Boethius

So the heuristic you're applying is that the credentialed experts (writers for Psychology Today, for instance) are in general (even if not complete) agreement that MBTI is not good, in some way or another. Horse shit, one might say. I personally would say that that actually is a pretty good heuristic to apply when you're trying to figure out what are the reasonable things in the world to believe. It's an approach you may over time find to be lacking in nuance (which is why I spent time commenting on continuous vs discrete models of personality and provided links to articles that go into detail on the nature of the criticisms of MBTI). But as heuristics go, it is a good one to start with, and by the sounds of it that is one of the heuristics you are applying in helping yourself to understand the world.

The meanings of these words is shifting as our society engages with the ideas of Social Justice and as we start to center the voices of the marginalized. Here, for example, is a recent article by The Guardian on racist jokes as a form of gaslighting: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2020/mar/12/its-time-to-put-an-end-to-the-gaslighting-that-occurs-every-day-in-australia

I thought at the beginning of this thread you said you don't know anything. By the sounds of it you know everything! By the way, the Areo Magazine article has author "Laith Al-Shawaf, Ph.D. is a researcher and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado". But if you want a different article on MBTI you could try https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/my-brothers-keeper/202002/in-defense-the-myers-briggs

This is a good article on MBTI: https://areomagazine.com/2021/03/09/should-you-trust-the-myers-briggs-personality-test/ The criticisms are mainly philosophical ones about the personality model being discrete rather than continuous (at the Big 5 and HEXACO are). Thinking about introvert vs extrovert I think clarifies the issue. For people who are extremely introverted, learning that one is an introvert can help make a lot of sense of oneself. But for people who are in the middle of the introversion/extroversion spectrum, discovering you're in the middle may well say little of great value about you. This seems like a problem that's unavoidable when discrete models of personality are based on continuous spectra (as MBTI is). I'm not sure what to make of this myself, other than the ambiguous statement that some people find MBTI useful (those that hew to a particular personality type) whereas others don't (those who are on the boundary between different personality types & perhaps those who belong to the most common personality types?) Maybe we have to consider what is the purpose of personality tests in the first place, what are we hoping for them to tell us about ourselves. In any case, it is not as simple as "science has proven MBTI to be false".

OK. So what does racial healing look like to you?

I wouldn't tell a rape joke to a woman, a dead baby joke to a person who experienced miscarriage, a 9/11 joke to a person who lost a loved one in the collapse of the towers, an AIDS joke to a gay man, or a racist joke to a person of color. I can't imagine any of those people would appreciate hearing such a joke from me. Besides that, this just feels like a no-brainer to me: racist jokes perpetuate racism. I have a POC friend who was hearing racial jokes from some "friends" of his and he gently let them know he found their "jokes" to be offensive. They responded with "we're just joking, don't take it so seriously". Which is really just a way of saying "too bad, we don't care how you feel about our jokes". He chose to disengage from those people and reports being happier for it.

GREEN: Prior to 2015 I would read a political or cultural article that had been written by a conservative and find myself agreeing with them in part, but then I would ask "what is their position on marriage equality?" I'd go to their wikipedia page and find their stance on marriage equality was bigotted, actively opposed, or just non-supportive, and then I would say to myself "well, who cares what they have to say about anything". And so I'd just ignore the things they had to say that I kind of agreed with. It was very tribal for me, as a gay man, since I felt a great sense that I didn't "belong" in the society at large and that society wasn't designed for people like me. So I was playing for Team Blue (i.e. Democrats) and was willing to adopt Blue logic, talking points, perspectives, etc, in order to advance the position of the Democratic party. YELLOW: That changed for me after Obergefell vs Hodges came down in June 2015 ratifying marriage equality throughout the United States of America. And after seeing the White House lit up in the colors of the gay pride flag! The very emotional issues around belonging started to lose salience for me. And so I became comfortable in engaging more thoroughly with the perspectives of conservatives (even social conservatives!) without great regard for their position on marriage equality. As I became more interested in hearing what they had to say and more accepting that I agreed with them on different things (more things than I would have been willing to accept prior to 2015, that's for sure!) I started to feel like I was deprogramming myself from some sort of a "cult" -- the cult of liberal politics, I suppose. I started to become angry at myself, at others, and at the Democratic party for only allowing a limited set of perspectives and voices to be representative of the whole. In fact, since I was so vocal about this discontent of mine, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people I've spoken to over the last few years would describe me as a conservative, as confused, or as both! I "walked away" from the Democratic party as a way of escaping the trap of tribal identification though I never gave any realistic consideration in voting Trump. I became an Independent (along with 40% of all other Americans, as I like to tell people). TURQUOISE: Something I started struggling with in late 2020, however, is that even though the issues are complicated, multi-layered, and ridiculously nuanced, does anyone really care to hear "my take" on any given situation? Does anyone need to hear Boethius' view on the political calculations behind defunding the police, for example, or his assessment of all of the wonky policy details that would lie behind such an initiative? Probably not. So it's like, how can I appreciate the complexity of these issues (personally) while talking to people who remain committed to seeing the world through a Blue pair of goggles or a Red pair of goggles. It probably requires having some incredibly holistic sense of what my goal is in discussing politics in the first place and then secondly having a realistic sense of how I am situated as a participant in the larger political conversation. With the understanding that most people don't want to hear most of my thoughts on most of the subjects as a humbling tool in helping me get my footing. So it seems to me that I'm leaving Yellow (knowledge elitism) and moving into Turquoise (relational intimacy?) with my current understanding of political conversation. But maybe that's all just a bunch of ego, who knows....

My focus is on helping to bring healing to the 400+ years of oppression against people of color and against Black folk especially. I suppose it does involve some guesswork as to how to do so effectively and without centering myself in the conversation. But I am grounded in my intention to be helpful, and so I'm comfortable in "feeling out" the best approach for moving the conversation forward. Now, what is your intention when engaging in conversation around race/racism?

It's a problem because you keep making yourself the center of a conversation on race/racism. And you do so while engaged in conversation with a biracial woman (Etherial Cat) who has repeatedly expressed frustration about how you're not "getting it". Instead you keep re-directing attention back to how good of a person you are. The goodness of your personal character is not the focus of this thread's conversation; white fragility is the focus. So congratulations on working to make sure you treat people of color with the same amount of dignity and respect as you accord to white people. Truly. It sounds that like that's been a very heartfelt goal of yours. Now a good next step may be to learn about systemic injustice and to practice "decentering yourself" from conversations about racism. Good luck ?

Do you hope for the return of Christ this century?

I see in a previous comment that you refer to POC as "colored people". And you write that we need to "crack down" on a good portion of the "colored" community. Not sure how you look yourself in the mirror in the morning.

In an earlier comment you said your goal is to return to the state of childhood innocence you had before you became "acquainted" with the n word. Even if you were successful in doing that, it would do nothing to help solve problems like the sort of policing that Black communities receive, the quality of schools that Black children are attending, the likelihood that employers call up candidates who have "Black sounding" names, etc. This is the sort of thing that is meant by "systemic racism". It is racism that is embedded in the systems that govern the various sectors of our society (school, employment, law). Again, it sounds like your focus is on interpersonal racism -- the racism that occurs between a Black person and a white person who are in conversation with each other. Working on healing interpersonal racism is an important and noble goal, but it does not address the problems of systemic racism in any direct way.

If you recognize that racism is a systemic problem, then why would you write "But to me, in my mind, what matters is what kinda person you are not the color of your skin"? If all people in society (magically) adopted that view of things tomorrow, it would not in itself solve the systemic problems.

@EddieEddie1995 I come from a pretty troubled extended family myself, so I see a lot of my cousins and my dad as being at red/blue. If I'm looking to hang out with one of my cousins and smoke some weed, then I know I can expect a fun time. But I would not trust them to help me in making big life decisions -- they seem to have enough difficulty in balancing their own life issues. I love them, but there's definitely a (class) divide there.

It sounds like you think racism is a merely interpersonal problem. If that were the case, then treating people decently and compassionately regardless of their race, ethnicity, or immigration status would be a good solution. But what you are missing, by the sounds of it, is that racism is also a cultural, institutional, and especially systemic problem. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, which is why the color-blind approach does not work. If you want to be an ally to POC then you need to become attuned to these other dimensions of racism and then start thinking about how you want to fight against those manifestations of racism.

People who are centered at the red or red/blue stages in our contemporary society have generally experienced a lot of childhood abuse/trauma. So I'm thinking about people who are prone to criminality, drug or alcohol addiction, and violence. So "trouble" is the word that comes to mind, even as I try to have sympathy for the background conditions that cause people to be stuck at that stage of development.

Nihilists are people who have succesfully deconstructed whatever religion, worldview, or philosophy they were given as children, but have not gone all the way down the path of deconstruction since they have yet to deconstruct themselves. What I mean is that if you deconstruct the views you were given and then deconstruct your own deconstruction of those views then you come to a place of finding what it is that you truly believe. What you believe in your bones, what you believe in your marrow, what you believe with every breath you take. That's not to say that you will be able to prove that what you believe to be true is objectively true or should be regarded as being true by everyone else. But at that point you will be able to make a committment to those things you deeply understand as being true, and questions about how you know them to be true will fall away since your knowing will occur at a much deeper level. That is, you will have something of a dual committment to honoring those things you understand to be true while also working towards establishing the reasonableness of your beliefs. You will have a way of steering safely in between the Scylla of pure rationality and the Charybdis of pure intuition. Or at least those are my own two cents as a person who has come to a place of deep religious committment! It may well be the case that a person with Eastern inflected views, for example, would have a different understanding of these issues.

And I would suggest that us white people do in fact have a racial identity, it's just rooted in defensiveness around the topic of race/racism. It's amazing how often white people get defensive when I (neutrally) bring up a topic like police brutality, for instance. You would think we could all agree that police brutality is wrong and that Black communities deserve the same quality of policing as predominantly white neighborhoods receive, and yet in my experience white people tend to take the issue personally, as if they were being asked to somehow "betray" their own individual selves by agreeing that police brutality is bad. Maybe it's the fact of my bringing it up in the first place that somehow leads to the defensive reaction, I don't know. I'm starting to think that a really good way for us whites to determine what our own personal racial identity looks like is to observe how we talk with other white people about race. I will say that I personally try to "advance" the progressive understanding about racial issues (that Black people have been suffering under 400+ years of systematic oppression and that us white people should try to do what we can to undo that legacy) but that I get timid about it when I sense my friends are pushing back against what I'm saying. I also live in upstate NY, which is a hotbed of racism, so I'm not surprised when I hear white people talk about "undeserving blacks" who are benefiting from affirmative action and so forth. It's uncomfortable knowing that a lot of my white acquaintances have views I would probably find to be either objectionable or grotesque should we really plumb the topic of race together. But of course POC must feel even more uncomfortable with this fact and I am in a better/safer position than they are to try to "educate" white people on these issues. I don't know, except to say that it's difficult even for a white person who is in fact trying to help "end racism" and that there is a lot of room for me to grow in talking about these issues with other white people.

Long terms consequences of covid: fatigue, headaches, vertigo, difficulties with cognition, difficulties with cardiorespiratory fitness. So why would you want to take the risk of contracting coronavirus and dealing with long term consequences? Get vaccinated.

So you're a "new" member and every single one of your posts so far has been racially iffy at best. In fact, at your 7th post you're already discussing the IQ of Africans. If you're not a person who was banned in the past (and here under a new name) I won't be surprised to see you get banned soon. As I recall from summer of last year, the moderators has a very limited amount of patience for race baiting.

@Carl-Richard Thanks for that deconstruction! I guess I was hopeful that dialogue was still possible even if debate wouldn't work. And yeah, the ego involved is obnoxious. I guess the sort of "procedural reasoning" that Orange employs is really meant to lead to only one valid conclusion. Or at least this is true when starting from a fixed set of priors (which of course are always unstated and under-examined). So maybe we shouldn't expect anything more from people who aren't willing to analyze their priors. @Gidiot I'm glad my thoughts were helpful ?

@Emerald Thank you for sharing! I'm reading a book right now that takes white shame (rather than guilt) as the central feature of whiteness: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Be-White-Money-America/dp/0826412920/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=learning+to+be+white&qid=1616696886&sr=8-2 It's written by the (Black female) UU minister Thandeka, and is a really empathetic heartfelt exploration of that idea, in case anyone is curious.

I engaged very extensively in the youtube comments to that video. In the end, I'm not sure it was worth it or what motivated me to engage (I guess a general annoyance with the casual use of the word "mysticism" as a slur). But it did help me get a better sense of how to draw different lines on a variety of different topics so it might be of interest to take a look at the back and forth. One thing I really didn't have a sense of before engaging is the shape that Orange's ego tends to take in discussions around spiritual topics: it's like Orange wants to be convinced about the reality of spiritual topics but only on its own terms. So show Orange the relevant scientific studies, was a common request! Or Orange is willing to entertain things like "infinite consciousness" or "God" so long as you can point to some specific phenomena (that is an object) in the world that corresponds to "infinite consciousness" or "God". Well, the request to do so is clearly self-refuting: if infinite consciousness could be analyzed as something occurring outside of oneself then it wouldn't be something for a person to experience, and if God could be turned into an object of scientific analysis then there would be no possibility of worshipping God. So yeah, Orange tends towards arrogance in its own unique way and there isn't the possibility of discussing the world with Orange except in ways that are very objectifying and instrumental (it makes one wonder whether Orange is even capable of talking authentically about Love, quite honestly!)

I haven't delved into Leo's videos on quantum consciousness, but just based on my own journey I have two thoughts on the topic of "quantum mysticism": I'm not sure that a non-dual mystic has much to teach a physicist about quantum mechanics. It's entirely possibly the mystic does have something to teach the physicist, but I would want to see an actual conversation between the two before making such an assertion. On the other hand, I do believe that the science of quantum mechanics is capable of shedding quite a bit of light on the experience of non-dual states of consciousness and altered states of perception. I imagine the creator of the video shared above would look at the reporting of such experiences as either a bunch of BS or as a "malfunctioning" brain, but neither explanation truly accounts for those experiences in anything like a scientific manner.

When we think of ourselves as centered at Green or Yellow or Turquoise or whatever, how do we know that our belief is rooted in reality and that we are not in fact just centered in Orange and thinking of Spiral Dynamics as some sort of a competition that we *must* win? Perhaps the idea of "advancing up the levels" is itself Orange to the core.