The danger of NTs

The dangers of NTs.

Those rare people identified as iNtuitive Thinkers on the Myers-Briggs personality typology have certain problematic faults. The good news is, perhaps better than any other type, they can also correct or compensate for those faults — IF they recognize them, and if they choose to.

I am an NT. Among everyone I know, I am an expert. Introspection is a key component of Introverted NTs, and I have used this to maximum effect. My primary counseling role is advising others concerning NTs and relationships. Being an NT, I am attractive to, and attracted to, those people who are attracted to NTs.

This goes a great deal of the way to explain why I’m always on the opposite side of the table listening to a woman tell me about the men in their lives. It in no way explains why I never seem to be some woman’s man.

One of the NTs greatest gifts is our ability to percieve discrepencies in organized systems, no matter how far removed by time and space. In lay terms, If you told me 10 years ago that you hated chocolate chip cookies, I will notice and probably ask you about why I saw you take a CCcookie from the tray at that office party last night.

We are excellent at organizing complex systems. We have an ability to abstract to an Nth degree, and we can use that Nth degree space to cache thinking processes as we anaylze any system in real time. From that Nth space we return a perfect solution, a perfect system (given the goals or standards against which perfection is measured.)

That last sentence is critical. Our accuracy is only guarranteed as far as our access to relevant data, and our understanding of the standards.

We are so good at this, that we often organize and reorganize systems for fun. Introverted NTs especially find that they have great skill at manipulating people and circumstances. The more often we do it for fun, the further we develop this skill until we, as a class, can be identified as the master manipulators of the universe.

First off, let me make it clear what I mean by manipulation. There is a common use of the term, common that we all do it all the time. It refers to the deliberate use or movement of a thing. We manipulate forks to get food in our mouths. We manipulate our schedules to make time for what is important.

This common form also extends to people. When we meet someone for the first time, we follow a social greeting structure. We do this, because for the most part the results are predicatable, and they are positive in terms of this new relationship. This is a simple use of tools for a standard, normal result.

There is a more subtle form of manipulation. This one involves manipulating the truth, or more accurately stated, the perception of truth. This kind of manipulation carries with it an inherent morality. When asked if particular clothing makes someone appear fat, we LIE and say no. When a child or a novice craftsman creates a work of art, we say positive and encouraging things despite the blatant fact that it was a failure.

We do this subtle subtle deceptions in hopes to manipulate the person or the situation in a positive manner. We hope to avoid hurt feelings, and encourage people to continue to try harder. This kind of manipulation shows that we care about another person.

This same kind of manipulation can be used to harm another. It is used selfishly, to deliberately tell another person that their efforts fail, even when they were marginal or even stellar, in order to destroy their ego, or build our ego up.

This kind of manipulation, both good and evil, are understood by everyone and utilized by most people on some small level daily. The lesson learned from the observation is the inherent difference between good and evil is that one is “other centered” and the second is “self-centered”.

This is the true description of good and evil, in any context.

It may be identified then, that often the boundaries with this kind of manipulation can become confused. Did I tell my date that she looked good in that dress to build up her self-esteem, or so I could avoid the emotional scene she’d cause if I told her how she really looked? And even if I did avoid a scene, is that wrong? If I love myself as much as my neighbor, then don’t I have some right and obligation to look out for my own emotional welfare?

Similarly is the concept of “Tough Love”, in which a person is brutally honest with another person in order to help them receive a benefit. The journeyman worker believes the early praise he received means that he no longer needs to make an effort to improve, so the quality of his work remains at the level of his earliest efforts. Tough love mandates that he be confronted with the substandard quality of his work — even if embarrasing or otherwise emotionally painful — in order that he should have a true opportunity to reach true quality.

There again, sometimes the concept of Tough Love is further abused as an excuse by people who are simply self involved and don’t choose to make an effort to use tact with their peers.

The potential for complication and obfuscation at even this lowest, simpliest level of manipulation is staggering.

None of this is the kind of manipulation I am talking about NTs being experts at. For they are experts at this, but they also understand a level of manipulation that leaves others shaking their heads in a vacuum.

Imagine a manipulation so subtle but so powerful that it takes over 10 years to bear fruit, but the results had massive impact. What for example will be the 10 year outcome of the war in Iraq? I’m not talking about just democracy by her peoples. I’m also talking about world commerce, social freedom in America, the subtle changes in the trust of young people for their national leaders (shifts both positive and negative). A particular result might be that a teenager is so moved by the event that they take up a particular course of study at university, graduate into a certain civil office, and are available to lend their particular expertise to a particular plan for housing in a certain neighborhood.

Now, what if I said that a particular plan for housing in a certain neighborhood was the desired goal? Could someone master a plan, working backwards, that compensated for a global array of responses, into a single, simply stated trigger 10 years earlier like “War in Iraq”? The answer is “yes”. That is the scope of an NTs ability to manipulate.

An NT’s accuracy in such a scope will be defined by the quality and completeness of information about circumstances in the present, and the level of desired precision of the goal.

The question of morality aside – the question of whether the end goal is self serving or other serving – the amount of manipulation required to maintain the original manipulation becomes manifold. Subtle corrections are usually required, usually to compensate for the subtle manipulations of others which happen to intersect with the plan at hand. The result in that case is many innoncent bystanders having their lives manipulated in an “unplanned” way, in order to have a planned effect on someone else.

In short, when you start stretching the timeline on that kind of scale, you start dragging the whole timeline along with it.

If you are interested in this concept from a science fiction approa

ch, read Asimov’s “Foundation” series. The applied science of this kind of manipulation is called Psychohistory. (right?)

To be continued…