Classic, Comic, Covert: Three Neuroticisms
Recently I went to a college cafeteria and sat down with some friends. As a matter of coincidence, a paid subscriber from this very same school happened to message me within the same hour. I told him I was in the cafeteria of his school, and he came by.
It was an intimidating situation. He sat down with us, and he was outnumbered four to one. We asked him probing questions, trying to figure out what this stranger was all about.
He seemed to dismiss religion, heroism, and idealism in favor of pragmatism. I explained that I was a deeply closeted homosexual, and he did not understand what I meant.
The two most salient elements of the conversation were:
His life goal to fuck as many 10/10 women as possible (“10s”)
His high neuroticism
The first statement came freely; the second was harder to get out of him. I asked him what his OCEAN score was, and he told me easily that he was high in openness, middle in conscientiousness, middle in extraversion, and low in agreeableness. I kept asking him what his fifth score was, and he forgot. I kept giving him hints, but he didn’t remember that the N stood for neuroticism. Personally, I think that neuroticism is the most important of the five axes. He said, to my surprise, that he was high in neuroticism.
I then looked around at the table we had assembled and compared him to my friends. I consider myself neurotic, and I consider one of my friends neurotic, but comparing the three of us, we seemed to express neuroticism in very different ways. This led me to hypothesize that there are three distinct ways that neuroticism can be expressed:
Classical
Comic
Covert
Classical Neuroticism
Classical Neuroticism is best explained as “small dog neuroticism.” It is insecurity, fear, worry, anger, or anxiety that represents itself aggressively, sadistically, and actively.
Let’s say that you try to come into my room, but my room is very messy. Instead of allowing you in my room, I might physically block the entrance with my body, raise my voice, or begin speaking very quickly to distract, obstruct, and overpower.
A low neuroticism person wouldn’t care if someone sees his messy room. But a high neuroticism person will irrationally perceive this as a nuclear threat, and do everything in their power to stop it.
Within classical neuroticism, there is a lot of room for variation. For example, a sadistic neurotic might use the threat of physical violence to get what they want; a masochistic neurotic might threaten to hurt themselves. However, in all cases, at the extremes, the classical neurotic makes life miserable for themselves and everyone around them.
My hypothesis is that neuroticism is a group-evolutionary strategy for enforcing moral norms. When someone forgets to eat kosher, for example, the punishment comes from both ends: someone must freak out at them, and the person themselves must be susceptible to guilt, shame, and regret. The more neurotic a population is, the more easily it can be morally conditioned. Since Europeans are higher in neuroticism, historically, they have formed the greatest military forces, per capita.1
Washington as a man was famously enraged and would personally beat his soldiers; Hitler2 would rant to his generals; Napoleon was love-sick for his slutty wife; Nietzsche was obsessed with a Jewish dominatrix. Being a great military leader and being highly neurotic are not necessarily contradictory. Fanaticism and neuroticism are the same.
Comic Neuroticism
Comic neuroticism is either funny or annoying, but it is much more tolerable and pro-social (on an individual level) than classical neuroticism. You could say that comic neuroticism is the result of combining neuroticism with high agreeableness and high empathy.
Comic neurotics make everything into a self-deprecating joke, compulsively. Every five seconds they will tell you how gay they are, how retarded they are, how stupid they are, and so on. This either results in humor or annoyance.
Comic neuroticism is juvenile. It comes from insecurity, but it is not threatening, aggressive, or demanding. Comic neuroticism is much less moral but individually more pro-social than classical neuroticism.
If done skillfully, comic neurotics can be some of the funniest people. Because their neuroticism drives them to constantly make jokes, they can be viewed desirably for the joyous addition to a social scene. For example, Larry David or Woody Allen could be considered comic neurotics. Jewish culture as a whole seems to be specialized toward comic neuroticism. People who are comic neurotics could be considered “spiritually Jewish,” such as Kramer from Seinfeld (played by an Italian actor).
Covert Neurotics.
Covert neuroticism is like comic neuroticism in containing or limiting the aggressive anti-social aspects of classical neuroticism. However, it goes even further beyond comic neuroticism in masking and hiding the internal emotional state of the neurotic.
Covert neuroticism represents itself in nihilistic, monotone, or dismissive heuristics. For the covert neurotic, a suppressive mask of superficiality helps them cope with the burden of internal emotional turmoil.
Covert neurotics have assembled an armor of excuses, ideologies, or explanations that help them simplify and reduce life to a simple series of heuristics. Life is “just” Darwinism; life is “meaningless,” life is “purposeless.” You can see this is the rhetoric used by looksmaxers: “love is reducible to facial and bodily measurements. If you have the right measurements, people will love you.”
These heuristics lack empathy. They flatten and oversimplify reality, removing nuance and intuition. As a result, covert neuroticism is hard to spot, because it masks itself with a veneer of low neuroticism.
If someone says that “all that matters is money” or “all that matters is looks,” that does not mean that they are necessarily neurotic; this is what makes covert neuroticism hard to identify. However, for the covert neurotic, these shallow beliefs quickly fall apart upon inspection. They come from a desire to clarify and control a world that is otherwise chaotic and difficult. If we can reduce life to money or sex, then questions of idealism, self-sacrifice, and heroism become irrelevant.
Some people are genuinely low in neuroticism, and many of those people hold Machiavellian or materialistic beliefs about the world, reducing life to sex or money. This is my standard assumption: if someone tells me all that they care about is sex and money, I assume they are low in neuroticism. However, if they add that they are high in neuroticism, then I interpret their stated beliefs in a different way.
Clarifications
I am highly neurotic, and I care immensely about my virtues, values, and ideals. I am a Platonist who believes in self-sacrifice and hero-worship. I wish to dedicate every moment of my life to seeking what is higher than myself -- the good, the true, the beautiful. My neuroticism gets in the way of my goals, because fear prevents me from living life as fully as I would like. However, I will never abandon my ideals, because a life without ideals is not worth living.
When I encounter people who appreciate some aspect of my writing, but they say something like “all that matters is IQ,” or “all that matters is sex with women,” I am taken aback. I take my writing seriously, and I want my position to be clear. If someone holds those beliefs, and they like me, I have failed to communicate my sacred beliefs.
If someone is an atheist, and they read me, and they meet me, I expect them to say, “I am an atheist; though I know you disagree.” I wish to make my views as public and clear as possible, so that when there are disagreements, they are brought into the open. Most conflict comes about because two people with two different sets of values feel “betrayed” that the other person secretly disagrees with them.
My definition of God is not empirical, but moral. It is a moral necessity that each man strive for something higher than himself. Saying “the point of life is to have sex” is a sin, and deserves condemnation. If someone holds those views, I want them to know up front that I disagree with them. I find such views spiritual destructive and pernicious to the soul.
However, if people are unaware of how strongly I hold these views, then this means that I have done a poor job of communicating my views. Rather than condemning others for having the wrong beliefs, I should focus on my own negligence to promote what I know to be good.
Religion provides a useful filter. When someone is a Christian, they know that it is a sin to say things like “the point of life is sex.” The disadvantage of atheism is that one must then rely upon ideologies to fill the gap left by religion -- one must become a conservative, for example.
But if I am not a Christian or a conservative, then I must put in more effort to express my views in a comprehensible, powerful, and convincing way. Ideally, I might write an article entitled “The Deep Left Commandments.” The problem with such and article is that it might not be exhaustive. Additionally, some of the concepts I am discussing might be too deep to cover in a simple few commandments. Still, I need to do a better job of attempting to communicate.
Here are some provisional commandments:
Never despair.
Always trust in God.
Give all that you have to God.
Live not for yourself, but sacrifice yourself for God.
Put your treasure in God, not in the world.
These principles can be found in Judaism and Christianity, but they can be found in the Bhagavad Gita. These principles follow logically from the axiom that God is supreme, and we are mere emanations or creations. Proving the empirical existence of God is either logically impossible or irrelevant. Some atheists fill the place of God with “being a good person” or “humanism” or “progress,” and this functionally brings us to a similar place.
The word God mysterious and can be contorted to either mean everything or nothing. Still, I find it useful for my purposes, since it points toward an all-loving all-powerful Heavenly Father, who prohibits us from living low, mean, “pragmatic” lives.
The Heavenly Father, Zdeus in Indo-European, and El for the Semites, is a proven social technology; hence, Platonic. Whether or not you believe God exists, you should behave as if He does. This is a common trope in liberal Jewish theology, where doubts about the existence of God are acceptable, but acting contrary to His Will is unacceptable.
Conclusions
Neuroticism is the basis of religion, because it is the source of fanaticism. Job, Noah, Lot, and David are all intensely neurotic. Poetry is neurotic. Art is neurotic. Left-wingers are better at art, because they are more neurotic.
Superstition, on the other hand, comes from schizophrenia — paranoia and hallucination. Schizophrenia and neuroticism might be correlated, but they are distinct.
I have no interest in “demonic entities” or UFOs or bigfoot as empirical phenomena. But I am very interested in “demonic personality traits” in the moral realm. My attraction to religion exists only in the realm of idealism — the pagan fetish for angels and demons as agents in the real world is lowly and goyish.
Rudolf Steiner has a tripartite typology, where Ahriman is on one side, Lucifer on the other, and Jesus in the middle. Ahriman represents materialism; Lucifer represents gnosticism; Jesus represents the marriage of the two.
In the worst case scenario, you have people who are fascinated with the “supernatural,” but who have no sense of idealism. These are like Nietszcheans who believe in ghosts and goblins. Their Luciferian sense is totally stunted. They experience spiritually as a purely physical phenomenon. This is essentially the religion of animism, of primitive tribes, who have totems and taboos but no true morality, no sense of guilt, duty, or honor.
In the best case scenario, you have those treat the physical world as a scientific question, but whose moral sense is transcendant. Secular Judaism, Mainline Christianity, Randian Objectivism, and National Socialism all approach this kind of “detached idealism,” where the physical world is treated coldly, while the moral realm takes on a life of its own. This is the essence of Platonism as well, which is the grandfather of all these later perspectives.
The problem with “pragmatists” is that they are emotionally repressed. In colloquial slang, it is common to call these people “autistic,” but this term obscures more than it clarifies.
Autism is used to mean someone with poor social skills, who hyper-obsesses on pedantic topics. That is not a useful definition for the emotional repression I am describing. An emotionally repressed person might go to parties and have a large social circle; they might go on lots of dates and have plenty of sex; they might dismiss pedantry as irrelevant and focus on what is “pragmatic.” But they do not experience the divinity of the moral dimension in all of its glory. They are closed off to the fullness of human experience.
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China and India also had great armies, but these were smaller relative to their higher overall populations.
The popular tendency to degrade Hitler’s intelligence is a result of the post-war literature which sought to promote the idea of the “clean Wehrmacht,” blaming Hitler for every defeat. His mental illness or hateful antisemitism does not negate his strength of leadership.