Mal12345
Permabanned
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2011
- Messages
- 14,532
- MBTI Type
- IxTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Self-Alienation and the Way Back to the Real Self
The MBTI is a pseudo-solution to the Socratic command to "know thyself." It is to know yourself (and others) in the abstract, as a thing to be categorized in terms of a concept. The concept, illustrated in terms of four letters, says that you are basically the same as all the other people who are in the same 4-letter category, and the same as all the people who share even one letter out of four.
As a concept it is intellectual, thus unemotional. It is a means of emotionally distancing the self from the self and from others. You become a spectator in life and no longer a participant. Even if the result is that you see people as works of art, it is still only abstract and conceptual, therefore alienating.
MBTI concepts give you the illusion that you are emotionally self-sufficient, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Your depth of interest in the subject points to the depth of your emotional dependency. And the compulsive way you go about it only goes to show how hypersensitive you are to the stark reality beyond your conceptual wall. It is likely that your only emotional bridge to others is merely sexual.
Your interest in the MBTI makes you feel superior, while conversely demonstrating how inferior you really are.
And yet in your tendency to suppress feelings, and not show yourself and others who you truly are, you have become like an unpublished novel, or better, a masterpiece that is kept locked away in a closet. It takes practice to open the closet, and there will be many mistakes made along the way. The self that is kept locked up doesn't know how to interact properly with the world because it has let the false front do all the work for so many years. So consider your hidden self to be like a sad child who is starving for attention and affection. That's who you are, right now. But that sad child shouldn't be kept locked up. You know it's true.
Only as you discover your own unreality — wrong conclusions, pseudo-solutions, evasions — will you reach the core of your being. Slowly but surely you will begin to act and react from your core, rather than from the erroneous and distorted superimpositions. Only when you act and react from the core of your very individuality will you reach and affect the core of others, regardless of whether or not they themselves work on such a path. This follows the law of affinity — the attraction of similar and repulsion of dissimilar substances.
The MBTI is a pseudo-solution to the Socratic command to "know thyself." It is to know yourself (and others) in the abstract, as a thing to be categorized in terms of a concept. The concept, illustrated in terms of four letters, says that you are basically the same as all the other people who are in the same 4-letter category, and the same as all the people who share even one letter out of four.
As a concept it is intellectual, thus unemotional. It is a means of emotionally distancing the self from the self and from others. You become a spectator in life and no longer a participant. Even if the result is that you see people as works of art, it is still only abstract and conceptual, therefore alienating.
MBTI concepts give you the illusion that you are emotionally self-sufficient, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Your depth of interest in the subject points to the depth of your emotional dependency. And the compulsive way you go about it only goes to show how hypersensitive you are to the stark reality beyond your conceptual wall. It is likely that your only emotional bridge to others is merely sexual.
Your interest in the MBTI makes you feel superior, while conversely demonstrating how inferior you really are.
And yet in your tendency to suppress feelings, and not show yourself and others who you truly are, you have become like an unpublished novel, or better, a masterpiece that is kept locked away in a closet. It takes practice to open the closet, and there will be many mistakes made along the way. The self that is kept locked up doesn't know how to interact properly with the world because it has let the false front do all the work for so many years. So consider your hidden self to be like a sad child who is starving for attention and affection. That's who you are, right now. But that sad child shouldn't be kept locked up. You know it's true.