Intuitively Rational

Genealogy, INFP-style

I’ve been doing genealogy for the past five years or so, and I suspect part of the reason I’m so hooked on it has to do with the function-attitudes I have.  Let’s see if we can sort this out.

I think my dominant introverted feeling gives me the basic motivation for doing genealogy.  Questions like “How did I come to be me?” or “Where do I come from?” are important, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be about me.  It could be about someone else that I’m doing genealogy for (I’m trying to do a family tree for each of my siblings’ kids, and I work on my husband’s, and other random people’s when they’re interested; I’ve thought about getting certified so that I could do more for other people).  Or I can apply these kinds of questions to people in my family tree, like my great-great-grandmother Sophia Elise Caroline Allwardt, who was born illegitimately to a peasant family in mid 19th century Mecklenburg: what was she like? what was her life like? what would she think of her descendants and modern life? I love finding little unique details about their lives - an inventory of their belongings, a biography, a story, photographs of them, pictures or descriptions of their houses, their church.

Extraverted intuition is satisfied by the quantity and breadth of things to discover when you do genealogy.  It’s one part history, one part sociology, one part literature, one part religion, one part geography, one part accountant.  You learn skills from each of these fields, and you get access to specific primary source information in each of these domains.  You learn about the variety of family structures in 19th century America (not much for nuclear families!), the epidemics of diphtheria that swept through a particular community, the wars and political structure of Germany, the cyclical famines of Ireland, dates when vital records were established in innumerable states, old medical terms for a host of ailments (summer complaint = cholera!).  I’ve become proficient with microfilm, getting acquainted with numerous hand-writing styles and record-keeping styles, learning to read records in English, Latin, German, and Polish; figured out how to read and glean information from countless kinds of legal documents; travelled across the country eating in local diners and walking around (often now-abandoned) downtowns; investigated rural cemeteries on gravel roads; written accounts of various ancestors; gone pawing through antique stores, talked to close and distant relatives about their lives and memories of older generations.  A little bit of everything.

Introverted sensation enjoys some of the same aspects as introverted feeling, I think, although the parts treated as important are different.  The orienting that knowing where your family is from, being able to compare “now” and “then” to find out what has changed and what has remained the same (i.e., persistence or lack thereof).

When I’m looking for new information, extraverted intuition and introverted sensation have complementary roles.  Introverted sensation recalls all the useful places I’ve found information before and suggests relevant ones for the particular search I’m carrying out.  Hey! This guy was in the Civil War, and if I can find his service record, it often lists birthplace, and has information about his family. Remember how that worked for Marshall Martin?  Extraverted intuition, meanwhile, keeps an eye out for sources I haven’t seen before or unexpected links.  I’m scanning through results for Sarah Anne Watts and a link for Van Nuys genealogy comes up.  Oh, that’s right, Peter Vannice married Sarah Anne Watts Smith.  Maybe they know something.  Click. Oh, look, a picture of Agatha Dickens (Sarah Anne Watts’ daughter-in-law, my 4th-great-grandmother) when she was 90 years old!  

I think genealogy also provides a healthy outlet for extraverted thinking in my life.  You have to learn what documents are reliable for what information.  You have to know how good your evidence is, and you have to keep track of the source for each piece of information you gather.  You have to know what kinds of mistakes can happen on which documents.  You have to decide if two pieces of information are contradictory or support each other or maybe they don’t say anything about each other at all.

Extraverted intuition and extraverted thinking provide complementary ways of assessing and fitting together the pieces of information.  Extraverted thinking lines them all up and compares the dates.  It gives criteria for discarding or including a piece:  Don’t take everything on a census as gospel truth; sometimes the neighbours were reporting, and someone was mistaken when they said that Mary, a daughter, was recorded here as Martin, a son.  Look at the other censuses, and the fact that Mary and Martin are in complete complementary distribution.  Extraverted intuition comes up with ways to connect the pieces of information, and stories about why the information is the way it is, pulling on the vast, broad data it has been surveying:  Marshall Martin was born the right age to be William’s son; he lived not that far from Clarksburg; he named his son John Bray Martin, which would be William Martin’s uncle;  let’s posit Marshall as Wiliam’s son.  Now extraverted thinking has a theory to test.  Hey!  Marshall’s military record says he was born in the county Clarksburg is in; and a bio of one of William Martin’s sons lists Marshall as a half-brother.  Bingo!

So as I move through the stages of genealogy: information-gathering, information-analysis, hypothesizing, concluding, understanding, each of my function-attitudes finds satisfaction: my auxiliary, tertiary and inferior functions working to support the driving force of my dominant function.  Genealogy: the perfect pastime!

The Blind Painting Man and Introverted Intuition

There’s apparently a man in Ankara that can paint shapes, color, and perspective without ever having seen them – he was born without eyes, according to the spot on him on the Discovery Channel (always a great source for in-depth discussion *snark*).

The cogsci people are all excited, because they naturally thought that eyes were necessary for visual information to be processed. He uses his hands to gain sensory information, but it’s pretty unclear how so much visual data can be transmitted by the hands alone. I conducted a series of studies on tactile information for speech processing several years ago, and found surprising results, too (e.g. that novice hearing subjects could recover a large amount of articulation information by using only their hands), but I am doubtful that tactile information is enough to give him this much conceptual information on perspective and color.

Within the Jungian conceptualization of intuition, there is an interesting way to think about this. One of Jung’s ways for gaining information is intuition, which is the semi-mystic way people perceive possibilities and underlying meanings. Introverted Intuition, for Jung, is the inward-turning kind of intution. It looks inside, finding the possibilities and underlying meanings.

For Jung and many subsequent thinkers, introverted intuition is often at odds with sensory perception directed at the outer world. In particular, it is conceived of as the di-pole opposite of extraverted sensation, which perceives the outer world “as it is.” Introverted Intution rejects the outer world and its perceptual information by turning inward, to the Self, and its infinite possibilities. To someone focussed on introverted intuition, the world of sensation is just so much “noise” – the “many colored, seething populace” of Kierkegaard.

Introverted intuitives tend to believe that the inward-looking eye can perceive everything that is important. This is a theme that has regularly recurred in religious thought – consider Gandhi’s elaborate and repeated discussions of this, or the numerous writings in Buddhist perspectives. As the fox in the Little Prince explains, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

People of other persuasions (especially those whose preferences are for Sensation) tend to pass off this kind of talk as silly mysticism. Yet here we have a man who can perceive the outerworld, including clouds, trees, and blue skies, by turning inward. Forced by his blindness, he necessarily followed an inward-turning line of perception, and arrived at a view of the outside world. This is how the introverted intuitive views their relation to the world, and, for them, it isn’t at all surprising that someone can do this.

Ne and Si

A lot of people typed as xNxP often end up in serious conflict with those typed as xSxJs. According to Jungian theory, the NPs have Ne (extraverted intuition) as a dominant or auxiliary function, and Si (introverted sensation) as a tertiary or inferior function. SJs are just the reverse: Si is dominant/auxiliary, and Ne is tertiary/inferior. So the conflict is perhaps unsurprising. It does seems that NPs and SJs share certain characteristics, however. For example, orientation seems to be a specialty of both NPs and SJs, both spatially and temporally. Maps are to me the quintessentially Si method of orienting, but I’ve observed that even those NPs (especially ENPs?) that `don’t get maps’ always have some system for orienting - remembering the layout of a house, being able to picture where everything and/or everyone was situated at a given time/place (e.g., knowing exactly on which shelf in which aisle the 7-grain, no-gluten bread is on), having a knack for knowing which direction is north, etc. A kind of personal, experiential map. Same thing for memory - locating yourself in time. Both NPs and SJs are - especially from other kinds of people’s perspective - obsessed with memory, with the relation between what is and what was. I think of Si as a recording function, and Ne as a coherence function; both are looking for the relations between things. In both cases, there is a sensitivity to whether something is stable or changing; Si leans towards the stable; Ne towards the change. This leads to conflict, since they’re on opposite sides of the coin, but there is an agreement between the two types about what the coin is.

Introverted Feeling: The Intersection of Bitch and Inner Harmony.

So.

Introverted feeling (Fi) finds it complicated to explain anything, including itself.  Putting an explanation into words is difficult, because if you don’t explain enough, then everyone else oversimplifies it and interprets it much too narrowly.  If you explain it enough, people are bored and say you’re making it too complicated.  You’ll notice lots of parenthetical comments in my writing (and I think, introverted rationals’ writings in general), because there’s all sorts of things that need to be in there for better understanding, but if they’re not in parentheses, people are just going to get lost.  Well, they’re lost anyway, but I’m trying to be helpful here.

So then a lot of other people try to describe introverted feeling, the dominant function of ISFPs and INFPs, and they mostly fall into two kinds of description: either introverted feelers are closed-off, cold-hearted, bitchy people who are totally inaccessible to anything or anyone (i.e., Lenore Thomson and Carl Jung’s description, and I think, more broadly, the extraverted rational’s take), or they are mushy, Unite-The-World-For-Peace-And-Harmony, rainbowy, words-don’t-matter saps (i.e., just about any T’s take).

I clearly come off as the first (inaccessible and cold and angry) to a lot of people, because they’re afraid of me, and when they’re less afraid, they’ll tell me this.  I don’t understand why, most of the time.  I’m not mad at them.  I’m not mad at anyone. Life is just, intense.  It takes concentration.  And it’s serious.  If life is going too well, then something is probably either already wrong (e.g., someone’s cheating someone or something), or is about to be (e.g., catastrophe waiting in the wings).  Think of the introverted thinker’s distaste for and suspicion of predictive theories that keep on making the right predictions, and then apply it to individuals instead of propositions, and you’ll have my take on success.  I guess that makes me cold and pessimistic.

Also, getting at the best understanding possible is much more important than feeling good about it.  Feeling good about something, or wanting to feel good about something, often seems to be at war with real understanding, so the former often gets repelled.  Even, perhaps, when feeling good would be entirely harmless.  This would contribute to our image as party-poopers… Sigh.  (See? what did I tell you?  Understanding over feeling good, right there. ;p And I didn’t even realize I was doing it.)

David Keirsey comes the closest to getting at an external description of introverted feeling, I think, when he talks about them always moving towards some vision of good, but always looking over their shoulder at some pursuing evil.

When I talk about individuals, I don’t necessarily mean people.  I think I used to think I just meant people, and I think most people (including a lot of introverted feelers) only apply the term ‘individual’ to ‘person’ when they talk about what introverted feeling cares about. But it’s not true.  Anything that can be seen as having a past and a present and future, particularly if they also have an internal state, a mind, that can be seen as being an individual (this what analysts call the introverted feeler’s obsession with uniqueness). Animals and much of the natural world are easy targets for individualism, but depending on the introverted feeler, just about anything could be seen as an individual.  Are introverted feelers prone to pantheism?

Each individual is an extremely complex bundle of motivations, values, and experiences that make them distinct from everything else (Mooch: No two anythings are alike.) As an introverted feeler, I like to think about what all those motivations and values and experiences are, how they fit together, how it relates to what I see and experience of them.  Oh, I bet that’s where the thinker’s use of the phrase “inner harmony” comes from.  How come they don’t apply that to their theories that they want to be all harmonic?  No, no, they use terms like “consistency” and “internally coherent”.  I see how it is.  But I digress.

So I ask lots of questions (mostly to myself - things don’t tend to go well when I ask them of other people): “What does X mean when they say that?” “How does X feel about that?” “What is it like to BE X?” “How is X the same or different from Y?” “What would happen if X experienced Y?” “What are the criterial properties of X?” 

(Hmm. Now that I think about it, Kierkegaard’s obsession with the solitary individual probably suggests that he is in an introverted feeler.)

As understanding comes, I want to take that understanding and tack it onto my larger understanding of something like the concept of “Life” or “Existence”. I want all the pieces to fit together; I have a deep-seated belief that truth - even when it looks contradictory on the surface - can always be integrated with other truth.  Integration and a holistic picture (of anything, and everything) are vital.

When it comes to myself, I ask those same questions that I ask of other individuals.  I spend a lot of time trying to understand what I think, what I believe, what I want.  This doesn’t always seem to be put into words, in the sense that it’s not readily explainable to others.  Often I’m comparing different states I’ve had, or decisions I’ve made, or things I’ve said, trying to understand how they can be integrated, or whether they signal development (or regression!).  I try to understand what kind of trajectory I’m on, and what the things I’m thinking, doing, saying show about me.  When people say things about me, my internal response is almost always “Yes, but you don’t know about [fill in the blank].”  So it’s hard for me to take compliments; it’s not even that I think I’m really evil or don’t deserve them, it’s more that I don’t think they have enough understanding for the compliment to be valid.

Oh yeah, there’s another thing.  Nothing’s ever a  closed book with introverted feelers.  Just like introverted thinkers never reach a logical conclusion (i.e., a theory by which they can test everything else), I don’t reach conclusions.  It’s all open for additional data or reinterpretation.  So my favourite words are the hedgers: I think, I guess, maybe, okay, might, probably, etc.  Don’t box me in, people!  On the other hand, though, I know experience will always mess up my theories, so often I’m afraid of it and try to keep it at a distance.  I’ll just go with my tentative theory use that for the next twenty years.  It’s hard work revising it. Sometimes I get tired. Of course, this always makes me unhappy in short order, and then I get rigid about my tentative theories.  I know, it’s a paradox, and I’ve seen it make people mad. I don’t know what to do about this.  Anything?

So now I’ve written a whole ton about introverted feeling and I’m not sure it’s clarified anything for anyone.  Although, it clarified a lot for me, particularly about other people’s takes on introverted feeling and how and why they might be coming to the conclusions they’re coming to.  So for me, as an introverted feeler, this is a success.

I’ll try to come up with some quotes that I think define introverted feeling (and maybe I’ll even talk about why I think that), and see if that helps anyone.

Gandhi, the ultimate INFJ

Gandhi is often typed as an INFJ, but usually there are no reasons cited – just a name and a category.

Mohandas K. Gandhi was a proponent of what he called Satyagraha ‘Clinging to the truth.’ That could, itself, be the motto of the INFJ. He took on the suffering of all of India, and tried to embody it in himself – when India was rioting, he stopped eating. When India was enslaved, he went to prison. He felt himself as a sort of an incarnation of the nation of India, but at the same time, he preached the universal truth of all religions, and the destruction of all divisions between people (race, religion, and caste, in particular).

Universal experience is a common theme with the discourse of Introverted Intuitives. They believe that their inner landscape embodies the universals of the human state. In the case of the INTJ, this usually manifests itself in terms of knowledge; their perception of their inner landscape gives them a perspective-less kind of universal knowledge. For example, an INTJ might say that, because of some particular characteristic of their Self, they can know some theory is right or wrong – and that it’s right or wrong universally. In contrast, the INFJ, who is an extraverted feeler rather than thinker, tends to bring out their universality in terms of morality. Through some inner path, they have arrived at an intuitive understanding of the underlying morality that drives all humans, and which all humans are called to adhere to, or perish.

In its worst cases, these kinds of traits surface as megalamania and controlling, aggressive behaviour. Even in Gandhi’s case, this was often apparent, as anyone can see in the first few pages of any of his books. However, when it is directed properly, it gives the INFJ an indomitable will (which Gandhi himself referred to often), bent on achieving the realization of Universal Truth on earth.

Ironically, it is this goal itself that typically is the INFJ’s undoing, as well as Gandhi’s. Politics, and the motivations of great masses of people, are not so easily simplified, and what works for an individual of Gandhi’s strength of character is often disastrous when applied to large groups of people. The INFJ can end up absorbed in power struggles and big-picture political debates and end up not fulfilling their purposes, dying frustrated, misunderstood, and even hated. Worse, because the INFJ refuses to submit to external circumstances, they can often become blind to the real consequences of their ideology, making ruthless decisions without considering the real human consequences of them. Another well-known INFJ, Adolf Hitler, is a good example of the INFJ gone far in this direction.

I think that the best way for an INFJ, like Gandhi, to realize their potential is to restrict themselves to realizing it for themselves, being mindful that people around them will be best influenced this way. Rather than forcing other people’s hands with power-plays and political games, or becoming submerged in objective, big-picture issues, the INFJ is most effective by living the life themselves. This is what Gandhi meant by Satyagraha: convincing others by employing the INFJ’s indomitable will on the Self.

Extraverted vs. Introverted functions

For each function (iNtuition, Sensation, Thinking, Feeling), Jung posited an extraverted and an introverted attitude towards it. These two attitudes are opposite, and often find the opposing attitude at least as frustrating as an opposing function.

The critiques that each attitude makes about the opposing attitude can be helpful for diagnosing one’s one attitude as much as (or more than) someone else’s.

Introverted function critiquing the extraverted function (Fi > Fe, Ti > Te, Ni > Ne, Si > Se): your function is shallow; it has no meaning; it is unstable and blows with the wind, tending towards inconsistency or incoherence; it is overpowering and squashes its introverted counterpart.

Extraverted function critiquing the introverted function (Fe > Fi, Te > Ti, Ne > Ni, Se > Si): your function is opaque; it gets lost in itself without being anchored to anything external, bordering on solipsist; it is inaccessible; it is impractical; it is selfish.

Extraverted vs Introverted Intution

I think an intuitive has to live by Investing themselves, bleeding themselves out for some Thing. You hear this in all their talk - for both sides. The Ne types, like St. Exupéry, say you have to die for your rose - you have to barter your life for something Else (in his example, a Tree). The introverted intuitives say the same thing. Gandhi’s ideas are full of it - cling with your whole soul to The Idea. To your Belief. Live for it and through it.

So, if you think about it, both intuitive types barter their lives for something - they just differ in what this is.

For the Extraverted Intuitive, it is something External to the self - something Out There. A tree. A book. A work of art. It may be a person (e.g. the Man bartering his life for the Boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), but it will be an external sense of bartering - to keep them alive, to keep that person In the World, so to speak. As McCarthy once said, Nothing worth doing is worth doing unless it almost drives you to suicide.

For the Introverted Intuitive, it is something Internal. An Idea - a Belief. A Value. (Depending on the type.) This could be a Theory (e.g. an INTJ), or one’s understanding of religious Faith (an INFJ). But it’s going to have to be Total - in order for the Introverted Intuitive to feel really completed.

I think, for people that have it as a secondary function, it’s slightly different. It adds a ‘drive’ to their dominant attitude. The INxPs use Ne to drive them to make their ideas and systems meaningfully relevant to the world. The ENxJs use Ni to drive their ideas, to give their plans for people or institutions a sense of real purpose and fire. 

Of course, this often puts these two attitudes at odds. The Ne is selling themselves out, to the last drop of blood, for The World. For the beauty of things external to the self. The Ni is renouncing that world in favor of the Inner World. The Ne will see the Ni as blind and possibly destructive (if they destroy external beauty while following their vision), while the Ni will see the Ne as devoid of values and flighty - pretty much like the external World that they want to renounce.

The trouble with Ne

In the Lenore Thomson interpretation of Jung’s personality theory, People have a ‘stack’ of functions. For example, I - the ENTP - have this ‘stack.’

Primary: Extraverted Intuition   The ‘ENP’ in the code.

Secondary: Introverted Thinking The ‘T’ in the code.

Tertiary: Extraverted Feeling

Inferior: Introverted Sensation

Thus, my dominant attitude (roughly, ‘mode of living’), is to look outward at the world (extraversion) with intuition (the world of connections and possibilities). My secondary attitude is the ‘helper’ - the one that gives me a sense of orientation. In this case it is inward-looking (introverted) and thinking (i.e. concerned with propositions and the like, rather than values). Those two other functions get shadowy for me. Extraverted feeling and Introverted Sensation. The bottom one is very shadowy, and is a driver of much of my psychological issues and troubles.

Other types, obviously, have a different stack. Problem: people with these functions in a DIFFERENT order are going to show DIFFERENT behaviour with them. Enter my nemesis: The ESFJ.

ESFJs have all the same functions that I do, but they’re all juggled around differently.

Primary: Extraverted Feeling

Secondary: Introverted Sensation

Tertiary: Extraverted Intuition

Inferior: Introverted Thinking.

We tend, I think, to express our tertiary function in frantic ways. It’s the one that comes out under stress, the one we’re nervous or worried about. Extraverted Feeling (Fe) for me makes me really worried about social conflict. I catastrophize, when under stress, about how people react to me, or will hate me, or how I made some kind of gaffe. So I sometimes tend to be over-agreeable. Frantically agreeable, in fact.

The ESFJ does not have this problem - oh no. The world of social rules is their home. The back of their hand. Ha ha! Instead, THEY have problems with extraverted intuition. With imagination - with catastrophes. With wildness and craziness.

I could care less what sort of problems they have, honestly - boo hoo, they worry about the world blowing up or want to write a fantasy novel but are afraid they’re not creative enough. Too bad for them. Here’s the rub. They go around projecting Extraverted intuition A LOT. So do their ESTJ siblings (who share that attitude and position with them). Result: There’s a whole lot of Extraverted Intuitive bullshit going on out there.

Example: That guy you know who’s WACKY. WACKY WACKY. The WILD and CRAZY guy. Who’s just so &^%*% WACKY. I mean, Mr. TOTALLY CRAZY. Lampshade on the head. Oh it kills me, hyuck hyuck. What a WACKY guy. A real JIM CAREY (can you tell I hate him, yet?). You may be tempted to conclude this WACKY fellow is a dominant Extraverted Intuitive, because he’s obviously projecting Ne so heavily, what with his WACKY CRAZINESS. But - guess what. He’s not an ENTP. He’s not an ENFP either. He’s not an INFP or an INTP. He’s an ESFJ who’s having an Ne-tertiary Episode. He’s Acting Out. He makes my skin crawl. He makes ALL xNxPs’ skin crawl. BUT, the world will categorize HIM with ME. And that’s the societal role for Extraverted Intuition, thanks to the ESFJs studious projection of it. Wackiness. 

When I’m at a ‘party’ (which I generally try to avoid), I can have one of two ways or relating to people. ONE way is the ‘honest’ way for me. They say something. I put it in context. And by ‘context’ I mean “You are as a speck in the inexhaustible vastness of the universe, in all of its multitudes of times and spaces. Your meaning is infinitely big and infinitely small.” I will do this via experience, because experience is the absolute ruler of the extraverted intuitive. I will tell them unflinching stories, in a pleasant voice, about people I saw starving to death in Malaysia. Or the necessity of my own death. Or, if they seem intelligent, the vast significance of some natural object, and how Frances of Assisi was right about every flower having a halo of divinity around it. Sometimes, I like to take all of my experience, lay it out on the mental floor of my mind, and compact it into clear, concise statements for other people, to help them understand something that I understood through great personal cost. 

…

You know how well THAT goes at a party? Not well. I’ve tried. “Well, of course, CHINA is out to GET US. It’s going to be War. They want to destroy our economy.” They say. I swallow hard and think of the yellow river, with its over-farmed banks, and the mountains of trash, and the little kids looking at me from the other train, all crushed up against the window to see a White Person. I think of the cops in the railway station with their wild-west politeness and their bottles of tea, and the hotel clerk with her standing-room-only ticket back to He Bei to see her family, and I think of the girl sitting out at the end of the road in the country, on a broken folding chair, just crying and crying. I think of the Great Wall with its stones all sleeping in the mist, waiting for the Mongols who never come, and the kindness of the people at the hotel, and the teenagers bopping the soldiers on the head with their umbrellas, and the tour guide with his frustration and his pictures of empty streets in Michigan, and the miserable English-speaking clerk at the silk factory, and the throngs of people in the subway, and the elegant woman with the proud face holding bags of cans and looking so magnificently, unspeakably sad. And I lay it all out, and I compact it into something to try to tell them. And they laugh at me and say I’m exaggerating and being Too Serious and what do I know anyway? They got THIS from the Talk Show.

Sometimes, I forget, and I try again. It helps if I’ve had some wine. Well, not “helps” in the social sense… “helps me be myself,” I’d say. But mySELF isn’t what’s wanted. It basically NEVER is. What’s wanted, out of people like me, is WACKINESS. C’mon you piece of &%& - MAKE US LAUGH. Because THAT is the sole use for Ne. WACKINESS. The ESFJs have already taught us that. 

Don’t believe me? Go look at Ally over at Hyperbole And a Half. Go read the comments. KEEP US LAUGHING, ALLY. WHEN UR NOT FUNNY, WE DON’T LUV U! She’s going to burn out so bad, because she has made a name for herself based on her Funny. But she’s not ALWAYS FUNNY, people. Sometimes she THINKS ABOUT THINGS, Sometimes, she’d like to tell you about the Other Side of Ne, but she can’t. Because nobody would listen. So it’s always gotta be the barfing dogs. That’s the only audience she’ll ever have - just like me. 

And, to make matters worse, we have the ESTJs on the other side. They tend to have Ne episodes in a slightly different fashion. They catastrophize. They exaggerate. They over-state the significance of things. (All of this, only when they’re having an ‘episode’ of course - otherwise, they are obviously hyper-sensible.). Hence, Ne becomes the Bullshit Function. They tell you they have Inside Knowledge about Viet Nam, because they played Call of Duty. WTF?! And they all do this. So then, when an actual ENTP (like a relative of mine) ACTUALLY WAS IN VIET NAM as an ACTUAL COMBAT SOLDIER, nobody will listen to him, because he frames it in Ne terms. And Ne is the Bullshit function. Can’t he just get back to being WACKY?! Leave those opinions to Serious People (invariably, extraverted thinkers and feelers).

Okay, now I’ve made myself cranky. I’m ranting. What do I know about anything? I’ve just got a silly perspective on the world, and I’m blowing it out of proportion and exaggerating. Definitely. That’s all My Type does.