King on the Mountain
A style of conversation
In the King-on-the-Mountain style of conversation, one person (the King) makes a provocative statement, and requires that others refute it or admit to being wrong. The King is the judge of whether any attempted refutation is successful.
A refutation, for the King to rule it valid, must be completely self-contained: the King will ignore anything outside the way he has conceptualized the topic (see below for an extended illustration). If the refutation involves two or more propositions that must be heard together, the King will rule that each proposition individually fails to refute his statement. He won't address multiple propositions taken together. Once a proposition is rejected, he gives it no further consideration. A refutation must meet the King's pre-existing criteria and make sense in terms of the King's pre-existing way of understanding the subject. The King will rule any suggestion that his criteria are not producing insight as an attempt to cheat.
Example
Chris: "SPECIES CANNOT EVOLVE FROM OTHER SPECIES!! LIKE BEGETS LIKE!!! THAT IS A LAW OF NATURE!!!"
Pat: "To see how species can give rise to new species, consider the fact that offspring are not identical to their parents: there is always some slight variation. And consider the fact that unchecked population growth is exp--"
Chris: "VARIATION YES, BUT THEY ARE STILL OF THE SAME KIND!!! LIKE BEGETS LIKE!!! THAT IS A LAW OF NATURE!!!"
Pat: "If all the offspring survive and their offspring survive, and so on, the population will soon exceed the capacity of the environment to support them all: food, water, space, etc. So a great many of them will die, and--"
Chris: "YES MANY OF THE OFFSPRING DIE. DYING DOES NOT !!!CREATE!!! A NEW SPECIES!! THAT IS LOGICALLY OBVIOUS!!! THAT DOES NOT REFUTE LIKE BEGETS LIKE!!!"
Pat: "If you consider that the children's genes are not exact copies of the parents', you can see evidence of a family-tree relationship among species. Species that diverged from a common ancestor more recently would tend to have more of their genes in common. The fact that humans and chimpanzees have about 98% of their genes in common suggests that--"
Chris: "A CLOUD IS 100% WATER AND A WATERMELON IS 98% WATER. DOES THAT PROVE THAT CLOUDS AND WATERMELONS WERE BORN FROM A COMMON ANCESTOR?"
Pat: "Of course not. You also have to consider the way inheritance works and how there is always selective pressure on a population. You can't expect to understand evolution by taking each fact out of context!"
Chris: "HA HA!! YOU LOSE!!! YOU CAN'T REFUTE MY ARGUMENT!!!"
Two Kings on the Mountain
When two Kings on the Mountain talk, the conversation follows this pattern:
Chris: I SAY, I SAY, YOU ARE NOT MEETING THE CRITERION!! YOU HAD BETTER ADMIT THAT YOU ARE NOT MEETING THE CRITERION!! THIS IS THE CRITERION!!! HERE IS MY PROOF THAT YOU ARE NOT MEETING IT!!! THESE ARE THE FACTS!!!! THEY PROVE THAT YOU ARE NOT MEETING THE CRITERION!!!
Terry: I SAY, I SAY, YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!!! THE CRITERION IS THIS!!! YOU ARE NOT MEETING IT!!!! HERE IS MY PROOF THAT YOU ARE NOT MEETING THE CRITERION!! MY PROOF IS CORRECT, YOU MUST SHOW ME A FAULT WITH IT OR ADMIT YOU ARE WRONG!!
and back and forth and back and forth.
Hypotheses
Extraverted Thinking
Hypothesis: The King-on-the-Mountain style reflects an extraverted thinking attitude on the part of the speaker.
Reasons why it's extraverted
The King's response to each statement is immediate. He knows exactly where he stands, and he can judge instantly how the other person's statement relates to where he stands. He doesn't need to ponder and sort things out or clarify anything. To the King, everything he says seems obvious--to him and to everyone.
Seeing the conversation through the attitude that he's taking, there is no conceivable reason why he should try to get in tune with the other person in order to understand him. The failure of his opponent to meet the proper criteria is obvious and plain to all; there is no need to investigate subtleties.
The King's behavior comes down to "you can't stop me". By the rules of his game, no one can make him back down. He treats conversation as a negotiation with his opponent. If his opponent wants him to back down, it's his opponent's responsibility to make him back down, not his responsibility to do something to help his opponent. He himself feels no responsibility to learn or understand or cultivate his mind. Why should he, when he can simply assert himself in the public arena and no one can stop him?
He puts his idea on the table and makes you respond to it. There is no doubt about what he is saying. You don't need a lot of patience, effort, or diligence to see what he's offering to the conversation. Pat's argument, by contrast, requires considerably more effort on the part of a listener to understand. The King's idea is easily heard through noise or a low-bandwidth communication channel (like a one-sentence exchange in a conversation).
Reasons why it's thinking
The King is looking at everything in terms of a mathematical space: a set of distinct possibilities, which are logically connected or logically unconnected to others. As he hears each new idea, he notes where it sits in his mathematical space.
The emphasis on law. He appeals to the LAW of nature that LIKE BEGETS LIKE as the basis for his beliefs.
Reasons why it's extraverted thinking in particular
The King holds to a single, stable criterion defined in advance of the argument. He doesn't continuously adjust his criteria to suit the patterns and relationships found among organisms, genes, etc.
The King believes sincerely that he is judging fairly, and that logic and objectivity determine fairness. The criterion is that you have to show that like does not always beget like. He rules fairly and objectively on whether each individual statement logically contradicts "like begets like". And indeed, each statement taken individually fails to meet that criterion, regardless of anyone's personal feelings about the matter, their social position, whether anyone likes them, etc.
The King has a simple, articulable reason for each decision that he makes.
When his opponent showed a slight sign of emotion (the exclamation point at the end), and called into question the procedure that the King was using to evaluate the opposing idea, the King declared victory. From a Te perspective, letting your emotions into decision-making is a violation of fairness and objectivity, and disqualifies you from being accorded respect and moral worth.
Reasons why it's J
The amount of information that the King considers at one time is very small: one statement. He makes one decision at a time. He then moves on to the next attempted refutation, putting all previous decisions behind him. The broad panorama--of mathematical, spatial, and temporal relationships between many facts--that makes up the pro-evolution argument, which need to be viewed all at once to be persuasive, cannot get in, unless someone finds a way to package it as a one-step-at-a-time argument (and the King has patience to hear it). Where his opponent was attempting to communicate just one idea, the King heard many separate ideas to be judged one by one. (See Truth-and-Language Exegesis.)
Properly speaking, the small amount of information considered in each discrete decision suggests an extraverted attitude. The fact that the decisions are discrete, the slate being cleared after each one, suggests a J attitude.
Te at its worst
While the King on the Mountain style clearly reflects a Te ego state, it would be a serious error to think that ETJs or ITJs ought to strive to talk that way as the ultimate fulfillment of their "true type", or even that only TJs or FPs ever engage in it.
The usual Myers-Briggs sort of theory uses four-letter codes to name different ways in which people make sense organically and what constitutes full flourishing and self-actualization for them. Not so with Lenore Thomson's ideas. Lenore's vocabulary of attitudes is just that: a vocabulary of ways in which you can see things. By having such a vocabulary, you can think to yourself, "I am engaging in Te now," and see that it's not your only option. Thus you gain access to more of your talents. You become more conscious: more able to see into your own blind spots, more able to tap into dormant capabilities that clash with your dominant sense of self, more willing to address conflict and complexity instead of trying to overpower it. You become less a "type" and more a person.
You might observe that a person playing King on the Mountain is behaving as a braying ass. By understanding it as Te, the speaker can see that he has other options. He can decide whether holding the line on his preconceived criteria and judging such small increments of discourse at one time is really what he wants to do. He can decide, because now he is aware of other options.
And by being aware of King on the Mountain discourse and its limitations, listeners--people who might find it persuasive--can also be aware of how they are being drawn into a box that permits no light to enter. Consciously aware of this form of rhetoric, people can look intelligently at public voices like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Duane Gish, etc., and see if these people really shed light on the topics they talk about or if they practice a style of argument that creates a cognitive dead end. Note that this style has nothing to do with conservative politics. No doubt Al Franken has played King on the Mountain, too. Why might a person be led to such a crude form of discourse? How could he be led out? Now we're in Lenore territory: beyond personality and into increased consciousness and self-awareness.
Not about function attitudes at all
Perhaps, though, King on the Mountain is really the relevant concept, and not extraverted thinking at all. We might be reading an interesting idea into Lenore here rather than truly reading Lenore.
Instead of Te, we might be seeing the archetype of the King: the masculine leader of the tribe, who decides fairly and for all, and whose word must be obeyed. To be the leader of the tribe, you have to be able to defeat all challengers--and prove it from time to time. Hence the format of the conversation: challenge, challenger defeated; challenge, challenger defeated; etc.
Against this hypothesis
It would be a mistake to think that the King is on a masculine ego trip, merely trying to womp challengers in order to justify his social position. The analysis at the top of this page proposes that the King sees himself primarily as fair. Social position and vanity are disallowed as factors in making a decision, as a matter of moral principle.
People who talk that way do change their minds when someone makes an argument that genuinely meets their criteria. The trouble is that the criteria themselves are not examinable in the King on the Mountain state of mind, and the only opposing ideas that the King can consider are very, very tiny (so close to his current conceptual framework that they can be expressed comprehensibly to him in a sentence or two).
The point is not the challenge-and-response format or even the declaration of victory, it's the stability of the criteria of judgement and the smallness of the amount of information considered at one time.
We also get the further hypothesis that Te as a way of addressing opposing ideas tends to turn conversation into combat, or at least into the courtroom trial format. So we might have a much better representation than the usual pop-psychology explanation for this behavior as merely "testosterone". What appears to be a petty attempt to make others knuckle under is explained as resulting from a form of mental representation that's oriented primarily by fairness, and draws upon words and defined criteria to create fairness (see Extraverted Thinking).
My interpretation of this is, it's inferior Ti. -Kier
What can you find in Lenore's writing that would link this behavior to inferior Ti? --Ben Kovitz
See also: Shallowness, Hobby-Horse Personality, Egghead Personality.
Last updated