Intuitively Rational

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.

What Introverted Sensation looks like to me, an ENTP

Long and the short: Do something you hate for a really, really long time.

I think of Introverted Sensation as the function that senses where you’re at in the Here and Now. How are you feeling? Where are you? What do you like, what do you dislike? It’s arbitrary - it revels in the arbitrary, in fact. People with dominant Si (ISTJ, ISFJ) often like to collect arbitrary things (e.g. objects associated with Abraham Lincoln. Pigs Roosters.) They like to decorate their houses with arbitrary things that have arbitrary meanings to them. Si says “pick a place, any place, on the map, and go from there.” 

That’s pretty much the opposite of Extraverted Intuition (Ne), if you think about it. Ne is all about the Big Picture. Who are you? What are you? Bah - who cares. Consider the universe, all the potentials of the past that weren’t - all the potentials of the future that could yet be. All the meanings behind everything that is and is not. Cormac McCarthy has a nice turn of phrase about how everything is necessary, everything is important, all stitched together into one tapestry whose seams are hidden from us. That sort of thing. Arbitrariness - there is no such thing. Small? What is small?

I used to just detest dominant Introverted Sensates (Si) - ISFJ and ISTJ, but I had even a worse time with the ones who have it as a secondary function - the ESTJs and ESFJs of the world. Ho ho! Either THEM or ME had to go. Usually, it was me, because THEM was a large group. Typically armed, in the case of the ESTJs.

I used to scoff at Si and think I had no relation to that kind of thing at all. I was an Adventurer. Si is for bean counters. For accountants. I mean, LOOK at me. Just LOOK at me. (Okay, you can’t look at me. This is the internet. If you are looking at me right now, that means you’re a sick, sick person. Stop stalking me.) To elaborate: I look, at best, like an impoverished high school drop out, and at worse like a homeless pedophile. And yet I have a PhD. I have a decent job. I’m married, and I even have a kid. I can explain classical philosophy to you while welding your car’s broken sway bar. But people who are younger than me talk down to me because I don’t know how to dress myself. Wal-mart clerks give me sympathetic looks because they think I’m unemployed and homeless (to be fair to them, I had no idea what day of the week it was, or if I ‘worked’ on that day or not).

Of course, I can run from Si, but I can’t hide. I tend to agree with Jung and Lenore Thomson; your inferior function is something you’re chained to. You can sail away from it, but eventually the chain will pull taught and *yoink* you have an Episode.

True story: I was in Safeway in Vancouver, BC one time, and they have those stupid cards you need to have to get the sale prices. D’oh! I forgot mine. No problem, says the clerk. Just give me your phone number. D’oh! I don’t know it (numbers and me have an estranged relationship - like Sonny and Cher. AFTER he died in the ski accident, I mean.). Well, what’s your address, the woman asked patiently. D’oh! I don’t know that either. That’s okay, the angelic clerk said, just show me some ID with your address ON it and we can work this out. *I pat my pants.* I have no ID. Just money. She paused. Then she used a code they use when homeless guys want to buy something. I got my discount, but lost what scraps of public decency were left to me.

This sort of thing happens to me on a regular basis, and every now and then I go OHMIGOSH. MY LIFE IS A MESS. It’s TIME TO GET SERIOUS. It’s TIME TO STOP BEING A FLIBBERTY-GIBBET. It’s time to POUND ONE’S HAND DECISIVELY into one’s OTHER hand.

Usually, this means that I end up laying on the floor, face down, making mumbling sounds. Or playing a video game that I hate. For hours. (Wild Arms 3, I hate you so much.) Grinding away on it, miserably. Sometimes, I scrub pots and pans with steel wool. Because it sucks.

Other outlets include exercise. I once broke both my wrists doing pushups while working at a job I hated. I’d go in the bathroom, lock the door, and do pushups until I couldn’t do any more. Just because - it was SOMETHING to do. Arbitrary, they name is Me.

Broken objects also trigger this kind of issue. Machinery that is broken or has lost or missing pieces - particularly if those pieces were lost or broken carelessly - will sometimes make me really really miserable. After I defended my thesis, and I was hyper-stressed, my wife left the power supply for the laptop at a hotel in South Carolina. My day - TWO DAYS - were ruined. UGH. The best part of it? I don’t even like computers.

And, classically, this comes out also in my physical health. I have the weirdest ailments. I mean, I’m not a hypochondriac - they’re real, but they’re weird. I have bizarre migraines. I had typhoid fever. I have Epstein-Barr chronically. Lyme’s disease? Yup. Last year, I spent 4 weeks basically bed ridden, not realizing that my liver was failing. I only realized I was in trouble at the very moment when it basically failed and I passed out with stabbing pain in my ribcage.

True story: I lived in Northern Alberta for awhile. I had an older car, and it had a problem where the hood wouldn’t open. One of the few Si-related things I’ve achieved is a decent mechanical skill and careful, meticulous car maintenance. So I went outside to fix the car. Problem - it was -50C out. I was laying on ice the whole time. I was out there for more than an hour, under-dressed. Doo-dee-doo. At one point, I noticed that I was ‘kind of cold.’ That quickly moved to ‘I can’t move.’ From there, I went to ‘My heart is starting to hurt and I can’t breathe.’ I literally dragged myself towards the door of the apartment building. I hauled myself to my feet and stumbled inside, blacking out. I didn’t NOTICE that I was freezing to death until I was FREEZING TO DEATH. Good for me.

Ironically, my avoidance of Si makes me vulnerable to it. Si tells you where you’re at, what you like, what you don’t like. I ignore this, so I have no idea what I like and what I don’t like. Hey! Look! A job where I have to work 90 hours a week at a desk filling out paper work and being yelled at! Yeah - that sounds good! I’d better spend a week applying for it. Of course, after I apply, I lay face down on the bed and beg God not to have them call me. 

In short - ignoring Si makes you the slave of some kind of cruel fate, where you are doomed to do what you hate, but you won’t realize it until you’re too deep in. It took me 30 hours of playing that blasted Wild Arms game to finally come to grips with the fact that I’d hated every minute of it. Then it took me another 20 hours to quit playing it.

Man, do I suck. Sometimes. But if you ever need someone to get in a fist fight with the Mafia in a Beijing Rail Station for you, I’m your boy.

The right tool. The right time.

“The right tool at the right time” is often used as a header for ENTPs, but I think can more generally be extended to all xNxP personality types - the interplay of extraverted intuition and introverted rationality (Ti or Fi). Introverted rationality is all about collecting and storing tools: ideas, concepts and philosophies for Ti; feelings and values for Fi. Extraverted intuition is the ability to know exactly how to apply a tool in any situation.

Dominant extraverted intuitives and dominant introverted rationals face different challenges in their quest to wield the right tool at the right time. The ENP needs to go acquire an array of tools, so that when the time comes to use one, they will have more tools to choose from and thus be more effective. Many ENP types don’t see the necessity of doing this, since they can see exactly how to use the tools they have. Thus, even if one of these people has only a hammer, they will be able to use it in ways that nobody else even imagined. Who needs a screwdriver? or a saw? The job’s done. is the general attitude. But with the acquisition of more tools (ideas or values) comes the joy of having exactly the right tool, making the result highly polished and precise, with much less effort on behalf of the wielder.

Dominant introverted rationals spend most of their time going around and acquiring tools. They’re in love with the collecting, organizing, and storing; they have inventories unmatched in depth and breadth. However, in their ongoing acquisition, they can lose sight of what they already have. In particular, when a situation arises in which one of those tools is needed, they often don’t recognize which of their tools they need to use, even though it is sitting there waiting for that one occasion. I have the tool that no one else will ever find, let alone understand; what do you mean, it needs to be used? would be the question INP people would ask. INPs need to take their knowledge of their tools and match it up to the situations they encounter and the experiences they have (i.e., Ne). This gives the INP a chance to enjoy their collection in a new way, a chance to air out their inventory, and to see the value of their tools externally, instead of only mentally.

Yes Man, No Man. Stupid Jim Carrey.

So I got stuck watching this ‘Yes Man’ movie on a plane from Hong Kong to Singapore. In it, Jim Carrey makes a contract to say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that arises, no matter what.

Not exactly a movie for the ages, but I think the message is pretty much straight Ne.  Go for broke, everything in life is significant, you don’t want to miss out, never turn down a chance to `live’, no matter what.

A lot of NPs actually end up where Jim Carrey’s character was at the beginning of the movie – with a knee-jerk reaction of `no.’  And it’s easy to do – after all, look where saying `yes’ can lead you (i.e., some pretty uncomfortable situations).  INxPs, for whom Ne is auxiliary, often find saying `yes’ difficult just because it isn’t first nature; ENxPs have had enough bad experiences that they just decide to get rid of it.  INxPs probably need to just let go and say `yes’; ENxPs need to find a metric of some sort so that they can start saying `yes’ again.

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that Jim Carrey is a gigantic inferior complex - probably an ESFJ (tertiary Extraverted Intuition), who causes dominant Extraverted Intuitives no end of grief.

Jerk.

Andy Kaufman the ENTP

Andy Kaufman had all the behavior patterns of an ENTP. I think these patterns can be partially summed up as ‘buy in.’ If he can get you in a lather, if he can get you to take his tricks seriously, he wins. He’s shown (himself) how easy you are to manipulate. A few appearances, and you’re hooked. It’s Socrates meets Bugs Bunny, which is where a well-developed ENTP lives. Well, at least until that giant lady wrestler has her final say…

Get a car, you filthy hippie!

One day, when I was driving to the University, I passed a mellow dude standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus. He looked so mellow and content that I was almost overcome by an urge to shout the title of this post at him. I didn’t, but I kind of regret it.

While this may sound like a classic extraverted rational judgement, I think this urge is actually related to the reasons I always test as a strong dominant Extraverted Intuitive, believe it or not.

When I saw him, I was reminded of my own failure to use public transit and car usage, and I remembered my Undergrad days, waiting for the bus. I now felt like I was the typical working slob in North America, and I didn’t like it. What does a working slob from the upper middle class say when passing a hippie at the bus stop? Fine. I’ll say that, just to fully experience the moment. And, and, and. He would be shocked by me saying it, and it would confirm his opinions about car people.

In other words, “That’s RIIIIiiight!”

The Hattifatteners take us away to Extraverted Intutional Land of Joy and Joyness

The hattifatteners are little white creatures that sail continuously around the world, from island to island, never resting. From Tove Jansson’s Moomin books.

A good way to figure out if someone is a dominant Extraverted Intution is to imagine them sailing with the hattifatteners. If you can… Odds are they’re an Extraverted Intution dominant. If you can’t… Something else is going on.

And yes, this means that I think Moominpappa is a dominant Extraverted Intuitive. You’re just going to have to live with that, people.