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The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). dealing with a topic Lobaczewski mentions only a couple of times in his works: anankastia, or anankastic personality disorder.
All Lobaczewski says is that this is one of the ponerogenic personality disorders and that they are "silent despots" who are difficult to get along with and who "become causes of neurosis in others."
Martin's article is thus a welcome addition to the study of ponerology, filling a gap.
As you'll see, anankastia is an important piece of the puzzle...
One interesting development in the ICD-11 is the inclusion of anankastia as,
In fact, the ICD-10 classified anankastic personality disorder as an extreme form of this quality.
But what does it mean to be anankastic?
The American mental health diagnostic manual, the DSM-IV, contains an analog to this condition: the so-called,
This label is problematic because it conflates anankastia with OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, when the two are completely distinct from one another.
Also outdated is the "anal retentive" designation, a term coined by perverted cult leader Sigmund Freud.
Thankfully, this vulgar phrase has mostly dropped from the public vernacular.
More recently,
Considering the alternatives, anankastia is probably the best label for this trait domain, awkward as this word may be.
For this reason, the labels "anankastia" and "anankastic" will be used throughout this essay to describe an extreme personality type, a collection of tendencies, or as a socio-psychological trend.
Consider that while some people are more anankastic than others, we can all exhibit this tendency, sometimes, to varying degrees, which means it can be exploited in all of us.
Also note that this author is not a professional psychologist, and words like "fixation" or "repression" are meant to be taken in their colloquial (i.e. non-Freudian) meaning.
Some of these are identified by the ICD-11, and some are based on my own observation. In describing these traits, I will compare anankastia with other malignant personality types to which the reader may be more familiar - like narcissism - or less familiar, like schizoidia.
Keep in mind that these are discrete characterizations, and in reality, an individual can possess overlapping traits (e.g. schizoid and anankastic).
Here's a list of what I consider the essential facets of an anankastic personality:
Diminished empathy is a trait shared by several pathological personality types, including paranoia, schizoidia, and narcissism.
Anankastics also demonstrate limited empathy, but in a unique way. The anankastic is so focused on the way she thinks things should be, and so righteous in her own assumed correctness, that she tends to lack a humane sense of propriety and will spout her opinions in a way that seems exceptionally tone-deaf.
For this reason, she can read as narcissistic.
By contrast, the narcissist's lack of empathy
places huge blind spots in his social awareness.
The severe narcissist, however, is completely
solipsistic in his perspective. It doesn't occur to him that anyone
does anything once they exit the frame of his experience.
Empathy can lead us to sympathize with others, but also recognize when we're being conned or manipulated.
The paranoiac reflexively distrusts everyone
because his low empathy causes him to view everyone as a potential
threat; but Polyanna is also limited in her empathy -
trusting to a fault.
Nevertheless, you know it when you see it:
Thus, the label "autistic" is used here,
interchangeably with "schizoid," in favor of familiarity over
precision.
Those on the autism spectrum struggle to empathize with others.
However, the schizoid can often reason with an open mind, because his low emotionality places less pressure on his thinking process - whereas the anankastic has high emotional pressure on hers.
Her decisions are fear-based, her thought process
closed and self-censoring.
The anankastic, however, is highly conscientious, and therefore extremely honest. She has an internalized sense of integrity - an admirable trait.
She settles all her debts and returns every favor, as a matter of honor. It's hard for the anankastic to tell a lie - even a white lie - and a "victimless crime" is no excuse.
Even if no one knows what she did, and no one was directly affected, she still knows she did something wrong (or, for the religious anankastic, God knows what she did) and she has to live with herself.
She makes fear-based decisions ("what if something goes wrong?") and worries that her decisions may carry repercussions for others.
...she worries, anxious that she'll inadvertently place someone at a disadvantage.
But this is all based on an abstract idea of what
she thinks could affect someone, and not on the actual feedback she
receives from others - spoken or otherwise.
Burdened by responsibility, threatened by perceived impropriety and racked with guilt, she's never really living "in the moment", but rather in anticipation of an expected outcome, in fear of unintended consequences, or in rumination over disappointing results.
Both types of people become absolutely fixated on small, often inconsequential details. Both types are procedural to the point that the process itself becomes a ritual more important than its own objectives.
The most crucial difference between the two is
that people with OCD understand they have a problem. They don't
actually want to obsess in this way, but feel compelled to do so.
Obsessive-compulsion is considered a component of anxiety, while anankastia is a defect of character. The obsessive- compulsive individual can seek and obtain help for his condition, because he wants to alleviate the burden of his anxiety.
The anankastic, by contrast, believes in her pursuit of ideal perfection, and her hyper-perfectionism makes her unlikely to even identify fault in her patterns of thinking and behavior - much less admit fault.
It is thus extremely unlikely that someone so
pathologically inflexible would willingly undergo the personal
transformation necessary to shed her anankastic traits, even if she
wanted to - which she doesn't.
She considers trial-and-error, rules of thumb and educated guesses as improper or amateurish, relying instead on her formal instruction.
We all have to "fake it till we make it," sometimes, and "winging it" gives us real-world, on-the-fly training that you can't get in a classroom.
But because the anankastic refuses to operate in
this way, she limits her own opportunity for growth.
The Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994).
'I cannot have done that,' says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - memory yields."
Friedrich
Nietzsche
The narcissist may want to be seen as good by others, and the anankastic wants this, too, but the anankastic wants to actually be good and moral.
Again, not a bad trait to have!
She really does want to act with integrity and can be very hard on herself. But she is also human, as we all are. She can become jealous, spiteful, or mean-spirited, as can anyone - and even more so, because she is extremely petty and uncooperative to begin with.
But she's also highly scrupulous and wants to
believe she is motivated by altruism, so she won't admit to herself
when she's misbehaving.
The anankastic's mind is a labyrinth of circuitous reasoning and self-deception. She fears not just the consequences of her actions, but the implications of her own unpleasant thoughts.
For this reason, sinful notions are terminated before they are annunciated in her internal monologue.
For one, she's usually incredibly miserly,
hoarding her money for "a rainy day" and never spending it; hence,
her surroundings are often spartan and she lives well below her
means.
The anankastic believes that sacrifice is morally purifying - a virtue unto itself.
Anankastics have a tendency toward hoarding, as they're afraid to discard something which may be of some use, someday. What's less recognized is that anankastics also hoard information.
The logic seems to be,
Anankastics love to gatekeep information in this way.
However, the point of gatekeeping is that when
the other person gives you what you want, you then open the gate for
them.
The rationale seems to be that if she spends her
bargaining chip, then she won't possess it anymore. This is
obviously self-defeating, because people will stop transacting with
you if there's no payoff.
You could probably get her to take a secret to her grave if she believed it was her duty.
Unlike the narcissist, she can be made to feel guilty and to seek redemption, so she can certainly internalize fault; even so, she can't really take a step back, evaluate her assumptions, and analyze what it is that motivates her behavior.
Despite her attention to detail, she lives an unexamined life, and, despite her righteous certitude, her beliefs rest on an insecure foundation. In fact, her impulse to impose her way on others is partly because it makes her feel more secure.
She proves her correctness to herself by reinforcing the integrity of the rules, and she does this by imposing them on others.
She either buries her judgment under disingenuous
courtesy, or delivers it in a fit of indignation - but whether
seething or scolding, she can never accept that others simply
possess different standards than her own.
When a narcissist has the power to make the rules, he rigs them in his favor; but the anankastic's vision of fairness does not necessarily benefit her disproportionately (or even at all), and when it does, it's simply to the extent that she can monopolize power, because she can't trust others to make things truly fair.
She may use the rules to her own advantage, but to her, the rules themselves have a sacred quality and apply to everyone - even herself.
If extemporaneous circumstances require her to
bend or break the rules, she might use pretzel logic to justify her
rule-breaking, in an attempt to resolve her own cognitive
dissonance.
Conversely, narcissists (and psychopaths) believe rules are for other people, so hypocrisy and double-standards don't bother them at all.
Anankastics do not see what is right in front of
them, because they can't see past what they think should be there.
In this way, anankastia becomes more than a feature of personality,
producing significant perceptual cognitive distortions.
The instructor will show you the card for a couple seconds, put it down. then ask what was written on the card.
Most people will say "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" because they don't notice the word "THE" printed twice.
A variation on this test is to srcabmle the lteters of some words, but keep the first and last letters intact. Your brain will recognize what words are supposed to be there, and in many cases won't even recognize the typo.
This is because our brains constantly fill in or
"correct" incomplete information. This kind of cognitive revision is
something we all do, to varying degrees.
Con-men and hypnotists call this a "mark."
While the anankastic isn't whimsically
suggestible in this way, and is actually very stubborn and
headstrong, once she latches on to an idea it puts her under a kind
of hypnotic spell that no amount of contradictory evidence can
break.
I had a teacher once who told me there isn't a single word in the English language that starts with the soft "zh" sound, as in mirage or massage.
She pronounced it again, under her breath, and then informed me, with total confidence, that the word is pronounced "John-ra" with a hard J.
The obvious incorrectness of this assertion, and the fact that she had just pronounced it zhanra a moment earlier, and indeed, presumably, her entire life to this point, was not enough for her to reconsider her rule.
The reason is that a corrupt system is less a function of design than of its own subversion or degradation.
"Conspiracy theorist" can't really be considered
a political persuasion, because a conspiracy theorist is less
focused on how the government should function, and more on the ways
in which it undermines its own existing, ostensible purpose.
Luckily, several authors have attempted to explain societal dysfunction by combining their political observations with an analysis of mass psychology.
Notable works include,
All three books explore the mass psychology of
tyranny, with Ponerology attempting to explain the way psychopaths
can take over a society and warp it in their own image.
Popular visions of dystopia conjure the image of a psychopathic despot oppressing the terrorized masses, or a closed bureaucracy of Machiavellian overlords unaccountable to a bewildered public.
While there may be validity to these conceptions,
they portray a simplistic dichotomy between the ruling elite and the
mass population, which fails to illustrate the structure of evil.
Corporate and intelligence structures are two
such examples, and it's no surprise that both produce a high number
of powerful, psychopathic individuals.
The most important of these personalities is the aforementioned narcissist, who craves power but also attention, and who basks in the public spotlight.
He has no morals or convictions, so he's easily molded to play whatever part is necessary. He's so self-interested and so lacking empathy that he's oblivious to the machinations of psychopaths in his midst.
And unlike the psychopath, who is unburdened by human emotions, the narcissist is entirely ruled by his own childish ego - making him a willing manipulator who is easily manipulated himself.
He's also easy to blackmail, due to his fear of public humiliation and his propensity for misbehavior.
Thus, the narcissist becomes the ideal puppet for the psychopathic puppet master, especially if the puppet possesses some psychopathic traits himself - as narcissists often do.
Ordinary people model their behavior after the vapid, superficial quality of the figures held up as society's leaders.
A population of selfish, self-obsessed
individuals is unlikely to question the nature of society, or to
work together to challenge the power structure.
Anankastics are not true leaders, nor are they followers, but rather the regime's enforcers, its bureaucrats, pundits, policy wonks, middle managers, stool pigeons, hall monitors, and other petty tyrants...
(1985).
Narcissists make good figureheads in this kind of order, because they're often high- functioning, but incurious and imperceptive. High-functioning autistics/schizoids are narrowly-focused, unintuitive, and potentially useful, but they may present a liability if they can think freely without being cowed by emotional and societal pressure.
Anankastics are often highly productive and
effective, are imperceptive, are easily controlled by establishment
pressure, and are obedient to authority - making them the perfect
Janissaries.
Remember that they are enforcers, not followers. They don't rely on the social proof of ordinary people to make decisions, and they aren't afraid to go against their peers.
They think they're smarter than those around them, and more qualified to make decisions. Therefore, propaganda tailored to the anankastic cannot simply project that "everyone's doing it."
You need official (looking) reports and
authoritative (seeming) organizations to bring the anankastic
population to heel.
Postmodernism's rejection of epistemic certainty and objectivity leaves little terra firma to support the anankastic mind, yet this is the culture in which we live, and so we see interesting results when postmodernism and anankastia collide.
when you hear the progress of wisdom vaunted, that the cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!"
Charles
Baudelaire
Her mindset trends toward a polarized, Manichean conception of good and evil.
However, the contemporary, Humanist perspective insists that deep down, we're all the same, and it characterizes people not as "good" or "bad" but as "good" and "misunderstood."
Everyone is basically good, and bad behavior is
the outcome of either suffering or misfortune brought upon the
offender.
The logic seems to be,
And when that interpretation falls apart, and there's no way to explain away the behavior:
So then the cope is that the person must be lashing out in some way, or reacting to some larger injustice.
In other words,
When she does this, it's because she needs her real-life experience to conform to her existing assumptions about human nature - in this case,
It is doubtful that the belief in universal goodness is a feature of the anankastic personality, though, but rather a function of upbringing and education.
An anankastic raised on secular humanist ideals
might think this way, but an anankastic religious fundamentalist,
raised to believe that men are wicked sinners, might only assume
good faith among her co-religionists.
This natural contradiction is especially so for the anankastic, who is intolerant by nature. She seems able to simultaneously believe that everyone is basically good, but that there are also bigots in society that are irredeemably evil.
In this worldview, "bad" and "intolerant" are practically synonymous.
To the anankastic, a person who transgresses the assumed moral code is bad, but then it's intolerant to think of people as bad - unless he's intolerant in some way, in which case he's unambiguously bad.
This means that when someone deviates from her
belief system, she is motivated to perceive him as intolerant in
some way, so that she can give herself license to hate him.
She believes this position is especially altruistic because it's self-defeating. Of course, it also pisses off self-respecting white people, and non-whites don't respect it, either.
The anti-white anankastic lacks self-awareness,
and is unobservant, so she doesn't recognize how much this erodes
her status with everyone except other anti-whites - but of course,
the more anti-white rhetoric she espouses, the less likely she is to
ever reverse course, until she ends up in the exclusive company of
other anti-white white people.
I believe this is because the anankastic white
liberal has rigid, unexamined assumptions about how one should and
shouldn't behave, and because her background and upbringing inform
these assumptions, people of very similar walks of life are least
likely to offend her sensibilities.
Moral crusades
Their code of ethics is more legalistic than
humane, and once acting on her righteous determination, the
anankastic crusader is unlikely to second- guess herself when the
deleterious effects of her actions become apparent.
Moral outrage at injustice is altruistic and selfless, however, and so a moral crusade offers an opportunity to expend this pent- up, negative energy.
Consider this quote by Aldous Huxley:
If you don't have a certificate and a title, you're not an expert. Rare is the truly autodidactic individual, and never is the anankastic such a person. Her mind cannot educate itself.
This is largely why she scoffs at the notion of self-education: because she could never learn through curiosity, dialectic, experimentation, and experience.
She learns by instruction, and the extent of her
self-education is to read the manual.
A leader who projects crassness or mediocrity
upsets the anankastic because it becomes so difficult to suspend her
disbelief when faced with such an obviously unathoritative figure.
One is whether he's articulate. This is very important.
Another cue is whether he's well-mannered. He can't be seen to transgress social norms, and the anankastic, who is herself highly scrupulous, holds others to very high standards of behavior.
An authoritarian leader must project an air of altruism, of stoicism and virtue, and, above all, of competence - even if his actions obviously betray this posture.
Conversely, the populist demagogue who insults his opponents with vulgarities and speaks at a 5th-grade level is likely to provoke the anankastic segment of society into an apoplectic fury.
When this makes everything even worse, she will either octuple-down or start blaming "wreckers" in the group for sabotaging the system. Or, she will defend the system at the expense of its victims.
When the agenda leaves casualties in its wake,
she assumes those people deserve what they got, because they didn't
play by the rules or failed to meet its standards.
From here we can see the internal contradictions that society's planners attempt to resolve, but again, anankastics are not actually society's planners, but its enforcers.
For them, an unstable system creates a great deal
of cognitive dissonance and can lead to revolutionary fervor.
Never mind the horrible judgment exercised by the victim, or his just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In this case, the system failed, which means it's
imperfect, which means it's invalid.
The smug, anankastic liberal assumes she has a monopoly on rational thought, primarily because she doesn't hear any reasoned, illiberal arguments, and she doesn't hear the arguments because an illiberal person is not worth engaging.
In fact, to consider an illiberal line of reasoning makes her queasy, like an Irish Catholic who sins simply by having impure thoughts.
Dialectical argumentation is not the process by
which she forms her understanding, but rather by instruction, so
there's no entertaining an opposing viewpoint, even to craft a
counter-argument, or even as a thought experiment - she can't
entertain an idea without embracing it, so considering a dissident
position is like hugging a tar baby.
This pathway can be exploited to radicalize her, like so:
Once she accepts a premise, she is now receptive to the next premise.
And because she can't entertain an idea without
embracing it, the new premise is absorbed and she's primed for the
next one.
So how does the anankastic resolve this?
She resolves it by pathologizing her opponent. She claims she wants to understand him, but in reality she attempts to "understand" what's gone wrong with the mind of someone who hasn't naturally arrived at the same, extreme conclusions as herself.
Hence the unctuous, condescending way she
pretends to seek understanding with dissenting, illiberal voices.
Science is presumed to be perfect and gives us the answers we need.
If you can pack every ideological premise into
this framework, then it's assumed that no ideological premises can
be challenged.
The scientific community has suffered a replication crisis since at least 2005.
When scientists attempted to reproduce the results of an accepted, peer-reviewed and published scientific finding, they were unable to do so about 40% of the time.
However, the failures to replicate findings vary significantly across disciplines, with the worst results in biomedical research, economics, and the social sciences.
This implies that the scientific establishment
has more of replicability "problem" in the hard sciences than a
crisis, but that these other disciplines are either corrupted by
special interests or are soft to the point of being semi-scientific.
However, it's clear that Scientism, or science as
ideology, can exploit the less-empirical disciplines for the purpose
of mass manipulation and revolutionary fervor.
This included, among many reforms, the imposition of the Revolutionary Calendar, which reset the year to 1 and which made every day 10 hours long, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute.
Those who rejected the Jacobins' reforms were
subject to mass execution.
The claim of Bolshevism's scientific basis allowed the party to label their opposition as against science itself.
The Soviets eventually pathologized disagreement
to such a degree that they declared political dissidents to be
psychologically unwell and had them committed to psychoprisons.
There are plenty of religious fundamentalists who exhibit highly anankastic behavior, as well as extremely doctrinaire, anankastic (and schizoidal) libertarians who will try to enforce the non-aggression principle, and claim Ayn Rand's objectivism applies to all these aspects of reality that are actually quite subjective (Rand herself was guilty of this).
Scientific inquiry and ideological struggle are both important, even noble pursuits.
However, there is a subtle but important distinction between one's quest for logos and veritas, versus an emotional need to be righteous and correct.
In order to appreciate irony, one must understand that looks can be deceiving, and that something's actual, effective meaning can betray its official, ostensible meaning.
This alienates the narcissist, for whom appearances and meaning are practically the same thing, and who doesn't consider the intrinsic value of anything. It also alienates the anankastic, for whom meaning is static and inflexible.
For this reason, you can usually filter out a lot
of pathological people by observing who can understand and
appreciate irony, and who cannot.
This is why anankastics like to police speech, and find political correctness reassuring:
For the same reason, they like explicit consent codes around courtship, even though these don't work at all in practice.
An anankastic may be surrounded by scandal and intrigue, to which she is utterly oblivious.
So intense is her aversion to conspiracy thinking
that she leaves herself vulnerable to those who might use her as an
unwitting pawn in a grand scheme.
She's easily manipulated by social predators because of her stubborn, presumptuous, and unobservant nature.
I believe our society is currently suffering the effects of extreme anankastia, both imposed by the pathological functionaries of the system, and as a general spirit possessing the public at large.
While some social critics describe this as mass
psychosis, I think it's more accurate to see this as wide-scale
anankastic neurosis.
We see it in both the binary thinking and the "beetle like men" that Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with their "scuttling movements" and "inscrutable faces,"
We see it in the "illiterate air" of Eric Hoffer's True Believer, who,
We see it in the "oversocialized types" Ted Kaczynski describes in his infamous manifesto, the "rebels" who form the vanguard of state ideology.
And we see it in the Kafkaesque quality of our
current era, so named for the bureaucratic madness so vividly
described by Kafka.
While the progressive and the libertarian may believe everyone has the capacity for rational thought and a destiny for self-actualization, the last few years prove that this is obviously not the case.
So, if large numbers of people are destined go
along with whatever, then our best hope may be some emergent, more
benevolent leadership.
Technological progress once required the hands and minds of many people willing to, say, fashion arrows all day, with meticulous craftsmanship, in a design they didn't invent and for a cause they never questioned.
Perhaps the survival of the tribe depended on
these people.
Her mistake, if anything, is to think we still live in communities, and not the vestiges of community.
It's likely that a somewhat anankastic person is
made more so by fear and anxiety, and I wonder if those who need
order and structure to feel secure are becoming more anankastic as
society's structure continues to break down.
It's ironic that the
heinous, odious World Health
Organization (WHO),
which has so terrorized the world population and which so threatens
the fabric of society, has also offered us this framework to better
understand the widespread pathology they have so exacerbated...
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