Thinkers and Feelers

Jay Zilber argues:

The human race is perpetually at war — not simply between the good guys and the bad guys, nor even between liberals and conservatives. If only it were so convenient to draw the lines in this struggle so starkly, but it’s more complicated than black hats and white hats. Forgive me the cliche, but it’s the whole dual-nature-of-man hat. It’s a war between the Thinkers and the Feelers.

Okay, a promising start; I particularly like the disclaimer, that it’s not about good vs evil. But he blows it later on:

But in the end, it is the Thinkers — those whose words and deeds are governed by Intellectual Honesty, those who demand adherance to high standards of critical thinking, both by their opponents and of themselves — it is the Thinkers who hold the high moral ground in any argument. By definition.

Are there no Corrupted Thinkers? I suggest that Communism would be impossible without them. The boy who ratted on his parents for ‘hoarding’ (i.e. declining to play their assigned rôle in Stalin’s famine) was following a Thinker impersonal code, albeit an artificial one, rather than natural Feeler impulses. (Or so I have always imagined. Because I’m a rather stiff Thinker, it didn’t occur to me until just now that he was a brat who wanted to get back at his family for some slight. Still, it was Thinkerish to applaud him for it.)

The evils of Stalin and Pol Pot were built of lies, and probably were ultimately rooted in personal hatreds — but they were packaged in Thinker language like “the good of the greatest number” and carried out inflexibly. Even we Thinkers can get it wrong sometimes.

I’m disappointed to find a fellow INTP arguing in such reductionistic bipolar terms; it reminds me of how Leftists like to lump fascists and libertarians together as “far Right”.