Essay 1. TYPOLOGY OF SOCIAL CHARACTER OF UNPRODUCTIVE ORIENTATION

Essay 1.
TYPOLOGY OF SOCIAL CHARACTER OF UNPRODUCTIVE ORIENTATION

What an interesting creature – a human! The sun is shining – it’s hot! It’s snowing – it’s cold! The rain is dripping – it’s wet. And the morning is gloomy. And the mood wants to be better. And incomprehensible anxiety in the soul. What is being done with the character? You start to understand and it gets even sadder.
But if you look at it … it’s not so bad. You just need to realize the cause of failure, make the right decision and it will immediately become easier. Anxiety is the first reaction to an obvious or imaginary danger, and a constant state of anxiety, irritability, dissatisfaction is a bell that signals that it is time to take care of your physical and psychological health.
What is so spoiling our lives and how to deal with all this? Why do we have such a character and why can it change? Let’s try to understand this.
First of all, you need to get rid of physical ailments, eliminate the painful stimulus that destroys you. Then take care of your mental health.
One of the most important problems, the solution of which is necessary for a successful life in the modern world, is to obtain reliable knowledge about yourself and your character.
We will not fall into banality in the analysis of a healthy lifestyle, but will be based on the fact that one of the most important prerequisites for shaping a person’s character, his individual characteristics, are the personal characteristics of parents and the psychological atmosphere of the family. As well as features of his constitution and temperament, life experience gained within the culture and social system in which he lives.

In order to know yourself more deeply, it is necessary to have at least a basic idea of ​​the SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL character, as well as fruitful and fruitless ORIENTATION.
CHARACTER is a model of behavior characteristic of a given person, it allows a person to act quite consistently and get rid of the burden of making new and thoughtful decisions. The character also performs the function of selecting ideas and values.
SOCIAL NATURE is a model of behavior of a particular person in a particular community. This is a kind of “imprint” of the system of social or group relations, which is imposed on the individual in the process of his socialization, communication, education. Changing social conditions leads to a change in social character. If a person cannot fit into the changed socio-economic conditions, then his character acquires neurotic features and the person dooms himself to “loneliness in the crowd.”
From the social character should be distinguished INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER, due to which within the same culture, one person is different from another. These differences are partly due to the personality of the parents, the mental and material conditions in which the child grows, as well as the peculiarities of the constitution and temperament.

E. Fromm identifies the following types of social characters:
Social character can be “productive” or “unproductive”. Productive character encourages creativity, awareness of responsibility, love. Unproductive character isolates from people, leads to a spiritual impasse.
Freedom of initiative, democracy, the rule of law form an active, confident, disciplined and rational thinking person.

Unproductive ORIENTATIONS:
1. Receptive orientation – it seems to a person of this type that the “source of all good” lies outside, and he believes that the only way to find what is desired is to obtain it from an external source. Material things, love, knowledge, pleasure – everything is expected from other people: with this orientation, the problem of love is to “be loved” and not to love; in the field of intelligence are also focused on the perception of ideas, rather than on their creation. Their first thought is to find someone who will give them the information they need, instead of making the slightest effort. If they are religious people, they expect everything from God and nothing from their own activity.
2. Exploiting orientation – people of this type believe that all the necessary goods are in the external environment and nothing can be created yourself, but they do not believe that you can get something from others as a gift, but believe that what you want should be obtained by force or cunning, take from others. Even in love, they feel attracted only to those whom they can take away from someone else. They also do not create ideas, but take or steal them in the form of plagiarism or in the form of paraphrasing ideas expressed by someone else. The things they can take from others always seem better to them than the ones they can create themselves. They use and exploit anyone and everyone from whom they can squeeze something. Their motto is “Stolen fruit is the sweetest”. Their installation is colored by hostility and manipulation. Each person is considered by them as an object of exploitation and is evaluated for its usefulness. People show cynicism, suspicion, hidden or overt hostility, envy and jealousy.
3. Acquisition orientation – people of this type do not believe that they can get something new from the outside world, so you need to save and economize what you have. They seem to surround themselves with a protective wall, and their main goal is to bring as much of their shelter as possible and give as little of it as possible. In the realm of love, they seek to completely “take over” a loved one, consider it as their belonging. In the material sphere, they show selfishness, greed, over economy and over accuracy. The claimant always has things in order, thoughts, feelings, memories, he can not stand if things are not in place, and will automatically put them in order. His manic tidiness is an expression of his need to stay away from contact with the outside world, things outside his own world are perceived as “dangerous and unclean.” Once the outside world is perceived as a source of threat, then standing your ground is the answer to the threat from the outside. Therefore, these people are stubborn, suspicious, uncommunicative, stay away from others or seek to completely own another person. Their slogan: “Mine is mine, and yours is yours.”
4. Market orientation developed as dominant only in the modern era in connection with the economic conditions of a market society. Orientation of character, which is rooted in the perception of themselves as a commodity, and self-worth as a currency, is called market orientation. The material success of all in today’s market society depends on the recognition of their identity by those who pay for their services or hire for a fee. Success depends on how well a person is able to sell himself in the market, how well he is able to present himself on the attractive side, that is, a person begins to perceive himself as a commodity. Everyone must offer the necessary type of personality, which, regardless of his needs, must meet one condition: to be in demand. A person must be able to compete with many others, he cares not about his life and happiness, but about becoming a commodity, and to do this you need to know what type of personality is in high demand.

In conditions of dominance of market relations of the individual in order to succeed it is necessary to possess mental baggage, professional skill, abilities and skill, sincerity and decency. Social success today depends on how well a person knows how to present himself, how attractive his “packaging” is, how prepared he is for fierce competition with his peers.
If the sense of identity to oneself was previously expressed by the formula “I am what I do”, then in a market orientation the sense of identity becomes as unstable as self-esteem, and the formula of continuously changing identity in different roles looks like this: “I am what you want.
The authoritarian regime forms an authoritarian personality, one of the most striking manifestations of which E. Fromm calls “sadomasochistic”. This individual is not capable of democratic equal cooperation and acts effectively only in a system of domination-subordination.

Analyze yourself, establish the features of your social character, using the typology of social character, proposed by E. Fromm.
The next essay will be devoted to the analysis of the typology of social characters of PRODUCTIVE ORIENTATION.