Fuller Wiser

While at work earlier this week, I succumbed to boredom and took a Meyers-Briggs personality test my friend sent me. It’s the sort of thing that usually fills me with contempt, in much the same way that astrology does. Simple people looking for simple instructions that are somehow the same for all people in a given category, which is of course clearly delineated and not at all complicated, not at all. Thank you, come again.

The crappy part is that, unlike astrology (read: bunk), this thing nailed me. It really did, down to a frightening level of detail. I’ve never read any Jung, but the guy obviously knew a few things.

So it turns out I’m an INFP. For those unfamiliar, that’s an Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving person. No, I don’t know why it isn’t just IIFP. Ask the dead guy who came up with it. The main thrust of the type is here, and it’s pretty comprehensive. Another description I read had the bullet point “attracted to sad things” which makes me sound a bit like the Screamapillar. Nonetheless, I can’t fault the analysis.

A bit more digging, and I came up with a page of famous INFP’s. Lo and behold, who do I see there but my good childhood friend Fred Rogers, Mister to you. It makes sense, he’s definitely an introvert by nature, and someone who feels and empathizes deeply. I’ve been watching Fred’s show early in the morning with my son. Mister Rogers has been dead since 2003, but the kid doesn’t know that yet, and I think he sees a little bit of me (and maybe himself) in the old guy, because he watches very closely. I’m glad to have the opportunity to reacquaint myself with Fred, and equally glad that his message of true individualism is still being broadcast. It’s a very necessary antidote to…well, pretty much everything else on television.

True to my descriptor, however, part of me is very sad when I watch the Neighborhood. It actually doesn’t have anything to do with Fred being gone, though. It’s more that as hard as I’ve tried, I can’t be like him.

This became more apparent during one of the 4AM craps I’ve had of late (both perverse and annoying). I needed reading material, and I grabbed a little book my mom bought me a few years ago for Christmas: The World According to Mister Rogers. This, too, made me sad.

Fred was a man of many gifts, but chief among these was the ability to see good in everything. Some might call him naïve for this, but I honestly don’t think there was a naïve bone in his body. A man can’t live past 70 and not be confronted with cruelty, evil, and hate. Hell, you can’t live past 10 without encountering the dark side of human nature, which is exhibited in children far more plainly than in adults. It was a peculiar angle he could apply to everything, to see himself in them, and to see the painful causes of people’s darkness. He put himself in their shoes, and you can only do that if you understand and accept your own darkness.

To many, this would sound like liberal hippie mumbo jumbo. Which is funny, actually, since the man was a lifelong Christian, a minister no less, and one of the staunchest guardians of family values in the 20th century. Indeed, he got far closer to the ideals of Jesus than any high-profile preacher. Loving your neighbor as yourself? Check. Turning the other cheek? Check. Helping the poor? Bingo.

In reading the book, he repeatedly recounts times when he has been angry, spoken unkind words to loved ones, and felt like doing worse. But the key is his power to pull back, to look at the situation from a new angle, one that takes all factors into account, and not just himself and his own feelings. Contrary to what our culture might suggest, this is not weakness. It is true strength, the sort that I wish desperately to cultivate.

I am a bitter and cynical man. That has been my inclination for the past several years, and now it is my persona. It is my public face, and in many ways my private one.

Like all avowed cynics, I started life as an optimist, albeit a cautious one. My mother, who shepherded me towards Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, was and is an uncrushable optimist, certain that given the right attitude, the best can come out of any given situation. My father is and always was such a hardened cynic that I look like Mary Poppins’ magic rainbow vajayjay by comparison.

For most of my life, I followed my mother’s example. Anyone upon whom life was emptying its foetid bowels was obviously not in the right frame of mind. Spielberg, Lucas, and balderdash parables like the Neverending Story (whose main character Bastian is also an INFP) reinforced my impression that strong will, hard work, and belief in goodness and justice would bring me happiness.

Then came adulthood. I tried, I swear I tried. Setback after disaster, hurricane after famine, blow after twisted blow, I kept my stiff upper lip and believed that the good fight was being waged, and that I was on the right side. Surely light would prevail.

But the facts kept spewing from the mangler: Luck does not discriminate between good and evil; kindness carries as much peril as reward; intentions matter less than circumstances; hard work by itself does not bring rewards.

This last was a very harrowing lesson for me. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, my belief in the intrinsic value of hard work was the very blade upon which I was impaled by opportunists of many stripes. In the end, unless you are very lucky, you will be sent to the glue factory.

Attempts to free my fate from the whims of others have thus far proved fruitless, as plan after plan for independence fall flat in the empty forest of circumstance and luck. Add my studies of history and politics to the mix, and the true nature of the beast became clear, the most horrific Magic Eye poster ever, revealing its twisted form in small glimpses, drawing my gaze as I hoped in vain that my eyes deceived me.

Beyond revulsion, the chief emotion I experienced was betrayal. How could so many people lie to me? But then, we lie to children casually all the time. Bears are your friends, Santa squeezes down the chimney, believing makes things so, people will like you if you be yourself. We try to shelter our children from unpleasant facts, singing happy songs so we don’t have to think about what will happen when those young adults splat face-first into the cold concrete wall at the gates of reality. A gray troll peeks out, opening the latch from within, saying “Come in, but know this: You are not special, and no one cares about the goodness in your soul.”

Hearing artists, authors, and sports figures thanking God for his good graces sets my teeth on edge, as certainly it must all the artists, authors, and sports figures languishing in failure, absent the largesse and opportunities offered by craven promoters looking to fill their coffers through the efforts of their hapless but talented charges. The world from atop the mountain looks perfect, the gory details in the underbrush hidden and blurred. Life is more accurately described from among the rocks and brambles, where the traps and snares are laid, and where hungry eyes scan for prey, the fauna that have stopped to smell the flowers.

Wild animals know this. It is only humanity which insists on deluding itself that civilization has rid us of the animal within. It has only masked it, given it mechanical arms and legs to carry out its brutal eviscerations. Nature kills and moves on to the next kill. We kill and make pretty stories about it.

But then there’s Fred. My friend, Fred Rogers. He tells me that we can be greater than our flaws, and I can’t deny it, for I’ve seen it. He speaks of the darkness, and of our ability, even obligation to fight it, to be more than our brutal evolution has made us. To become good by force of will, if not by nature. We are not monkeys, we can make a choice. I want to choose. I want to be more than I have had to become. Being the irascible old bastard may get the job done, while garnering laughs and intellectual cred, but it doesn’t bring happiness.

So I suppose I haven’t given up on the light, on the vision of the world shown to me by my mother and her friend Fred. And I don’t want to give up on it, because there’s someone by my side who needs the world to be a better place than it is. He needs me to give him hope that he can accomplish anything he sets his mind to, even if I know for a fact that he may not succeed. Is this why we lie to our children? So that perhaps, in ignorance of the odds, they will hit the lucky number and become greater than life would seem to allow?

I don’t know, but Fred tells me I shouldn’t give up. And of all the voices that whisper in my head day after day, his is still the strongest. Good, like dignity and love, only exists because we say it does. And I will continue to speak of the power of goodness in hopes that it will be true.