I see it in general, meaning in the cultural system in which I live (I live in the US, which I see as in many ways a cultural child of Europe at its core) overall. Certainly in this forum, but I don't think it's specific to here. The general/cultural pattern I see is a actually two-sided coin: on one side, Ni is trivialized, devalued etc, on the other side it is exotified and mystified/New-Age-ified. Both are routes to distortion and they work together somehow.
I’ve been thinking about this- I
think I know what you mean, but I’m not sure how to describe it.
Several years ago I had a visceral reaction to reading Piaget’s
The Child’s Conception of the World. A problem with Piaget is that there’s no accounting for abstract thinking- he interpreted what children were saying
very literally. When children said that the things in dreams “really happenedâ€, Piaget interpreted this as children believing the events in their dreams “really happenedâ€
in waking life, outside their dreams. (He does this repeatedly- with all sorts of things, he interprets what they’re saying in a very literal way and mystifies their reasoning skills as being different….when really, imo, it’s just that they haven’t yet refined their ability to articulate subtle distinctions.) I actually got really angry reading the book- it gave me flashbacks to my own childhood and being
constantly misunderstood by people (in precisely the way he was misunderstanding).
One of my earliest memories is of getting angry at my mom and sister because they didn’t understand what I was talking about (I must have been around 4 yo). I kept telling them I wanted to watch a show on TV, and all I could think to say to describe it is “it’s real, but it’s not real.†And I kept trying variations of that: “There were people there, but there weren’t PEOPLE there.†I was talking about cartoons. In retrospect, it’s understandable why they had no idea what I was trying to describe- but I can very clearly remember often getting angry and frustrated to get a reaction like “What’s that? Timmy fell down the well again?†when I’d try to communicate because I
felt like I was being clear.
I have no idea if this is a common problem for Ni doms growing up though. I have always felt like most people seem to be able to take easily communicating for granted- and as such, they expect a certain kind of efficiency (?) that I can’t really keep up with? I’m not sure that makes sense, and it’s not even entirely about communication so much as overall interaction and the ability to make sense of other people’s words and behavior. It’s like there’s this big invisible metronome somewhere and other people don’t have nearly as much trouble keeping up with it as I do (i.e. being told when and how long to focus on something, and being told specifically what to focus on, etc). It’s not that I expect the world to revolve around me, but I’d like to as least make a pocket around myself where I can do things at my own speed- and even that seems difficult sometimes.
That thin slices thing, it sort of sounds like a way of judging, the wikipedia article even uses the word judge. I understang with jungian theory it's not judging but quite honestly this use of terminology is very confusing. If you make an initial assessment and are instantly convinced it's correct, that's a judgement in my book. How in Jung's view could it not be a judgement?
I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking here. It sounds to me like you’re asking how this could describe Ni when it sounds like a judging process? (If not, disregard the following explanation.) I don’t think Ni is the aspect that scrambles to come up with an explanation- I think Ni is the thing that drops “If A, then Q†on the table and the judging functions then must scramble around to find the linear progression which led from A to Q.
Everybody does the ‘thin-slicing’ thing. I think that each ‘type’ probably has its own criteria which regularly gets focused on.
I really like your position. I guess I always have the patience to explain my position (and in turn, hear the other person's), it's just that quite a few other people don't have patience to hear it or even consider the idea of listening, let alone consider the idea of explaining their own position instead of just giving up too fast.
What I could learn better though is, how to figure out some positions of people in some cases, where it's possible to put it together from the data available. Really cool you try to do that.
Do you feel this limits your Ni too much though? Does it never turn out that it was a good idea trying to figure out what the other person's position REALLY was?
Maybe a better way of saying it is that I think it’s important to take responsibility for the assumptions we make. Jumping to quick conclusions- and throwing a lot of negative emotional charge at someone because of that hasty conclusion- is (imo) just a shitty way to treat people.
As an oversimplified example: say someone steps on my foot. I could either instantly react and explain to that person how careless I think it was for them to step on my foot….or I could stop and look for the reasons why it might have happened. If something stands out (like, say- someone on the other side of the person, physically pushing them in my direction) as a cause existing beyond that person, then I can save us both the trouble of that conversation (e.g. “Goddamnit, why are you so careless?!†/ “It wasn’t my fault! That person pushed me!!â€). Those conversations are
so exhausting- I really can’t handle too much interaction with the kinds of people who can’t put that stuff together on their own before saying something.
I think it’s a bad idea to ‘figure out someone else’s position’ in a non-dialogical sort of way, to make assumptions about someone else’s position and neither talk about it nor listen to any disagreement they have about it, for probably obvious reasons- but specifically what I was talking about was stopping to consider the larger ‘cause and effect’ picture before throwing a bunch of negative emotional charge at someone. It’s important to make sure what we’ve “figured out†actually does match what goes on inside the other person- but I was specifically referring to figuring out how to avoid senselessly throwing negative emotional charge around.