Maggie's Farm

Most avid bloggers at all types of blogs are INxx.

Freud and Ayn Rand were also big on “tabula rasa.” It might be interesting to study the more steadfast ‘blank slaters’ to figure out what they had in common.

My personal bias is that there's no such thing as a "superman" - everybody has strengths and weaknesses that add or detract from a societal whole. It may be nature's way.

Meta mentioned Jungian-based MBTI, and I recalled that Freud and Jung were at some odds regarding "tabula rasa". Is it a matter of definition and preference? Freud preferred to focus on the ego and superego, while Jung went into more detail describing aspects of “the id”?

“Tabula Rasa is also featured in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud depicted personality traits as being formed by family dynamics (see Oedipus complex, etc.). Freud's theories show that one can downplay genetic and congenital influences on human personality without advocating free will. In psychosanalysis, one is largely determined by one's upbringing.” – by (how do you find the author in Wikipedia)?

Personally, I much prefer quotes from the source itself.

Nurturing? A mixed bag. IMO, NF parents would likely have nurtured with more skill knowing your type while STs may have thought you a bit strange, if they even took the results seriously at all.

MBTI is homogenized and simplified, maybe to keep it interesting. It boils things down to 16 distinct types, but I see people falling somewhere in the hump of the 4 bell curves they test for. An extreme ESTP (psychopath) will have much less in common with a "normal" ESTP who reacts and behaves much more similarly to a "normal" ESFP.

An interesting thing you can do is take the test from the perspective of ‘you, when you were 10 years old’. I was probably an ENFP, but now I’m always an INTJ, occasionally INFJ or ENTJ (depending on the kind of week I’m having I suppose). Major events in my adolescence did change me.

Robert Hare claims that sociopaths can be redeemed but has many case histories of people who were just "born bad". He says they’re not suppressing social emotions through some defense mechanism but simply cannot ever feel them. I got into it with a developmental psychologist who claimed the issue was ‘the tough-minded baby who gets attachment disordered by a crappy mother’. I dunno - I lean more towards the addiction theory. Just as some people can have alcoholic genes, I say other folks have their power and control drives unleashed (for lack of a better word) by weak fear-based emotions and they become addicted to all the goodies that power and control can bring.

In prehistoric times it was easy when everybody in the cave or village knew each other and their situation well and could determine when somebody really had to go. But today expensive ‘holding pens’ have to be built and/or funded to hold those who unacceptably consume more than they contribute. Socially adept psychopaths are the worst of all since they can leverage their societal damage thru acquired power and superhuman predatory skills. If prenatal termination is not an option, I don’t know where or how they could be kept.

INFJs are said to note discrepancies and sinister patterns via implicit emotional memory and abstract reasoning abilities (their gut feel) as well as anybody.

Socially Adept Psychos are fairly rare in my business, where technical expertise is hard to fake, but near-psychos often move up the ranks.

I’ve met one ‘SAP’. She’d been a likeable and friendly work acquaintance for over 10 years before I learned the hard way that I had been never been anything more than a cultivated tool after she invited me to work for her. She’d smear good people who she perceived to be disloyal, cheated openly on her husband, stole ideas and credit, routinely lied, ran a sweatshop via manipulated taskmasters while rarely being in the office herself, and went after perceived enemies with a vengeance. Many years after escaping that nightmare (my only sin, aside from telling a few people about my reservations about her) I had to deal with her again from a position of relative equality and made the foolish mistake of trying to negotiate a peace. To my face she “forgot the whole thing”, then knifed me in the back, again. That’s when I realized she was “morally insane” – concepts such as trust and honor were totally alien to her – she apparently couldn’t ‘feel’ win/win scenarios. The other person had to lose in order for her to win, even if it involved great risk and created enemies.

I later met a couple other near-PAPs (Machiavellians, or manipulators) wishing I’d listened more to my gut afterwards and acted more quickly. So I hit the library and internet. I’m currently open to any decent personality typing system to figure out not just how to better spot Ps, but how they are able to spot and use sycophants, henchmen, or otherwise normal salt-of-the-earth folks, against others.

Most politicians have some SAPy qualities. They'll speak to their base to get elected but move to the tax and spend power center. How else do you explain Bill Clinton and Dick Morris, Bush and Rove, Kerry and McCain and Lieberman..