Studying personality psychology is as useful as it is annoying. It’s useful because it allows you to realize that people actually differ in how they view and experience the world. It’s annoying because it requires you to reconsider that the chatty Kathies of the world who claim to enjoy horrid things like corporate Christmas parties and small talk aren’t full of shit. Somehow, in a way that I can never fully understand, the Kathies are telling the truth.

That’s because the world manifests itself differently for people with different personalities—same world, different worldviews. To an extrovert, it’s a place of social opportunity and novel experiences. To a disagreeable person, it’s a place to compete for what you want. Creative people see it as a place to make new things, even if it requires breaking the old ones. Conservative people disagree, seeing it as a place to maintain what we’ve been given. All of them are right—some of the time.

It seems to me that a functioning community is built of opposing personalities. Introverts oppose extroverts. Creatives square off with conservatives. Optimists have pessimists. Leaders have followers—and so on. Instead of this oppositional nature justifying endless in-fighting and calamity, it can have a balancing effect on society as a whole. The problem is when it becomes imbalanced.

SOCIETY AS A ROWBOAT:

Human beings are both individually conscious and social creatures, which means we exist at two levels simultaneously. We are singular entities, completely separate from other people, as well as members of a community. As a result of this, we have to learn to cycle between the individual and the collective, something that we rarely do well. More often, we find ourselves pegging the needle to either extreme. It can take decades for a person to learn to how do this well. It takes a community longer still. But how long does a society take to get the balance right? Centuries? Millennia? A better question might be, how long does it take for a society that has by some miracle managed to balance the individual and the collective to devolve into something akin to a dysfunctional rowboat—the crew working against one another, lacking a shared destination, and destined to sink?

In evolutionary biology, there’s an idea called balanced polymorphism. Within a species, if there is a trait with durable variants, it’s likely because each version has some unique advantage in a given environmental context. I think this applies quite nicely to human personality. However, in addition to ensuring the future survivability of the species, I think it is likely that the tension between opposing personalities also serves the collective in the here and now.

Part of the troop needs to prioritize cooperation while another elevates competition. Compassionate folks care for those who need caring for and combative folks fight those who need to be fought. Traditionalists and innovators. Thinkers and doers. No individual can be expected to be all things, so we seem to specialize roles to ensure smooth sailing in the rowboat of society.

Yet things can devolve quite quickly when one side is underdeveloped, leaving the lone extreme without the counterweight of collaborative opposition. Then the rowboat lists hard to port with a single side rowing—dipping long oars into the sea and pulling like hell. The other side stares down at their oars-turned-to-stubs—lopped off at the collars—wondering why no one else seems to notice that the boat is spinning like mad and that the water is swirling around them in what looks to be on the brink of a vortex capable of sucking the whole damned thing under.

PATHOLOGICAL EMPATHY:

Agreeable people are great. They’re polite, compassionate, sympathetic, and particularly adept at feeling the emotions of others. They’re the people who tend to give more than they take, defaulting to generosity. They make exceptional caretakers and excellent teammates, prone to altruism and being highly reciprocal as they are. They’re particularly involved community members due to being genuinely concerned with the well-being of others—sometimes more than they ought to be. In a world completely devoid of predation and danger, trait agreeableness may well be the personality dimension to usher in the utopia. This isn’t that world though. This world has both danger and predators to spare. Therefore, an excess of unbridled and unbalanced trait agreeableness taken to an extreme is prone to running afoul time and time again.

Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” Carl Jung said, “No one receives free gifts from the gods.” While Sowell was talking about economics and Jung was talking about whatever the hell his psychologically mystic ass was up to, with regard to human nature, they were both right. As with every extreme in personality, being high in trait agreeableness isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, for the individual or the people around them. It’s only in recent years, however, that we’ve begun to see what it looks like when agreeableness scales well beyond its utility and leads to an unbalanced society.

Foremost among the attributes that characterize a highly agreeable person are compassion and empathy—two attributes that have reached near-religious levels of elevation as moral imperatives in our current culture. Don’t get me wrong, joining someone in their suffering (compassion) or feeling their plight as if it were your own (empathy) can be useful, especially in the case of infants, very small children, and genuine victims. However, beyond this, both tendencies have the potential to be helpful or harmful, depending on the situation. There are times when the right response is to listen to the problems of others and gently help solve them. Sometimes though, someone saying, “Get up, stop your bitching, and rub some dirt on it” is exactly what’s needed. The absence of this latter sentiment reverberates through our current society.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard the word empathy in university, I would have been able to pay cash for grad-school tuition. It has become a cure-all, a panacea, in all aspects of culture and academia alike with little to no acknowledgment of its iatrogenic potential (when a well-intended intervention causes harm). Empathy cuts both ways. Just as too much compassion can alleviate people of the need to assume agency in their own lives, too much empathy can excuse them of a much-needed culpability for abhorrent decisions and actions—leading to a lack of negative reinforcement to dissuade undesirable and unsafe behaviors. All mercy and no justice make Trevor an entitled and unaccountable little asshole. We’re the type of creature that requires both the carrot and the stick to stay on the straight and narrow.

Agreeable people are often overly permissive and forgiving—at least until they’ve been burned a few times by people who don’t share their innate inclination toward reciprocity. Combine this with an impulse for undiscerning generosity and take it to scale and you end up with a society of manic Oprah-like gift-giving that acts as a beacon to predators, grifters, and tricksters alike. People respond to incentives after all. Without the hard-earned wisdom needed to be judicious and discerning in these tendencies, an overly agreeable person is easily taken advantage of. Therefore, an overly agreeable society is likewise destined to be taken advantage of and, even more bleakly, would likely be short-lived.

Being highly agreeable is no different than any other personality-trait extreme in that it is both integral to a functioning society and insufficient on its own. Mature individuals can learn to consider people’s feelings while managing to tell the truth. They can learn to non-impulsively apply empathy and compassion only when it’s necessary and useful. They can learn when to let things go versus when they have to have a fight. Yet, not everyone decides to develop. Some people lean into their default nature so hard, refusing to incorporate the wisdom of balance, that their personality becomes a pathology. What happens when a society does the same?

I reckon it takes to infantilizing huge swathes of the population—treating them like babies, victims, and children. I imagine it demands that all of the sharp corners and hard surfaces of life itself be rendered into safe spaces for soft heads and unsteady legs. It would certainly demand that everyone gets a turn and everyone gets a prize so that they don’t feel left out. Any sign of aggression on the playground of society would be met with phrases such as “use your words” and “violence is never the answer” punctuated with syllabic hand-clapping.

It would no longer be enough to invite the excluded kids to join in on your game. That would be tolerance, not inclusion. Instead, you would be expected to reconstitute the rules of your game from the ground up in order to accommodate whatever game the new kids left to join yours, even though they left theirs for a reason. If you question whether or not this is all necessary—as the playground equipment sags under the weight of too many kids and you notice that a few of the little bastards brought screwdrivers and a couple of those seem hell-bent on taking off the slide and the bridge and disassembling the structure itself—you’re met with a hiss and a tight-lipped insistence to “be nice”.

Then you remember something. You’re a grown-ass man and you don’t have to apologize for well-considered aggression or for putting the well-being of the community over the need to consider a few people’s feelings. You don’t have to accept the prioritization of others’ welfare over your own just to keep the peace and so that other people give you an “I’m a good person” sticker. You don’t have to extend your game to everyone with a heartbeat, nor do you have to tolerate when people overstep and assert themselves unduly. This is the role of disagreeable people. A society without them is a society prone to elevating tenets of agreeableness to the point of public pathology, as if these tendencies were somehow a panacea without the potential to cause problems. This makes for a society that, without the counterbalancing effect of cultural wisdom or an oppositional mode of being, is uniquely and equally susceptible to predation from without and within. The problem is, we’ve spent the last 50 years derogating the counterweight of human personality meant to balance out the cult of empathy.

DISAGREEABLE MEN:

The Five-Factor model of personality is perhaps the most valid and cross-culturally reliable framework of human personality. It’s become fairly common in recent years, to the point that most people are aware of the five domains (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). They may not be aware, however, that each of these traits follows a normal distribution pattern—that most people score in the middle as average, while a subset of people scores very high in the trait while another subset scores very low. They also may not know that men and women overlap considerably in all of the traits, meaning that on net men and women are more alike than they are different.

However, in trait agreeableness, there is a significant sex difference at the extremes of the distribution. This translates to the fact that, though there are disagreeable women and agreeable men, the vast majority of extremely disagreeable people are all men while the vast majority of extremely agreeable people are women. Why does this matter?

Often when people bring up that there is a “war on masculinity” in the West, they’re met with a few different tricks by apologists for the feminization of boys and men. Sometimes it’s met with outright denial. Other times there’s this new-fangled bad-faith rhetorical tactic of asking someone to define a term and then dismissing the impromptu definition as narrow and/or reductive. Fine. One of the largest problems in our culture right now is the demonization of disagreeable men and society is suffering as a result.

Disagreeable men are competitive, unempathetic, aggressive, blunt, and vengeful. It’s not hard to see why these traits would be unsettling to people who would transform the world into an existential daycare. However, their discomfort doesn’t make disagreeable men any less necessary to balance out the pathology of agreeableness taken to the extreme. There must be people who prioritize competition over inclusion in order to elevate the most competent among us, so that everyone can benefit from their achievements. There must be people who prioritize truth and logic over kindness and emotion for society to stay grounded in reality rather than spinning off into an oblivion where everyone is granted their own personal truth.

We need people willing to mock bad ideas so the collective doesn’t get wrapped around the axle and warped around the ravings of crazy, stupid, and/or manipulative people. There need to be people willing to evoke a capacity for violence and aggression in order to inhibit bad people from doing bad things. Someone has to respond to the collective whine over the cosmic injustice of it all with. “What are you going to do about it—be a victim or a victor?” A functioning society is balanced by both extremes of the agreeable/disagreeable axis. Both sides must have their oars in the water to keep the whole thing from spinning away into a vortex of unhinged empathy and compassion or an equal and opposite one of aggression and competition. We find ourselves in one such downward spiral, like a rowboat careening down an oceanic toilet bowl. The question is, how do we get the other side’s paddles back into the water before it’s too late?

For a while, I thought the answer to this was to convince people to stop derogating disagreeable men—to appeal to their sensibilities for a collective need for balance. Recently, I’ve seen the already crowded ranks of activists swelled even further by those raising the alarm for masculine men. We don’t need another protected victim class though. We simply need disagreeable men to be disagreeable, rather than conforming to society’s maladaptive agreeable insistences. They need to compete, elevate truth and reason above emotion, demand that people be judged for their actions, reject the derogation of meritorious achievement and refuse to let the West fall on the sword of compassion in its guilt-fueled insanity.

No amount of maternal hand-clapping will alleviate disagreeable men of their role in balancing our society. Contrary to what is taught, these things don’t have to manifest as primate dominance or as selfish dragon hoarding of wealth. They can be done in a way that serves the individual, their family, their community, and society at large. You can be a disagreeable man and be a good man. If anyone tells you otherwise, simply look them in the eye and tell them that you agree to disagree.