Our Ways: Values and Character

134 Pages·1997·1.213 MB·English

by  Armando Molina

Contents
Editorial Foreword
REM B. EDWARDS

Chapters

ONE Theory and Personality
1. The Case
2. The Frame
3. The Tool
4. Some Triads of Concepts
5. Three Broad Ways
6. Some Triads of Characterological Traits

TWO Nine Sound Ways
1. Placid 9II: Peace, Aplomb, Harmony
2. Active 3EE: Adaptability, Efficiency, Pragmatism
3. Rational 6SS: Commitment, Independence, Analysis
4. Mighty 8IE: Assurance, Power, Realism
5. Righteous 1IS: Duty, Perfectionism, Ethics
6. Loving 2EI: Warmth, Service, Romanticism
7. Tasteful 4ES: Intensity, Discrimination, Aesthetics
8. Wise 5SI: Detachment, Isolation, Synthesis
9. Smart 7SE: Expansion, Smoothness, Analogy

THREE Many Unsound Ways
1. Unsound: 9II
2. Unsound: 3EE
3. Unsound: 6SS
4. Unsound: 6SSi
5. Unsound: 6SSe
6. Unsound: 6SSs
7. Unsound: 8IE
8. Unsound: 1IS
9. Unsound: 2EI
10.Unsound: 4ES
11.Unsound: 5SI
12.Unsound: 7SE

FOUR Love, Sex, and Lovers
1. 9II in Love
2. 3EE in Love
3. 6SS in Love
4. 8IE in Love
5. 1IS in Love
6. 2EI in Love
7. 4ES in Love
8. 5SI in Love
9. 7SE in Love

FIVE Summary and Farewell
1. In Sum
2. Farewell

SOME GOOD BOOKS

APPENDIX: SUMMARY TABLE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE EDITOR

INDEX
EDITORIAL FOREWORD

In the following exploration of Our Ways, Armando Molina develops a
remarkable and illuminating portrait of character types, along with the
personality distortions and sexual inclinations which tend to accompany them.
His characterology synthesizes three distinct but highly complementary
components: (1) his own profound understanding of human nature gained from
years of in-depth exposure as a personal counselor to a great diversity of
human individuals, (2) his extensive study of and knowledge of the ancient
Enneagram and its recent psychological interpretations, and (3) his mastery
of Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and the insights into human
values and psychology that it makes available.
Robert S. Hartman discerned that the connection between our values and
our character is extraordinarily intimate, indeed that our values are the
principal keys to our personalities, to what and how we are, to our ways. We
are what and how we value. Hartmann himself developed this insight in his
writings and through his value-based personality test, the Hartman Value
Profile (HVP). This test shows conclusively that our values structure our
personalities (and vice versa), and that once our basic value orientation is
known, our general psychological constitution is thereafter an open book to
an experienced axiologist who knows how to interpret the test scores.
Armando Molina devises a different but complementary strategy for
disclosing the intimate and intricate connections between our values and our
ways in the following pages. Personalities can be meaningfully typed
according to how they manifest the three dimensions of value identified by
Robert S. Hartman, the intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic. Intrinsic values
are unique centers of conscious experience, activity and valuation like
individual persons; extrinsic values are things and social roles in public
spacetime; systemic values are rules and other conceptual constructs. Each
type of value gives form to an important aspect of selfhood. The inner
intrinsic self is the innermost structure of self-identity and self-reality;
the extrinsic self is the public self, its features, behaviors, roles, and
functions; and the systemic self is the thinking and rule-following self. The
whole intrinsic self includes the other two but has its own distinctive
features.
Axiological characterology shows how human personalities differ with respect
to the ways in which intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic values are developed
(or not developed) and ordered (as dominant or subordinate) within individual
human selves as a whole. Armando Molina shows what we are like when we are
disposed toward one or more of these nurture or upbringings. His penetrating
insights into how the value orientations of children are molded, for better
or for worse, by the values and practices of mothers, fathers, and/or other
significant adults will deeply engage parents, child psychologists,
caretakers, and all morally concerned persons who believe that both love and
duty require us to avoid distorting the value orientations of our children
and to help them develop the best of their potentials.
Formal axiology directly addresses the questions of what is best in us,
and what counts as a distorted value orientation yielding a disordered
personality. Psychotherapists always operate, consciously or semi-
consciously, with assumptions about characterological goals or goods to be
pursued, avoided, modified, and corrected in the therapeutic process. In his
sustained discussion of distortions of personality types, this author
develops the foundation for a novel and promising axiological approach toward
both an etiological understanding of, and therapeutic interventions with,
personalities that are distorted by perversions of value orientation. He also
shows how a value-based approach to character disorders can be linked to
moral vices and to many familiar diagnostic and therapeutic psychological
categories like obsession, hysteria, schizophrenia, neurosis, and various
addictions.
Finally, this book gives special attention to the many ways in which
value orientations find expression in sexual attitudes and in patterns of
relating, successfully or unsuccessfully, to sexual partners. The value-based
character traits that dominate the non-sexual parts of our lives are
definitely carried over into the sexual parts; and now, thanks to Armando
Molina, we can know just how.
Most of us will recognize ourselves somewhere in the axiological
characterology, as well as in the distortions. Developed in the pages to
follow. When we arrive at the end of this book, I hope and believe that we
will be grateful to Armando Molina for contributing significantly to our
self-knowledge and to our understanding of other persons.
Rem B. Edwards
One

Theory and Personality

Forgive me for searching thus for you
so awkwardly, within
you.
“The Voice owed to You”
Pedro Salinas

1. The Case

The human species is part of a whole called the biosphere. Unless we members
understand that fact, accept it, and act consequently, our very survival is
in danger. To avoid global disaster, we need to study all of inanimate
Nature, the stage on which life unfolds. We also need to decipher life's
script so as to predict and influence its course, and this implies
researching every single life-form on this planet and how they relate to each
other. Both tasks involve recording and digesting such a mass of data that
they would be hopeless without computers.
Thanks to the young sciences of ecology and information, we are
grasping both stage and script, just in time. But we are not accepting the
facts and acting consequently; the protagonist of life, the human being,
decides and acts not always according to reason and, still a riddle, is a
most serious risk. However, a third young science-—as relevant as the two
above, but little known as yet—-opens a window of hope. It studies our inner
moral and psychological nature, the value and personality structures and
workings of human individuals; its name is: Formal Axiology.
This book offers you an initial exposure to this new discipline. As
applied here, it will help you to understand personalities, to find out how
yours and others' are structured and operate, to discover, in two words, our
ways, how we are. But expect no more from these pages: who we are and what we
are cannot be figured out solely by reading; experience is essential.

2. The Frame

Expressions like "New Paradigm," "New Consciousness," and "New Thought" are
now heard and read more and more often. They all allude to a novel and
different way of employing mind to bring about a fresh understanding of
reality. A mental shift is taking place on a planetary level, and the
adjective "new" is much in vogue when referring to this globally emerging
manner of thought, to the consciousness that this mutation in the mind's
operation reflects, and to the era whose dawn it signals. This is the meaning
of the expressions above; since they are new, let us delve somewhat into
them.
A paradigm is the basic model of a system of thought and of the
personal philosophy with which and by which each of us lives. Each paradigm
includes a few postulates that define not only what can be thought of within
its system, but also what necessarily must be omitted as unthinkable.
All persons think in their own individual manner; but in each cultural
era and historical period most individual thinking styles share some basic
postulates and operate within common limits. An expression as usual nowadays
as "a trip around the world" lacked any kind of meaning while Earth was
thought of as flat; the concept it expresses was just unthinkable because the
paradigm of those times made no room for it. The term "paradigm" will be used
here in this cultural sense.
Our paradigm is presently undergoing a major change, for contemporary
culture is now negotiating the transition between a system of thought being
left behind and another becoming gradually established. Toward the end of the
nineteenth century, the basic understanding of the material universe began a
radical transformation, and this change is not yet complete. The traditional
method of using the intellect—until very recently the only one deemed valid
and scientific—proved unable to advance knowledge any further; humankind
found that it needs a different manner of using mind, a new style of
thinking, if it wants to increase its understanding and improve its
management of reality.
This is not the first time a shift of similar import has taken place
in collective thought; a comparable shift happened some five-hundred years
ago when the paradigm now declining was born. Until then, lineal, monopolar
thought had ruled Western culture; if the Bible or Aristotle had decided a
question, or if a Pope had defined it as dogma, the issue was settled
forever. The answer was universally accepted, and no one gave it another
thought.
It became evident around the fifteenth century that the antique
paradigm with its lineal, dogmatic way of employing mind had reached its
limits of usefulness. Then a new manner of thinking began to spread; it was
bipolar, logical, questioned authority as the ultimate criterion of truth,
and opposed it with analytical reason. Only a few isolated geniuses had used
this paradigm before; but a global revolution began that gradually
transformed human thinking in every field. Plucking areas of knowledge from
the rule of monopolar thought one after another, it replaced each previously
accepted understanding with new formulations, until every sector of culture
followed its postulates. With its dialectical saw, it cut the chains of
lineal inertia; and the rational, or classical, or Cartesian-Newtonian,
paradigm took firm hold.
Bipolar analysis, applied to the observation of Nature, spawned the
modem scientific method, which forged logical models of the material world
amenable to mathematical treatment and fostered the technological development
characteristic of our civilization. Riding on it, knowledge advanced faster
and faster until it bumped against another barrier as the nineteenth century
was closing.
About one hundred years ago, natural scientists endeavoring to
understand and explain the universe, began to realize that bipolar thought
was unable to continue to advance, despite having yielded so much success in
the past. Its precise logic could make no sense of many areas of the world
that were regarded as chaotic, without order, impossible to understand, thus
off-limits to reason.
So, during the twentieth century, natural scientists contrived a new
way to use mind. Multipolar, fractal, and holistic, its diffusion, very slow
at first, accelerated exponentially after 1950. This novel manner of thinking
found order where only chaos seemed to exist in one after another of those
sectors of material reality previously not amenable to comprehension; these
sectors, too, can make sense and be both understood and managed. Thus was
born the so-called Science of Chaos, to whose fuzzy probabilistic logic
Quantum Physics, Astrophysics, Flow Mechanics, Meteorology, and Demography—
among many other specialties, owe their recent advances. As this innovative
thinking spread to discipline after discipline, new ones like Ecology were
born along the way. Thus, the collective paradigm shifts again and is
shifting right now.
Humanity has discovered a new perspective on reality and, by applying
it to diverse branches of knowledge, is currently building a new
understanding of the cosmos in each and every one of its aspects. If the
world changes its thinking, persons unwilling to be left by the wayside of
History must learn the new method of thought. Voices of warning have been
heard for some time now: The Aquarian Conspiracy1 by Marilyn Ferguson, as well
as Future Shock2, The Third Wave3, and The Powershift4 by Alvin Toffler echo
around the world.
We, born and raised within the bipolar paradigm, learned to think
according to its postulates, without realizing it. we are bound by their
limitations, which are difficult to transcend spontaneously; we are not even
aware of their constriction because they match so closely the testimony of
our physical senses.
Our sensory organs evolved to serve physical bodies organized in
bipolar longitudinal symmetry, provided with two eyes, two nostrils, two
ears, hands, and two feet. In most cases our bodies belong clearly to one or
the other of only two sexes. Fittingly, the iris of the eye is a barrier that
segregates from the world the mind which, from behind the retina, peers at it
through the peephole of the pupil.
Looking from its first duality, separation, mind projects it onto the
environment and perceives dualities everywhere. Its initial in-out dichotomy
branches into up-down, left-right, front-back, and before-after. Within this
dominating perceptual frame, our senses witness a clearly bipolar reality of
opposites where each dawn engenders a sunset, each birth guarantees a death,
and each of us inhabits a discrete body. We encounter a reality composed
exclusively of material, separate entities that can be objectively located in
space-time with total certainty and exactitude. Dialectical bipolar thought,
ideal to process such data, found that repetition and succession in time
permits inferences about cause and effect.
Immediate and magnificent success at explaining and managing the
material world led the classical paradigm to focus on physical things until
it believed that matter—never created, never destroyed, always transformed—is
the only reality. In its understanding, matter is the only true substance; it
both constructs and comprises the only actual world; anything else is just
illusion.
However, in the twentieth century, our senses were exposed and
convicted as false witnesses; and natural science was forced to renounce its
earlier conception of the world as naive and insufficient. That conception is
valid only within very narrow limits of size, frequency, and intensity;
continuity between these limits is less than we usually think.
Science learned that matter is just a web of energy fields lacking any
concrete substance: bye-bye matter! It learned that anything happening in one
point of the universe both reflects and influences what happens in all other
points: bye-bye separateness! It learned that the outcome of an experiment
changes by the mere fact of its being observed: bye-bye objectivity! And it
learned that this planet is ruled neither by the meridian light of total
certainty, nor by the thick darkness of total ignorance, but by a mist of
variable density called Probability. Subatomic Physics obeys throughout the
Uncertainty Principle put forth by Werner Heisenberg: bye-bye certainty!
Certainty has vanished from the Earth; in truth, there never was any!
Material objects can be very similar, but no two of them are ever completely
identical, especially at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels. No
kilogram was ever weighed nor any meter measured with absolute exactness. The
practical application of science always deals with approximations, and from