The Consideration Cycle, Briefly.

     The psychologic theory that I use for my character analyses is presented in my recent book Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology.  This theory claims to explain people’s congenital nature as distinct from the traits they develop after birth.  Modern psychologists refer to the latter, our postnatal nature, as either our personality or our character, and throughout their work they use these two words ambiguously and interchangeably.  In my theory, however, the term character means only our congenital nature, the basic impulses of which I believe stay with us throughout our lives, while the term personality means our total nature; both the characteristics we had at birth and all the developed traits that we acquired later from our life experiences.

     The premises of my theory are that we humans reason cyclically and that the structure of the universal “Consideration Cycle,” as I call it, forms our common logic.  This Cycle begins in us each time we consider a new event, or realize that something has happened, after which we may analyze that whole event and perceive its parts.  Then we choose some of those parts for further speculative reasoning and we create hypothetical constructs that form those fictional notions that, in new turns of the Cycle, become our fictional notions of Reality, or of what we think is happening.

     The Cycle, as I conceived it, consists of four cardinal ideas plus various conscious and subconscious phases.  It has five conscious phases, which I call our psychologic systems, each of which consists of two polar ideas, one of which is an objective perception and one of which is a subjective perception.  We have an objective perception when we assimilate something from outside ourselves, and we have a subjective perception when we project something from inside ourselves.  The tension between these two opposite poles is what allows us to form tangible ideas that we can explicate and remember for future uses.  But in our subconscious phases we can do nothing but store these tangible notions as memories for possible recall in the future.

     I have named our five psychologic systems, in their invariable order, our Will, Thought, Feeling, Judgment, and Power systems (WTFJP), each of which consists of two polar ideas.  And since there are two ideas in each system, each of which we perceive either through assimilation or projection, we humans will handle each system in one of four different ways.  We can be balanced (B) in a system, which makes us realistic and logical at both poles; we can be reversed (R) in a system, which makes us unrealistic and illogical at both poles; we can be projective (+) in a system, which makes us subjective at both polls and so only half logical there; or we can be assimilative (–), which makes us passive, accumulative, and half logical in that system.

     It follows by hypothetical count that in each of our psychologic systems 25% of us are logical, 25% of us are totally illogical, and 50% of us are, in opposite ways, half logical and half illogical.  These facts confirm the old understanding most of us have that in total, considering all five systems, very few humans are realistic and rational.  Offsetting that bad news, however, is the fact that with this new psychology theory, we now have an objective analytic tool that shows us why and when people or generations of people are or are not realistic and logical, and specifically just who those people are.