I was talking with a Socionics friend the other day about something I had read that I thought was very Fi-valuing. It was a post criticizing the idea that science fiction used to be about hope and the advancements brought by a bright future. The post, by the way, was about a girl growing up reading classic scifi and feeling extremely uncomfortable about the way the futures that these writers were imagining all portrayed women as a definitively second-class citizen at best. The post talked about the frustration the reader felt that these forward-thinking writers couldn’t imagine a better society. It ended by mentioning a different post that was “criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder” and the author responded to that with: “No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.”
So that post was very Fi-centric to me, and made me feel uncomfortable. It forced me to think about how I disagreed. I felt that those classic scifi authors couldn’t conceive of such a societal change because they just weren’t interested in societal changes except as a result to technology. To me, classic scifi WAS about hope and thinking about future advancements and the sense of this boundless, endless human potential that was about to be harnessed in the world. Today’s hard scifi doesn’t do that; today’s hard scifi is much more dystopian and destructive and certainly not about hope and future advancement. And to me it is because it reflects this feeling that we have today in our culture of a sense of hopelessness and despair.
When I said this to Jesse, he said that there’s been a sense for him that since the turning of the millennium there’s been an experience of the loss of hope. We’ve had 9/11, the war on terror, the economic crash and recession, and more; and it’s reflected in our ever more dystopian media. He said there’s a kind of raw defensiveness and hopelessness to the way people today are conceptualizing their lives and sense of future, and that there seems to be no underlying confidence that things are going to work out for the best. The comfort and stability of the earlier ages seem to have left us.
That conversation left me thinking. To me, Socionics is a positive force in the world. It isn’t a powerful one necessarily because it has a small following, but it definitely is positive.
Socionics, in its way, is really about connection. It’s about understanding yourself and other people conceptually, about putting together a worldview in which people fit together in a certain way. In that sense I think Socionics is creative rather than disruptive. It does not seek to highlight the ways in which things don’t work socially. It seeks to explain how people may be given to thinking about things in certain ways, which can then lead to dissonance. Instead of being dystopian and hopeless, Socionics is more utopian and structured, in that it suggests a unified method that everyone can use to personally relate to everyone else.
This might be an especially Beta way of thinking about Socionics, because to me this thought pattern is really Ni+Ti. But I can see the way in which Socionics works passively against the background of a generalized sense of disconnect and hopelessness. It gives us tools to connect with others, and to replace hopelessness with understanding.
Socionics itself can be used as a tool for connection through understanding. Despite much internet controversy, I see it as generally a unifying system that brings people together under its umbrella. It not only gives you tools to dissect your relationships with others, it immediately removes many endemic issues of class, gender, and other forms of inequality by making space only for the functions of the type personalities. Instead of asking whether you share interests and values with a stranger--which can easily be a mask for questions of economic similarity and culture-specific values--it asks whether you share valued functions and the personal ways you each express them. That is what is most humanitarian about it, and I think at this point I couldn’t ask it to be more meaningful to me than that.
So that post was very Fi-centric to me, and made me feel uncomfortable. It forced me to think about how I disagreed. I felt that those classic scifi authors couldn’t conceive of such a societal change because they just weren’t interested in societal changes except as a result to technology. To me, classic scifi WAS about hope and thinking about future advancements and the sense of this boundless, endless human potential that was about to be harnessed in the world. Today’s hard scifi doesn’t do that; today’s hard scifi is much more dystopian and destructive and certainly not about hope and future advancement. And to me it is because it reflects this feeling that we have today in our culture of a sense of hopelessness and despair.
When I said this to Jesse, he said that there’s been a sense for him that since the turning of the millennium there’s been an experience of the loss of hope. We’ve had 9/11, the war on terror, the economic crash and recession, and more; and it’s reflected in our ever more dystopian media. He said there’s a kind of raw defensiveness and hopelessness to the way people today are conceptualizing their lives and sense of future, and that there seems to be no underlying confidence that things are going to work out for the best. The comfort and stability of the earlier ages seem to have left us.
That conversation left me thinking. To me, Socionics is a positive force in the world. It isn’t a powerful one necessarily because it has a small following, but it definitely is positive.
Socionics, in its way, is really about connection. It’s about understanding yourself and other people conceptually, about putting together a worldview in which people fit together in a certain way. In that sense I think Socionics is creative rather than disruptive. It does not seek to highlight the ways in which things don’t work socially. It seeks to explain how people may be given to thinking about things in certain ways, which can then lead to dissonance. Instead of being dystopian and hopeless, Socionics is more utopian and structured, in that it suggests a unified method that everyone can use to personally relate to everyone else.
This might be an especially Beta way of thinking about Socionics, because to me this thought pattern is really Ni+Ti. But I can see the way in which Socionics works passively against the background of a generalized sense of disconnect and hopelessness. It gives us tools to connect with others, and to replace hopelessness with understanding.
Socionics itself can be used as a tool for connection through understanding. Despite much internet controversy, I see it as generally a unifying system that brings people together under its umbrella. It not only gives you tools to dissect your relationships with others, it immediately removes many endemic issues of class, gender, and other forms of inequality by making space only for the functions of the type personalities. Instead of asking whether you share interests and values with a stranger--which can easily be a mask for questions of economic similarity and culture-specific values--it asks whether you share valued functions and the personal ways you each express them. That is what is most humanitarian about it, and I think at this point I couldn’t ask it to be more meaningful to me than that.
