me tarzan, you jane. in taking yet another personality test, this time the enneagram one, there were some questions that caught my eye. in particular number 153 was interesting. question 153 stated: when i enter a new group, i know immediately who the most powerful person is. you are supposed to answer: always, sometimes, never. now what i want to know is what kind of question is this?



do you know who the most powerful person in the room is? what if you say "always"? what does that mean? that you are in tune with social structure and power? and if it's "never" then you are unaware of how people are connected? i answered "always" because i figured i'm the most powerful person in any group so i of course know immediately who that person is. convenient no?



now this could be useful i suppose. walk into a group setting, identify the leaders, the sheep, the clinger oners. the whatevers. and then act accordingly. but it makes me wonder about how often people actually think about this. do you meet people, or meet a group, and immediately try to identify the lords and masters? this seems kind of sick to me. smacks of some type of insecurity or manipulation. but maybe not, it could just be something we all do. a remnant of being brutal social animals who judge based on powerful physical or intellectual traits. thank god we evolved out of that phase.



supposing we had this knowledge, this knowledge of who was the most powerful person, what would we do with it? in reading life of pi, there are many sections that talk about animal behavior. the key to training animals (specifically tigers in this case) is to make them believe that you are the alpha person. once you have established that, you try to train the tigers at the bottom of the social ladder. these omega tigers are more likely to want to "kiss up" and be obedient to the alpha person. the beta and not quite so low status tigers will chafe under authority.



so in thinking about this question, it occured to me that maybe it means that by identifying the most powerful person, you are really a sucker for trying to get their attention. for trying to kiss up to them to gain acceptance into the group as a whole. and that is....disgusting.....smart......what?



there is for sure something positive to be said for recognizing who the big shot (wo)men are, but it's such an interesting question to appear on a personality test don't you think?