What is religion?

According to Ayn Rand and my understanding it is a disintegrated attempt to interpret reality (i.e. “truth”) and thus a primitive form of a fully integrated objective philosophy.

Why is this relevant?

It explains how some people look at personality type. They essentially hunt down their own type and ignore the rest as if they don’t matter. Of course naturally everyone’s biased (and selfish) to want to discover themselves with such ‘tools’ although without the ‘bigger picture’ your type on its own remains rather trivial.

As you may have noticed I’ve started compiling individual type overviews with some referenced material included. At the end of the day they serve to better understand inter-type relations where the synergy (or sum) of two individuals in a relationship is more important than its parts.

This keeps true to Jung’s original warning that the classification of individuals means nothing except to the practical psychologist who has intensely studied many variables and factors at work from objective analysis.

Why I still don’t like the MBTI^®:

It represents something similar to religion i.e. a primitive attempt to interpret Jung’s original work and in doing so creates distortions of reality (“truth”). Like a cult or religion it becomes riddled with dogma which produces The Forer Effect as a by-product.

I remember someone who said to me, “I paid £80 for an MBTI^® assessment to discover that I was a Mentor”. The very language used (i.e. I was a Mentor) demonstrates how this kind of tomfoolery can make a lot of money for people who like to preach that you are this and thus destined to always be just that.

The use of “are” and “be” represent a skill in pseudology (i.e. lying considered as an art form). You’ll find these kind of passive verbs in all manner of advertising and propaganda. The question arises, who will you next trust trying to tell you that this is this and that is that?

Perhaps now we see where Karl Marx got his ideas from (i.e. possibly knowing that certain dogmatic words in our language close down your thinking and limit the possibilities for a finite existence).

The Plato Disease:

Plato in ancient Greece (350 BC) would have had us believe that knowledge cannot be known outside of the mind and your personal experiences thus laying a 3000 year old psychological matrix biased towards subjectivism thus fostering a world of stereotypes and distorted truths later exploited by those “in the know”.

The philosophy of objectivism basically asserts that knowledge is externally knowable through observation, testing and constant re-evaluations. Therefore there are universal “truths” in which to re-discover. “There are no facts, only interpretations” as Nietzsche said.

According to PTypes.com, Plato (340 BC) was likely the first philosopher to identify a distinct social trend of “four types of person” which he originally called the Philosophers, Scientists, Guardians and Artisans. These have been revised over the centuries with further classifications especially exposed in Psychiatry with its plethora of disorders.