We're socially constructed people in dire need of being true to ourselves
When kids learn about gender stereotypes, they usually love it – they see the acting, and they take it for what it is – good acting. So they jump into the part aswell, and soon, they’ve found themselves so immersed in it, they confuse themselves with their character. But every person has a depth deeper than the social construction, just as they have a social construction longer and more adaptable than their depth. Consider the social construction the hand that feeds us, and the personality to be the head that drives us to what we want to eat.
Male and female becomes ways to describe who we are and define ourselves. You may not like it, but people love good acting, they love systems. That’s why we have tons of systems out there. The socially constructed forms of gender, Astrology, Typology, Big Five, the ancient greeks theory on the four elements, auras, and hundreds more.
We’ve all developed these personas, and usually we carry quite a few different ones around, all set to either adapt to the groups values, or to shift them in some way we see fit. Roles are tools, not to be confused with personality. What the MBTI and Typology and Big Five does, is it measures our role, not our inner drive, behind it. It’ll still get far with it, because it matches something real, and our core drives affect how we play out our personas, because our core goals are still noticable behind it. But it also mistypes people, it gives you a type, and uses it to explain why you’re in the shit you’ve got yourself into, you’re a teacher, because you’re a teacher personality type, you’re poor, because you’re a.. poor personality type. You’re black.. because you’re black. Completely disregarding humans ability to adapt, and motivating social inequality and believing that people actually are able to detachedly say “I’m gonna be a teacher (because I’m a teacher personality)”, when for most people it’s more about adapting to and surviving to the requirements life puts on them.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference of where the hand begins and the head starts. And the personality systems out there often ignore this fact, because they have no response to it. A test won’t catch the real you, but yet the MBTI claims it does.
Poor people will say they need security and stability more than rich people, because they in fact.. do need security and stability. Because they worry about if they will be able to feed their family tomorrow. And what this tells us is – we’re adaptable people, in dire need of all four core values – both a system that works, values that tell us we matter, a story which tells us there’s a tomorrow, and a history which tells us we have a present and a past. But an Imaginative person without a Story to imagine, is like a writer without a pen. The apathy it brings, it’s saddening to read it in a person. An Experiencing person stuck in a story of the unknown, something they can’t see or touch, or experience, it’s all the same, it hurts a person not to be able to express themselves. And that wouldn’t be the case if we were all just walking social constructions, whilst things would appear to matter on the outside, they wouldn’t on the inside. But they do.
I read what’s behind the hand. People may claim I only read the construction, but if they’d take a minute to look, they’d see the difference. I read the foundation, and I know how to tell it apart from the building above it. And you can aswell. Just look, and if it resonates with you, reason with it, feel how it makes sense with your history, and imagine what it changes for how you view yourself, how you view others, how you view the world, and how you envision the future. That’s when it becomes real, when you’ve read yourself. Much more real than the MBTI description made it. Ofcourse, I’m just a student of this, and I do get things wrong, as it is human to, what I read however, is real, but how I interpret it, may be wrong. And that’s something you only learn by doing.
When people get read, sometimes they don’t really look, they don’t try to see it for themselves, so it just becomes “oh, this is cool.” – Just seeing what someone else says about you, won’t say anything about you, you have to look for yourself, aswell. People come to me for reads, but there’s truth to the saying, you shouldn’t just give the person a fish, you should teach them to fish. Or you’ll never solve their hunger.
My evidence for the foundation is that you can read too. It just takes a few minutes of focus to begin spotting the first general patterns. Finding the nuances takes more time, because there’s alot. And when you see it, you can’t unsee it. And all the personality systems out there try to describe it. They see it too, they just don’t know how to get it all the way down the rabbit hole. Their filter becomes a trap, it’s reads mistake people for their construction, and it’s assumptions are often completely outside how people really work.
This isn’t just about understanding people. If it was, I’d stop right now. Because for me, it’s all about understanding the story, the people, the system, and the history. I wanna get to know it all, and people help me on this path. We may kid ourselves it’s just about ourselves, or that we just want to make money, or that we just want to be happy, to have kids and family, but ofcourse, we want more than that.