Hm.

[yvannairie]

There's a post going around about the racist, eugenicist origins of MBTI and I've passed it by without reblogging or commenting on it b/c like. Yeah, acknowledging the fucked up origins of my special interest might be the responsible thing to do, but at the same time this is a thing that makes me happy and gives me something to let my thinking revolve around as a way to make myself happy,

and I feel like self-flagellating about how I didn't know I was perpetuating something "bad" would... just be kinda performative, because I am not gonna stop engaging in MBTI analysis, I enjoy it too much, I'm just gonna treat it even more like horoscope when applied to real people and stop bringing it up as a conversation opener.

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

If you're interested, hbomberguy has a great video essay about why people may find personal meaning in things with problematic origins (and especially origins that are problematic in a way which specifically has Implications for the person finding meaning in it). The video essay itself relates more to fiction and specifically to reinterpretations of HP Lovecraft's stories, but its overall message is very compelling and says a lot of really good things about the function of relating to things and enjoying them which I think would also be up your alley.

[yvannairie]

The irony of ironies, I've actually sworn off HBG b/c the Paperlion drama soured me on him and made me untrustworthy of any statements relating to personal responsibility :'DD But, no yeah, I actually agree with that broadly, this post originally had an appended explanation that I learned about MBTI through my analysis of fictional characters, and further talked about how it's more useful to me as a self-knowledge tool, which is how I also relate it to other people, and some of my history with MBTI analysis with my friend, which we used to explore, contrast and better understand each other. There's a lot of stuff I've "learned" through MBTI that I can phrase into normal people-ese pretty easily now, but when I'm approaching a new problem, I like going back to the words that taught me how to think about it.

But after having typed that.... I realised I don't actually have to justify why something resonates with me. That's the self-flagellation urge talking -- if I start trying to talk circles around what I wanna talk about, trying to make sure nobody can interprete what I say in an eugenicist way I'm never gonna be able to talk about the things I want. That interpretation, for those whom MBTI is inseparable from its origins, is gonna come up, and it's much more useful for me to just accept tbat, and if necessary explain my thinking open.

FTR, the way I learned about MBTI? Never really assigned "values" to the various traits, because it was used as a character-building tool. It's kind of like an abstracted version of those pictures with vice-virtue scales that you're supposed to place the character on, and everything I've read since has emphasised that literally any function overly dominant is going to make someone an asshole, and that in reality all people have the same capability to utilise the different fuctions, and failing to recognise that will end with you treating grown-ass people like toddlers. I've always found that a very pro-ND stance, b/c my linearly-thinking arse got infantilised a lot, and the idea that I have the capability to be a full person regardless of what traits dominate my behaviour is the reason MBTI analysis is so dear to me.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

(You obviously don't have to watch the video--I'm just going to talk about it because I think it's great and makes a lot of relatable points.)

One of the premises for the video essay is that fiction is a reflection of reality, and that sometimes pieces that aren't intentionally created to comment upon a specific real world thing end up becoming apt metaphors, simply because fiction which is distant from some topic allows us the emotional space to think about that topic. In the case of non-fictional non-media like MBTI, I would argue that it functions the same way--while it's not reality itself that people can fit into a calculable box and be highly predictable based on that, it reflects a kind of reality that people experience, which is that people have different traits, and traits may conflict with traits that others have and may guide their owner's personalities or behaviors. Having MBTI as a framework for understanding the complexities of other people can make it easier to conceptualize actual things about them, much in the same way that people who don't understand class analysis might be able to understand an extended metaphor about vampirism which then gets related back to the bourgeoisie (one of the examples in the video about fiction which becomes a reflection for reality).

The ultimate purpose of the video is to understand why queer people like Lovecraft's work despite him being a raging racist, homophobe, and bigot in life (and having that bigotry reflected blatantly in his work). And to those who don't understand why those queer fans see in the work, it just seems like hypocrisy or a disjoint or a contradiction. But hbomb speculates that it's because of Lovecraft's themes of being an outsider to society, such that when horrible monsters appear, it's almost underwhelming compared to the horror of Otherness and being a stranger to an unwelcoming world. It's a pretty classic example of how people would be able to see meaning and truth reflected back at them through the lens of things that are explicitely meant to be problematic.

(non-hbomberguy paragraph) The interpretation of MBTI that you learned from sounds really cool and definitely perverts the origins of it in a way that makes it useful and enjoyable by people who eugenicists would hate. It's super common to feel like every single thing that has even the slightest problematicism to it needs to be defended if it has even the slightest utility to it, and it gets really tiring having to say over and over "yes, the original thing was problematic, but there are different ways now of viewing it and understanding it." People who hate an original source so viscerally will seek to dismantle every possible iteration and reinterpretation of it, to the point where we can't have anything even remotely functional anymore, because somehow it goes back to something racist or sexist or ableist in history. But maybe in the same ways that fanfiction can be transformitive and undermine a source material's intent while making the most of its redeeming bits, it should be possible for People Who Like Things to be allowed to enjoy Problematic things which nonetheless speak to them. If somebody likes something which is seemingly at a disjoint with their own identity, they're probably already aware of that dissonance and have their own means of "resolving" it (if it even needs to be resolved!) and don't need a third party saying "by the way, you shouldn't like that thing you like."

[yvannairie]

Yep, yep, yep, you've got my feelings down on it pat. I have seen MBTI used the way people talking about its racist origins talk about and my neurodivergent arse has always been like "YOU DON'T GET IT" because they're leaving half of the most interesting implications of the theory on the table, just like the idiot racists who designed it did.

But also -- I honestly just think self-flagellating about the bad implications of the thing I like (or the bad implications of something anyone else did, I literally just got into an argument with a friend over whether it's okay to endlessly hold one bad-taste joke over someone's head) is actually detrimental to analysing what those bad implications are and how we might go about either alleviating them, reframing them, or questioning them. The damage from me applying it without being aware of the eugenicist agenda behind it has already been done, essentially, if I get hung up on that instead of continuing to analyse the way I use MBTI to structure the world around myself to see a) what kinda damage I did and b) how to not do it in the future.

I've always found perpetually bringing up the badness of something a distraction. Does it matter? How is it relevant? Is it more worth my time to keep thinking about ways to weed out unconscious racist bias from myself rather than keep repeating "I know this thing is racist in origin, but--"