There are nine wolves inside of you

A love letter to the Enneagram

Illustration by Alexander Naughton

When I first encountered the Enneagram, I thought it sounded pretty dumb: Nine types of people, precisely? It seemed awfully arbitrary, not unlike astrology. But some wise friends (including my husband) convinced me to give it a shot, and that decision ended up making me happier, saner, and more free. Here are a few notes about how I came to love it and why you might too, especially if you’re an overly cerebral type like me.

I.

People say you know you’ve found your type when you feel mortified by its description, and that was my experience reading about Type One (principled, perfectionistic, and self-righteous, in a nutshell). Had the experience been less vivid, I’d have probably found it mildly interesting, chalked it up to the Barnum Effect, and moved on. Instead, it was as forgettable as a slap in the face.

The effect was totally dissimilar to other personality tests, which felt like they’d done something more like take my vital signs than read my diary. The Enneagram seemed to break a spell that had kept me from seeing the through-line of my biggest strengths and weaknesses: fear that I am selfish and corrupt. This has at times motivated me to forego money in favor of things that matter more, which I like, but it has also steered me toward self-destructive and totalizing ideologies. It shows up in me doing what I say I’ll do, but also in hall-monitory fastidiousness and petty score-keeping.

The Enneagram helped me see all of these things as related, the good and the bad, and for reasons I don’t totally understand this has freed me to be real about my faults and get better at addressing them.

Behind the character sketches of the personality types, this is the core thing the Enneagram does. It identifies a small set of drives or fears that are the fundamental forces behind traits and preferences and behaviors. Your type is simply the drive or fear that is so overpowered it becomes the primary organizing principle of your life, generating both your successes and failures. You are “ruined by your gift,” in the words of Major Enneagram Guy Richard Rohr.

II.

Okay, but people are motivated by more than one thing, right?

Yes, and it’s here that the Enneagram makes a design choice that seems to alienate a lot of people. Typically, the way you first identify your type is by taking a test that assigns you a numeric score for each of the types -- like the Big 5, except that instead of five sliders you have nine. You can think of these scores as reporting how much each of the fears motivates you, in proportion to the others.

Clearer Thinking has done research showing that when you look at these continuous scores, the Enneagram is actually better at predicting life outcomes (things like life satisfaction, strength of relationships, work success, and criminal tendencies) than the Big 5. Flattening this information into a single type, as Enneagram canon does, reduces its predictive power down to that of the MBTI, but the tradeoff is that it’s a lot easier to work with and talk about.

Source: Clearer Thinking.

Still, the question remains: Why these particular types, and why not seven of them, or ten, or twelve? The Enneagram has been around in various forms for several millennia, so maybe it’s better to ask why this is the version that survived. Reframed, the answer seems straightforward: (1) The set of core fears it’s based on gets close enough to covering the space that most people resonate with at least one of them. And (2) as a system, the Enneagram has other properties that enhance its memetic fitness, including an elegant set of symmetries that arise from slicing up the nine types into sets of three in various ways. What looks like magic arises, as it so often does, from selection effects.

This is, incidentally, similar to the Big 5, which was developed by different researchers making long lists of personality traits, then trying to condense them down to a manageable number over and over until one particularly fit grouping emerged victorious.

III.

You know what other system covers the space of personality traits pretty well and is obviously memetically fit? Our old friend astrology. Astrology claims to be doing something similar to the Enneagram: It identifies a core personality type that is both your strength and your weakness, that dictates everything from what kinds of jobs you’ll excel at to who will make a good life partner.

Which brings me to my boldest claim: Astrology works! … for the 1 in 12 people sorted by the birth date randomizer into the type that best corresponds to their personality (the “strongly agree” folks in the chart below).

In this story, astrology’s persistence is explained by the allure of a magical narrative that’s right as often as a broken clock.

If one were inclined, I can think of a couple ways to test this. (1) Create a personality test that sorts people into zodiac signs based on the traits typically associated with them, rather than birth dates, then see if it has predictive power. Or (2) collect data on people’s life outcomes vs. zodiac signs (as here), but see if the signs become predictive when considering only the subset of people who say they strongly believe in astrology.

I think this might explain why people who believe in astrology sometimes get really upset by people who don’t (see some of the comments here): It’s a tool that works for them, and it probably feels like skeptics are trying to take that tool away. People use the frameworks at their disposal when they have predictive power, even when the causal explanation is lacking. Telling someone they can’t use what works because it shouldn’t is bound to fall on deaf ears.

You won’t see me trying to argue anyone out of astrology, because I’m all about finding the “harmless untruths … that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s words -- hence the name of the blog itself. And for me, that’s what the Enneagram is: A model of self that has made me more free. By helping me see my flaws as part of a larger pattern that I can live with -- more like an overextension of my virtues than a repudiation of them -- it has introduced some optionality around conflict and self-righteousness and forgiveness that wasn’t there before. As my husband put it, “I like it because its talons sunk into my heart,” and there they shall remain.

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