The Wizard

Ack. The first three-and-a-bit days of this week were spent in the middle of fucking nowhere, attending a Roberts Agenda transferable skills programme that -- viewed as objectively as I can manage -- provided no transferable skills and was essentially a phenomenal waste of everyone's time. That said, a few of the tasks -- specifically, the outdoorsy problem-solving type that one might imagine dispatching middle management to do in the vain hope of making them clueful about cooperative working -- were at least quite entertaining. If one has to go through this sort of shite, those are the sort of shite one should preferentially go through. The rest, however, was toxic hogwash of the most intolerable kind.

Among the many and varied unedifying activities along the way, one of the most egregious was the administration of a Myers-Briggs Type Identifier test. I recall that some of you have been through this fuckery yourselves, so purely as an information point and without allowing that the analysis has so much as a nanofragment of validity, I will note that I -- in common with many of my schoolmates -- rated as an INTP: "introverted thinking with extraverted intuition" or, phrased in MBTI's pseudo-Jungian archetype terms, The Wizard.

On the face of it, I have nothing to complain about: I am classically wizardly, right down to the grey beard, cloak and pointy hat. And indeed I took the opportunity to turn the motherfuckers into toads with a flick of my wizardly staff. But honestly, what a load of pernicious and despicable bollocks the whole thing is. If I wanted to divide the whole population arbitrarily into gruesomely stereotypical veal-fattening pens, there are plenty of such characterisations already available, from the hackneyed tropes of the zodiac to the late Gary Gygax's D&D alignment system. Every single one of which is vapid and worthless, but at least not sleazily dressed up in the garb of quantitative science. MBTI, on the other hand, drapes itself in arithmetic and statistics, pretending to earn some specious validity which is utterly and offensively lacking.

More than that, the MBTI system goes beyond mere cluelessness into the realm of the deliberately and culpably poisonous, because its spurious quantitation is specifically geared toward the construction of divisive categories. The whole framework is painstakingly designed to trample nuance and deny complexity; to binarize our behaviour in the meagre dimensions it recognises. It is evil, Mr Hart, evil to the core.

Of course, I would say that, as an INTP.

In any case, while my wizardly prowess may not quite have run to transmogrification, it does seem that I have played my part in terminating the course as we experienced it: faced with the unprecedented level of disdain brought by my colleagues and I, the organiser experienced a Damascene conversion and decided to go off and write a book instead. A far better use, I'd say, of his undoubted talents.

Tomorrow, motherfuckers, the world.
Posted by matt at March 20, 2008 04:17 PM