It’s a crazy undertaking to break open an existing order without falling into an addiction for a new master-template for behavior. So let’s be careful: our task is to reveal, not to improve.
I herewith try to put current human behavior terms in a structure that shows my hopefully uncomprehensive view on its order. This effort is done to introduce you later to a behavior repertoire that refuses to be put in this line.
View 1 - The ordinary Behavior Repertoire Order
How would I structure the current behavior definition landscape? I start with talent, skill and capacity.
Talent gives you action potential; skill develops those abilities; and capacity ensures you can apply them consistently in real life.
View 2 - The Super-Powered Behavior Repertoire Order
If I add competency, strength, and superpowers, I will describe the order, now with six terms on board, as follows.
How They Work Together
- Talent = natural starting point
- Skill = taught and practiced
- Competency = skills + behaviors applied to standards
- Strength = talent + skill + energy + consistent high performance
- Superpower = uniquely amplified strength that creates exceptional impact
- Capacity = the fuel that keeps everything running predictably
How Superb Powers jam the Signal
Below is a short explanation of how superb powers influence talents, skills, competencies, strengths, and capacity.
They prevent you from spreading natural ability too thin and keep caring focused.
They amplify learning curves and reduce friction.
They turn standard competencies into differentiated performance.
They take strengths from “good” to “transformational.”
They expand available capacity and prevent burnout.
The Unruly Side of Superb Powers
Every superb power has two sides of the coin: Constructive→ it plays with facts, flairs, virtuosities, and Destructive → it gets lost in excess, confusion, overuse. Superb powers can orchestrate the current behavior regime, but they themselves must be “tamed”.
Where the Destructive Part Shows Up
Skills get distorted under pressure
When superb powers are overused skills are no longer tools. They become weapons or shields. That is the spillover effect.
Competency becomes caricature
When superb powers lose alertness, a competency can shift from „exceptional” to “distorted” entering the “too much of a good thing” zone.
Strength hardens into rigidity
When superb powers become overdependence strengths become self-limiting.
Capacity collapses
Ironically, superb powers create energy — until they generate too much of it.
Overuse leads to fatigue, emotional volatility, reduced empathy, or tunnel vision This is the burnout-bound side of superb powers.
The Key Insight
Superb powers are destabilizing amplifiers of human behavior. They are high-voltage human capabilities that elevate us when used wisely and drain us when left unchecked.
View 3 - Superbness as the Go Between in the Behavior Repertoire Order
“Go-betweens” serve as a unburdened link, helping bridge gaps in communication, resolve conflicts, or coordinate interactions when direct contact is difficult or not desired.
In poetic language: they are the diplomats of unsaid things, translating ache into understanding. In a world where propaganda mocks and undermines the trust in uncontrolled human behavior, caring for superb powers gives me hope and direction.
Superb powers are the brilliant, slightly unhinged parts of you where your best abilities show off—and occasionally run wild. They're the strengths that make you exceptional when aimed well, and a lovable disaster when you forget to steer. High impact, high voltage, and just chaotic enough to keep you humble.
The New Man – a Scary Master Foil of Human Perfection
The master foils that serve the disbelief that human behavior can be “manufactured” have various sources. I mention here two precarious sources. that have already found their modern expressions- the soviet new man and the fascist new man.
The post Soviet Nostalgia movement is still worshipping the concept of the “New Man” (новый человек, an utopian ideological model promoted in the USSR. The ideal citizen was imagined as loyal to the Communist Party, self-sacrificing for the collective, rational, disciplined, atheistic, physically strong and industrious, educated and cultured, detached from bourgeois individualism. Work as the ingredients to form the new man in this version.
Maxim Gorky wrote in “Man” (1918):"Man... must become the creator of a new world and of himself."
The Fascist New Man , invented in Hitler Germany builds its ideology on these components: Collective identity over personal freedom, war and conflict are noble strengthening., violence is the purifying creative force, life is struggle for sacrifice, duty, achieved by discipline and submission to authority and leader
I recommend reading The Nature of Fascism by Roger Griffin, 1991
You can find rhetoric parallels in Western self-improvement culture with its idea of biohacking, or the techno utopians with their idea of transhumanism.
While not ideological in the old regime sense, Peter Thiel’ s theme of “making a new kind of human” through tech/innovation parallels those older models.Thiel places strong emphasis on technological progress in his book “Zero to One “ (2014). He’s influenced by the ideas of René Girard, especially “mimetic desire” — how humans imitate desires of others rather than define their own.
Here is my trial to integrate superb powers to our understanding of human behavior. Put this model in circles, stretch it or dense it. Important to me is the idea of superb powers as a visible play partner , not just a chimera of thought.
Talent is our genetic and cultural potential
Superpowers are their standout manifestations,
Skills are refined tools,
Superb Powers are intentional integration,
Capacities ensure consistent application.
Patricia von Papstein
The Dadaist Psychologist with a Fondness for Unruly Mental Health
Read other essays of this series here