08-08-2016, 09:11 PM
(08-07-2016, 08:49 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The Myers-Brigs system of understanding human personalities has four opposing pairs of types. One that interests me in my exploration of world views and values is the distinction between Judger and Perceptive. While this isn’t the purest expression of Myers Brigs, I see the Judger as having strong world views and values. The Judger will have a firm set of principles on how to perceive the world, and a set of goals to be striven towards to improve the world and thrive within it. The Perceptive is more oriented to the perceiving of the world accurately, on constantly refining his view of the world while being rigidly dependent on it less.A couple of names come to mind as examples, Classic/KIA (highly perceptive person representing r-libertarian values) and Kiff (highly judgemental person representing so called liberal values or left wing-progressive values). I found it odd that I had to constantly remind Kiff that she lived in the United States. Now, that may not be what she wanted hear, may not be what she wanted to accept or believe as far as the future was concerned but it was the cold reality that she was facing as far as the rest of her life and the lives of her children are concerned. So, just out curiosity, are you going to so called cling to our American values or cling to your progressive values? The dividing line within America has become very very clear to me.
It takes all types. There is something to be said for both types of thinking, indeed, for all eight of the Myers Briggs stereotypes. Building a team, I’d want to include representatives of all of them. A Judger can look at a situation, fit it quickly to his idea of how things work, and come up with a fast and seemingly obvious solution. A Perceptive might be more inclined to sit there and examine the problem in more detail, to eventually come up with a customized solution appropriate uniquely for the given situation. Of course, it might be a pain in the rear do do things a bit different in a given case than in every other case, which might annoy the Judger in his desire to cleanly use the tried and true solutions in a similar way every time.
It’s not so simple as one approach is good, the other bad.
One extreme form of what I think of as a Judger is the religious fundamentalist. If an individual is totally committed to a holy text, anything that conflicts with the text is false. Somehow, some way, there is assumed to be an error in the thinking of anyone who disagrees with the holy text. This can result in discarding entire fields of science wholesale, with a feeling that a student of scripture knows better than professional scientists that have spent their lives working in a given field.
Extreme Judgers with strong political values, extreme partisans, have a talent for defending their world view. The have, they have to have, solid defense mechanisms that kick in whenever a threat to the validity of their world view rises. This involves a special ability to ignore all parts of reality that conflicts with or requires refining their way of seeing the world.
A political partisan can be as dedicated to political systems of understanding the world as any religious fundamentalist. If you are a conservative, you are apt to have the ability to detect doctrinaire partisan progressives that are detached from the world, folks who seemingly have no clue. Conservative posters on this site will gang up on certain progressives who seem way out there in la la land. I feel no need to name names or point fingers. I'll state it as a truth as self evident as anything declared by Jefferson. While I might label these progressive natives of la la land extreme Judgers with strong world views and values, conservatives are more apt to use more pungent and demeaning language. It amounts to the same thing. Some folk are disconnected from reality.
While it might seem easy to identify political opposites whose world views are disconnected from reality, it is difficult to impossible to recognize when one’s own thought patterns are similarly off. If people direct pungent and insulting language at you frequently, this might be considered a clue. I’m not one to advocate argument by insult, but when it gets flying well above the usual level there is apt to be a major league world view clash in progress, and one’s own world view is apt to be part of the problem.
I consider myself to lean Perceptive. It is more important that one’s world view match reality than to cling to the world view one has unchanged. This doesn’t imply I haven’t got stubborn principles I’ll cling too. I just have different principles. Key among them… If a large number of people follow a political world view, at one point the world view was appropriate and worked. There are historical reasons people were drawn to it. Once drawn in, it is hard to revaluate it, hard to tune it or incorporate changing circumstances, but if one looks back in history there are generally valid reasons various world views came to exist and dominate.
I hold this to be true of both the FDR New Deal world view and the Reagan - Nixon unravelling memes. There are times of crisis when things are falling apart, when it is necessary and appropriate to come together to work for the common good of all. There are times of unravelling when one party has been in power too long, when taxing and spending are being done to win favor from special interest groups more than to solve dire and otherwise unsolvable problems, when a progressive party has been in power too long and has become corrupt and inefficient.
People are not (fill in your favorite insult here) for embracing either world view. Both can be justified. Both have their place in history. The place for helping each other out as things are falling apart is in a crisis. FDR was a fine crisis leader. We’re heading into another crisis today. Nixon and Reagan — well, Reagan anyway — was a fine unravelling leader. The GIs and to an extent the Silent and Boomers as well were well and truly burned out trying to bear any burden, pay any price, fight any foe, etc… We had tried to do too much. We failed at too many things with Watergate, the hostage crisis, oil crisis, stagflation, the fall of Saigon and national malaise. It was time for a change and a break.
I’m into cyclical history to the extent of saying the FDR and Reagan memes are part of the cycle, with both sets of ideas having their place. My world view has come to embrace cyclical history more than either the FDR or Reagan memes. I see the current election as a referendum between the two sets of memes, a vote on where we are or ought to be in the cycle. I can look at extreme Judger partisans who cling to one set of memes or the other with rigid certainty while rejecting the other absolutely and without doubt and shake my head in great frustration.
Now, the policies appropriate to today are no more a precise return to FDR than Reagan’s memes are a replication of Gilded Age laissez faire. History doesn’t go around in a circle. It’s a spiral. Major progress is made every crisis. The problems being solved in any given crisis are not the same as the problems of the crisis before. Thus, the new solutions will reflect four score and seven years worth of changing technology and culture.
But you still want to work together for a common cause for the common good in a crisis, while that sort of intensity and dedication isn’t going to be sustained indefinitely. One shouldn’t try. Unravellings are a time for the Robber Barons, while crises are a time for the People.
But people generally don’t think cyclically when examining their political values. Some will say FDR’s ideas were great for his time and embrace them. Others will say Reagan’s ideas were great for his time and embrace them. Few are ready to admit that both leaders had considerable merit, knew their country, knew the mood of the people given the state of the cycles when they took power. Both did what they felt had to be done, what was entirely appropriate during their times in office.
A cyclical world view embracing and including both sets of values is more complex and nuanced than either world view alone. To me, both sets of values have merit in their time and place. Neither set should be embraced as all inclusive. One needs to understand and respect both sets of values if one is to truly understand a culture where both FDR and Reagan are respected and revered. One can’t forget, though, that both sets of ideas have flaws. Each way of thinking has its time, and that time is not always. One can’t blindly worship what was right a decade or a century ago. One must absolutely acknowledge the flaws in both perspectives and be ready to tune and improve big time.
Not that I expect extreme Judgers, extreme partisans, to grow their world views that much. That is really really hard. People are used to thinking linear and thinking binary. One sees either or confrontation rather than inclusive understanding. If one side of a world view clash is right, it seems to follow that the other side must be wrong.
Buzz. Incorrect. There is more to history and politics than you can find while clinging to either set of values only.