I watched this Omeletto video this morning and was pleasantly surprised.
It wasn’t super profound, but it was a light-hearted example of what society looks like when we’re unbalanced in the three intelligence centres, with an overweight toward the heart.
In the Enneagram, we have three intelligence centres- the head (logic, rationality, etc), the heart (empathy, ability to track someone’s emotions, etc), and the body (defence, gut instinct, anger, etc.)
There were three camps in this film, and if you’re planning on watching it, this will spoil the ending so beware:
- a guy getting robbed- he was overweighted toward the heart.
- the robber- he was overweighted toward logic
- the cops- they were underweighted in the gut
All human beings are imbalanced in the three centres. We’re majorly in touch with one brain, secondarily in touch with the third, and very much out of touch with the third, and one of our main life journeys is to bring the third brain into balance with the other two. When we’re out of balance, we can be a danger to ourselves and to others.
Not only can people be out of balance, but societies can too. When there is not enough compassion, but rationality and gut instinct are strong, you can get a conservative majority. When there is less will for law or border control, but the heart and intellect are strong, you can get a liberal majority.
For example, Donald Trump has a great gut intelligence for protection of the United States’ interests , but he’s so wildly out of touch with his intellect that he is a danger to the entire world.
The frustrating thing is that this short film is, for the political right, a worst case scenario in short film format- it’s their caricature of us on the left that they scare us with, while deriding the heart. The problem is, our worst-case caricature of a liberal imbalance rarely plays out in history, while their caricature is being played out in real time with the crumbling of western democracy in 2025.
This is a reminder that we need all three brains to be a healthy, robust, and balanced society. When there is derision for the heart (compassion for minorities, for example), one must remember to come back into balance to make sure everyone has a chance at success, and it doesn’t become an impoverished, autocratic, fascist regime.