The "Personality" Problem

This is going to be a long post, and only tangentially applicable to RPGs, so read the next paragraph and skip the rest if you want.

Last week, Mandy Morbid and Vivka Grey both stepped forward with horrific accusations of abuse by a well-known RPG industry figure.  (There are a couple of other accounts nested in Mandy's account, too.)  Most commentary beyond the initial statements devolves into grotesquerie, taking victims' pain and transmuting it into something self-serving, either reframing accounts to be about themselves or turning it into the pointed dagger of some sort of agenda.  (For example: if you took this opportunity to gloat and tell people, "I told you so," then congratulations!  You're also a monster, one very similar to the creature described.)

(Cheyenne Grimes' and Luka Carroll's allegations against another well-known RPG industry figure also emerged within the same week.  Some of those have been repeated for several years now, but absolutely merit repetition here.)

Because people are complex and I'm a goddamn hypocrite, I would like to discuss something adjacent to the matter at hand.  I've been ruminating on it for decades, and moreso within the past year.  For obvious reasons, it's dominated my thoughts for the past week.  Maybe it will help someone else?  Or perhaps it will just exorcise it from me?

In either case, let's talk about the "personality" problem.

I've seen the term bandied about in the old-school RPG scene, but there are no doubt various terms across multiple disciplines that cover the same thing.  A "personality" is someone known for being a singular presence in a subculture, often able to exert their influence over cultural trends.  They're similar to the postmodern, social media concept of an "influencer," but there's usually a distinct difference: whereas "Influencers" act like courtiers in medieval salons, controlling what things become popular through social pressure, "personalities" usually do that and offer useful services to their subculture.  All the "personalities" I've met are intensely creative in their own right, and while they might benefit from good marketing, there's at least a modicum of substance around which the hype builds.

Basically, they're cranky artistic weirdos who have the influence to guide artistic trends through social pressure, because they have a cult of personality gathered around them who value their insights.  (By contrast, an "influencer" typically doesn't have anything to offer apart from their potential value as someone who correlates and collates content.)

A couple of warnings about the rant to follow:

• I will offer no solutions, because there are none.  This is the Devil's bargain we took when we settled down to agriculture, cities, and the whole civilization schtick.  There are things you can do to mitigate potential problems, but there is no way to exorcise it from the species without drastic societal change.

• It's probably going to be winding and disorganized, thoughts vomited upon a page.  Expect a variety of asides, all eventually leading to some manner of rambling conclusion.  Again, perhaps this will help no one, and I am only exorcising it from myself.

• As a hobby blog focused on role-playing games, it's going to talk heavily about cults of personality in nerd spaces.  Make no mistake, though: it's applicable everywhere.  I am not involved in kink spaces, but a growing number of associates are, and I hear enough of a trickle of news to recognize cults of personality peddling influence in that subculture.  Strangely, my heathen ass gets far more news about ecclesiastical spaces, and let me tell you: that's a hot bloody mess of personality cults and Byzantine intrigues.  I've also seen personalities in every workplace I've ever encountered, and even in friends' circles.  It's broadly applicable.

• In personal anecdotes, identifiers have been scrubbed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.  I'm not Mark Twain — and I'm a conflict-averse hippie freak, besides! — so my ability to throw shade is severely curtailed.  But maybe someone can read these words and change their path.  That's all I can offer.

First things first: every artist has a sociopath lurking in their breast.  The hubris of the artist is to look upon the world and deem it incomplete, so there's at least a little ego involved in the creation of anything.  It's just up to you how much sociopath you let into the wild.  (Stephen King's "Why We Crave Horror Movies" essay says we watch horror movies to "keep the gators fed."  That's descriptive of art in general, the overwhelming need to either exorcise something from yourself, or to share it with someone else in the hopes of human connection.  You're always trying to keep the monster in your heart at bay.)

You could (and probably should) make a case for any form of expression, beyond just the arts, requiring a little sociopath to fully put your stamp on it.

Therein lurks the kernel around which a personality can grow.

I'm not sure nerd spaces are more vulnerable to personalities than other places, but they certainly have some unique concerns.  Nerds have a tendency to be misfits for myriad reasons which all tend to reduce to it's easier to read than socialize.  Maybe you have a disability, maybe you're from a marginalized community or subculture, or maybe you just think running is bullshit.  You have a touch of an outgroup on your soul, and now you're reading three or four grade levels above your standard age range.

Astute observers will note that these are the exact conditions under which cults recruit.

A cult is actively looking for members who feel marginalized because they are more receptive to recruitment.  If you're doing well in your relationships, feel comfortable in your job, and are all-around confident in your skin?  You're probably well-insulated from cult recruitment.  But if you're somebody craving human affection and feeling somehow removed from your fellows, you're vulnerable.  A cult reminds you that they're the only people who can truly understand you and love you, the only people who can give you the affection you're lacking.  And when you're fully convinced of that, they can make you do anything.  Which you will do, because you love them.

There's a parallel with abusive families, with the added complexity that babies are born vulnerable to cult recruitment.  It's a species survival trait: since a baby takes a lot of effort and requires near-constant care, it forms a potent familial bond that ensures you will care for this tiny human (so that this child can become an adult and propagate the species), and that this tiny human will do what you say (so this child doesn't walk into an alligator's mouth, or whatever).  But abusive families will abuse this genetic, hormonal trust system, convincing you that the family is the only structure you can trust.  And again, they can make you do anything at this point, and again, you will, because you love them.

Truly astute observers will note that these vulnerabilities are often interrelated.

Back to the core point: you have a group of people who feel like misfits and tend to have small, intense interpersonal relationships.  Likewise, being a misfit, you feel grateful whenever a new contact doesn't immediately reject you for being eccentric.  And maybe you even have a weird, shitty homelife, so friends who understand you are far preferable to whatever hell in which you rest your head at night.

There's a truism that friends are "the family you choose," but that's not precisely true, is it?  You exercise a little more choice over your circle of friends than your family, but you are only introduced to your friends by way of complex environmental factors that are largely beyond your control.  And your choice to engage with them is likewise impacted by previous experiences you've had; a minute early or a minute late, a sentence more or a sentence fewer, and maybe you wouldn't have connected with this person the way you did.

As with many things in your life, there's a large illusion of choice.  (Don't get me wrong: you absolutely made a choice.  But your free will is mediated by a variety of subconscious influences that you may not fully recognize within yourself, and further mediated by external factors beyond your control.  Your free will, then, is never completely yours.  Especially if you refuse to confront the influences that push at your desires.)  But that illusion gives you a potent sense of ownership and engagement.  These friends are yours.

So, you're a smart eccentric with a tight circle of friends — your friends — and you didn't fall for the Rajneeshees' recruiting pitch and you didn't fall for the blatant racism and nationalism of British exit.  So nobody's going to trick you into joining a cult.

But thinking you're immune makes you more vulnerable to certain kinds of attack.

You might not fall for a cult or a fringe political movement, but your friends are neither of these things.  They don't have branding or a wide-ranging political agenda, they're just your friends.  They love you, and you can trust them.

Enter the personality.  You meet someone creative, with similar interests, who's charming and funny and gives great advice.

(A couple of other asides about this one: I'm not telling you to be suspicious of everybody you meet.  Your friends aren't plotting against you, and most of the people you meet have no hidden agenda, save perhaps a slight preoccupation with their own best interest.  Just be careful out there, okay?  Likewise, personalities aren't inherently bad.  It's that old saw about competition: good competition makes everyone bring their top form to try to get to the top of the heap, while bad competition cuts out otherwise viable producers through underhanded tactics.  That's an oversimplification of a complex idea with a lot of weird permutations, but you get the picture.  Sometimes what you need is a single iconoclast to shake up a staid old subculture.  But sometimes a single iconoclast can destroy that subculture, or completely remake it in their own image.)

Personalities are weird because they're as much the person as the group that forms around them.  It's that whole pointillistic, Big Data structure of humanity in microcosm: an individual person might not mean much from a Big Data perspective, but without a collection of individuals, you couldn't get the trends of the whole.  (Facebook and Google don't care about you, but there's paradoxically no them without you, you dig?)  Likewise, a personality in isolation is just a creative weirdo; it's only with a support structure that they can get thrust into a position as an agent of change with all the good and bad that potentially represents.

But the thing you get from a personality is usually an intensely creative person with strong Opinions™ about things that can be dispensed as wisdom.  Their well-considered opinions and creative output will usually earn them a small but zealous group of supporters; these supporters may also be creative people, or just friends and influence peddlers there to soak up the sun.  (Social media "influencers" probably fall in the latter camp, social remoras hitching rides on bigger fish, but potentially providing useful service as hype men.)  The support network is often a combination of archetypes: those who are creative in a feedback loop with the personality, and those who have learned to surf the social trends necessary to worm their way into the inner circle.

There's nothing wrong with this by itself — I bet we can all identify core movers and shakers in our friends' groups or work endeavors — but the real problem comes with isolation.  A cranky, gross weirdo is someone to be ignored and reviled, but if you end up in their orbit and think their behavior is normal, that's when you have a problem.  That knife cuts both ways, too: you might be a perfectly reasonable human being with a cult following, but when you start to be drawn into your own circle of influence, surrounded by people who think you can do no wrong, any action you take suddenly seems a lot more reasonable.  When the support group turns inward, all anybody can see is the personality.

Herein lies the beating heart of the personality problem: you are someone who feels a sense of alienation from the world, but you meet a creative soul who challenges your assumptions of what that world can resemble.  (Alternately, your sense of alienation prompts you to become that creative soul.)  You fall into their orbit.  If you're not paying close attention, it's very simple for the orbit to become all there is, a small group of people consuming each others' content and thinking the rest of the world looks like this, or perhaps the rest of the world should look like this.  The insidious part is that none of this is, on the face of it, bad — the world can always be improved.  It takes a great deal of reflection to notice when the commune goes wrong, when people are asking too much of you, or when they're cutting people out of the group due to minor disagreements or because it better enables them to jockey for position.  It also takes a great deal of reflection to notice that what's good for you and your friends' group isn't good for everyone else.

That also gets into the inherent paradox of the personality problem, because it's hard to tell who's in charge.  Sometimes the personality is in charge, but sometimes a supporter can subvert the original effort.  (Sometimes the sultan is in charge, sometimes it's the vizier.)  But it's the isolation that can turn a sweet little artists' colony into a hormonal hothouse, as things happen in the shadows and seem perfectly reasonable because at least it's better than things out there.

A handful of personal anecdotes from subcultures allowed to run in isolation.  I will freely admit I do not know all details, but here are facts as I know them:

• Three associates indulge in a not precisely criminal, but certainly unethical conspiracy.  One is a personality; the other, their herald.  All three are caught.  The personality and herald turn public opinion against the third and completely push them from the friend group.

• Two associates this time.  Same sort of conspiracy, same personality, same result.  The personality turns the group against the co-conspirator and pushes them out.

• A friend operating at the periphery of the local cult of personality.  They're creative, enthusiastic, and among the best role-players with whom I've ever had the pleasure of gaming.  Someone you absolutely want at your gaming table.  But there is a strange undercurrent, and the local heralds do not like them.  They are forced in the periphery for reasons I do not understand and fathom.  (Although if we're all being honest, maybe it's the racism.)

• Another friend in another scene, closer to the core.  Intelligent and insightful, I've never had a conversation with this person lasting more than maybe two sentences.  Why?  Because they're treated as a china doll, and it's usually only two sentences in before a paramour arrives and interrupts their train of thought.  We all pretend this is normal and not creepy and possessive in any way.

Why am I telling you this?  Because perhaps you'll recognize the rot that lurks in your own scene.  I previously told you there's nothing to be done — the damage was started when we outgrew our tribes, and had to rely on strangers to run the lion's share of civilization for us.  We still want hierarchies and families and senses of belonging, so we still arrange ourselves in these groups.

But while there's nothing to stop it, you can be aware of the dynamic.  You can extricate yourself from the horror if you're in the midst of it.  There are only a handful of things you can do, but perhaps they will be enough:

• Self-reflection is key.  If you're in a situation you know is bad, or makes you feel bad, or makes you feel very conflicted, find somebody outside the scene to make sure it's normal.  Or just leave.  It hurts, and it sucks, but it might save you in the long-run.

• If you're in the middle of a cult of personality, and you can look upon yourself doing all the weird, petty, kingmaker things previous described, extricate yourself.  Use your influence for good.

That's really it.  Be brutally honest with yourself, make sure you're doing the right thing, and you'll be okay.