Jimmy Wales and the Underground Man

It's very dangerous for us to have a small number of companies secretly controlling the flow of traffic and flow of information. - Jimmy Wales.

As I've read about Jimmy Wales, and seen images of him, over the past few years, my impression of him has been that he best fits the Vigilant type.

His personal philosophy, as summarized on his Wikipedia page, is congruent with this typing. He seems to share the Vigilant type's strong need for autonomy, freedom, and independence.

"Wales is a self-avowed "Objectivist to the core", to the extent of having named his daughter Kira after the heroine in Ayn Rand's We the Living, although he says, "I think I do a better job — than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists — of not pushing my point of view on other people." When asked by Brian Lamb in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A about Rand, Wales cited "the virtue of independence" as important to him personally. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to having a political philosophy at the time of the interview, Wales reluctantly labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics" and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles. From 1992 to 1996, he ran the electronic mailing list "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy." An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason."

But I also believe that Dostoevsky's Underground Man is of the Vigilant type. And according to Bernard J. Paris, the Horneyan theorist and literary critic, the Underground Man's most distinctive and significant characteristic is his neurotic need for freedom and independence.

"The underground man's affirmation of freedom as the most advantageous advantage is, like his hypersensitivity to constraint, symptomatic of his detachment. The compliant person finds the meaning of life in love; the aggressive person finds it in mastery. For the detached person the highest value of all is freedom, independence. This can be a healthy value, and any appeal to it tends to be stirring; but, as Horney points out, "the fallacy here is that he looks upon independence as an end in itself and ignores the fact that its value depends ultimately upon what he does with it. His independence, like the whole phenomenon of detachment of which it is a part, has a negative orientation; it is aimed at not being influenced, coerced, tied, obligated" (OIC, 77). The underground man does not wish to be free so that he can fulfill his human potentialities. For him freedom is the goal of life, the highest fulfillment, and he is ready to embrace suffering, chaos, and destruction in order to have it."

Chapter VI The Withdrawn Man: Notes from Underground

PTypes - Bernard J. Paris: The Withdrawn Man: Notes from Underground

Bernard J. Paris (1974). A psychological approach to fiction;: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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