Parliament of Attitudes

An understanding of attitude-functions as conflicting different internal attitudes

The main idea of Lenore Thomson's stuff is that everyone is always simultaneously making sense of things in terms of eight radically different, mutually incompatible attitudes at once, these attitudes often produce conflicting interpretations of events, and it's attempting to resolve the conflict between them that creates a high level of adaptability and intelligence.

Democracy as a computational contrivance

James Madison proposed that instead of trying to prevent the existence of conflicting interests and factions within the country, in the vain hope of getting everyone on board with a one, true, right way for the country to be, it would be wiser to allow factions to form and fight an unresolvable conflict forever. As long as the fundamental conflict between social classes or factions remained unresolved, and they continued inventing compromises on one small, concrete issue at a time, the government would act more wisely than if power were given exclusively or permanently to one wise person or faction or permanently held policy. One faction might gain control for a while, but the system is set up so it's very hard for one faction to hold power. As it inevitably pushes a single, coherent view of the country too far, it tends to get voted out, have difficulty gaining cooperation from different branches of government, etc. The many concerns of the country that have no place in that coherent view--as indeed any sort of coherence must inevitably omit some things--have many avenues through which to assert themselves even if they can't get into the presidency.

It was hoped that the overall system of government would be more stable this way, because it would find intelligent ways to address many people's needs at once, whereas a single faction, no matter how wise or benevolent, would inevitably attempt to muscle out the concerns of people who opposed it. Looking back over 200 years, it seems clear that by and large, the American federal government actually has shown exactly the hoped-for kind of adaptiveness to changing circumstances and opposing concerns, even as the individual members of government are no more intelligent or adaptive than anyone else.

A parliament of attitudes

To make a complicated metaphor, Lenore is saying that your conscious sense of self (your ego) is created by a sort of parliament of attitudes. Each attitude is like a different lens, giving you a different image of yourself, your situation, and where your stakes lie. The lenses are different enough that there's no way to bring more than one image into full focus at once. The extraverted lenses show you your stake in expanding your social influence and capitalizing materially on available opportunities within present limitations. The introverted lenses show you your stake in attuning your mind to things that are of unconditional value: they see ways to increase the depth of your awareness and the solidity with which you are planted in one place (see State of Grace). Fundamentally, these kinds of stakes are irreconcilable. (See Cocooning-vs.-Conforming Exegesis.)

Hence the need for a parliament, not to choose one lens fundamentally and permanently as providing the final, true perspective on the Self, but to continually address and resolve conflicts between the images created by these lenses one situation at a time. In this parliament of lenses, there emerges a ruling party, an opposition party, and swing voters who can be cajoled into going along with one side or another.

The genius of the design of the ego is that while one function attitude can gain enough control to create coherence and continuity within the personality, it can't get absolute control. Once it (inevitably) starts pushing one view of the self too hard, so that there is no acknowledging some genuine needs of the full Self, things start happening to undermine that control.

The dominant function, in other words, is like the Prime Minister in a democratic parliament. It represents certain interests and sees events a certain way. It does not truly represent your entire Self. Nevertheless, in the interest of creating unity and coherence, it rules the coalition, and can usually find a way to get the other attitudes to cooperate in finding an interpretation of events that make sense to it. When the overall policy of the self represents one attitude too much at the expense of the others, there are insurgencies and rebellions. It might take a lot of internal violence to keep the rebel faction in line.

The inferior function is an attitude so far out of sync with the dominant one that it sees importance in nothing that the dominant function regards as meaningful, and vice versa. The ego, or conscious sense of "I", tends to view the interpretations of the inferior function as anathema--as things coming from outside the self, which threaten the self and must be destroyed or at least continually discredited.

Insurgent behavior

"Shadow" behavior occurs when dominant and inferior attitudes have gotten so far out of sync that the interpretation of the inferior function begins to guide the person in ways that are outside of his conscious sense of "I". Your conscious sense of self is doing one thing, but you're also doing something that you just won't acknowledge as something you could do.

A whimsical but perhaps illustrative example is from an episode of Gomer Pyle where Gomer (ESFJ?) illegally brings a friend's girlfriend onto the base, obscuring her from the view of the guards with a mattress that he's carrying. He spends a lot of the rest of the episode insisting that "I wasn't sneakin'!" For Gomer, a sneak is the worst possible kind of person: without loyalty, going around the rules to do whatever you like. That's the Extraverted Feeling interpretation of sneaking. From the standpoint of Introverted Thinking, however, any and all uses of any and all available variables are legitimate, as long as their overall pattern fits "the groove" of how things should go--regardless of rules, agreements, or other people's approval. Did Gomer sneak the girlfriend onto the base or didn't he? His sense of "I" won't allow him to consider the possibility that he did. But he may well have seen the opportunity to circumvent the rules by exploiting the means available right then, in order to accomplish a good that he thought transcended social agreement.

If that interpretation is right, then it would be a clear case of dominant Fe and inferior Ti in a clash. The compromise worked out was one that endangered personal integrity: to violate the rules for the greater good, and then insist that it was unintentional.

(Hypothesis: quite a lot of Gomer Pyle episodes might revolve around this same theme: Gomer maintaining his allegiances and his integrity in the face of weird conflicts where it seems that he must sacrifice one or the other--a tricky thing for an ESFJ, for whom integrity is maintaining one's allegiances. Or rather, it seems that way when you view yourself through the lens of Extraverted Feeling.)

Possible problem

Could Gomer be an ENFP? Such a look-on-the-bright-side attitude. An ENFP would probably also be very displeased to be thought "sneakin'". But this couldn't be explained by inferior Introverted Thinking.

Different types

What separates one "type" from another, then, is which attitude is in the presidential palace and which is reduced to crawling under barbed wire to get its way--not which attitudes you "have" and which you "lack". Different people's senses of self are organized around different primary ways of making sense of experience (see Semiotic Attitude, Truth-and-Language Exegesis), even as all attitudes contribute to the whole. The brain, like a democracy with checks and balances, is constructed to have many different perspectives all continually vying for control, in order to make better overall decisions than any one perspective alone could make.

To "type" people in terms of function attitudes, then, you wouldn't base your guess on gross personality traits like "calm" vs "high-strung", etc. (see Not Personality), you'd look for ways in which the rules of a particular function attitude have informed the content of his beliefs and self-image--not so much at the particular beliefs and self-image. A person who looks primarily to fit things to or direct affairs into clear-cut boxes, making one decision at a time according to the box being aimed at and the box in terms of which he's categorized his present situation, is structuring his experience in a left-brain, or J, way. The particular boxes, though, could be just about anything: "blocks of time" will probably be a particularly important kind of box to fit things to, along with other sorts of consumable resources, but the criteria for decision-making could be anything from "proven medically safe" to "kills people most efficiently". The main factor is the way the person navigates: always in relation to some box--even to say, "putting things into this box is distorting your perception of the reality" (typical among INJs).

A person who usually expects concrete reality to show him the way instead of having a map or a policy in mind before diving in, is structuring his experience in a right-brain, or P, way. (See Truth-and-Language Exegesis.) The person may or may not be an "artist", but will be guided in making decisions mostly by aesthetic criteria: what makes an impression, what stands out, what's exciting, and especially an inarticulable notion of what seems to fit everything together into a harmonious whole. Some have figured out that to manage time well, you need to do certain things within certain defined limits (like show up for the concert on time and charge enough to pay the staff), and may even favor a scheduled lifestyle for that reason. But they would still be Ps because the kind of experience to which they give the most weight is one where the concrete world itself is felt to provide the structure (rather than the J approach of providing structure from within or by choice).

A simple way to guess someone's type is to watch what approaches to making sense of things (function attitudes) he tends to discount as being unreliable, untruthful, or unimportant. The opposite attitudes will be the ones with the strongest grip on his sense of self.

The person with the predominantly J approach will still apprehend things in a gestalt way, but he will likely see it as childish, sneaky, unpredictable, playful, and generally not very important--until he's found a way to incorporate the opposing function attitudes into his conscious sense of self. The person with the predominantly P approach will still apprehend things in terms of boxes, but he will likely view the boxes as unnecessary baggage preventing him from responding to reality "as it is", or as a necessary but unpleasant chore.

And of course, via the Tertiary Temptation, Js almost always have a P attitude providing backup to ther main attitude and Ps almost always have a J attitude in the same role. For example, ETPs often make appeal to principles of rudeness and social obligation (Fe) when they don't get their way: using socially recognized boxes to persuade others to behave in line with the ETP's goals and style.

Synthesis of attitudes

On the hypothesis proposed on this page, Developing the Secondary would be finding a way to take seriously an introverted or extraverted perspective, whichever is opposed to one's basic physiological leaning. The secondary function offers a way to do that without the horrific J/P clash that results when you try to resolve conflict by pitting dominant and inferior attitudes directly against each other.

Isn't this unusual in biology?

Actually, in biology, lots of things work this way. Even at the molecular level, there are lots of positive feedback loops, any one of which would destroy the system if allowed to run unchecked. Checking it are lots of other things with their own positive feedback loops. The result is an amazingly adaptable harmony and stability, always changing in response to circumstances (extraversion) but always finding a way to maintain its own nature in spite of circumstances (introversion).