We seem to be living in an age of gurus. They’re all over the place, building large followings in domains like politics, self-improvement, spirituality, religion, activism, philosophy and even (occasionally) science. Gurus may not be more numerous now than in the past, but they seem to now more easily garner audiences of hundreds of thousands due to the fracturing of media, social media and YouTube.
If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come u...
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paranoia
Personality traits as continuous spectrums
Nearly all human traits lie on continuums. Even many multi-trait conditions can be viewed as having distinct traits that each lie at one end of a spectrum. There are a number of cases where we only have a word for one side of a psychological spectrum, and we lack a word for what you'd be like if you inverted all the most common traits of a condition. Here's an attempt to give names to these opposites:
[Note: I've updated this post based on some feedback in the comments I received when I firs...
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