all men are brothers, and that they should live like brothers, in peace and harmony. That is to say, that there should be no war, no violence used by one set of men against another, no monopoly and no poverty, no oppression, no taking advantage of your fellow-man.” Of course, Berkman clearly meant to include all genders here—or else he would not have had Emma Goldman’s lifelong loyalty.
Free association is paramount in anarchism, which is optimistic about humanity and its capacity to cooperate. In Emma Goldman’s essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” she wrote: “Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.”
The vision of a society without coercion is attractive to many people—intoxicatingly attractive to some people. And anarchism’s attractiveness makes it so threatening for various authoritarians that anarchism is their common enemy. For example, in the 1930s, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Stalinist Soviet Union, Western capitalist nations, and the Catholic Church all played a role in destroying a successful anarchist society in Spain.
Authoritarians are horrified by anarchism because they believe that without coercions, people would run amok and life would be fraught with chaos and violence. The reality is that coercions do “work” to keep certain populations in line. Social critic Alfie Kohn, in his book Punished by Rewards, documents that coercions such as rewards and punishments can be effective in shaping behaviors of laboratory animals, children, institutionalized adults such as prisoners, and others who are dependent on authorities for the necessities of their survival. In order to most effectively control people’s behavior, research shows that people have to be needy enough of the rewards and terrified enough of the negative reinforcements and punishments. And so there is actually an incentive for authoritarians to keep people alienated and infantilized, as such people are easier to control. Coercions can effectively control behavior in certain populations, but not without humiliation, resentment, and rage. Not coincidentally, U.S. society is replete with people feeling humiliated, resentful, and enraged.
In anarchism, people perform activities that they desire to perform, and so coercion is unnecessary. However, in U.S. society, people are mostly performing activities they dislike. In 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Seven out of 10 workers have ‘checked out’ at work or are ‘actively disengaged,’ according to a recent Gallup survey.” The more one is disengaged from an activity and dependent on authorities for survival, the more coercion is necessary to maintain order.
Anarchism’s opposition to coercion is not an advocacy of chaos but rather a faith that human beings can be organized with love. A key belief of anarchism is mutual aid (discussed later) and cooperation. This requires altruism. Concern for others is not created by coercive rewards and punishments. Kohn’s review of the research confirms that children whose parents use rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous children than their peers who are not so coerced. Instead of coercions, it is the experience of love and the modeling of love that best creates caring and cooperative people.
In U.S. society, anarchism is not only a radical political idea but also a radical psychological one. Anarchism asserts that human beings can have community without being dominated by fear. Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, live with great fear and anxiety. Given our ordinary fear-based existence, when people experience fearlessness through an extraordinary experience, that fearlessness can feel so exhilaratingly different that it can be intoxicating, sometimes so intoxicating that we can become manic. The more fear pervades a culture, the more extraordinary is the experience of fearlessness, and the more likely it will be so intoxicating that it can cause us to behave irrationally. Fearlessness does not intoxicate people who are accustomed to it.
There are anarchists who are rigid ideologues. For them, attempting to survive in an economic system based on the coercion of money is so shameful that they either deny their hypocrisies or self-flagellate for their failure to live up to their ideals. In either case, the rigid ideologue is not going to be much fun to be around. In current society, if we have no money, we cannot pay the bills that most of us have. Without money, we are likely to become either a financial burden on friends or family, at the mercy of some of the most oppressive authorities in society, or dead. The reality is that while all aspects of the anarchist ideal cannot be implemented in non-anarchist society, some aspects can be implemented, even within the workplace. For example, the publisher of this book, AK Press, is an egalitarian organization without hierarchical control but accepts the present reality of money. There are many other such non-hierarchical workplaces in the United States.
Among anarchists, there are several different schools of thought that emphasize different aspects of anarchism. Anarcho-syndicalism, Noam Chomsky explains, is a particular variety of anarchism which is concerned primarily, though not solely, with control over the workplace. “It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions . . . control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and . . . democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.” Another anarchist school of thought is anarcho-primitivism, a major concern of which is gaining freedom from the tyranny of large-scale authoritarian technology. Among different schools, there are also different views as to how to achieve an anarchist society.
Anti-authoritarian perspectives like anarchism don’t simply provide an individual with an ideology. Discovering a belief system that rings true can also serve as a vehicle for connecting with like-minded people. In the 1880s and 1890s in the United States, if you were an alienated anti-authoritarian, you could go to the Lower East Side in New York City and hang out at places such as Sach’s Café on Suffolk Street or Justus Schwab’s basement tavern on First Street which called itself a “gathering place for all bold, joyful, freedom-loving spirits.” Here you would meet and connect with all kinds of anti-authoritarians. Your belief system would be a vehicle for a support group and provide an opportunity to connect with friends and lovers. That’s what happened to Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and many others who created a rich social network for themselves that mitigated some of the pain of being an anarchist in the United States. In 1900 when Schwab died, 2,000 mourners followed the hearse down Second Avenue.
Buddhism
In The Religions of Man, religious studies scholar Huston Smith states, “Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority,” and so, not surprisingly, Buddhism appeals to many anti-authoritarians. Buddhism is a rebellion against what is normally considered religion.
Smith detailed how Buddhism is “a religion almost entirely dissociated from each of the six corollaries of religion”: (1) authority; (2) ritual; (3) speculation; (4) tradition; (5) God’s supreme power to confer grace; and (6) mystery. In Buddhism, authority is confronted in several manners. Born into the top of India’s Hindu caste system, the Buddha challenged that hierarchy’s legitimacy. Rituals, rites, and prayers were frowned upon by the Buddha who considered it a waste of time speculating on that which one can never know for certain, and he told his followers to reject traditions if they had no value in reducing suffering. Rather than depending on God’s grace and resigning oneself to fatalism, the Buddha preached intense self-effort to a path that can lead one out of suffering in one’s own lifetime. And finally, unlike figureheads of other religions, Smith noted, “Buddha preached a religion devoid of the supernatural.”
Buddhism is in direct contrast to what we normally view as a religion. Buddhism is empirical, as one’s direct personal experience is the final test for truth. Buddhism is scientific, aimed at uncovering the cause and effect. Buddhism is pragmatic, concerned with problem solving. Buddhism is psychological, in its study of human nature. Buddhism is therapeutic, aimed at alleviating suffering. And Buddhism is democratic, in its attack on the hierarchy of the caste system.
Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyas (approximately 560–480 BCE) was born in northern India into wealth and royalty. At age 29, deeply discontented, he rejected his society and took the next six years to discover the root of his despair and the solution to it. He probed the minds of Hindu masters, then joined a band of ascetics but ultimately rejected the path of asceticism. Finally, he sat under a fig tree, which has since become known as the Bo tree (short for Bodhi or enlightenment), and with a combination of meditation, rigorous thought, and mystic concentration, he remained in a rapture of sorts for 49 days. When he opened himself to the world again, he had become the Buddha, meaning the Enlightened One or the Awakened One.
The Buddha would spend the next 45 years teaching what he had discovered about the roots of suffering and solutions for it. “Perhaps the most striking thing about him,” philosopher James Pratt noted in The Pilgrimage of Buddhism and a Buddhist Pilgrimage, “is his almost unique combination of a cool scientific head with the devoted sympathy of a warm and loving heart.”
We in the West commonly learn that the essence of Buddhism is the “Four Noble Truths”: that life is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; the cure for suffering is the cessation of craving; and that this can be done through the Eightfold Path (of the right knowledge, aspiration, speech, behavior, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and absorption). This is not wrong, but it does not truly capture the essence of Buddhism.
In Buddhism, it is certainly true that craving ephemeral pleasures is a bad idea—not because it is shamefully sinful but because we become enslaved by it, as these pleasures will be transient and interfere with peace, freedom, and equanimity. In Buddhism, it is not a good idea to desire things that in the long run will bring us more pain than pleasure. However, for the Buddha, not all desires are evil.
“It is perfectly plain that the Buddha desired a number of things,” Pratt noted. The Buddha was filled with pity for human suffering, and he desired alleviation of that suffering. He dedicated his life to disseminating truths that would liberate people from misery, and he trained others to spread these truths. The Buddha actually taught that there are “bad” and “good” desires. It is a good desire to want less ignorance and more compassion. “The two cardinal virtues of Buddhism,” Pratt tells us are “wisdom and love.”
The Buddha saw great ignorance about suffering and attempted to simplify the major cause of self-inflicted human despair. While suffering is caused by societal oppressions, suffering can also be a result of our own self-oppression, specifically through self-preoccupation. Pratt summarizes: “The great bulk of our woe, thinks the Buddha, most of us bring upon ourselves quite needlessly by viewing everything from its bearing upon our little selves.”
In Buddhism, compassion and generosity are not—as they are viewed in most other religions—righteous good deeds, but instead are pragmatic vehicles for pulling us out of our self-absorption. If one is attached to getting recognition, praise, or other rewards from God or fellow congregants for one’s generosity, one is self-focused and will not receive the psychological benefits of moving out of one’s self-preoccupation.
The path away from self-induced suffering is moving out of self-absorption, yet, in a tragic comedy, virtually the entirety of the modern mental health profession promotes self-focus. Psychiatrists’ most common treatment consists of “medication management” in which patients are directed to self-focus, as they are asked questions solely about their symptoms so as to tweak their drug prescription. Even doctors who conduct “talk therapy” may direct emotionally suffering people to become even more self-focused. For Buddhist teachers, a focus solely on our symptoms and our feelings will only give them greater power over us.
Buddhist “therapy,” in contrast, consists of dialoguing with a person in a way that pulls them out of self-absorption. This is most apparent in Zen Buddhism, which Smith tells us, “is a world of bewildering dialogues, obscure conundrums, stunning paradoxes, flagrant contradictions, and abrupt non-sequiturs.” He offers some examples: “An ancient master, whenever he was asked the meaning of Zen, lifted one of his fingers. That was his entire answer. Another kicked a ball. Still another slapped the inquirer in the face.” The Zen therapist knows that without provoking us out of our ordinary consciousness, we will not be able to see life differently.
As is the case for anarchism, there are different schools of thought in Buddhism with different emphases and differing ideas about therapeutic methods and techniques. Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987), Buddhist scholar, teacher and founder of the Naropa Institute, was a controversial figure for his personal drug and alcohol use, his sexual choices, and his provocative style. But Trungpa was sought after by the famous and non-famous for instructions on meditation. In his The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, Trungpa tells us, “Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person”; instead the goal is “to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.” The purpose of mediation is greater enlightenment, including becoming “aware of our awareness,” especially of those mental events that result in suffering.
From the perspective of Buddhism, most mental health professionals are trained to be out of touch with reality—to be psychotic and delusional—to the extent that they are trained to view the causes of human suffering as chemical imbalances and defective genes. To assert the true cause of human suffering would put professionals in conflict with oppressive hierarchies and a consumer economy based on self-focus and attachments. And mental health professionals tend to comply with societal norms rather than rebel against them.
The God of Spinoza and Einstein
When it came to religion in the 1950s and 1960s, Lenny Bruce was perhaps the most outrageously courageous Jew around, as he was unintimidated by authorities and paid a legal and career price for his words. In the 1650s and 1660s, the most outrageously courageous Jew was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who so infuriated Jewish religious authorities that they excommunicated him, and who so enraged a religious fanatic that he attacked Spinoza with a knife in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.
The anti-authoritarian God of Spinoza can be more threatening to religious authoritarians than an atheist rejection of God. Religious authoritarians know that “Godless atheists” will have no influence over people who sense a force that is greater than they are; however, the anti-authoritarian God of Spinoza offers a real alternative for them.
The God of Spinoza is in no way the Biblical fatherly God who personally punishes individuals and populations for disobedience and who rewards for compliance. Spinoza’s God doesn’t have a “personality” and is in no way a “top-dog” in the hierarchy of life. Spinoza does not anthropomorphize God.
The God of Spinoza, instead, includes all aspects of nature and the universe, including its finite and infinite aspects and all of its laws—physical, psychological, and otherwise. Human beings are part of nature but limited in their capacity to understand all of nature. And thus Spinoza’s idea of God compels a humility in the sense that we may connect to some of God but that it is rationally impossible to connect with all of God. So for Spinoza, someone who self-certainly claims to have God’s truth is arrogant and delusional.
Philosophers debate whether Spinoza was a pantheist (God is all, and God and the universe are identical) or a panetheist (God is the soul of the universe, transcending the universe). However, there is no debate that the God of Spinoza has absolutely nothing to do with the God of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, whose God speaks with a deep powerful voice, gets pissed off, and cruelly punishes transgressors. Spinoza’s God is just way too cool to do that kind of thing.
Spinoza wrote, “The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature. . . .The more it understands the order of nature, the more easily it will be able to liberate itself from useless things.” To know Spinoza’s God is to know the truth of nature, to know its laws, and how the universe functions. That’s why the anti-authoritarian scientist and humanitarian Albert Einstein (1879–1955) believed in the God of Spinoza.
“Einstein Believes in ‘Spinoza’s God’” was a 1929 headline in the New York Times. In response to a public criticism by a Boston cardinal that Einstein was a Godless atheist, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein sent Einstein a telegram asking him, “Do you believe in God?” Goldstein requested that he respond in 50 words but Einstein needed only 32: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”
Just as religious authorities had accused Spinoza of being an atheist, Einstein also was similarly accused. In response to this atheist accusation, Einstein responded, “From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.” Einstein called the idea of a personal God “a childlike one.” However, Einstein rejected the “crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.” Instead, Einstein asserted, “I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.”
“Einstein’s God,” concludes Einstein biographer Ronald Clark, “thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them.” Michael Gilmore, writing in Skeptic, concludes, “Einstein continued to search, even to the last days of his 76 years, but his search was not for the God of Abraham or Moses. His search was for the order and harmony of the world.”
Einstein’s view of God had pragmatic psychological value for him. Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson points out that for Einstein, a belief in something larger than himself produced a mixture of confidence and humility. “Given his proclivity toward being self-centered,” Isaacson concludes, “these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self-awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world.”
Spinoza studied optics and made lenses for telescopes and microscopes, and, like Einstein, had an interest in all the laws of the universe. While Einstein focused mostly on the laws of physics, Spinoza was more of a psychologist, focusing more on the “mental laws” of human beings. Spinoza cared very much about what he called our “passions” and our emotions, which are part of our humanity and thus part of nature. For Spinoza, to sin, shame, or pathologize our emotions and our passions would sin, shame, or pathologize an aspect of God. However, what was clear to Spinoza was that our passions and our emotions can become tyrannical forces, destructive to ourselves and others.
Like Spinoza, Lenny Bruce realized that organized religion was in many ways an oppressive force, but had Bruce absorbed Spinoza’s great work, Ethics, he might have realized that so too could his own passions and emotions be freedom-depriving tyrants. To be controlled solely by one’s passions and emotions is to be incapable of wise judgments about ultimate consequences of behaviors. Like Bruce, Spinoza championed freedom and tolerance and opposed the tyranny and intolerance of political and religious authorities. But Spinoza also knew that we could tyrannize ourselves, making ourselves less tolerable to ourselves and others.
For Spinoza, one cannot be truly free if one is in bondage to one’s emotions. As Spinoza scholar Joseph Ratner put it, the wise human being “does not madly satisfy or repress one passion at the expense of the rest of his nature.” If only one aspect of our humanity takes over, then the remainder of our humanity—including our intellect and our need for justice, community, wisdom, beauty, autonomy, and freedom—will suffer.
Sinning, shaming, or pathologizing our emotions and passions actually gives them the power to tyrannize us; while simply acknowledging them gives them the influence they merit, which is not the power to dominate and control but merely the capacity to partially inform.
Spinoza was not an ascetic. He simply had few material needs. He had a view of happiness in which fame or material goods would not provide him with joy. For Spinoza, the incremental understanding of the universe, of nature, of life, and thus of God is the supreme source of happiness.
Both Spinoza and the Buddha are very much psychologists who came to similar conclusions. Both taught how to gain freedom from self-induced tyrannical attachments. And both practiced what they preached. There are other anti-authoritarian views of God, or at least less authoritarian views than the God of the Bible and the God of Cecil B. DeMille.
Thomas Paine, like Spinoza and Einstein, was condemned as an atheist for his attack on Christianity. However, Paine was not an atheist. After reflecting on religion a good part of his life, he came to believe in deism, the belief in a God that was the Cause or the Creator of the universe, not a God who interferes with the universe. For deists, a universe created by God does not require an intervening God. Deism was actually the belief system of many Enlightenment thinkers, including Benjamin Franklin and other so-called “founding fathers” but most of them, more politically astute than Paine, did not widely publicize these views.
Other anti-authoritarians are attracted to the God of Martin Buber (1878–1965). Buber’s God or Eternal Thou is found not by looking high up in the sky but within an I-Thou encounter. An I-Thou relationship may be between lovers, friends, strangers, or even between a person and a pet. In this I-Thou encounter, there is no using of the other in any way. In the I-Thou, there is simply an experiencing of the other, and this results in the experience of God or the Eternal Thou. Buber recognized that life is not possible without some objectifications or what he called I-It (e.g., cutting down a tree and using it to fuel a fire to warm oneself), so Buber does not shame or sin the I-It. But Buber was troubled by a world that was increasingly entirely I-It and without I-Thou, and he famously said, “Without It, man cannot live, but he who lives with It alone is not a man.”
Some anti-authoritarians sense a divine force that can liberate humans from social and economic injustices, and they selectively believe in only the anti-authoritarian aspects of the Bible. That would describe Harriet Tubman (profiled later), often called “Moses” for leading multiple slave escapes in the mid-nineteenth century. Tubman believed in a God that told both Moses and herself to free their people, but she scorned the part of the Bible that sanctioned slavery and promoted slave obedience. Similarly, Frederick Douglass (profiled later) espoused what today is called “liberation theology.” Douglass confronted the hypocrisy of those who claim to be Christians but dishonor Jesus by their support of slavery.
The Enneagram
The Enneagram is a lens by which people can better understand themselves and others in a manner that is almost completely opposite from the way psychiatry categorizes people. Unlike psychiatry and the DSM, in the Enneagram there is no labeling pronouncements of “mentally healthy” and “mentally ill” people. Lenny Bruce’s comedian mentor Joe Ancis was known to say, “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well,” and that is certainly the view of the Enneagram.
When I first heard about the Enneagram—composed of nine interrelated personality types—I reflexively rejected it. In my professional training, I had been exposed to not only the DSM but to several other classifying systems, and they all seemed unhelpful. It was ludicrous for me that mental health professionals, who themselves didn’t seem all that together, were the people deciding who was normal and who was mentally ill. Psychiatrists and psychologists, more than the general public, appeared to me to get a control buzz out of classifying people; but their control was illusory, as human beings are not consistent and have a large range of potential behaviors. It seemed to me that putting people into boxes caused a great deal of harm and did very little good.
Thus, initially I had no interest in the Enneagram, and only by serendipity did I become intrigued by it. Three decades ago, a client demanded that I listen to audiotapes about the Enneagram by a Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr. This felt so ridiculous—to listen to one more personality system and this time from clergy—that the utter preposterousness of the request made me chuckle and comply. By luck, the tape was not completely rewound, and I began listening to it just as Rohr was matter-of-factly asserting that the nine “compulsions” of the nine Enneagram personality types included two compulsions that were omitted from the seven deadly sins (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth). I was surprised that a Catholic priest would assert this “defect” in the seven deadly sins list, and I was curious as to what were the two omitted sins/compulsions that are included in the Enneagram. These omissions, Rohr announced, were “deceit” including “self-deceit” and also “fear.” Then he added, “America is capable of immense deceit . . . . . America has to own its capacity for deceit.” I had never thought it possible that a Catholic priest could in any way be anti-authoritarian, and so I became curious about the Enneagram.
What I like and respect most about the Enneagram is that it is decidedly non-hierarchical. No doctor, researcher, clergy, guru, or any authority informs you of your personality type. Typing only has value if it is you who autonomously discovers it, and it only has value if you are brutally honest with yourself. It is easy to deceive others and yourself as to the true nature of your attachments and compulsions, and the Enneagram claims no scientific pretense that it can detect your deception. Typing yourself to be a personality that you’d prefer rather than who you truly are provides you with nothing—people who are ignorant of the Enneagram couldn’t care less about your type, and people who understand the Enneagram know that no type has more or less status than any other.
The Enneagram is an egalitarian system. Within the continuum of each type, it is possible to bring ourselves and others both joy and suffering. In the Enneagram, every personality type has the potential to deteriorate, which, depending on the nature of one’s culture may be labeled as mental illness, criminality, adjustment, or success. And similarly, each personality type can transcend its compulsions and create joy for themselves and others.
Among the Enneagram’s recent well-known disseminators—Richard Rohr, Helen Palmer, and Don Richard Riso—all address the problem of how classification systems can neglect the uniqueness of the individual and disrespectfully pigeonhole people. But as Palmer notes, “The Enneagram . . . is not a fixed system,” as it allows for movement within our own personality type continuum and even toward other types. To know another’s personality type does not mean one can control or predict another’s behavior, because typing does not tell you whether someone is transcending their compulsions or surrendering to them.
The idea that human beings have a variety of temperaments based on the domination of different ego attachments, passions, and compulsions rings true for me. Any observer of young children sees that they have different innate temperaments. I have found that the Enneagram rings true for many anti-authoritarians, including many adolescent anti-authoritarians, and it creates a more satisfying and meaningful life for them. While scientific objective validity in the area of personality may be illusory, the Enneagram is pragmatically valid for many anti-authoritarians.
The descriptions of ONE through NINE personality types vary slightly among Enneagram authors. Type ONE is called the “Reformer” or the “Perfectionist,” compelled to be morally right, fearful of condemnation. Type TWO is called the “Helper” or the “Giver,” compelled to being needed, and fearful of not being loved. Type THREE is called the “Performer” or the “Motivator,” compelled to be seen as successful, fearful of failure and not being admired. Type FOUR is called the “Artist” or the “Individualist,” compelled to be unique, fearful of being defective. Type FIVE is called the “Thinker” or the “Observer,” compelled to understanding and freedom, fearful of being overwhelmed by others. Type SIX is called the “Loyalist” and the “Doubter,” compelled to have security and certainty, fearful of abandonment and insecurity. Type SEVEN is called the “Generalist” or the “Epicure,” compelled to fun and pleasure, fearful of deprivation. Type EIGHT is called the “Leader” or the “Boss,” compelled to self-reliance and power, fearful of submitting to others. Type NINE is called the “Peacemaker” or the “Mediator,” compelled to union with people and the natural world, fearful of conflict. The number does not in any way signify any one type being superior to any other; but the numbers are significant in that, for example, the TWO is adjacent to both the THREE and ONE, and so the TWO has elements of ONE and THREE as well.
Within any Enneagram type, there is a wide continuum of behavior. Take type FIVE, the “Thinker.” At their most transcendent best, the FIVE accurately observes the world, makes perceptive connections, and generates profound insights. The FIVE can also be a one-dimensional intellectual analyzer and a boring professor. And a deteriorated FIVE can become so fearful of human attachments that this leads to becoming reclusive and making intellectual connections based more on fears than on reality, resulting in becoming paranoid, delusional, impulsive, erratic, and even violent. System creators such as Baruch Spinoza, Albert Einstein, and Noam Chomsky appear to me as part of the FIVE group, but so too does Ted Kaczynski.
I say “appear to me” because we cannot be certain of the true personality type of others. We can easily mistype others based on how they appear which may not be who they really are. We should be wary of certainty when it comes to typing famous people, yet typing their public persona is one way of conveying the Enneagram and learning it. My apologies to Spinoza, Einstein, Chomsky, and Kaczynski if they are not FIVES—they just appear to me to be in my FIVE group.
The Enneagram offers a psychologically pragmatic way of transcending our ego attachments and compulsions. When we type ourselves, we are recognizing our imbalances of being too dominated or too devoid of an aspect of humanity, and so a path for balance and wholeness becomes quite clear. Returning to the FIVE who is compelled to observe, think, and analyze: the Enneagram does not shame or pathologize observing, thinking, and analyzing but instead informs the FIVE that if the FIVE has the courage to move outside one’s head and engage the world, the FIVE will have more accurate observations and thus more superior insights. For all Enneagram types, if they transcend compulsive pursuits—and acquire a sense of humor about them—they will be rewarded with what they care most about.
Anti-authoritarians exist among each personality type, though, given their type, their anti-authoritarianism plays out very differently. Whether any type becomes an anti-authoritarian who challenges and resists illegitimate authority is determined by an array of many variables that includes luck and choice. Because of the subjective, unmeasurable, and indeed mysterious nature of the variables that determine one becoming an anti-authoritarian, scientific prediction is not possible. This is good news for anti-authoritarians, because if powerful authoritarians could scientifically predict anti-authoritarians through personality typing or genetic testing, they would try to eliminate them.
The Enneagram is similar to the teachings of the Buddha and Spinoza in that all these lenses are concerned with how we create suffering for ourselves and others by being enslaved by our ego attachments, passions, and compulsions. But the Enneagram is actually more satisfying for me in helping myself and others break loose from our self-enslavements because the Enneagram takes the next step. While all human beings have the general problem of being enslaved by ego attachments, passions, and compulsions, the Enneagram helps us understand how we are dominated by different ego attachments, passions, and compulsions.