As a hypothetical construction from these “marginal” cases, we may suggest that another group of administrators is recruited from among those who have passed smoothly through their developmental crises. They have not overrepressed powerful hostilities, but either sublimated these drives, or expressed them boldly in the intimate circle. They display an impersonal interest in the task of organization itself, and assert themselves with firmness, though not with overemphasis, in professional and in intimate life. Their lack of interest in abstractions is due to the fact that they have never needed them as a means of dealing with their emotional problems. They can take or leave general ideas without using them to arouse widespread affective responses from the public. Tied neither to abstractions nor to particular people, they are able to deal with both in a context of human relations, impersonally conceived. Their affects flow freely; they are not affectless, but affectively adjusted. Very original and overdriving administrators seem to show a fundamental pattern which coincides with that of the agitators; the differences in specific development are principally due to the cultural patterns available for identification at critical phases of growth. CHAPTER IX POLITICAL CONVICTIONS Political prejudices, preferences, and creeds are often formulated in highly rational form, but they are grown in highly irrational ways. When they are seen against the developmental history of the person, they take on meanings which are quite different from the phrases in which they are put. To begin, almost at random, with L. He believes that the United States ought to join the League of Nations and that our government ought to lead the world toward conciliation and peace. He is a Republican in party preference, and possesses well-rationalized judgments on a number of public questions. It is for none of these reasons that his history is of special value to the political scientist. What his intimate history does disclose is an exact parallelism between his political opinions and those of his father and mother, and, besides that, a conscious anxiety on his part to conform to the parental pattern of belief and occupation. He has a strange premonition that if he goes his own way something terrible will happen. Thus L is not only a simple conformer, but a compulsive conformer.