American Turnings, Presidents, and the Enneagram

Posted by: duckandgather on: January 2, 2007

• In: people vs. corporations | Personality and the Brain
• 4 Comments

After the series of blog postings I did on a model linking new American music genres with American social turnings, and after noticing that the messiah-wanna-be Barack Obama seems to side with the People versus Corporations, I got a hunch that maybe there was a link between these turnings (specifically, the crises), American Presidents during the crises, and the Enneagram. Sure enough, studying the matter closely, I concluded that George Washington (Commander-in-Chief during the Revolutionary War), Abraham Lincoln (President during the Civil War), and Franklin Roosevelt (President during the Great Depression and World War II), all were Enneagram “Seven” types.

Looking at the list of viable Presidential candidates for 2008, I concluded that Obama was the only Seven among them. And given that, as I mention above, he seems a tad anti-Corporate, I made the rash decision to predict that Obama would win the Presidency in 2008, even though still, as of this writing, he hasn’t even announced that he’s running.

It’s not like that I like this guy any more or less than I like anybody else. Like Love Lovett once sang, I love everybody. Still, I see Obama just as yet another messiah-wanna-be in American history. But more than two centuries of American history say that when the sh#$ hits the fan in America, America always seems to turn its lonely eyes to one of these self-styled messiahs.

Moreover, the last two such messiahs have appointed ultimately victorious generals who seem to have been Enneagram “Fives” (namely, Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower).

This fascinates me. A year ago, I podcasted that, as a nation, American “culture”, such that it is, seems to be of the Enneagram “Eight” type. So perhaps one might expect that during our nation-defining crises, we People would elect an Eight to take us through the crisis. And short of that, maybe one would expect that the general who brings us victory would be an Eight. Yet this is not what I have found. Instead, we Americans seem to fall for messianic Sevens who turn to plodding, determined, highly-organized Fives to bring an end to the crisis.

This fascinates me because it suggests the reason why I seem to love America so. America loves the ideal of the Eight — the go-it-alone person of strength who acts forcefully to protect the innocent. Of course, during “peacetime”, we’re a land of selfish self-interested bullies who pretend to be all about “justice” and “process”, but really we’re all just about ourselves. This is the downside of the Eight which leads us into the crises. But then during each crisis, the upside of the Eight is reborn anew, and the nation becomes even more emotionally healthy.

Yet this dance of the Eight toward enlightenment is manifested by personalities other than Eights (namely, Sevens and Fives playing major roles). This, I believe, makes for a truly singular nation in history.

Here are my podcasts on this:

(113) American Turnings, Presidents, and the Enneagram: The Model. It seems that every U.S. President in office during American crises — Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt — were Enneagram 7 types. Moreover, the winning generals of the last two — Grant and Eisenhower — seemed to have been 5s.
(114) American Turnings, Presidents, and the Enneagram: Where are the 8s? Since the crisis Presidents were 7s, and their generals were 5s, how is that America is an 8 country? We find our answer in George Mason.