The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki
Louis Farrakhan is the charismatic and controversial leader of a U.S. Muslim sect known as the Nation of Islam.
One this page, examining Lenore's type guess leads us to some surprising ideas about what Lenore might mean by her terminology.
A bio of Farrakhan, written before a trip to the U.K. in 2001.
Some incendiary Farrakhan quotes
"Correct the Wrong", a speech from 1982 in which Farrakhan calls the nations to judgement, trying to place current-day racial conflicts within a broad historical context.
"Louis Farrakhan's Rise & Decline"
p. 298: "Another interesting example (of the wholistic and imaginal character of Introverted Thinking) is the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Many of Farrakhan's speeches suggest a classic INTP perspective, in that he believes the structure of American culture deforms and degrades the self-understanding of its Black constituents. Moreover, his manner of defending his ideas is not analytical but analogical, designed to unify his audience in terms of shared contextual experience.
"Whatever may be said about Farrakhan's views or politics, his process of thought tells us something about Introverted Thinking's prophetic power. At the societal level, this function will bear the burden of moral imperatives a culture has not acknowledged, keeping the outward face of law in touch with the immediate experience of real people."
The above passage is rather surprising. Wouldn't an emphasis on how people's culture affects their self-perceptions, and an attempt to change those self-perceptions by looking beyond the culturally available options, fit much better Lenore's conception of Introverted Intuition, especially when related to secondary Extraverted Feeling?
So how did Lenore arrive at INTP?
She seems to emphasize two things: Farrakhan's rhetorical style and an emphasis on first-hand experience. Of course, she's trying to illustrate Introverted Thinking here, as an attitude that emphasizes first-hand experience and understanding without regard to a culture's shared categories and agreements (more than she's offering a type guess).
One possibility is that Lenore characterizes Introverted Intuition in terms of an attitude of relativity of perspectives, especially the attitude of granting the validity of multiple, incompatible viewpoints without accepting any of them. So perhaps she is distinguishing between Introverted Thinking as leading you to give priority to a perspective derived from first-hand experience and Introverted Intuition as leading you see things at a second-hand remove, through the intermediary of representations each of which reflects only a part of the whole.
That, in turn, raises the broader question of why so many people who test INTJ seem obsessed with rendering judgements from an independent perspective. And of course bemoaning the existence of power and power structures that keep people down, especially by setting up a cultural language that encourages some people to see themselves as inferior to others, seems to be an especially common pastime of people who test INFJ.
Wouldn't a great deal of INFJ rhetoric be well characterized as follows? (1) an Ni attitude of seeing biases from an attitude that earnestly attempts to be independent or unbiased, (2) an Fe emphasis on self-definition through social relationship and obligation created by a social contract that you did not originate but that still binds you, (3) a radically Ti perspective of trying to point out (give people first-hand knowledge of) patterns that suggest that the social contract really works in a way inconsistent with our social fictions, and (4) a loathing of Se attitudes that people are to be defined by surface appearances combined with an obsession with the power of surface appearances.
To that, Farrakhan would add an inferior-Se approach of trying to project an image of physical strength, intimidating opponents through viscerally felt fear that he and his followers will "rise up" and destroy their oppressors. Aren't Farrakhan's attempts to be intimidating, suggesting physical violence without explicitly threatening, typical of tertiary and inferior Se?
From "The Purpose of Education", a Farrakhan speech from 1993 calling for putting God at the center of education, and teaching self-knowledge, where self-knowledge is especially knowledge of the past accomplishments of your race:
"One of Americas greatest crimes was and is depriving us totally of the knowledge of self. This is a crime of immeasurable dimension. Having been deprived of the richness of our history deprives us of the springs and motives of human action that would tell us the possibilities that are within us. If you know what your forebears did, then you know the realm of possibility for you. If you are deprived of that history, then you have nothing to connect yourself to as a person. You are left vulnerable to attach yourself to the circumstances you are given, and in a White society everything that is given to us has a Eurocentric perspective that has historically been hostile to Black people."
Isn't the opposition to "attaching yourself to the circumstances you are given" what Lenore would call a J perspective?
Isn't the unstated but dominating premise that the self is defined by the community from which one originates what Lenore would call an Fe perspective?
"We as Black people never, therefore, get a root in ourselves, but focus instead on White peopletheir vision and accomplishmentsas the standard by which we judge our possibilities. Further, we are subtly and overtly taught that we can never measure up to them and achieve their level of accomplishments because, by nature, we are inferior beings."
Doesn't this passage combine an Fe assumption of group identity with an Ni attitude of describing, from the outside of a cultural vocabulary, an implicit and self-serving agenda of meaning that cannot be said from within that vocabulary?
"A new public school system should relate the curriculum to the self. When we see the curriculum as an outgrowth of self, then we can identify with the curriculum, giving us an incentive to learn. In the Muhammad University of Islam school system, our students learning is facilitated because they identify with the subjects. They are taught that they are the subject. They are taught, 'I am chemistry.' Not, 'I am a student of chemistry,' rather, 'I am biology. I am economics. I am history. I am mathematics.' When we relate the forces within self to the forces that lie outside the self, this connects us to subjects we are studying in a manner that we can ultimately master these subjects.
"Our bodies are controlled by the mind. So mastering economics should not be as difficult with this thought in mind. This body takes in and separates what is useful, puts it to productive use, and eliminates what is wasteful. Therefore, this body is economics and since I am the master of this body, I can master economics."
Doesn't this sound like something from EST or the Landmark Forum (presumably some leading examples of wacked-out ENTJ perspectives)? Saying strange things to yourself like "I am chemistry" in order to change your perceptions and thereby "master the universe" seems like classic Te/Ni: the mind held independent from reality, choosing categories and concepts to reprogram one's ways of responding to reality, rather than the Ti/Ne approach of building categories and concepts out of patterns found widely throughout reality. "I am chemistry" is not a discovery about chemistry: it's not a pattern of valences, atomic weights, reaction ratios, or anything found within the subject. It's a choice of words to impose onto the subject. Telling yourself that you "are" economics will make it easier to learn economics!! Isn't this pretty classic ENTJ "cult leader" talk?
Perhaps a heavily Extraverted perspective is in evidence throughout in the form of viewing the world as a place primarily of negotiation between competing interests. Other people try to define things to serve their purposes so you've got to define things to serve your purposes or you won't be able to push back. Could Farrakhan be preaching a classic EJ "stick to your guns" negotiation strategy?
Notice the syllogistic sophistry in the argument quoted above that starts with "The mind controls the body" and ends with "The mind can master economics." This is pure word-game reasoning, deductively corralling the conclusion by legalistic/verbal rules that address nothing of the difficulties in learning and understanding economics.
Isn't that kind of sophistry a little incongruous for someone with a developed Thinking perspective?
Perhaps this passage from Lenore explains how it could grow from a Ti attitude:
p. 295: "In the Renaissance, churches were deliberately constructed with the idea that their design and structure could align a worshipper's psyche with a deeper pattern of reality. The same principle lies behind the art in traditional Islamic institutions, whose lines and dimensions are meant to bring one into harmony with the perfect design of the cosmos."
So perhaps:
(1) Farrakhan's argument is not sophistry but a proposal of a theory: if you see how the body is chemistry, is economics, etc., your psyche would become "aligned" with these subjects. Once you're aligned with a subject, it becomes easier to learn.
(2) Lenore is saying that Introverted Thinking in general emphasizes learning by finding that "alignment". From a Ti perspective, you try to find "the groove" and ride along with it. If you're not on that groove, then all seems arbitrary and you stumble along clumsily.
Here is one of Farrakhan's most famous pieces of rhetoric, from his speech at the Million-Man March in 1995:
"There in the middle of this mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a 1 in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves.
"In the background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial. Each one of these monuments is 19 feet high. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, Thomas Jefferson the third president, and 16 and 3 make 19 again. What is so deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19, when you have a nine, you have a womb that is pregnant, and when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded.
"Right here on this mall where we are standing, according to books written on Washington, D.C., slaves used to be brought right here on this mall in chains, to be sold up and down the eastern seaboard. Right along this mall, going over to the White House, our fathers were sold into slavery. But George Washington, the first president of the United States, said he feared that before too many years passed over his head, this slave would prove to become a most troublesome species of property. Thomas Jefferson said he trembled for this country when he reflected that God was just and that his justice could not sleep forever.
"Well, the day that these presidents feared has now come to pass, for on this mall here we stand in the capital of America, and the layout of this great city, laid out by a black man, Benjamin Banneker, this is all placed and based in a secret Masonic ritual, and at the core of the secret of that ritual is the black man."
Perhaps the structure of this rhetoric is what Lenore has in mind when she calls it "not analytical but analogical". The premises are fairly clear: a bunch of factoids, mostly about various quantities that don't seem to have anything to do with each other. What is the conclusion? The conclusion is far from clear, but it seems to be that "the black man" is at the core of the design of America--that there is some sort of deep, purposeful, God-driven drama being played out in America, and these are various hints dropped by God about what the plan is.
Ignoring the absurdity of the ideas, the rhetoric might appeal to a first-hand perspective by appealing to the listener's ability to see a great many things in relation simultaneously: to "get", all at once, from a vast pattern, what is really going on. The conclusion cannot be stated or understood separately from the premises used to illustrate it or reach it. That could well be the distinguishing feature of Introverted Thinking as opposed to Extraverted Thinking]. The object of the rhetoric is to get listeners to "align themselves" with order found in the world: to see things in a certain way, and therefore think and therefore live in a certain way that is harmonious with that order.
(The Jamestown factoid is false, by the way. One of the best-known dates in U.S. history is 1607, the year settlers arrived in Jamestown.)
See just the numerological excerpts.
Perhaps Farrakhan is an ENTJ of the "cult leader" variety.
First of all, from a Myers-Briggs perspective, Farrakhan certainly comes across as an outgoing, high-energy fellow, though of course we only see him on stage, where even introverts usually appear Extraverted. Somewhere I found something on-line that suggests that Farrakhan lives a pretty structured, scheduled life, suggesting that he'd test J. (Sorry, I didn't keep the URL. --Ben Kovitz) That he'd test N and T seems apparent.
Second, the rhetoric is so nutty, so incoherent, that perhaps Farrakhan is simply giving people a snow job. The hypothesis proposed in this section is that Farrakhan's rhetoric shows secondary Ni supporting a Te agenda of grabbing and expanding social power. It would be Ni because Farrakhan chooses his words not to illustrate anything, not to point out anything in the world that might be enlightening, not to persuade by logic, but for reasons entirely unrelated to what his words refer to or their ordinary interpretations.
On this hypothesis, Farrakhan is choosing his words to sound sort of like a very complex, rational argument, logically assembling evidence that establishes that there is something big and conspiratorial and hidden going on, but of course this only fools people who lack a sense of logic and/or give him a very big benefit of the doubt. There is no clearly stated conclusion, because a clearly stated conclusion could conceivably be put to a test and possibly refuted. It's kept vague to create a sense that what he has to say is too big, too profound, to fit in words: any attempt to state the message clearly would only cheapen it.
All that sounds like pretty standard smoke-and-mirrors Ni/Se demagoguery as described in books like The 48 Laws of Power. Farrakhan is exploiting the connotations of words, the connotations of high-sounding language, to encourage his audience to enter a sort of mystic trance where they feel communion with ineffable truth. The hypnotic music of the words, not their denotation, is the point.
This also seems to fit his more didactic rhetoric, such as telling yourself nonsense like "I am economics" to make economics easier to understand.
Farrakhan has, of course, been a pretty formidable power player during most of his career, grabbing control of the Nation of Islam after Elijah Muhammad died, pushing Malcolm X out, and holding a devoted cult following in a relentless hypnotic grip.
A further aspect of Farrakhan's rhetoric is that the commitment with which he says it aloud is perhaps half the message. This could be tertiary Se: demonstrating one's ideas by making it viscerally clear that one is committed to them enough to play a very hard game of chicken. As if to say, "How could I be this committed if it wasn't true?" Or even, "True or not, if I'm this committed, you might be wise to toe the line." (I believe I've seen this a bunch in person from clear-cut ENTJ power-players. --Ben Kovitz)
Against the INTP hypothesis, don't most INTPs continually doubt what they come up with, continually revisit it from many angles [No, this is an Ni perspective, though it does hit Si and the intuitive subtype of Ti some, as well. Ti won't visit from many angles, but will continually pull back to see if what it is thinking/using/describing does really exist. Perspective is not the point, coherence to reality is (the laws of physics). -- Robert Evans], and seldom present a conclusion as definitively established by specific premises? Most profiles say that, and that's my (Ben Kovitz's) self-experience and experience with other INTPs. Also, breaking the referential connection between words and the things they stand for--using words for purposes other than pointing out--for example, using them to reprogram yourself by exploiting their connotations--is anathema to most INTPs. Most INTPs would feel called upon to point out the brazen illogic in Farrakhan's rhetoric. Then again, whatever type Farrakhan is, he's surely not a typical example.
It's hard to say whether the ENTJ or INTP theory better fits the facts of Farrakhan's rhetoric, though. He'd be an insane, perhaps hyperintroverted INTP if his rhetoric is sincere; if he's engaging in such wanton illogic knowingly, he'd be a deliberate deceiver taking a ruthless ENTJ attitude.
Perhaps the essence of Lenore's type guess is that Farrakhan's rhetoric encourages people to look outside the man-made law for solutions to their social problems, and to align themselves instead with a transcendent "natural law"--what Lenore might call "archetypal truths".
The natural law can only be understood through first-hand experience, but it is experienced as manifest in every day and every moment and is thought to be accessible to all rational beings. The natural law is not a contract to be signed--not a compromise among many people's interests to make social life definable and workable--but a natural order of things that transcends all personal interests. It is something to conform your personal interests to, not a framework within which to negotiate your personal interests in relation to other people. Whereas the man-made law is a contingent thing, ever shifting as people negotiate changes to it, the natural law is felt to be a "necessary truth", unchanging in its essence even as it appears in infinitely varied manifestations. This way of seeing things is the very essence of Ti, and it's how Ti leads one to form a moral code that "claims the whole self", calling you to duties above and beyond any socially agreed-upon moral code.
So Farrakhan the man may well be an ENTJ, in that he's decisive for empirical reasons that he could easily articulate (dominant Te) and proselytizes for some vision of how, by seeing beyond culturally defined options, we can release more of the infinity of the self (Ni). On this hypothesis, what Lenore is calling INTP is Farrakhan's (perhaps knowingly fraudulent) role in the public arena, "calling to account" the very social contract that binds us as a society--calling it to account by a higher standard, one that we can all perceive by noticing, for ourselves, patterns that exist all around us in our histories and cultures.
If this hypothesis is right, it would shed a lot of light on Lenore's conception of Psychological Type. A person's type would have almost nothing to do with their personality (despite the title of the book!). Rather, a person's type would be how they've "plugged into the social matrix": the role they are playing in relation to the shared vocabulary of their culture. Extraverts would be people whose self-definition is in terms defined by their culture; introverts would be people whose self-definition calls upon innate potentialities of self regardless of culture.
To take an Extraverted stand, then, would be to represent in some way the cultural consensus--what Lenore calls "consensual reality":
| • | Se: I will embody what looks attractive according to the standards of my culture. I will continually form and re-form my appearance so that people will recognize and appreciate me as current, up-to-date, "hip", "now". I will make an impression. I will have impact. |
| • | Ne: I will embody what is emerging within my culture: the unexpressed potential that is ready to burst forth and change the way my culture understands its options. I will be whatever is "outside the box" of whoever I'm with. I will always be just ahead of the curve--just a little beyond what can be known with certainty right now. |
| • | Te: I will embody the rules of causal predictability in terms of which my culture defines its agreements: sanctity of contract shall be my guiding principle. I will see to it that rewards and punishments are given fairly, according to agreements stated in measurable and objectively verifiable terms. I will be a promise maker and a promise keeper. |
| • | Fe: I will embody loyalty to my society, in visible forms that show to all that I'm not just out for myself. You will know at all times where I stand: where I stand is the people with whom I stand. |
To take an Introverted stand, then, would be to stand against or beyond the shared vocabulary of your culture:
| • | Si: I will keep faith to the hard, representable facts that are relevant to human survival, regardless of whether anyone else recognizes them. |
| • | Ni: I will seek what lurks in the shadows of my culture's vocabulary: that which cannot be said. I will arrive at a perspective independent of the private interests that maintain my culture's public vocabulary of signs, so I can use those signs for purposes that do not serve their intended interpretations. |
| • | Ti: I will align myself with the eternal natural order that provides a Law that transcends all man-made laws and authorities: I will learn to see the Law within the infinite forms of its manifestation. |
| • | Fi: I will align myself with the life force: I will learn to see in every living creature's actions the expressions of the unique needs of that creature, and honor them no differently from any other manifestation of the life force. |
The personality of someone who takes any of these attitudes could be almost anything at all. Any Dominant Function is compatible with being gregarious or shy, conceptual or practical, tough-minded or friendly, or scheduling or spontaneous, or indeed any other dimensions of personality that one might draw up.
Defined as above, there is little doubt that Farrakhan is taking an INTP stand. He primarily calls his society's laws and practices to account by reference to natural law (Ti) and presents himself as the representative of radical new changes in his society that will soon emerge when pent-up forces finally break through (Ne).
If he were taking a Te stand, he would say, no matter what you do, do not go outside the law: if you have problems with the law, you should negotiate a new agreement rather than take the law into your own hands. EJs by definition take the stand that if we all took the law into our own hands, we'd have nothing but people seeking their own interests in a way that dissolves society and law and order. There you have Lenore's basic Je/Ji conflict.
Perhaps this last hypothesis--that Lenore's type theory is not about people and their quirks but about how individuals plug into society--explains Jung as well. One of the most frustrating moments in Psychological Types is when he cacually tosses Charles Darwin and George Cuvier--surely two of the most obvious examples of INTPs in the Keirseyan, Myersian, Briggsian,... sense--into the Extraverted Thinking bucket with zero explanation. Actually he does give a reason: "because they speak with facts." Perhaps our "but... but... what about how Cuvier never saw a bone fragment he couldn't reconstruct an entire species from"-like protestations based on the nitty-gritty of their personalities are irrelevant. All that matters is their relationship to society in the grand scheme of things. Cuvier's greatest legacy (in spite of losing the catastrophism versus evolution debate with Darwin) is of course taxonomy, a system of buckets. Even though he developed this system of buckets with what we might describe as experiential, fromt-the-ground-up, iconoclastic reasoning we associate with Ti, the fact remains that Cuvier gave us the buckets we now teach high schoolers to stick animals in when they go on "field" trips to the zoo. I.e., he provided a Te service to society.
George Cuvier rebuttal (follow the link).
Other Jungianisms that make sense: basically classifying all women as Feeling.
Problem: why does Jung then talk about personality; e.g., Introverted Intuitives being pale, eccentric, irritable etc?
Yet another way to make sense of Farrakhan in terms of Lenore-attitudes might be ENTP. Farrakhan could be a black militant version of Johnny Carson's character Floyd R. Turbo.
The incoherence, blatant pseudo-logic, and willingness to toss out the speculative as if it were proven might actually be a fairly common way for undeveloped ENTPs to grab and hold attention. The "calling to account" and even the rhetoric that aims at alignment with an order that can't be described independently of the evidence for it, would be clear-cut Ti. The reason for the illogic--the sheer incompetence of the reasoning--would be that it's fairly undeveloped secondary Ti.
A problem with this hypothesis is that the cosmic order that Farrakhan preaches and tries to illustrate "analogically" is suggested to be morally binding, trumping all other concerns. That would a genuinely dominant-Ji attitude. Of course, preaching that other people should be bound by the cosmic moral code, while violating it oneself, is probably not unusual for ENTPs.
Would Developing the Secondary bring Farrakhan a less one-sided view of things, able to see things in (excuse the pun) less black-and-white terms? Able, perhaps, to see that his arguments do not establish his conclusions in so cut-and-dried a manner? Able to see beyond interracial conflict to the vast majority of things in life, which cannot be understood in terms of one person shoving his agenda onto another?
What form might Developing the Secondary take for Farrakhan?