# Against Rounded Personality - The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/against-rounded-personality-the-lonely-crowd-by-david-riesman
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2024-03-30

## Summary

Written in 2024 as notes on passages from the Korean edition of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, this essay examines how peer judgement shapes consumption and emotional life. Jeanyoon Choi reads the institutional ideal of the well-rounded personality as a wish for substitutable people, produced by socialised, converging preferences. Contrasting it with Nietzsche's Übermensch, he argues against regression towards the mean in personality, education and preference, since training people to fit a template also trains them to resemble machines that may perform it more efficiently.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 데이비드 리스먼의 『고독한 군중』을 읽으며, 사회가 요구하는 '원만한 인격'이 사람을 대체 가능한 부품이자 기계와 닮은 존재로 만든다고 비판한다.

## Questions this answers

### What is wrong with the 'well-rounded personality' according to Jeanyoon Choi?

In 'Against Rounded Personality', Choi argues that the ideal sounds generous but can express a wish for readily substitutable people: if two candidates are both acceptably rounded, an institution can exchange one for the other.

### How does The Lonely Crowd relate to conformity in consumption?

Reading David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Jeanyoon Choi notes how peer judgement organises consumption and emotion: fear of standing apart, possessions as investments in social value and converging ways of consuming. He links this to a treadmill of consumption and regression towards the mean.

Topics: conformity, well-rounded personality, socialised preference, consumer culture, regression towards the mean, ubermensch

References: [David Riesman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Riesman), [The Lonely Crowd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd), [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche), [Übermensch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch)

## Full text

Reading David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, particularly the discussion of socialised preferences in the Korean edition, pages 148–157, I was struck by how extensively peer judgement can organise both consumption and emotional life. The passages I copied concern fear of standing apart, the wish for an ordinary child, possessions as investments in social value, and the increasingly similar ways children and adults consume. These are my notes on those passages, not a quotation from an English edition.

The ‘well-rounded personality’ appears everywhere: job descriptions, recruitment criteria, university admissions. It sounds generous, but I hear another possibility in it—the wish for a person who is readily substitutable. If person A and person B are both acceptably rounded, the institution can exchange one for the other.

We are trained to become rounded by being socialised: following our peers’ trends, learning the same preferences, consuming the same things. We acquire different specialisms while the rest of our lives converge. The result resembles a manufactured personality with a few adjustable features.

This is difficult to reconcile with my reading of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Such a figure need not be balanced in every respect. They may be weak in one area and forceful in another. A new value does not necessarily emerge from the person most comfortably fitted to existing expectations. What passes as innovation within that fit may be little more than branded innovation.

I want to resist this treadmill of consumption and regression towards the mean—in personality, education and preference. If we train people chiefly to meet an existing template, we also train them to resemble the machines that may perform that template more efficiently. The task is to challenge the preference for roundedness itself.

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Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.