Saints-and-Politicians
Introversion and extraversion as being inside or outsider of a social arena
Saints and Politicians
From an extraverted perspective, the social arena you are in is a given; you try to figure out a way to fit into it. From an extraverted perspective, you can't judge the rules of the social arena; you are in the social arena, and there are no thoughts to think except how to get around within the social arena, ways to do well in socially recognized ways, etc.
From an introverted perspective, you see things from a timeless perspective that enables you to criticize the social arena and its rules, and to willingly do good even when it comes with a steep social price.
To put all this another way, extraversion makes you a politician while introversion makes you a saint.
The Function Attitudes seen through this exegesis
Se types make a place for themselves in the social arena by creating an attractive image--attractive according to current tastes. Their main tool is impactfulness: sensing what will stand out and get people's attention. If no one sees it or it bores people, why waste a moment of your life on it?
Si types hold steady to things that they see as mattering regardless of change or whether anyone regards them as important. For example, sanitation is probably the greatest boon to humanity ever, but it never has nor will ever be glamorous. From the Si perspective, you maintain what needs maintaining because it needs maintaining, not because people admire you for it or even thank you for it.
Ne types make a place for themselves in the social arena by sensing what is latent or unexpressed and presenting themselves as the people who bring it. Their main tool is suggestiveness: sensing what their audience will perceive as suggesting something transformative and desirable. What about finding new alternatives, negotiating by proposing out-of-the-box counteroffers?
Ni types explore gaps and blind spots in society's ways of understanding and deciding. Commenting from an "outside" perspective, they point out ways in which seemingly fair and equitable rules and customs give advantage to some and not others--perhaps suppressing important concerns that are not acknowledged socially. From an Ni perspective, unintended consequences are just as real, and call for just as much responsibility, as the concerns that were the basis for the rules.
Te types make a place for themselves in the social arena through the creation of contracts--they find ways to make promises that they can keep, and which are fair to all. Their main tool is rules: rules created by agreement, which define a common vocabulary for people to negotiate, resolve disputes, and know where they stand with others.
Ti types attune themselves to a harmony of things that emerges from the things and not from social agreement. They bring an understanding of natural law, doing the right thing even when the man-made law forbids it. Ti types explore the potential of things and the causes of things without regard for usefulness, predictability of results, comprehensibility to others, or possible clash with the social fictions that define people's loyalties.
Fe types make a place for themselves in the social arena through the creation of networks of mutual loyalty. Fe types find ways to make themselves socially important, as measured by how many people depend on and value them. Their main tool is: relationship: ways in which people understand their very selves as bound together in a common fate--especially, ways in which people signal their loyalty to others by limiting their own behavior in visible ways.
Fi types attune themselves to whatever is humane and decent, without regard for how important or attractive someone is socially. They give aid to people who fall through the cracks of the social system, regardless of whether anyone rewards them for this.
Seen through this exegesis, Lenore's basic proposition that when you're stuck in life, the answer is found via the Secondary Function, this boils down to:
When politicians are running out of options and don't know what to do, the answer is to become a little bit saintly: to do something for its own sake, without regard for political repercussions. They may well find that the political repercussions of doing the right thing are actually quite good, in addition to reducing anxiety. Saintliness actually enables you to connect with people on a deeper level. There is just no way to understand that until you do it.
When saints feel like the world is against them--that bad, powerful people seem to run everything and not give a damn about what's right--the answer is to become a bit of a politician: try doing something that people can perceive and understand and relate to--try bending with the social currents a bit. This might seem like selling out, but it won't be. It's entering an unknown world, where other people's interests and limitations have to be taken into account, and your own part in things is just a tiny part of the totality.
Your particular Secondary Function provides a feasible way for you to enter the world of politics or the world of right-doing-for-its-own-sake. It's feasible because it calls upon skills, knowledge, social connections, etc. that you already have. But it calls upon you to not just develop those assets further, but use them to modify your very understanding of what is good or what your interests are.
For example, left-brain politicians (EJs) can tap into a kind of saintliness that is relevant and beneficial to their existing lives by pausing and allowing themselves to become aware of and appreciate the rich quirkiness and complexity of the world, the vastness that lies beyond the simple categories through which we judge what's better and worse for ourselves. Introverted Perception is for them a way to stop making rulings on every new piece of information they hear and just listen without judgement for a while. A great example of this is minister Jack Groverland, presumably an ENTJ, whose main message is "Be still." In this way, EJs come to truly merit the positions of power and importance that they typically inhabit. They become capable of using them for a good that transcends the political means by which they maintain those positions.
Left-brain saints (IJs) already have that appreciation of the uncategorizable and patternless. Every day for them is already a sacrament to a world overwhelmingly rich in things to focus on that don't fit into any conceptual framework. The problem for them is not to be still but to find an orderly enough way of existing to relate to other people, lest they fall into sheer schizophrenia. Some achieve this by holding fast to a small part of the world where the social rules are especially well-defined and stable, such as deep inside a large corporation or academia. Extraverted Judgement, though, can provide more than form for otherwise amorphous experience: it also can provide a lens through which they can see themselves as active participants in the wider world who can judge and take risks for themselves, on their own authority, not merely as a representative of someone else or a spokesman for for an already-existing consensus.
Right-brain politicians (EPs) can add a little saintliness to their lives by using their already-honed skill at seeing deeply into people or things (Fi or Ti) not to score points in other people's eyes, but to orient themselves by their own understanding of what is good. This sort of politician gets "stuck" by telling everyone a different story--whatever it takes to please the audience at hand or "win" at whatever seeming competition is happening now. Bill Clinton, presumably an ENFP, well illustrates the dangers of that. Introverted Judgement provides a ready way to achieve integrity. Understanding how the actions are expressions of needs and causes that call out to be fulfilled, they can focus long enough to find their own, independent moral compass. Paradoxically, doing the right thing without regard for whether people appreciate it tends to earn their respect. The best way to earn people's trust is to really be trustworthy. Introverted Judgement gives EPs an independent mental place in which to build that trustworthiness.
Right-brain saints (IPs) can make a worldly contribution by using their already-honed sense of what is impactful (Se) or promising (Ne) to "package" their creations in a way that doesn't require people to have put in a lifetime of experience in the same skill. Linux geeks and Perl hackers illustrate this form of stuckness: calling the people who benefit from their services "lusers", refusing to deal with anyone who doesn't know the ins and outs of operating systems, deriding the salesmanship and marketing that makes their jobs and the software economy possible (e.g. endless Microsoft-bashing). Extraverted Perception can give them not just new experiences but a way to see themselves as participants in the wider world of alliances based on common interests and opportunities to be discovered and pounced on. To these people whose calling is to merge and adapt themselves purely and faithfully to the underlying ideas and callings of people and things, without letting any notion of self taint the picture, marketing and negotiating for their concerns seems like a sell-out. But it actually leads them to an even greater communion with the world, in broader ways than they can imagine.
Getting into trouble
Introverts get into extraverted trouble when they declare that there should not be a social price to pay for doing the right thing. For example, declaring that the important things that most people don't respect, ought to be respected. Introverts can come up with all sorts of reasons why people ought to respect the things that the introvert cares about, but if they don't play in the social arena, there is a cost to supporting them. The truth is, the world is a bigger place than an introvert's mind, no matter how knowledgeable the introvert.
Declaring that people ought to attend to or value things differently than they do just puts you into a weak bargaining position. You find yourself demanding that people behave differently than they do, finding them unmoved, demanding more forcefully, coming across ever more laughable and irrelevant. You find yourself up against something way bigger than you are: the world beyond yourself, the place where extraverts are most comfortable.
Extraverts get into introverted trouble when they overextend themselves. More detail, anyone?
At this point, it looks like your only choices are to become a hopelessly ineffectual saint, going down with your ship as a point of honor, or a soulless sell-out, grasping all the power you can and abusing it all you can, purely as a matter of survival. This dilemma is the result of the inferior function trying to assert itself--trying to compensate directly for the weaknesses of a purely political or purely saintly approach.
Here's one possible way it might work with some ENTJs. Playing a very hard game of taking responsibility, making promises and consistently delivering on them, you find yourself in some strange way muffled by other people's petty concerns and narrow minds. You start seeing yourself as the saint: you've always done the honorable thing, keeping your agreements, making no claims beyond what you can prove, a paragon of fairness and objectivity. Why, oh why, is this world covered in soft-headed troglodytes who couldn't change their own diapers without someone to tell them what to do? Isn't a saint entitled to some wiggle room? Don't my much higher concerns justify bypassing the law and trampling over some of these morons? Don't I have the right to be fully myself? Don't I have that right unconditionally, simply because of what I am?
That's a direct clash between Te and Fi ways of understanding your situation. One's faithfulness to law--justifying self-indulgence and breaking of the law. Some creepily ENTJ "personal transformation" seminars turn this into something bordering on Se/Fi criminality, in the name of "honesty". If you "honestly" feel like punching someone in the face, then it would be "dishonest" not to...
Or...you can find another way. What if you looked at things not in terms of the law or agreements or who is justified and who is irrational, but just looked at things independent of any purpose or criteria or interpretation? There's no telling what you might see. That's why it's a fruitful place to look. You won't find more ways to expand and dominate, you'll find ways to see outside the limits of your own categories and criteria. You'll find things of value that are not definable in terms of getting your way vs. someone else getting their way. You'll find things that you can't define at all and that can't be proven by empirical test, but are nevertheless real. And you'll see how "winning" often comes with a cost. You'll even be able to see the elements of truth in the ideas of those soft-headed troglodytes. Everything will become useful to you, with your expanded understanding of what is useful. You'll become intelligently patient, because you'll know what's feasible now and what isn't. You might even find room to develop a little empathy.
That would be an example of developing the secondary with Ni as the secondary function. The secondary opens your eyes to what was already plainly visible but that you weren't looking at because in some way you thought it unworthy of your attention. For politicians, the secondary provides an avenue to saintliness by becoming more of a person--becoming more worthy of political success. For saints, the secondary provides an avenue to political success by learning to deal with things greater than and beyond yourself--becoming more relevant to other people's concerns, and therefore a stronger negotiator.
The hemisphere that binds the society
The social arena is an ever-shifting flux of common understandings, changing always because people either negotiate changes to the social agreement or find ways to incorporate things from outside the current limits of the social agreement. Different Extraverted Function Attitudes prevail at different times in history. Introverted attitudes, however, are incapable of serving as a common framework for a society, because (by definition) they open up a person's talents without regard for social comprehensibility.
When Extraverted Judging attitudes bind the society, there is an understanding that the shared enterprise requires that people sacrifice some of their desires: that the rules that make up the negotiated social contract are there for everyone's benefit--that holding some of our impulses at bay is ultimately for everyone's benefit. During a time when Je attitudes dominate, Introverted Perception is needed to soften the harshness and impersonality of the rules to take into account unique circumstances that the rules were not formed to address and that perhaps no rules can address.
When Extraverted Perceiving attitudes bind the society, there is an understanding that each individual should fully live out his own uniqueness, that the result is mostly synergy and fun for everyone. Social rules are seen as ways in which the people who created those rules benefit at the expense of people who have less of a say in those rules. During a time when Pe attitudes dominate, Introverted Judgement is needed to hold people back from exercising power simply because they can, and consider themselves answerable to a higher concerns than "whatever plays to the crowd".
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