What The Psychotechnicians Mean

This will be a personal and philosophical post but it is occasioned by reading Poul Anderson's works. 

First, partly with the help of meditation, I am getting a better appreciation of what Anderson's psychotechnicians are talking about. When my personality was forming at a very early age, it combined some strengths with a lot of weaknesses and blind spots - very extreme ones, I now think. The upbringing to which I was subjected did not help me to develop the strengths or to understand and work on the weaknesses or blind spots. On the contrary, it condemned me for being in the wrong most of the time. If I had been conformist and competitive, then I would have been amply rewarded. I can now understand and appreciate some of what my (self-designated) "elders" were saying although I was completely unequipped to accept it then. I also now utterly reject a lot of what they said not about me but about the world around us. No wonder many individuals brought up like that have problems and their social interactions go awry! It is understandable both that the Psychotechnic Institute tried to address a problem and that it was overwhelmed by the course of events.

One of my strengths, I still think, was a determination, as far as possible, to seek out the truth, not just to accept received doctrines although I spent/wasted(?) a lot of time trying to rationalize them. I was told that I believed a doctrine (!) and that it could be proved so I did my best to clarify and reformulate the proof to my satisfaction but I also thought and read more widely. Science fiction was a great way to open out cosmic and conceptual horizons, especially Poul Anderson's perspective on time and history: the Time Patrol, the decadence of civilizations, characters as familiar with the fifth century as with the twenty-fifth...

Each of us has a distinctive personality from an early age. Many people think that this is explained by reincarnation/rebirth but I think that genetic-environmental interaction is a sufficient explanation. Poul Anderson celebrates individual liberty and cultural diversity.

Forward into the cosmos...