While we’re on the subject of arbitraries, I have a couple of tabs to dispose of. First is an article [Link] from Scientific American about introvert aversion in modern society. It is not too bad, despite the source, because the article is an interview and evidently suffered from not too excessive censorship.
I was rather surprised by this, portraying the nature and fate of introverts in our modern society as something novel and unknown. I suppose that comes of working for a third-century for a Yankee army obsessed with Meyers-Briggs temperament taxonomy. Since the early ’90′s, every class I attended longer than four hours started with the taking of a Meyers-Briggs test of some form and then completely ignoring the results.
For those familiar with the taxonomy (others can go do a Gooey search) the bulk of its permanent leadership/management is ESFJ, which means that the organization is overwhelmingly extrovert, existential, emotional, and judgmental. Any of the opposites are somewhere between tolerated and persecuted. SO being told that introverts are harassed and punished by modern society is no news to me, especially because, like so many scientists, physicists especially, I am an introvert.
Parties, any social gathering, tires us out. So every meeting, class, or religionist service is at best taxing and at worse torture. And in contemporary Amerika, society, shules, churches, and government ignore this completely. Or sometimes, it seems, deliberately try to break us of our temperament like some sad delusional archaism of beating homosexuality into heterosexuality.
Too often, the view of introverts is that extroverts are the curse of humanity, morlocks to our eloi, devils to our angels, Nazis to our Freedom.
And while we’re on lonerism, I also note an article [Link] out of Washington U that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder tend to spend more time doing solitary ‘screen’ (computer and television) activities than group activities. Now not all introverts are autistic, however much we get treated as such by the extroverts, but clearly very few with autism are extroverts.
I could also reiterate that a lot of physicists have Asperger’s or Asperger’s envy, which is at the low end of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Which brings us back to the arbitrariness that the extroverts get to define modern society and fundamentally what society classes as ‘the good’, to borrow the term from Sokrates. This is at once the perversion and the persecution, that those who think they are the epitome of human are defining that those who are not as they are not human.
One of the joys of being an ORF is that I do not have to attend group activities, including in the workplace, that are contrary to my well being and being condemned as bad because of my temperament. I was reminded just this week that most of my social contacts, outside of mandatory things like dealing with medicalists – the blessing of being old – and merchants, are with nerds who are predominantly introverts and if not, smart enough not to impose extrovertism on me.
Since it is sundae it seems meet to ask the question of which is the worse form of persecution and harassment, religionists who demand that I adopt their dogmatic beliefs or extroverts who demand I adopt their temperamental behaviors?
