deathwarmedup
New member
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2012
- Messages
- 416
- MBTI Type
- IXTJ
- Enneagram
- 6w5
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
Enneagram enthusiasts often assume that everyone has an ego fixation and that it was always so, but I don't think so.
I have an amateur interest in "primitive" cultures from paleo-anthropology to contemporary indigenous groups. On reflection, I doubt that the Enneagram personality styles are clearly identified in such people or that they even exist among them. I don't think that it's because they're too primitive. I believe you could have taken an infant from an ice-age tribe and "westernised" him and , other things being equal, he would be much the same as the rest of us.
I think that civilisation is necessary for the Enneagram ego-defences to be actualised and specifically, the more individualistic civilisations, particularly our own. Maybe that's got a little to do with why it wasn't recognised until the 20th century.
Civilisation's been around for about 4,000 years though, so why now? I'd speculate that for the broad swathe of that time, only the numerically insignificant elites have enjoyed the freedom for individualism, expression, material abundance and choice that millions of us now enjoy, and it's the particular existential experiences created by that emotional and material affluence that create the conditions for the existential ego defences that the Enneagram describes.
Life in an ice-age tribe (as an extreme example) would have been a lot different. They were a few steps down the food chain and it's very likely that they little differentiated themselves from the animals around them, let alone from each other (think of the absence of people from the great animal panoramas of ice-age cave art). Ego-fixations in an animalistic and non-anthropomorphic culture? Ego-fixations are relative: they exist in relation to each other. And ego is the operative word - it needs to be fed and supported by the temptations of society: achievement, power, greed, righteousness, vanity, self-absorption. There are some fixations I can see taking root in a primitive culture, but only in a constricted form, and there are some I cannot envisage at all.
If the basic components of the three centres were always present, perhaps it was the conditions of advanced and abundant civilisation which split each of them three ways according to the dialectic described in the symbol: over-development, under-development and non-development. Perhaps that is why the historical record for the system or anything resembling it is sporadic; episodes of abundant civilisation were similarly sporadic.
I have an amateur interest in "primitive" cultures from paleo-anthropology to contemporary indigenous groups. On reflection, I doubt that the Enneagram personality styles are clearly identified in such people or that they even exist among them. I don't think that it's because they're too primitive. I believe you could have taken an infant from an ice-age tribe and "westernised" him and , other things being equal, he would be much the same as the rest of us.
I think that civilisation is necessary for the Enneagram ego-defences to be actualised and specifically, the more individualistic civilisations, particularly our own. Maybe that's got a little to do with why it wasn't recognised until the 20th century.
Civilisation's been around for about 4,000 years though, so why now? I'd speculate that for the broad swathe of that time, only the numerically insignificant elites have enjoyed the freedom for individualism, expression, material abundance and choice that millions of us now enjoy, and it's the particular existential experiences created by that emotional and material affluence that create the conditions for the existential ego defences that the Enneagram describes.
Life in an ice-age tribe (as an extreme example) would have been a lot different. They were a few steps down the food chain and it's very likely that they little differentiated themselves from the animals around them, let alone from each other (think of the absence of people from the great animal panoramas of ice-age cave art). Ego-fixations in an animalistic and non-anthropomorphic culture? Ego-fixations are relative: they exist in relation to each other. And ego is the operative word - it needs to be fed and supported by the temptations of society: achievement, power, greed, righteousness, vanity, self-absorption. There are some fixations I can see taking root in a primitive culture, but only in a constricted form, and there are some I cannot envisage at all.
If the basic components of the three centres were always present, perhaps it was the conditions of advanced and abundant civilisation which split each of them three ways according to the dialectic described in the symbol: over-development, under-development and non-development. Perhaps that is why the historical record for the system or anything resembling it is sporadic; episodes of abundant civilisation were similarly sporadic.
