The Ten Types of Human: A New Understanding of Who We Are, and Who We Can Be

by Dexter Dias

‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses.’

What Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary calls that temporary loss of sanity curable by marriage – love.

the effective limit of our social circle is 150 – what has come to be known as Dunbar’s Number

Marcel Proust wrote that the real voyage of discovery lies ‘not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes’.

‘To repair the pain of invisibility,’ Kip Williams says, ‘we may provoke other people into paying attention to us, to force others to recognise our existence. Ostracism is a thread that weaves through case after case after case of school violence.’

‘When animals experience extreme physical pain,’ Naomi Eisenberger, speaking in Reject, a film on social ostracism, says, ‘one of their first responses is to attack whatever’s nearby. This sheds some light on why people may be aggressive after they feel rejected. The extent to which there’s some overlap between the system that regulates physical pain and the system regulating pain of rejection, means people may become aggressive in response to social rejection.’

Deviance from the norm may trigger similar systems to those directed at distancing from contagion. Group members who loyally hold onto the pervasive group norm avoid individuals who depart from or transgress it in a similar way to that in which they avoid disease-bearers. As such, ostracism amounts to a social isolation which can be viewed as a kind of quarantine, with the ultimate sanction being total group exclusion.