Dark + light triads

On formula, myth, and metaphor toward a new paradigm

Hi y’all,

I’m revisiting a post I wrote in March 2022 today as it feels more relevant than ever, and I had far fewer of you here at that time. I’ve dug into the archives to meet all my new subscribers with something you might have missed, and all of my longterm subscribers with something I find so worthy of revisiting.

Also, I’ve never asked this of readers before but I’m resharing this piece in large part because I feel this information is criminally under-discussed. Three years later, I haven’t heard a single person talk about this concept AT ALL. So, I’m wondering, after you read it will you do the collective a favor and share either this post or one of the referenced links on the research it presents with someone in your world who might be fascinated or supported in some way by this knowledge?

Thank you.

Rachel

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In a dream, I grew wings and took flight. On my journey above nations, glimpsing at the globe from on high, I saw gigantic inflated figures floating in the sky like you might see in a parade, tethered by strings to their human counterparts – balloon caricatures of Trump, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Putin, Xi Jinping… each displayed a gargantuan version of their maniacal Earthbound expressions. Their faces were marred by the myriad predatory cruelties they’ve devoted their lives to inflicting. The air pumping them larger overhead was sourced from a constant flow of energy, attention, wealth, resources, etc siphoned from the masses of humanity and from our Earth, drenched in the shadow of unyielding darkness from these obliterative entities crowding the sky. I felt an immense sorrow wash over me as I absorbed the scene.

And then… somehow… they exploded. Sputtering and spiraling, those monstrous figurines crashed down and collapsed onto their likenesses, leaving them breathless and distraught as humanity, now bathed in sunlight, gasped in awe seeing their skin shine again, watching the green-blue marbled Earth around them glitter anew, everything enchanted by recovered radiance. The energy that once engorged the balloons flowed back to the sources once exploited – every human, every whale, every forest, every spider, every hawk, every ancestor, everything and everyone regaining their life force from all the conscious sacrifices and subconscious surrenderings they’d made to sustain this system. A celebration erupted. Collective clarity and coherence arrived immediately once reawakened. Community and kinship were suddenly empowered and enlivened by the release and redistribution of all that was hoarded by the few, reweaving broken bonds pressured toward destruction amidst the suffering of prior conditions that were instantly irrelevant in this new reality.

Meanwhile, the balloons crushed their human attachments, trapping them under the dead weight of their dense egoic structures inflated unrighteously, leaving them to bear the burdens of their actions they could no longer offload, avoid, nor project. The scene was saturated with peace, as though the catastrophic orchestration of supremacist constructs corrected itself in a moment of profound and instant karmic/cosmic rebalancing, of sharply executed reclamation from the feverdream that had, for too long, coerced and controlled and distorted and numbed and suppressed life as though all of us were held in a now-broken trance. Dissolved all at once. Free.

What a dream.

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How are we still here, cycling eternally through haunting reincarnations of the very same quality of male authoritarianism for thousands of years despite our visceral intimacy with their violence? Why haven’t we outmoded this model of governance? How do so few men still have this much power over all of us, except in more sophisticated and insidious ways than ever?

In the original publishing of this piece, I included this quote that speaks for centuries, from the beginning of Putin’s ruthless war on Ukraine:

Ira Glass: “It's so crazy you have an entire country with millions of people that essentially just have to guess what one man will do.”

Richard Ensor (Ukraine correspondent for The Economist): “Yeah maybe more than just an entire country. Maybe the whole world.”

How long have we been asking what will one man do? How far will one man go? How many must die on the short road of a man’s temper?

I fear we are nipping at the edges of these questions instead of targeting the central issue directly: a particular expression of extreme male supremacy as a formula, but also as myth and metaphor to create centuries worth of meaning that entrench this control regime into our consciousness. To put this more simply: thousands of years of meaning-making through the tools of logic, storytelling, and symbolism around male superiority have only reinforced the very successful, viral framework for organizing a world order.

formula + myth + metaphor = meaning

The Dark Triad

So let’s talk about formula as one of the puzzle pieces to explore for a moment. I first discovered the following framework in July 2020 when I was conducting research to co-author this paper with U.C. Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute’s Director and a dear mentor during my time there, john a. powell, regarding the rise of authoritarianism and responses to it through his concepts around “bridging”. It’s called the dark triad of personality, and it was first discovered by Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002. It is a highly socially, culturally, financially rewarded personality type, particularly when it is lived out in its extremes (as I'll explain below). The dark triad of personality consists of:

• Machiavellianism: manipulativeness, callousness, strategic exploitation, deceit, amorality, ruthlessness, a drive to use whatever means necessary to gain power

• Narcissism: entitled self-importance, all-consuming motive for ego reinforcement, acclaim-seeking, superiority, selfishness, antagonism, narcissistic shame, grandiosity

• Psychopathy: callousness, cynicism, deficits in self-control, impulsivity, thrill-seeking, recklessness, aggression, detachment, unafraid of crossing moral boundaries

These characteristics create a “socially malevolent character with behavior tendencies toward self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity, and aggressiveness.” In 2014, Palhaus expanded this research and added a 4th to create a “dark tetrad” with “everyday sadism: intentionally inflicting physical, sexual or psychological pain or suffering on others in order to assert power and dominance or for pleasure and enjoyment.”

What intrigues me most about this concept is that everywhere I’ve found it discussed, despite acknowledgment of its aversive, antisocial outcomes, it is also understood as advantageous, strategic, and evolutionarily adaptive. This tension might seem disturbing on the surface, but practically speaking it’s an inevitability when you consider the manufactured paradigm we live in. As I said before, the paradigm rooted in a particular expression of extreme male supremacy as a formula, myth and metaphor to create centuries worth of meaning that entrench this control regime into our consciousness.

Here are some startling facts:

• The dark triad personality is found to be positively linked to higher salary, leadership level, and career satisfaction (source).

• 20% of CEOs rank high in dark triad personality (source).

• Higher social class predicts greater dark triad personality tendencies.

  • A series of studies on this was conducted, but I’ll shout out Dacher Keltner on this piece regarding the intersection of class and unethical behavior. He’s a real gem.

• Dark triad personality rates are three times higher on corporate boards than in the overall population (source).

Unsurprisingly, Trump was linked with high dark triad personality traits as are the world’s billionaires.

The dark triad was positively correlated with:

• being younger

• being male

• being motivated by power

• pursuing instrumental sex, achievement and affiliation (but not intimacy)

• having self-enhancement values

• immature defense styles

• conspicuous consumption

• selfishness

• viewing creative work and religious immortality as routes to death transcendence

Sound familiar??

One text that extrapolates on this research is Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible (linked for free here) which outlines the strategies the 1% employ to maintain the status quo ( i.e. “change is dangerous”; “concerns over inequality are overblown”; “hard times hit those who don’t measure up”; “the wealthy [the men] [white people] are the ones being mistreated”; “critics of the billionaire class are un-American...” ). Another study links dark triad personality types with disproportionately espousing racist attitudes and right-wing authoritarian ideologies.

Though the dark triad is positively correlated with success and wealth, it is negatively correlated with life satisfaction, conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-transcendent values, compassion, empathy, a quiet ego, a belief that humans are good and a belief that one’s own self is good.

Without any shred of irony Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace is a highly praised book. The author says what she loves most about Machiavelli is “he takes emotions, morality and ethics totally out of the situation. So it’s like a chessboard.” Right. . . emotionless, amoral, unethical. (Or, could men harness more ethical behavior, more emotionality, and more morality..? Where's that book? Oh yeah, right here.)

Thus, we exist in a society that rewards the dark triad persona not only as aspirational but, as pitched and coded into masculinity, as a birthright. The formula is reinforced by myth and metaphor – story and symbol – to permeate culture as though no other paradigm is possible. (See: “pick yourself up by your bootstraps”, “every man for himself”, as well as the vast majority of male leaders reflecting insidiously cruel, cut-throat, amoral qualities, pedastalizing the likes of every world leader past and present such as the idolization of Hitler, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Trump, Joe Rogan, the MGTOW movement which some believe the second biggest male podcaster - Kyle McKay - is part of, etc etc.

In other words, I don’t think it’s enough to label masculinity as “toxic”. We have to understand the systemic mechanisms that have rewarded a particular kind of male supremacist ideation/representation for thousands of years. It’s not enough to be anti “patriarchy”. It matters that we get specific about what this means so that we can be accountable to transforming the core mechanisms of its proliferation.

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The Light Triad

Now let’s pivot to new research on a subsequent concept: the light triad personality type. First, the light triad is characterized by:

• Kantianism: treating people as ends unto themselves, not mere means

• Humanism: valuing the dignity and worth of each individual

• Faith in Humanity: believing in the fundamental goodness of humans

The light triad is associated with:

• being older

• being female

• having less childhood unpredictability

• higher levels of religiosity, spirituality, life satisfaction, acceptance of others, belief that others are good, belief that one’s self is good, compassion, empathy, openness to experience, conscientiousness, positive enthusiasm, having a quiet ego and a belief that one can live on through nature and biosociality after one’s personal death.

“Individuals scoring higher on the Light Triad Scale also reported more satisfaction with their relationships, competence and autonomy, and they also reported higher levels of secure attachment style and eros in their relationships. In general, the light triad was related to being primarily motivated by intimacy and self-transcendent values. Many character strengths correlated with the light triad, including curiosity, perspective, zest, love, kindness, teamwork, forgiveness and gratitude.”

– Kaufman, Yaden, Hyde, Tsukayama

This research also found, importantly, that the average person is tipped more toward the light relative to the dark in their everyday patterns of thoughts, behaviors and emotions. In this scatterplot, we see extreme malevolence is very rare in the general population:

The light triad is abundant and innate. So how do we reinforce formula, myth, and metaphor toward meaning-making that reflects the core truths of who we are and who we deserve to be governed by beyond the disproportionately few dark triad personalities on this planet that have gripped power so long we might think they are the majority? What does leadership look like rooted in Kantianism, Humanism, and Faith in Humanity? And why do we keep choosing away from that?

I believe we have to leverage these tools I’ve now repeated a few times – formula, myth, and metaphor – if we want to build change.

Let’s think about the following as a tiny example of rewriting the formula with data that undermines the manufactured, manipulated, coerced credibility of male supremacy and presents an accurate and reflective formula of the healthfulness of balance:

“If leaders are serious about ending war, women need a seat at the table. International data from 1989-2011 shows that when women are involved in negotiating, mediating, witnessing, and/or signing agreements, peace is 35% more likely to last 15+ years. Men alone should not decide the fate of nations. Male egos are on full display on the world stage and these results from a study of 182 peace accords have never been more relevant.” – Adam Grant

35% more likely to last 15+ years! With women at the table! And we can now understand the correlations here:

1. women tend to be light triad personality types by nature

2. men in positions of authority are not reflective of the broader population and are instead disproportionately dark triad personality types.

Thus, the remedy is undeniably found in having more women involved in leadership, particularly national leadership. But what do we do about the more complicated situation that the worst men are rising to the top and skewing the field so dangerously? And how does this distort a collective perception of men broadly which does so much damage to everyone, not only men?

I’d love to hear from you. What does this spark or inspire? What can you add here?

Ok, now that you’ve reached the end, I’ll kick it back to the top and wonder if you’d consider sharing this post or one of the referenced links on the research it presents with someone in your world who might be fascinated or supported in some way by this knowledge?

With massive heart, til next time, step by step we walk (or fly) together.

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