on blogs and IT
OK American Voter, apparently you didn't follow the links to the Jungian paradigm of the human spirit and you've never done a Myers-Briggs personality profile. None of this will make sense to a Freudian, much less to someone who isn't interested in psychology as a way of studying the human spirit. So here's the decoding of INTJ, made as short as possible.
I: introverted, not extroverted. Jungian use of the terms, basically an extrovert is slowly energized by dealing with ANY other people whereas an introvert is slowly drained.
N: guided by intuition, not senses.
T: processes using thoughts, not feelings.
J: trusts judgment, not perception.
Any three of these vectors occurring together are the obvious formula for the anti-"people person." A geek, someone who lives internally and keeps his own counsel. All four of them together are the classic IT professional, "Give me a computer any day, I'll never understand people."
I was a textbook INTJ, with four strong vectors, the first time I took this test about 25 years ago. Over the years I've mellowed. Now my N and J are less strong, and I'm right on the borders between I and E and between J and P.
There's hope for geeks.
BTW Joseph Campbell was a magnificent popularizer of Jung's work. He worked heavily with "archetypes," images that occur in our "collective unconscious," e.g. in nearly all cultures and eras. You can transpose a discussion in Jungian jargon into one involving Greek gods or Shakespeare's characters to make it more accessible.
The concept of the archetype itself is wonderfully accessible. To a pragmatist it's a preprogrammed synapse that happens to be included in our brains because sometimes nature is random. To an evolutionary biologist it's an instinct that at one time was a survival trait so the individuals who had it were around to pass down their genes. To a spiritualist it's a legend that was breathed into us by the Goddess on our way down the birth canal.
