Posthumous edition. According to the bibliography, the booklet appeared in 1999, sixteen years after the author's death. It is an accessible version, without proofs, of the theory from Cybernetyka i charakter (‘Cybernetics and Character’), addressed to anyone who wants to recognise themselves and the people around them better.
Mazur's practical conclusion, set out in the introduction and returning in the passages on school, occupation and marriage, is simple: neither persuasion nor pressure will change a character, so satisfaction with life has to be sought in a well-judged choice of occupation, partner and surroundings, rather than in improving oneself or one's loved ones. This is the answer to the question with which the text opens: where the differences in what people strive for come from, and what in them can be changed.
For the author, the most important of the character parameters is character dynamism, determined by an excess or a deficit of disposable power and shifting with age from positive values towards negative ones. Alongside it stand character level, which has three independent components — intelligence, aptitude and talent — and character breadth, that is, tolerance and susceptibility taken together. Instead of formulae the booklet offers simple typologies: eight types of intellect, five degrees of dynamism with fifteen comparisons of their manifestations, and four types of breadth, which in the conclusion add up to 160 types of character.
A large part of the text is given over to applications: judging how true to life the figures in novels and films are (four categories); the choice of a marriage partner, where Mazur regards opposite dynamisms as the proper basis of love, although this opposition fades with age, whereas friendship and adoration and patronage can last longer; recognising characterological illusions; and school, whose requirements reward mainly memory.
Compared with the 1976 book, the booklet keeps the same typologies but leaves out continuous quantities, formulae and proofs, shortens the survey of the manifestations of dynamism from 35 theorems to 15 comparisons, and brings to the fore the practical benefits for parents, teachers, spouses and creators. Mazur justifies his own approach by pointing out that the humanities know people's motives mainly from what they say about themselves, whereas cybernetics, with the concept of the autonomous system, gives him a theoretical framework.
Our own account, working version; definitions of concepts are in the dictionary, with their sources.