The current geopolitical realities have forced any ideas concerning disparity and individual limits down to the status of marginal, non-politically-correct and outdated absurdities.
We have to merely label an opinion racist or sexist or cynical or fascist or prejudiced to deny it, these days.
We find support in our struggles to exclude anything creating rifts in those who, like us, seek total inclusion and the shielding of their right to participation and belonging within the whole.
The need for inclusion, so as to achieve social harmony, demands that all should be offered the illusion of equality and unlimited personal potential.
Beauty, intelligence, strength, talent are all spun in ways which makes them irrelevant or ambiguous and accessible to all indiscriminately.
Often the terms are reinterpreted to become more accommodating and less demanding.
We lower our standards, when they cannot be wholly done away with or labeled prejudiced and outdated, so that more can measure up and not feel outcasts or inadequate.
Total discipline to the whole and complete devotion to it is accomplished by nurturing the myth of equal potential.
This process is called leveling.
For this reason any hypothesis concerning the connection between outward appearance and character or psychology are deemed counterproductive, prejudiced or primitive.
Psychologists are now taught, as gatekeepers of normalcy, to consider any hypothesis which creates social disharmony as diseased.
The healthy mind is now the one which wants to completely disappear and be assimilated within fold. It wants to be a carbon copy of an average ideal.
Even beauty is now considered skin-deep or a chance occurrence with no deeper implications or it is diluted in significance by making it a matter of taste and perspective, ignoring the evolutionary implications of physical symmetry and the part it plays in natural selection.
Perspectivism, in general, is often recruited as a method of making all opinions and judgments equal and insignificant.
The prevailing ‘truth’ is that we all have a right to our own truth.
What’s ‘truth’ when any truth will do?
The idea that things are more than they appear, a Kantian outgrowth, and that we can only perceive the world superficially leads us to the wrong conclusion that there is more there than meets the eye.
Wherever an unknown exists man places a deity there.
So it has been with the thing-in-itself. Its very inaccessibility makes it a perfect place to plant a comforting myth forever protected from our curiosity.
Yet, others have proposed the idea that there is nothing underneath appearances. Reality exhibits itself completely and uninhibited and it is only our lack of perception or our misinterpretations that cause the error which results in us comforting ourselves with the idea that there is more there hidden and inaccessible to the human mind.
Of course what is “hidden†is always given a positive hue.
Man escapes reality into hope.
I’m more inclined to support the second proposition where reality is there entirely and it hides nothing, that it is our emotions and human limitations that cause disparity in understanding it and that success is determined by how closely we’ve managed to interpret our limited perceptions of it.
We live in an approximation of something actual.
Thusly the concept that physique is indicative of character cannot, in my mind, be entirely dismissed.
One could confront many of the suppositions concerning some of the opinions of what each individual physical trait means but not that it participates in a pattern that exhibits something real.
If we take the opinion that the physical and the mental are different manifestations of the same thing in a different context then we are lead to the conclusion that physical traits, inherited from our past or mutated due to present conditions, say something directly and honestly about us.
Ernst Kretschmer separates the physical types into schizophrenes and pyknics with the analogous psychological types.
He, furthermore, subcategorizes these groups into schizophrene athletic, schizophrene asthenic types and circular types, and admits to a hazy delineating line between the types with many intermingling and exceptions.
He also proposes psychological predispositions corresponding to each physical type.
The accuracy of his interpretations and generalizations aside, he opens up a subject which makes many, raised with western social sensibilities, uncomfortable.
Racism, sexism raise their uninvited heads and we feel threatened by the implications.
But our discomforts alone are not arguments against the hypothesis and can only point to our own prejudices concerning certain possibilities.
Nevertheless if we can distinguish ourselves as belonging to the same species using physical markers then we cannot deny the specific implications of each physical marker.
In my opinion physical characteristics expose psychological dispositions, as we can intuitively recognize them even if we rationally deny them, and they do affect our judgment concerning individuals.
