The Third Party Vote: Optionality

Just a short one today. I'm trying to cultivate the discipline of writing more.


I have written quite a few posts (they remain perennially the most popular entries on the blog) about the Myers-Briggs personality profile and being an INTP. It's 2020 now, and personality tests are not a trendy topic compared to when I started writing here, but I have found they continue to be a topic of interest on instagram, which has many channels devoted to MBTI.

Apparently there is a smaller but dedicated Korean MBTI community?

One stereotype of INTPs, frequently mentioned in those instagram posts on the topic, is that INTPs lack motivation. More specifically, the motivation is all focused on information gathering, and not on "getting out there and doing things." As far as I can tell this is true; I find myself naturally drawn to gathering and systematizing information to further complete a "theory of everything," which feels like an autotelic and all-absorbing occupation, whereas I often have to make to-do lists and try to cultivate good habits and drink coffee and cue up the right playlists at the right times to spur myself on to being productive and making progress on other kinds of goals. (Such as anything involving paperwork)

So coming from someone who struggles less to see things worth doing and more in summoning the willpower to accomplish some subset of them, a technique I find helpful is the one I want to explain briefly in this post.

An Embarrassment of Motivational Riches

There's a lot of good self-motivation material out there for free nowadays. If the motivation you lack can truly be supplied by anything external to yourself, YouTube has hundreds of hours of different styles and flavors of gifted speakers and accomplished people urging you to get out there and do something, to get up off the mat and overcome whatever is holding you back, to break your larger goals down into small enough steps that you can get started immediately, etc.

I enjoy a good Tom Bilyeu or Jocko Willink interview myself, and have gleaned some valuable puzzle pieces about how life and people work from some of the very accomplished people featured there, which I find ways to apply to my ministry work. (While recognizing the goals being discussed on that and other channels are usually very "this-worldly," if an observation is true then it's true, and truth works cross-platform)

In terms of self-motivation, self-improvement, "hustling/getting after it" and that whole milieu, Solomon tells us that chasing after material wealth isn't worth it; not only because a love for money can lead to all kinds of evil, but that it's simply not worth exhausting yourself for a lifetime for what you can't take with you and what other people may spend badly after you're gone.

(Yet that truth doesn't conflict with the true observation that "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit." Scripture also informs us that, generally speaking, when the righteous are diligent, they will also be prosperous, and this is considered a good thing, and society as a whole benefits.)

However many people have goals other than wealth; you may need motivation to work off that extra quarantine weight, to get skill certification and move into a new career path, or simply to accomplish that thing you've put off for two years already. But what about when that motivation is balanced more or less equally by our lack thereof?

"The Third Party Vote"

The 2016 election was a surreal experience, perhaps even more so to watch from overseas. One interesting thing to watch on FB was how people who were not excited about either choice mostly fell into two camps: either "lesser of the two evils" or "if we'd all just vote third party, it would solve this." Both camps had weak points which the other side pointed out, but the third party advocates were tenacious and I expect to see some of them back soon for election season 2020.

In trying to motivate ourselves to do a difficult or unpleasant task, we tend to fall into a similar dilemma. Not moving towards our goal is a bad option, but the effort or drudgery or willpower-expenditure involved is demotivational. We thus are trapped between two things we don't want: not making any progress, and some amount of suffering required to make progress.

In this situation, with one vote for progress yet one vote against it, we can benefit from a third vote. In this case, not a vote for a third party, but a vote by a third party. There is a third party involved in the decision, and we seldom give them a vote.

That third party is us, after we've made that progress and arrived at a different place. The you that has run the miles or applied for the grant or rearranged the shop or memorized the scripture passage. The you that now has increased optionality because you've put in the work to get there.

Give the third party involved in your decisions a vote...

Optionality, and the Coronavirus

Optionality is a topic I have not discussed at any length on the blog, though it is an integral part of the theory of Antifragility which I have mentioned quite a few times.

I will probably do a whole post on optionality in the future. For now let's consider it at a basic level--having worked to have more options at your disposal.

The coronavirus situation has caused untold economic damage and personal suffering in the US, partly because of a lack of optionality. Setting aside conspiracy theories to the contrary, the US healthcare system wasn't prepared to handle this kind of pandemic, and thus could only react in an extreme way (since nothing was in place to react at varying levels of extremity as appropriate), yet that meant both federal and state governments could only scramble to obtain resources for this kind of extreme reaction, for which there was no SOP (standard operating procedure) already in place. Hospitals couldn't obtain the supplies they needed and were under contrary instructions on what to do. It was most crudely effective shock test to the system imaginable (one the system failed badly) and yet new revised figures emerging all suggest it was a merciful one.

By contrast the optionality provided by things like more local manufacture of health supplies, a pandemic SOP and agreed-on chain of command, experience of previous pandemics, a smaller population size with fewer international points of entry, etc. helped Taiwan respond to the virus quickly and effectively. It is to be hoped that with the experience of 2020, the US federal and state governments, as well as the American populace, will know better how to respond. Some optionality will have been earned through experience, though at immense cost.

Optionality shows up in people's individual responses to the pandemic and quarantine as well. Some people with sufficient savings were in a position to "pivot" and use the unexpected time at home profitably, whereas those who depended on a weekly income were sorely hurt by the mandatory business closures and shelter-in-place orders. As the weeks drag on, some have even re-opened their shops in defiance of state governments, trying to provide for themselves and their employees with no other source of income. Their situation didn't leave them with any other options.

We can see examples of optionality in scripture, and the woman described in Proverbs 31 is an impressive example:

"She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come." (v25) 

She can laugh because she has worked hard, become a strong person, and knows she has options regardless of what may come. This is not only a question of material security because of all her "side gigs" (weaving, etc) as they'd say on some of those YouTube channels. Her hard work and the strong character she has developed, not to mention her position in the community and acts of charity, all work to secure her against future hardship. One given example is that she is not afraid of a cold winter, for she and her children already have warm clothes (v21-22).
I'm sure with little effort you can imagine various modern parallels. What does "laughing at the days" to come look like in 2020? Among other things, it certainly means setting your faith on a firm foundation and investing effort in doing lots of those things that are difficult, un-fun, yet give you good optionality in the future when you'll probably need it.

Conclusion: Vote for Optionality!

I said at the beginning that this would be short, and I'm rapidly failing to achieve that goal. So, let's wrap things up by combining this concept of optionality with the idea of a third vote: When caught in that balanced-dilemma moment of trying to decide whether or not to tackle a task you don't feel any motivation to complete, rather than just comparing the yes vote of our current level of motivation against the no vote of the effort and/or hardship involved and letting things stagnate there, try giving a third vote to that future self, who is in a place of better optionality due to your invested effort and time. If it's 2 vs 1, do it. You will thank yourself retrospectively from the future.

An INTP on the Mission Field - Wormtongue or Elrond?

Returning to the INTP series...

Back when I set out on my journey to the mission field, I noticed that there were not many people of my personality among my fellow travelers. To be sure, not all were extroverts, and my seminary was known for attracting former engineers. To be an INTP is not merely to be an introvert, however, but to be very interested in certain things few other people find compelling, and find real challenges in certain tasks most people find routine. That's true of every personality in one area or another, but for INTPs that tends to play out in ways that don't mesh naturally with the missionary lifestyle. It doesn't mean incessant navel-gazing or a robotic inability to empathize with others, but it does mean social energy is a resource that must be conserved wisely, and some time away to ponder the theory of everything (preferably in a high-altitude spot with a good view but also shade) is necessary every so often.

While I have written in the past about the specific struggles of being an INTP or my own experiences of working on the mission field as an INTP, today I want to challenge INTPs in a certain way which certainly doesn't only apply to INTPs. (Even you Enneagram people will get something out of it) To do that, we're going to first look at two well-known characters from the Lord of the Rings:

Grima Wormtongue: The Deceitful Hoarder

In the Rohan plotline of the Lord of the Rings hexalogy, we meet the subversive character of Grima Wormtongue. He is a servant of Saruman who is sabotaging Rohan from within while Saruman's forces ravage it from without. Grima is portrayed in a compelling way by Brad Dourrif in the Peter Jackson trilogy, although he's more Tim-Burtonesque than what I saw in my mind's eye reading the books. He wouldn't be a very effective tool of evil if his appearance and wardrobe screamed "tool of evil", and to some extent we've all been falsely trained by Hollywood to think evil looks like that in real life. Here the words of Lewis in his preface to Screwtape ring true:

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

Whatever his appearance, Grima is a subtle and dangerous opponent, as Gandalf observes. After Gandalf arrives at Edoras and breaks Saruman's spell over Theoden, Grima is (somewhat surprisingly, in the context of the story at that point) spared and given a horse to leave. Even at that point, the soldiers of Rohan seem to view him more with contempt than fear, not comprehending how much damage he has done. Theoden does not order him executed but gives him the option to show loyalty or be exiled. In the end he spits on that offer and runs off to join Saruman.

Grima Wormtongue's story has many interesting parallels to Smeagol/Gollum:
- Both are characters who serve the cause of evil individually for their own reasons, and both are bound to their masters by means other than force (Gollum due to his enslavement to the ring Frodo bears, Grima due to fear and guilt).
- Both also "lose" precious magical artifacts: Gollum literally loses his precious, Sauron's ring of power, and Grima loses a palantir (magical seeing-stone) for Saruman by hurling it out of Orthanc at the protagonists assembled below. 

- Both were originally good or at least neutral, and in choosing evil consistently became twisted into something unlike their original selves. (Gandalf says to Theoden about Grima: "once it was a man, and did you service in its fashion.") 

- In the end, both characters are spared when they could have been executed, and eventually attack their master for more or less the very reason they've been serving them. (Gollum when ring-lust overcomes him, and Grima when his fearful hatred finally tips to the side of hatred). 

- In another odd connection, Grima is actually killed by roused-up Hobbits who are taking the Shire back after he snaps and kills Saruman with a knife. (In the movie version which dispenses with this part of the story and moves Saruman's death to a much earlier scene, Grima is shot by Legolas)

Also similar to Smeagol/Gollum, Grima is a thief (who likes to accuse others to hide his own guilt): His crimes are not only limited to spying for Saruman and functioning as a sort of proxy by which Saruman's corroding influence on Theoden can be locally amplified (whether very obviously in the films, or more subtly in the books); he is actively working for the downfall of Rohan in whatever ways he can, and this extends to pilfering and thieving as well.

Grima apparently acted partly out of greed; Saruman had promised him spoils after what he assumed was his inevitable victory, which possibly included Eowyn as well (I may not be alone in thinking in that case victory would have ended Grima faster than defeat did). Apparently he had begun this spoil-taking preemptively: When Grima is forced to retrieve Theoden's sword, it is remarked that "many things men have missed" are found in the trunk where he had stashed the sword away. This is purposefully not elaborated upon by Tolkien, but one assumes that the various other things are items of real or symbolic strength which have been stolen away by Grima. Ahead of Saruman's assumed victory, he couldn't keep his hands off of the most valuable things he could find when the opportunity to steal them away and hoard them presented itself. 

Elrond of Imladris: The Wise Giver

Let us now consider an extremely different character in LotR: Elrond the Half-elven, Lord of Rivendell (called Imladris by the elves)

It wouldn't be helpful here to spend lots of time on Elrond's backstory, so let's summarize by saying Elrond and his brother Elros were born back in the Elder days, the children of a rare and specific High Elf/Historically Important Human marriage. They were given the option to choose their fate, whether to be Elven or Human (in Tolkien's world the afterlife works differently for the two groups, so being "mixed" wasn't an option), and Elrond chose to be of the elven kind, later becoming Lord of Rivendell, important to the plot of both the Hobbit and LotR, and holding one of the three Elven great rings. (His brother chose to be human and founded Numinor, of which Aragorn is the last descendant of the line of kings.) 

Rivendell/Imladris is an interesting place; in the Hobbit it is treated a bit more lightly, with elves singing in trees and Elrond the sage leader of a "homely house" at the edge of wilderland, who primarily helps the Dwarves figure out a map. In the Lord of the Rings and connected works it is described further as one of the three major strongholds of the Elves in Middle Earth, alongside the Shipyards which protect the elves access to the journey west across the Sundering Seas to the Undying Lands, and Galadriel's woodland stronghold of Lothlorien. Rivendell is important enough that it is mentioned in Tolkien's additional writings that Sauron had been hoping to mobilize Smaug and the goblin armies of the north against it, had Smaug not been taken out by Bard in the events of The Hobbit and Dale subsequently re-established as a stronghold that eventually limited Sauron's northern campaign.

Rivendell is described by Bilbo, who ends up living there long term after his departure from the Shire, as "a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all." It is the only place Aragorn could call home, the place where the shards of Narsil were preserved as revealed in dreams to Boromir and Faramir, along with many other things not to be found anywhere else in Middle Earth.

As the Lord of Rivendell, Elrond is wise and conservative (somewhat unlike the Jackson films' take on his character), but willing to generously provide precious gifts and important advice from the accumulated bounty of his house as appropriate.

Matthew 13:52

Having looked at those two characters, let's take a look at the truth of scripture. Specifically Matthew 13:52, which reads as follows: 

"And [Jesus] said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."

Jesus says this in the literary context of a string of parables, including some of the most famous and quickly recognized parables in the gospels (the sower and the seed, the wheat and tares, the mustard seed, etc.). After the disciples ask about the meaning of the wheat and the tares parable, they claim to understand the next three parables Jesus tells (treasure in the field, pearl of great price, fish in the net). At that point Jesus gives the statement above.

He uses an unusual expression here: "The scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven." In Jesus' day, the profession of scribe doubtless had attracted some INTPs; the job was to record and accumulate information. (Though the legal and administrative responsibilities that came with the task might have scared them off again) In the gospels we typically see the scribes at odds with Jesus, but here he speaks of scribes who are trained for the Kingdom.

There is much wisdom densely packed into this statement. The scribe needs to be trained in order to be like the master with treasures to offer. The training needs to be kingdom training, not merely scribal training. Yet a scribe is already trained to handle religious law carefully and correctly. When someone trained to handle important information carefully is then trained for the kingdom, truly he will have old things and new things to offer, from the redeemed "palace of his mind" of which he will be the master if he learns to take every thought captive for Christ.  

Two Paths for an INTP:

The Matthew verse has always reminded me of Elrond, Master of the House of Rivendell, with great treasures from which he brings forth new(er) and old gifts to aid the cause of Good. And his gifts are not always material, but also good counsel and wisdom, like the scribe above can offer. The opposite of Grima, he does not steal from others to hoard away, but accumulates good things to provide help and succor to others. He does not infiltrate and manipulate, he establishes and maintains.

Elrond himself doesn't take the front lines (not by the timeline of Lord of the Rings, except as part of the White Council). His main role is to be master of Rivendell and to maintain that strong place, described in the Silmarillion as a "refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore."

Similarly, an INTP is usually not going to be charging into the front lines full of battle fury, and that's not necessarily where you want an INTP. An INTP is not likely to show up with an army behind him either; the gifts of charisma and natural magnetism and strong-willed leadership that's not afraid to break a few eggs to make an omelet or chew out a subordinate when they need it are not the forte of an INTP. (Though it's quite likely this hypothetical leader's strategic war council has an INTP or three)

On the mission field, however, those who charge in furiously are likely to burn out just as furiously, sometimes leaving a mess that longer-term workers must labor to clean up. And those leaders who can inspire natural loyalty and dominate their subordinates may fail at the servant leadership and humility which seeks not to create a personal empire but to serve and build up the local church, to watch less qualified and gifted leaders struggle and encourage them rather than taking charge. 

By contrast, an INTP will be seeking to impose structure on disorder, to accumulate knowledge and wisdom, to determine what is most valuable and focus their limited energy on obtaining that. Above all, to understand, in a cohesive and articulate sense, what is real and true, to further grasp reality through this, and then to pass on this knowledge to others in useful ways. 

So in terms of leadership, an INTP rarely leads by jumping to the front and rallying others to their standard (I'd love to hear real-life examples of what happened in those situations), but they will seek positions of influence and adequate resources to have at their disposal instead, so that their knowledge and understanding and strategic thinking can be seen as strengths.

Having arrived in this kind of situation, the INTP has two paths to take; we'll call them the Wormtongue path and the Rivendell path:

On the Wormtongue path, the INTP is a loner who seeks influence and resources selfishly or anxiously. Protection and influence can be found by joining a strong leader, and resources can be obtained by wit and stratagem at the expense of others if necessary. Grima seemingly had no allies or "team" in Rohan; as an individual he had already attached himself to a strong leader (Theoden) then betrayed him in favor of a more powerful one with more resources (Saruman). It was an intelligent and strategic choice in terms of personal benefit, but it was an alliance with evil. Underestimated by the strength-and-honor warrior culture around him, Grima had an eye for what was most valuable and had already begun to accumulate it for his own purposes. Doubtless he felt pride in strategically steering Rohan to its ruin, in being the unseen puppeteer, a temptation which many INTPs may especially feel, to use their intelligence and strategic thinking skills to manipulate events for their own security and a desirable outcome. In the end, however, forces beyond his control brought all his careful schemes to ruin.

On the Rivendell path, by contrast, the INTP seeks influence and resources as part of a coalition which seeks to bless and build up: not subversive but superversive. Rivendell didn't build itself, and Elrond did not move to Gondor and slowly take over, like Sauron in Numinor, though he could probably have done so in a similar fashion. Elrond did start with resources few others had, but he used those to build up a strong house (both a location, but also a company of people) which was a blessing to any who stayed there or who passed through. Simply by dedicating himself to being the master of that house as a sort of locus for what was good and true, maintaining "the old that was strong and did not wither," yet recognizing a new age was at hand, Elrond was a major influence for the powers of Good in Middle Earth. 

Seek for the Sword that was broken: In Imladris it dwells;
There shall be counsels taken, stronger than Morgul-spells.
There shall be shown a token, that Doom is near at hand;
for Isildur's Bane shall waken, and the Halfling forth shall stand.

The Last Homely House East of the Sea

And Rivendell was not merely a stronghold and refuge, it also stood for something greater than itself. It was not only called a "Homely House," but "The Last Homely House East of the Sea." This meant it was not only a place of refuge, a place of peace and light and truth, but it pointed to the origin of those things, and the place to which they would return: The True West, in Tolkien's mythos, the Undying Lands, where the servants of God lived, and where the elves desired to return. White shores, and a far green country, under a swift sunrise. The world as it ought to be. Aslan's country, beyond the farthest waves that grow sweet. What people got in Rivendell, then, was not merely rest and refuge, and perhaps wise advice, possibly precious gifts, but also a glimmer of that eternal light beyond the Sundering Seas. What they felt there was a taste of heaven on earth.

The world needs Homely Houses. It will need them more in the coming days. Whether an actual home or establishment, a group of like-minded people, or even few close friends who have accumulated resources and wisdom with the desire to bless and give refuge to others, these small strongholds of light will stand against the turmoil of the world as they have done since the beginning. These places of peace where a little taste of heaven on earth can be experienced stand like burning beacons in the dark for peoples who have chosen to forget the legacy of the gospel they once received, or who have never known it. 

I wish that every church could be a Homely House, which points to and communicates the reality of an Undying World beyond the Sundering Seas not only via the truth kept there, and hopefully shared faithfully there, but as fellowships of light and wisdom and richness and refuge and peace which give those who visit a taste of God’s country. Sadly, many are not like that at all. Sadly, some have this appearance (like one ancient and famous example whose strong stone vault endured a devastating fire last week and protected what was within) but the truth itself may be but little heard inside. But by God’s grace the two are not mutually exclusive, and need not remain so.

And while INTPs have their unique struggles, if they are trained for the kingdom, building up a house (a space, and a fellowship) from which may be brought out treasures old and new for the blessing of the saints and advancement of the kingdom is a task for which they are indeed well-equipped. If God has not yet presented a more specific path to you, I believe it's worth pursuing. Be trained in the kingdom, and build up a house. The path must be chosen daily, and the road will be long, but He goes with us, and before us, and follows after.

A New Year: The Blessed Unknown

Borrowing this pic, since I didn't go to the Taipei 101
fireworks show this year, though we did watch from far away

Resolutions vs. The Future

Happy New Year everyone. It's January 1st, that time when many people make resolutions which will seem increasingly less worth the sacrifice it takes to maintain them as the cold weeks slide past. That's the problem with resolutions; they are goals which can't factor in what might happen in the coming months. Sure, maybe you give up out of simple laziness, but let's say you have better reasons than that. Often it's the same reasons we are all familiar with--by mid-February winter has worn most of us down and we don't have the mental fortitude to keep doing productive but willpower-draining things which aren't an established habit quite yet. (In Taiwan there's a different yearly rhythm; no Christmas holiday and a mad rush to finish everything in January before the long Chinese New Year break in late January or February.)

But let's imagine that your failure to maintain your resolution is entirely due to unforeseen events: you are determined to go to the gym, but then you land a huge work project which requires most of your energy and all of your time. Or you were going to lose weight, but you started learning to bake and have discovered your superpower is making delicious cookies. Neither a valuable work contract or the ability to produce perfectly-crunchy-or-chewy chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven whenever you want are bad things, and maybe if you'd known about their emergence ahead of time you could have planned your resolutions accordingly, or at least been better prepared for the struggle of maintaining your resolutions in spite of them.

This ignorance (not stupidity--ignorance is not knowing something, stupidity is when knowing it wouldn't help you) of what the new year might bring can in some ways be considered a form of mercy. My examples above are positive, but all too often what lies ahead as we face every new year is unforeseen hardship and pain. Perhaps the global geopolitical situation will become more unstable, straining the economy and threatening war. Perhaps sickness or disease will afflict you, your friends, or family members. Perhaps you'll simply find yourself unable to meet your goals through factors seemingly beyond your control, and slowly slip into ennervating ennui.

All these things and many more are possible, and we know that they will all happen at some point in the future, as a matter of statistics. This is the world we live in; we never know when misfortune may strike, and that inability to know can be faced in various ways. (Libraries of books and articles have been written about how to face the unknown without debilitating stress, many of which can be encapsulated in Paul's reminder to "be anxious for nothing".)

Making Impossible Decisions

With the future tantalizingly guessable but also unknown, many decisions must be made without knowing the outcome. As an INTP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, I know that I have a tendency to delay making a decision until I have all the relevant information to help me decide, the problem being that a) sometimes you simply can't know all the relevant information, and b) sometimes if you wait long enough to try to know everything, you've missed the decision-making window.
Life is unfair; sometimes the only effective decision is one made before you know how rightly to decide. It's still a little surprising even now when I do that and turn out to have chosen well; it seems like any decision made before you could know enough to make it would be wrong, yet that's often not the case.

People have different ways to make that kind of "stab into the unknown" decision; some like to "go with their gut feeling" (this depends on having a healthy/reliable gut in the literal, physical sense--anxiety and depression can make your gut feeling a bad and unreliable guide, something I have discovered only after many years trapped in the doubt-labyrinth). This is a form of taking personal responsibility for the decision, and for people with strong intuition and the "knack" for making good rapid decisions, the results can seem almost like magic.

By contrast, some prefer to offload the decision-making stress by flipping a coin or using some other "this is random yet maybe fate/divine providence is out there guiding it" method. This is more natural for people with a more external locus of control--they feel they're not really in control of most things to begin with, so every decision is somewhat arbitrary. I am the opposite, with a very internal locus of control--I believe there are very few things in life that you don't have some measure of control over, it's only a question of whether you are willing to really consider all of your options, including those most people aren't willing to consider, and deal with whatever consequences may result. (The upside to this is the capacity to see options and make choices and achieve results which are not even on the radar of many people; the downside is knowing that basically all the bad things that happen to you are your own fault, and not being able to externalize the blame for your problems without knowing you are being hypocritical in doing so. Some degree of self-loathing is the risk of making better use of your gift of free will.)

Other people (very commonly, here in Taiwan) try to get around the unknown future problem at its source, by resorting to a wide variety of fortune-telling methods. There are entire classes of fortune telling here largely unknown in the West, using birds and dangling pendants and the dates of one's birth and characters in one's name, and tossing little red crescent-shaped wooden blocks (jiaobei) at temples to see how they land.

All fortune-telling is forbidden by scripture, of course, as it's random self-deception and ex-post-facto rationalization at best (and real contact with dark spiritual realities at worst), and in every case an attempt to face an unknown future with less or no need for faith or God's presence and guidance (or for learning discernment and wisdom). God wants us not to know the future, because that's how we learn to trust. We want to know the future, because trusting is hard and can hurt. It's more or less the sin of Eden; we want to know what God knows so we can make decisions as we deem best, vs. trust and obedience to someone other than Self.

Hindsight Is Not Invalidation

Another reason knowing the future would be harmful, is because that knowledge is a "collapsed" version of reality compared to experience. You do not live a year instantaneously. The troubles and hardships are spaced out with joys and relief. Looking back with hindsight is different from knowing all the ramifications of a decision ahead of time, because knowing them ahead of time would compress them all together, a giant bundle of future pain, whereas experiencing them in reality takes place over time, where there is solace and recovery and lessons learned. Living in time means you only need to confront and deal with each problem as it comes, whereas the ability to see all the future problems together means mentally confronting all of them at the same time, which would make any decision impossibly daunting.

When I was making the decision to move to Taiwan to do long-term missions work, I had no idea how my life here was going to be. It turned out that I had mostly rational expectations (for those few expectations I dared to have, knowing how dangerous they can be) but I was also wrong about nearly everything: most of what I was looking forward to fell through, didn't work out like it was supposed to, or was taken away rather painfully. Why were my expectations so far off-base? Partly through things I could have known but didn't know to ask about (the "you don't know what you don't know" problem), and partly through things I could never have known or predicted ahead of time (I have a strange talent for getting myself into frustrating situations that no one I know has ever encountered before).

I think if I could have foreseen all the various difficulties and challenges I would encounter as a missionary ahead of time, I would almost certainly never have left the U.S. Yet that would have been the wrong decision, and coming was the right decision, which I could make because I was spared from knowing what would have made deciding correctly impossible for me.

When seeking God's will to come here, I did not foresee all the difficulties and obstacles I would face, but I did receive very clear confirmation to go. It was not wrong for God to decline to inform me of what would happen if I followed His leading, because it would have stopped me from obeying.

In terms of making the decision itself, I was blessed to have the strong confirmation that not every missionary receives. Yet that is not a necessary condition for making the decision, since with the Great Commission given to all followers of Christ, deciding to serve the Kingdom of God in a full-time capacity is never odds with the revealed will of God (who will open and close doors according to His hidden will for the particulars, whether we like and understand it or not).

Though we sometimes act as if the default is to do nothing, and that in special circumstances, some "super Christians" or the "specially called" can work at the Great Commission and spreading the Kingdom, the Bible teaches the opposite; the default is what God already told us all to do. I spent a lot of time worrying that being a missionary to Taiwan might not be God's will, until finally I made the decision to do it, and simply asked Him to close the door if it was not His will, and close it hard enough that I would absolutely not be able to get through it. Then it was simply a matter of crawling over every obstacle until I got here. (At which point the obstacles got taller and thornier. The reward for endurance is more weight on the next set, when strength and not comfort is the goal)

If It's Not Wrong, Pray, And Do It

No amount of hardship encountered after the fact can make a decision wrong purely on the basis that there is hardship (unless it was a comfort-based decision). That is a blessing for we time-bound creatures; we can "swear to our own hurt and not change"--make irrevocable decisions which cause us pain yet still honor them; Psalm 15 calls this a mark of someone who may dwell in God's presence. Because the future is unknown to us, we can make correct decisions which we might not be able to bring ourselves to make if we knew how hard the consequences would be, yet still not give up.

The idea that "God won't give you more than you can handle" is false and a lie; God will absolutely give you more than you can handle, so that you have no other recourse but to take refuge in Him, or reject Him. Those are the only two eternal choices any human has.

But it's one thing to make a godly decision, then need to rely on God to survive the consequences, and another to know how hard it's going to be and still make the decision. Ignorance is a protection for the weak in a sinful world; those who know a lot have to be much stronger to handle that knowledge and still move forward, and that strength often only comes through suffering.

Yet the Bible exists so that we should not be ignorant of those things God considers it necessary for us to know and act on, and it teaches us not to stay willingly ignorant, but to seek wisdom and get understanding. And while scripture is deep and sometimes complex, on the whole the Bible is not that complicated when it comes to what we should and shouldn't do. We no longer live under Old Testament law, but one sin of legalism in any era or church is that it destroys the freedom that God offers us: The idea of "Thou shalt not..." is actually incredibly liberating, because "Thou shalt..." would confine us to only what was mentioned. But we have freedom in Christ to do whatever is not sin, for His glory.

So that is my advice to you as we all face the daunting prospect of the year-which-comes-after-2017: make right decisions, and trust God to walk you through whatever difficulties may arise. And if you are a believer* who wants to do something that scripture does not condemn anywhere (specifically or in principle), if you have asked God to reveal His will to you, and He has not said No, then ask Him to close the door if it is not His will yet you can't know that, and move ahead with confidence that He will direct your paths. As I was told when in the middle of a tough decision once: "You can't steer a parked car."

(*--And if you are not a believer, 2018 is the perfect year to stop holding out against what everyone from astrophysicists to a child in Sunday school knows is true, and begin your path of faith to God. The Gospel of John is a great place to start--the trail of atheists who set out to disprove the Bible and later believed it is rather impressive.) 

The Church stagnates because we make non-action the default, afraid we might accidentally do the wrong good thing. We should be more concerned with not doing the good God has set in front of us. The world needs it in 2018 more than ever.

Avoiding "Friendly Fire"

Today I want to post about something very important that I've been learning in the last year (through the election and with the confederate statues issue, etc)...


"I can't go to bed yet, someone is wrong on the internet"

It's common to decry the anger and lack of civility in arguments online, for politics or theology or anything else. This is partly because the semi-anonymity of online comments tends to bring out the worst in people; also when you aren't face to face with someone, there is a tendency to respond to "wrong ideas" and forget that you are really responding to a person. (I think one could make the argument that someone who has decided to become an avatar or promoting conduit for those ideas deserves to be treated as such, but otherwise not.) Also, people are sinful and many simply have zero interest in treating other people well and enjoy trolling, insulting, and/or disputing, and the internet is a convenient tool doing so.

But one more specific danger of arguing on social media, for those who do it for reasons more or less involving what is true and what is not, and not because they simply enjoy it, is that you don't know the context of error that people live in and are responding against. So they may be coming at the issue from a different angle from you, and may indeed be wrong on some particular aspects which you may be pointing out accurately. But if you were to enter into their context, and see the errors they are confronted with and responding against, you would find you were fighting on the same side as them.

As the graduate of a well-known seminary, I and many of my former classmates have trouble not responding to error when we see it, especially theological error. (Yes, sometimes things are not a matter of perspective, but violate basic truths. If you believe the Bible is true, then you believe it's worth arguing about; for humans, one necessitates the other) We certainly have many issues where we disagree; part of going to seminary is being exposed to the scriptural fountain of theological truth whose water is poured (along with many sweeteners and artificial flavors and dyes) into the giant soda fountain of theological opinion, and we all have our favorite flavors of soda even when we did not come to seminary already possessing deep worldview differences that influence how we approach even that pure fountain.

But on the occasions when I have taken issue online with a fellow seminarian or anyone else either expressing a truth unclearly or expressing what was not true, I have often found that their intent was to combat an error they had seen in some other place. Perhaps they had been reading Genesis 1 and 2 and thinking about God's command to humans to be stewards of the earth, and then, stung by a video they saw of environmental devastation somewhere, posted an article which strayed over into dangerous "climate care is the gospel" territory. It is not wrong to stand against that error, indeed it is necessary to do so, but one needs to understand their motivation for posting to address the errors in a constructive way.

Understand 1, before deciding whether engaging 1 or 2 is better worth spending the time for 3

Attacking the wrong they saw, not the one you see

A vivid ongoing example would be the endless array of opinions possessed by American Christians regarding President Trump: If you live in a context (online and/or offline) where most people react to Trump with visceral hatred as a mascot of everything they despise, moving in the direction of truth requires setting aside those emotions and considering the actual ramifications of his actions as president, at least some of which have been positive and helpful, as was also true for Obama. So this is something it was fair to challenge people to do when Obama was the president they loved to hate, and it's fair now that we have a traditionalist authoritarian narcissist in the White House instead of a progressive ideological narcissist.

On the other hand, if you live in a context where there are a lot of people who consider Trump as God's gift to the Church, and to America, which are considered more or less the same thing, then moving in the direction of truth does require challenging some very erroneous assumptions there. (My own stance is that we must be more pragmatic and recognize that, like Treebeard in LotR, the Church should not be on any politician's "side," because none of them are on our "side," and certainly the political machine and swamp of corruption are hostile and corrosive to even those comparatively good men who find their way into positions of power. It is good to be concerned for the state of one's nation and culture; we do not give up our passports or our hard-won freedoms or stop paying taxes or stop driving across local bridges when we enter God's kingdom, for His kingdom is not of this world. But we also don't need the influence of Washington to get things done, and we greatly weaken ourselves to lean on that splintered staff; for we are the adopted sons and daughters of God Almighty)

With our current social media environment (exacerbated by the desire of companies like Facebook to become a walled garden that you never need to leave, by bringing news and everything else into the FB bubble) these arguments all fall into the same space. So I can see posts praising good actions by the president met with offensive hostility by Trump haters, and posts attacking the conflation of what is Caesar's and what is God's met with defensive hostility by Trump supporters, all on my FB wall on the same day.

I have written elsewhere of how the two camps and other zero-sum ideological groups could attempt to live together in relative peace by regarding each other as different nations in the same country. But what I'm talking about today is another way, especially for those being pulled to one side or the other but not yet "in the camp." Sometimes protesting the particular errors around them can drive people too far in a particular direction; many historical evils would be less inexplicable (though not less wrong) if we could feel what it was like to be in a particular context, the unfairness, the personal pain, etc. I see a dangerous tendency to use that kind of language now. In the past, violence usually follows, and that's been true for a couple of years now in America.

So while it's as important as ever to engage and combat falsehood, and keep ideological thinking from undermining the truth that changes not, it's also important to recognize that lots of people's worldviews are being pushed to extremes in our crazy fragmenting society, and attacking their ideas without understanding where they come from is not defeating that extreme thinking but is strengthening it and pushing those attacked to double down on those ideas. This is true of theology as well as politics, since we don't necessarily treat those convictions differently.

So, is it necessary to stop arguing about important issues in "the commons" for which social media has become a very poor replacement? It's useless to even try to say that people shouldn't argue online, but actually I don't think it's necessary to say that. We should argue sometimes, it's an important part of discovering and defending truth. But if truth is indeed our motivation, we should try as much as possible to argue constructively.

Avoiding Friendly Fire

So how do we engage error online when we consider it an appropriate situation to do so, yet focus on attacking the untruth while still loving the person? And more specifically for this post, how do we figure out if there is really a point of disagreement worth engaging, or whether the person is responding to their own context and not yours (or since you are part of their context if you can see what they are posting, we could say, responding to a different part of their context) I think we can do so by making use of two questions:


Important Question #1: What do you think the greatest danger/problem here is?

By asking this question, you do two things. You let the other person feel listened to (because you are in fact offering to listen), which tends to diffuse a lot of potential badfeel if constructive disagreement is going to follow. You also identify what really motivates them in the argument. If you were arguing with a robot, you wouldn't need that, but since even INTPs are people too, it's always more helpful to respond to that motivation too and not merely its symptoms.

In asking, you may find that you don't disagree in any fundamental way, you just don't consider the thing they've honed in on to be the primary issue at stake. In that case you can either end the discussion on friendly terms, agreeing that they are right to be concerned about that thing, or you can shift the argument to whether that thing is really the primary issue. In that case you may need to ask some more questions to find out why they are so worried about that particular issue.

One example of this would be the churches that consider drinking any alcohol to be sinful. That is scripturally indefensible, and the attempt to do so leads to convoluted absurdities of interpretation. However, one often finds that when normally sound, bible-loving pastors also preach this extra-scriptural rule, there are usually strong personal reasons for doing so. (A loved one was lost to a drunk driver, or ruined their own life through alcoholism, etc.)
It is right to stand against misuse of scripture even (especially?) when it has good motives, for that is how heresies tend to begin, with the best of motives. But at the same time, when attacking someone's error, it's important to know what the real motivation behind it is. All the arguing about alcohol in scripture may have been useless, where the person in question may have really needed someone to walk through the grief of their loss with them, so that they did not need to deal with it by bringing the authority of scripture to attack the source of their pain.

Important Question #2: If you were in charge, how would you solve this?

This is an invitation to constructive and not destructive thinking. Sometimes people have never thought this far, and it stops them short. Sometimes they have thought about it a great deal, and will be relieved that someone wants to hear them out.

It seems (at least to me) that a reply to this question of "I'm not saying I have all the answers, just that this isn't right" is basically a cop out. They just want to express disapproval, there is no substance to their opinion to argue over. On the other hand, as Sun Tzu teaches us in the Art of War, it's often wise to leave your opponent one line of retreat. Often lines such as the one above are a way of retreating from the artillery of reason offered in good faith with dignity and order intact.

This question is also one in which you're more likely to come away with something useful for yourself. It's highly unlikely that you are going to convince anyone of anything online via an argument, even a polite and constructive one, but this means that at least one side gets to be heard, and invites the other side to respond in kind. If you have an audience, asking them how they'd solve it also invites the audience to think in a critical way about your opponents proposed solution. If it's implausible or problematic in other ways, that's usually going to much more obvious to bystanders than when you're arguing about the problem itself.

Potatoes argue from identity. Don't be like a potato. Also the cake is a lie.

So...

In an age of ideological conflict and identity fragmentation, Jesus said it best: "whoever is not against us is for us." When we attack the arguments of people who are addressing problems from their own contexts, we need to at least understand their motives. We might be accidentally engaging in friendly fire, distracting or defeating their efforts to engage people in a different context from ours.

I have done this. As an INTP, for an argument I don't shoot a tiny missile at the other person as in my diagram above. I cease to restrain the hungry attack raptors and they devour anything in the argument that's not rock solid. I am not saying I win every argument, there is much I don't know and many other skilled debaters around, and if it comes down to good-sounding rhetoric or emotionally resonant language I'm okay at best. But I am good at seeing what is inconsistent or weak in an argument and articulately dismantling it. And, due to that, there have been times when everything I said was correct and every issue I raised was legitimate, but it was a misdirection from another real problem that needed dealing with, which I wasn't aware of. That didn't delegitimize my own statements, but it made them less helpful in the overall struggle against falsehood.
So today's post is written as much to myself as to anyone else reading it.

I do think arguing online can be selectively useful, and I also do it much less than I used to, partly from being busier with worthwhile things. I usually approach it from the stance that I want to learn more about what other people think and also demonstrate when a position is logically indefensible. Those have been tricky goals over the past year on many topics, especially when emotions and identity are so commonly involved. So my advice to everyone (most of all myself) is to only go into an argument 1) as much as possible not because you are "triggered" by something that seems indefensibly wrong and know exactly how to reduce it to a pile of shattered inconsistencies (or raptor poop), 2) having pictured what realistically winning the argument or having a profitable discussion as a result would look like and making that your goal, and 3) use the questions above and similar ones as needed to keep ideas and people separate, and show that you are willing to listen and learn, and yet that listening and learning doesn't mean conceding the point.

That's all for this post. Have a Resplendent Reformation Day and Happy Halloween!

INTP Thoughts: From Sherlock to Lecrae - Post-postmodernism

I have several posts on their way to being finished, but here's what's on my mind these days.

What Sherlock Holmes Missed

"The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable... as inevitable as mathematics." - Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Season 4 Episode 1)

As an INTP, I am constantly analyzing how everything in the world fits together, in an increasingly complicated model, which means my default state is a deep curiosity about everything, especially areas where I have no experience or knowledge (wikipedia was dangerous for a while until I got used to its existence), since it's all helpful for building the model of how everything works and and is influenced by everything else. Despite not being a dominant intuitive type, for areas of the model where we have a lot of experience/data, INTPs can still sometimes make leaps of intuition like Sherlock Holmes (though obviously not as dramatically and not enough to base a legendary fictional career on) because we've understood something deeply enough that we can make educated guesses according to its nature with some degree of accuracy, what Sherlock was expanding to all of reality in his super-INTP-ness. (Must have access to... ALL the data)

What Sherlock missed, however, at least in the context of the quote above, was inevitable, given that his character in the (deservedly) popular series is written as a dismissive atheist. Without factoring God in, it really all becomes math, because there is no greater Mind and Will behind observable reality. People are ultimately predictable, in this worldview, because in the end everything does come down to clockwork... the big bang was when the unthinkably immense wound-up spring was released (For many physicists who are not believers, their definition of God is "Whoever or whatever wound up that spring the first time"), and everything is simply energy falling downhill from there, and all people who ever lived are merely a curious by-product of radiant energy from our star striking a body in space with the right collocation of elements enough times that it started an extremely complicated and impossibly unlikely (except that we can observe it happened) self-sustaining chemical reaction which somehow got more and more complicated as it went along, unlike the way anything else works in nature.

If all that were true, then yes, we could at some point design a vast quantum supercomputer which would be a (lowercase) god for all practical purposes, which could model enough of the universe to know the future and predict natural phenomenon and human behavior.

What those atheists (including people like Neal Stephenson, author of books like Cryptonomicon and Reamde which I enjoyed a great deal) and the character of Sherlock Holmes in the popular current series have in common, is an almost charming anachronism: they are loyal modernists in a time when we are already leaving postmodernism behind for what comes after.

Post-postmodernism: I identify as a genius

The Legacy of Modernism, and the end of Postmodernism

To oversimplify, Modernism rejected traditional values and authority in favor of a grand forward-looking narrative in which we could throw off convention and become whatever we want. It became increasingly turbulent, however, and as Postmodernist thinking emerged there was doubt and rejection toward various premises previously taken for granted. In postmodernist thinking there could be no uniting narrative, no objective truth, all was constructed by one's context ("you only think that because ____"). In the popular consciousness, it was the age of subjectivity, "truth is relative."

Now that postmodernism has peaked and gone into decline, we are entering the new age of Post-postmodernism (no better term has been agreed on yet, my favorite so far is "metamodernism"). As with previous shifts, we preserve some remnants of previous ages while rejecting the current unifying idea and seeking a new "center" to hold things together. It will be a very interesting time if we don't all kill each other in ideological civil wars first.

In a nutshell: At the change of each thought-age in the West, people have rejected something that kept society at peace (common tradition under an aristocracy, common trajectory under a bureaucracy, common tolerance under a plutocracy) as the sins of each ruling group become too obvious and unjust to ignore. As the times shift, whatever was "the center" that held everyone together begins to give way at the same time as the group in power loses legitimacy, and there is a massive societal shift. Modernism: Reject Unifying Tradition - Find your own path
(What keeps us from fighting - a story that unites us)

Post-modernism: Reject Unifying Narrative - Find your own viewpoint
(What keeps us from fighting - living and letting live)

Post-post modernism: Reject Unifying Tolerance - Find your own identity
(What keeps us from fighting - good fences make good neighbors? the jury is still out)

What Comes Next: Messiness

The advent of post-postmodernism can be seen with the focus on identity recently. First we lost the unifying traditions, then we lost the unifying story, now we're losing any unifying identity labels too. When Lecrae decides that he's been trying to put aside his blackness to be Evangelical and says he doesn't want to do that anymore, he's responding to the shift where a deeper part of his identity he calls his roots (the racial/subcultural identity) calls more compellingly than a shallower one (Evangelicalism emerged in response to certain factors, like Fundamentalism before it, and the Church will remain long after both are merely part of Church history). Leaving evangelicalism because associations or aspects of it start to conflict with another part of one's identity doesn't mean leaving the Church, but it demonstrates when cognitive dissonance gets too strong, we "pull back" to less ambiguous identities.

Ironically the same phenomenon is at work with Southerners resisting attempts to purge Confederate flags and statues from the public eye. "Southerness" for many is an identity deeper than an Evangelicalism that says to keep things comfortable, Lecrae shouldn't be "too Black" and Southerners shouldn't be "too Southern." But the world is tired of playing nicely with others a little too different from us for comfort, and "the center is failing to hold," as in Yeats' famous poem. "We do" is no longer a quick answer to the question "who benefits?" because the "we" is getting really iffy.

In the Church, selfless love is supposed to be the glue that holds us together. When by the Spirit's help we manage it, it does work beautifully. In the world outside however, once tradition was found oppressive, and the narrative deconstructed, a broad-minded tolerance was preached as the new glue that would keep us all together. It has failed.

So How Do We Engage an Age of Post-Postmodernism?

For Christians, every change of thought-age is both troublesome and helpful. Modernism was sure there could be no supernatural, but people went to church because that's what good people did; post-modernism wasn't so sure, but it fractured the basic concept of absolute truth and people began to lose the church habit. Post-postmodernism is thirsty for the divine again, and searching for truth, but it wants to fracture us into identity groups at the same time, and a generation is growing up largely unchurched but ready to embrace causes and identities that don't compromise.

So on the one hand, our marching orders have never changed: Speak the truth in love, make disciples of all nations. Actually do that, don't talk about doing it or hold conferences about doing it. On the other hand, understanding and enduring the next decades will require a lot more wisdom and boldness than the Church has shown in recent decades. Do a little reading on the times; a storm is coming. Some have predicted the nation itself will get fragmented into groups that align based on those deep identity fault lines that have slumbered under a wealthy and tolerant age but never went away. That may never happen, but it's clear we are not entering an age of stability, but of things being pulled apart in seismic shifts. When the center can't hold, to continue with Yeats' poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The Church, built on a rock against which the gates of hell may not prevail, has been acting like an eager-to-please kite, blown here and there by popular secular trends. ("We can do feminism too." "We can care about climate change too." "Please acknowledge our relevance in the areas you've developed." "Notice me, Senpai." -- Meanwhile there's a steady trickle of evangelicals to Catholic and Orthodox churches) Now weak-conscienced church leaders are debilitated by every accusation of collective guilt the world throws at them. Commanded to love proactively, we are passively nice. Directionless except for inertia, we have expressed our dismay at the state of society either silently in the voting booth or loudly on social media, but not often made disciples of our neighbors. Even when we've strayed perhaps too far into politics, we've mostly chosen the label "Conservative." (What, exactly, are we trying to conserve at this point? It's a lose-lose proposition, wading into the political arena primarily concerned that we come across as respectable folk who know how to retreat with their honor intact. But I digress.)

The choice to be passive, tolerant, and easily swayed, damaging to the church in the best of times, will not even be a choice in the days to come. Belief is coming back into fashion to an almost alarming degree, and institutions with weak and yielding faith will simply not endure. Houses built on the sand will not survive the storm, but the Church as a whole is antifragile. She has survived every tumult of history, for Christ sustains her. The Kingdom will advance, but it may advance without you.

So: Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, not just the belt and shoes that can be coordinated with your Sunday outfit. In the post-postmodern age, believe unapologetically and they will come, and see whether we truly do have life abundantly and the words of eternal life. If we truly believe Christ is the only hope for a sin-struck world sinking into chaos and clinging to dreams of the latest reincarnation of Babel, now is the time to start acting like it.

An INTP on the Mission Field: Stuck in a Rut - Which Wheel needs a Branch?

Thanks for your Comments:

I have been encouraged by the positive comments some people have been leaving on earlier posts. It turns out there isn't much online for Christian INTPs. But yes, we do exist, and no, being creatures of logic doesn't mean we can't be believers in a God the worship of whom, given His existence, is not only logical, but the only sane course of action. Everything rides on the question of whether you first assume God, or first assume No-God; logic will take you in two different directions from that point, but to stick with the second assumption you must close your eyes to wider reality (general revelation), dismiss the faith of all believers throughout history along with the testimony of Christian scripture (special revelation), and reject any instances of God doing unusual things in your life to suggest His existence. Following up on any one of those would bring one to the point where logic suggested atheism was untenable, and one would either need to flee to the refuge of agnosticism or follow the journey of evidence and faith to its conclusion, as many atheists in history have in fact done. (C.S.Lewis being an obvious high profile example, but there are others)

Also, though some cast aspersion on the Myers-Briggs test for being "unscientific," etc, it has turned out to be a very helpful thing in the internet age, in that all of us people who are a certain way now have a name for ourselves and can find each other. Yes we all have our individual differences, but when someone is describing themselves in the context of being an INTP and you say to yourself, "Yes, exactly, so I'm not the only one!" then you know you have something of value in a categorization that allows that to happen. And I suspect it is not only INTPs who have that kind of experience.

1. Spinning our Wheels

Being both intuitive and logical types, INTPs are very capable of taking information from a wide variety of sources and suddenly arriving at valuable insights or conclusions on topics that may not be obviously related to the source material.

So, when confronted with a challenge in life, we tend to try to pull from our collection of data and observations and intuit a solution to it. Finding a creative solution which makes an apparently difficult problem simple is very fun, if nothing else, and feeling that every situation is both similar to others and unique in its own way, I tend to not want to apply a "standard" solution but either customize it to fit the particular context, or come up with an entirely new approach altogether. (This is somewhat useful on the mission field, since a lot of problems one encounters really are unique, or previous solutions are unusable because what worked in the past for a particular set of people in a particular context isn't a viable solution for here and now)

There are two weaknesses that arise from our intuitive problem-solving tendencies, however.

A. Being satisfied with a theoretical solution

The first is well known, and not limited only to INTPs; the idea that once a solution has been arrived at, the actual doing of it is left as an exercise for the interested student. You may have heard the joke about the three academics (usually a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician) who, caught in a fire, all figure out how to escape, but one dies because having solved the problem of how to put out the fire he considers himself successful. Yet the fire still rages, despite a perfectly good solution now existing.

INTPs can fall into the same trap: I have on multiple occasions felt out of shape, and began googling exercise plans, seeking to get behind this or that plan and understand an "essential" workout might be in terms of an average human body, and thus arrive at the most efficient workout in terms of not needing to spend a lot of time on it but seeing adequate results (living in our heads, perhaps some of us begrudge our body the proper maintenance time it requires). But having done so, less than half of the time did I actually make an effort to put that basic, efficient exercise plan into action. The fact that I'd located and grasped the core physiological principles required for a brief and efficient workout seemed like winning half the battle, when it was really only a preparation for a battle I never ended up fighting.

The knowing of a thing is not the doing of it, and the essence of a workout is not understanding the essence of a workout, it's doing the workout, imperfectly and when you don't feel like it, over and over. (Something I'm terrible at, because I want to to do everything "in the flow" and workouts rarely start with that feeling and only sometimes end up achieving it)

Either way, whether the problem is academic, or concerns our work, our life, our interpersonal relationships, or all of the above, the result is that we remain where we are, and don't move forward.

B. Getting trapped in a vicious cycle

The other problem, and a nastier one, is when we are unable to quickly intuit a creative solution to a problem, and began to fixate on it. We assume there is some missing piece of information which, if put into the mix, would recalibrate everything and a solution would magically emerge as it so often does. And when that happens it's a beautiful feeling, but often it simply doesn't. (It especially doesn't when it's an interpersonal problem.)

Like a car with tires in the mud, in that situation throwing more mental resources at the problem, focusing more intensely on it, often only makes things worse. The problem begins to loom large in our psyche, and though some INTPs might do their best thinking under stress, I suspect for many of us this is not the case. For those of us prone to getting mentally flustered, the effort thrown at figuring out a problem might become more or less totally unproductive, just churning processor cycles, spinning our wheels fruitlessly.

We might try to thrust the problem aside, to think about other things, but it's there, like a dead mouse under a hard-to-move bookshelf, sending a vague odor that makes us feel guilty for not solving the issue but not guilty enough to start taking all the books out of the shelves just to get at the rodent corpse. And like a bad odor, the-problem-we-can't-figure-out will taint our mental life if we let it run unabated.

As before, we can pretend to ignore the problem while subconsciously continuing to be stressed about it, or we can obsess over it, but either way we are stuck.

2. Actually Pragmatic Lateral Thinking

Perhaps I am simply a wimpy example of an INTP, but sometimes in these situations I find myself wishing or hoping I might simply find a way around the problem. Being clever and creative, I am quite good at this, but in the end the one I'm outsmarting is myself. The problems that bring us INTPs up short and without solutions are precisely those kinds of problems that we have to figure out how to solve to continue achieving personal growth. And if our eternal side project is not personal growth but, somewhat relentlessly, the pursuit of the theory of everything and how its all related to itself, we will find that personal growth actually serves this objective as well. (We can perceive more standing on higher ground)

Wanting to get in better shape, I once agreed to a friendly bench-pressing competition with some coworkers, back when I was a programmer. I started out pretty weak, and never got to impressive weights, but was pleased after a while to be benching 110% of my bodyweight. At that point I hit a frustrating plateau, where more effort on the bench seemed not to translate into more results. After talking to more experienced lifters, I began to realize that, as someone who hadn't been doing this long, nor being particularly robust, I needed to strengthen my whole body before my bench started improving again. I'd maxed out my short-term capabilities, and needed to grow stronger overall before more effort in a particular exercise was going to be effective.

Very often, for INTPs (or anyone), we need to stop pushing forward obsessively and do some lateral thinking. Lateral thinking should be a strongpoint of INTPs, so it's a bit ironic that we rarely follow that logic when it comes to our own lives.

For a more specific example, in studying Chinese I was finding myself hitting a plateau, or even losing confidence with the level of Chinese I had already attained. I tried berating myself, tried concentrating harder, nothing helped significantly. But then I started taking vitamins due to other health issues, and suddenly the problem resolved itself, and I felt like I'd suddenly remembered to release the emergency brake. My mental cloudiness was seemingly the result of a nutrient deficiency. Thinking harder didn't help at all, but a little vitamin pill after lunch with some magnesium helped considerably.


[N.B. If you have the gift of a higher abstract level of self-awareness, as I suspect INTPs typically do, then you are already ahead of the game because you are capable of a high level of metamotivation; the ability to regulate and coordinate your behavior in support of long-term goals. There is no inherent conflict between this tendency and your walk with God, it simply means you have to submit yourself to God very intentionally to ensure you are not undermining your walk with God with self-serving goals. (Maslow was a smart man, but his theory is inherently flawed since he rejects the idea of a sin nature) High levels of self-actualization are something like a human version of sanctification, and thus while it is a good thing, it should never be confused with what only the Spirit can work in us, nor given de facto priority since it's something we can control. I'm seeing a lot of confusion of the two lately from the squishier side of evangelicalism, and it's as dangerous to those who are attracted to ideas like the power of positive thinking as it is annoying to those of us who find solace in Ecclesiastes.]

3. Don't just lower a Window; Get out, Look at the Car, and Figure out which Wheel needs a Branch thrown under it for Traction

So, INTP or not, if you find yourself in a wheels-spinning-in-the-mud situation, don't just keep mashing the accelerator. Even if you are blessed with a mental V10, no traction means you're not going anywhere. In the worst case, you'll just run out of gas or set your tires on fire. Now, it's pretty common to suggest "you just need to shift your focus," but I'm not just talking about taking a walk or doing something random to distract yourself. I don't know about you, but I can't fool myself with that kind of thing, I'll just obsess over my problems on my walk too, etc. Or if I successfully distract myself during the nice walk, the problems wait patiently until the evening grows late, to arrive just in time to induce insomnia.

Instead, think laterally with regards to your own life, and be prepared to make changes. If you find yourself unable to rise to a particular challenge, your problem may not be a lack of mental effort or ability. Take a look at your current condition of life instead. One or more of your wheels aren't getting traction, which means your mind is stuck in a rut too, until everything gets moving again.

Emotional and mental and physical health are all tied together, and spiritual health affects all of these as well. Whether you are a dichotomist (body, soul) or trichotomist (body, soul, spirit) or octochotomist (who knows), humans were created with a body and meant to have one. Our existence after death as spirits awaiting final judgement and the new beginning of all things (whether in glory or in shame, with God or having rejected Him and existing in isolation from Him, which truly is hell), is actually an artificial and temporary state of affairs. In the new earth we will have bodies, just as Christ did. So while quotes like "You don't have a soul, you are a soul; you have a body." which C.S.Lewis never said, are popular, in one sense they are not biblical, or at least they are too short-sighted. You will only temporarily not have a body; the eternal plan is that you will have a glorious one.

We are designed to function as a unified whole. So for INTPs, who tend to ponder and throw their mental circuitry at every problem, when we get stuck in a rut, or up against problems we can't think our way out of, the problem might not lie in a failure of thinking at all. Look for weaknesses in other wheels. Where is the slippage occurring? Get some traction there, and you may find everything else begins to move forward.