How the biggest oil corporation in the world and eugenics drive the modern ideas behind working.
The term ‘work life balance’, today, means balancing your work with your social life, family time, and other hobbies.
However, around the time it was coined by a number of groups in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was another more cynical definition coming into play.
Allan Arthur Oman, the CEO of the international conglomerate Standard Oil, coined the term in the early 1900s with this cynicism.
Unlike today’s connotations, he didn’t mean a lifestyle where you balance work with your hobbies, being social, and family time.
He actually meant fully integrating your personality into your job, making you the same person both at home and at work.
The goal, amidst the growing corporatisation of the western capitalist world, was to make people feel like their work was their true calling.
It was an ideological basis for going to work freely and gladly instead of accepting it as a reality of living in the capitalist system.
To him, being more efficient to your employer is synonymous with making work your point of pride and validation.
He took his inspiration from Katherine Briggs, the co-founder of the Myer Briggs personality test, and her journey into making someone’s personality just as much about social control as it did about self discovery.
Though, this was only relevant among the ‘middle class’, white collar jobs as opposed to the blue collar jobs.
This is because personality types are “more distinct amongst the intelligent,” as Isabelle claimed. It was soft eugenic and had no scientific backing.
The tests were designed to increase the power and naturalise the dominance of upper class white men, much like every other western and colonial system.
But for the test to find out whether someone was normal, they were compared to a control group. This control group was the family of those initially tested, which was white, Christian, rural Americans.
Because of Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, the personality test industry is now worth around $2 billion, simply for telling you who you are at work to help your employer decide whether you’re useful or not.
But this information about who we ‘truly’ are isn’t just given to us for free because Katherine and Isabel were kind people.
It’s deeper and far more cynical than that.
Psychologists wouldn’t exist if we could completely figure someone out through a quirky five minute quiz.
They’re so readily available because big businesses benefit from their popularity.
The personality tests have roots in eugenics and have been perpetuated by big businesses to give us stable professional identities to make us good little workers on our own accord.
Katherine took philosopher Carl Jung’s eight personality observations as the holy grail, even though he said they were “imprecise generalities based on observation rather than scientific research.”
He didn’t intend for them to be used as scientific evidence — they were merely observations he had made about people over the course of his career.
Idolising him, she wrote songs such as “Hail, Dr Jung!” and stories about him and based her entire philosophy on his self-described generalisations.
She spent years developing her own pseudo-scientific categories for placing personalities into, and believed personality was predestined from birth and could not be changed — an idea the Myers and Briggs Foundation still spreads to this day.
Driving her ideas was a book titled The Eugenic Marriage, a eugenics book about making babies more efficient from the moment they’re born.
It was believed that babies needed to grow up to be as efficient as possible, and this was only possible if distinct personality traits could be predicted.
Her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, made her own quest for a “better social order” from her mother’s early exploration of the idea.
She created her mother’s test into a written questionnaire to calculate one’s personality, but it wasn’t designed for anyone under an IQ of 100.
Myers and her mother believed that “multitudes of people are utterly worthless or worse than worthless,” and results were calculated separately because women were thought to be “innately more feeling than men.”
She called this a “blueprint for many other institutions, corporations, colleges, churches and hospitals that wish to use personality assessment to bring their operations into the modern era.”
And this is exactly what happened.
In the wake of a brewing world war, many people were on a quest for purpose and were wanting to contribute to the ‘greater good’.
Because of this, personality tests were easily advertised.
They were used in assigning custody rights in family court disputes, calculating life insurance based on the person’s likelihood to take risks. Extroverts and intuitive people were considered bigger risk takers.
By 1956, 60% of corporations in America used personality tests to help sort people into the right occupation.
Today, over 100 million people per year are subject to the test, and one in three human resource managers use it to fill executive roles.
The idea that your personality aligns with a perfect job tailored to you is enticing and workers can’t be blamed for falling for it in the midst of a larger self help movement.
However, research has found that around 50% of people who take the test twice within weeks change types completely. It’s an inconsistent measure that lacks any scientific backing, and it ignores the very essence of the human condition.
German theorist Theodore Adorno said it’s the “liquidation of the individual into flattened types of people,” and the categorisation of people and stamping out individuality to make them easier to manage was a fascist impulse.
It makes sense why it was, and still is, so popular in military and corporate environments where it’s important for large groups of people to do as they are told and not ask questions.
Many soldiers in the first and second world wars had their personalities tested with Myer Briggs to figure out how likely they were to suffer from shell shock. Of course, there was also no scientific backing for this either.
Eric Fromm called this the “personality market,” in which we as people become a commodity and we have to advertise ourselves in order to get a job.
Having our self worth determined by the market value of our personality is stressful, and we need validation. Luckily, the very problem also offers the solution.
This validation comes by way of a personality test saying, ‘Hey, you’re normal — but only for this position in this job.’
Personality quizzes function as an opportunity to self interrogate in order to maximise our value as human beings — or workers.
A book by Otto Kroeger and Jane M. Thuesen in 1988, called Type Talk, outlined how the Myer Briggs personality test gave us the ability to “manage [ourselves] more effectively by understanding [ourselves] more completely in any situation.”
This makes the personality test a form of the rampant self help epidemic we are seeing today. It’s the idea that it is up to us to take control of our own lives, despite the fact that socioeconomic circumstances and opportunity nearly aways define the trajectory of our lives.
It shouldn’t be a ‘victim’ mentality to point this out, as not everyone can get out of a minimum wage, dead end job. If this was possible under capitalism, the world would be a very different place.
Being an effective worker is seen as more valuable than being a genuine person because the most important thing should be our work, which is often for someone else who doesn’t even know us.
The out-right test denies that people can change or grow, and forces people to accept that we just are one specific way and that’s how it will always be.
This can be harmful in a number of ways including moving through violent family dynamics, understanding how our actions impact other people and trying to learn from them, and denying that we have any room for growth beyond our preconceptions.
Personality tests, self help culture, and the corporate workspace tell us to maintain our fixed identity, making it easier for others (employers, politicians) to tell us who we are and what we are capable of.
Of course, some people are better at certain things “based on biogenic dispositions, sociogenic influences, and culture and society more generally,” says former university professor and academic author Michael Burns.
Burns says that when we are forced to “understand ourselves via innate personalities, it’s potentially harmful.”
“The personality type tells you that you are made up of static traits that can not change because you were born with them.”
He outlines that one of the longest studies of all time, made up of 1,000 people over 60 years, found that personalities were not at all stable or consistent over time.
Brian R. Little’s book Who are you, really? says there are two ways of viewing your personality: the attributes you have, and the projects you do.
Attributes can be something like having good communication skills, and projects you do can be something like getting good at cricket.
Projects like getting good at cricket may force you to adopt or lean into certain traits, like becoming a good communicator or increasing your self discipline in order to consistently train.
These behaviours are consciously pursued rather than coming naturally, meaning they can creep into personalities more permanently.
“What you do can remake who you are.”
He argues that it doesn’t make you inauthentic to change what you do, because acknowledging that your subjectivity is constantly evolving inherently makes you more authentic.
Guy Debord said that “the ’total denial of man’ has thus taken charge of all human existence,” and that “labo[u]r has become a total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained at all cost."
If the cost is telling people they’re personalities can’t be changed and they have to work in a particular field to be an authentic human, the ruling class will do it. An oil corporation started this idea.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”
Here, she is talking about social construction of gender identity as opposed to the natural state of affairs often lumped in with that, and makes the broader point that identity itself is something constructed by society and the relationships people have with the idea of what society is.
When we accept the foundational instability of ourself we can begin to better relate to and understand others.
Michael Foucault said that, “The experience of the self is not discovering a truth hidden in the self, but instead an attempt to determine what one can and can not do with one’s available freedom.”
The individualistic approach to living and governance that has been established by capitalism and the subsequent neoliberalism has seen people’s lives commodified.
Corporations are telling us that personalities are inherent because it suits their goal of using us to make money for themselves.
We’re not viewed as people with lives — we’re viewed as workers with the sole purpose of making money for someone else.