Mysterious Meaningful Madness

The first madness of media today is that we have so much of it available to us today. Then we all have an opportunity to indulge in that media - share it, speak of it, be inspired by it, rage against it, whatever, whatever.

The one thing we don't seem to do well is to think about why we individually do that. Thus this is the second madness of media today - we are not meta-cognitive about our consumption of media.

The third madness of media today is our need to correct it, advance it, praise it, engage spiritual dances around it, as if the only thing that matters is the tribe, the crowd, the group, the collective, the people.

Usually I role my eyes at the profession of psychology for both unintended consequences and actual serious harm (electric shock therapy was never a great idea). Yet there are pockets of brilliance within that profession. The most brightest light I found is a gentleman called Carl Jung. Intellectually I am distant from the depth of Jung's work, even intellectual folk have a hard time delving into the mind of this genius. Jung is a bonafide genius. Fortunately in his later years he was interviewed - so we get a smidgen sense of the man.

There are devotees who hang on his every word but my intuitive sense of the man is what is most important personally to me. That intuitive sense is the same reason I respect the founder of Toastmasters International who is Dr Ralph Smedley. Both have one thing in common.

The Individual

For Carl Jung the culmination of his work is the romantic notion of the individual finding themselves and growing and as they grow, enriching the world with their humanity. For Smedley it was creating an organization for the individual to learn public speaking and consequently leadership skills. While Smedley's intent is simple and straightforward, Carl Jung's vision is wrapped in mysterious thinking that is so deep, that it is like Exalibur, and finding the one person who pull the sword of this thinking out and raise it to all of us. There are great minds who do come around once in a while. One of them was Alan Watts and in the video below, Watts reads Jung

Alan Watts is pretty deep himself but he is a great intermediary between us and a mind like Carl Jung. Both Watts and Jung are no longer with us. Jung passed away in 1961, the year I was born. That is a coincidental thing which Jung would call synchronicity.

What Jung is best known for is personality types but his work and influence goes way beyond that massive interest there is in types. Jung did not create MBTI but it is based on his initial thinking and today it has a life of its own, that now goes beyond Carl Jung. Fortunately my starting point is Jung and not MBTI. It has it's detractors and it has it's defenders.

A part of this madness can be explained in the discovery of my type. It was actually watching the video below as I was watching explanations of various types. Prior to this I did hear about the INTP type which includes Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson and Socrates. If I had pretensions on being a type INTP is it ! It is when I got to the INJF video that it stopped me in my tracks because it spoke to me. (Not the video, my intuition).

It is when I went deeper into learning more about the INFJ personality type that I started to feel disgusted. There were some brilliant video's from really interesting people but every now and then I would come across real nut jobs and they were passionate about explaining and trying to talk me out of accepting an INFJ type. Which is strange because when I watched the video there is this mind reader who assumes I accepted it. These video's wanted me to seek out how I could reject it.

Worse was to follow. Unlike Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci (I like to think I am a renaissance guy and Da Vinci is classified as an INTP). The philosophers I understand like Weber, Kant and Franz Kafka but Da Vinci - this guy was a neo-generalist so that was a surprising classification. Not as surprising as finding out which famous people are associated with INFJ. Now Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr, now that was a brilliant start, but then it said also included are Osama Bin Laden, Robert Mugabi and what really takes the cake - Adolf Hitler. I like to value my creative madness but this plain crazy.

Probably the easiest way to dismiss this type talk is take an online personality test. After answering many questions, the button came up that asked if I wanted to know my type, which is additional reason to roll my eyes - "no that is quite OK I just spent a lot of time answering a lot of questions, I really don't want to know my type". Pressed the button and up comes INFJ. Of course, my first thought was I can retake it and keep taking it until it says INTP. Deep down I know that I am not INTP for the simple reason, I hate reading.

Then I thought about what kind of crazy person would I want to associate myself with, that I would think represent a crazy version of INFJ. My mind took me to the great clip from Network that stars the late and great Peter Finch who plays Howard Beale - a network anchor man who loses it after discovering he was going to get replaced by the network because the network don't think he is good for their ratings :

Now this kind of crazy is the kind of crazy I can live with, the kind that speaks to me. The clip itself is so right for our time and place today. The pandemic is bringing its own secondary pandemic of mental health issues that it might be therapeutic for people in a lockdown to open their windows and say "I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore" - except of course the rebellion that then arises has to be kept indoors.

The lockdown has the opposite effect on me because there is nothing I enjoy more on this planet than having time on my own. For sure I can hear a little sound of chatter from my kids in the other bedroom next to mine but it is just sounds, nothing that disturbs my flow as I think this out and knowing that they are not close to reading this. One day they can, when I shoot off into the heavenly skies, someone can tell them that their papa used to write his thoughts out on platforms like LinkedIn. As they read it, I can imagine them being sentimental as if this was a voice from the great beyond, but by the fifth paragraph, they will all look at each other and think, "we did not realize he was off his rocker!".

The joy of madness is not being mad, but when there is method in the madness. There is madness in media though, and the very people who finger point at the other side as being mad, are thoroughly unable to see their own words and actions as an outsider would see them. It is possible that my kids may never read this words, and this is no big deal for me. I am not thinking for the great beyond but for the hear and now. By 5pm I will be - - - (Shit my Tottenham game is on right now - oh! darn I will miss the first half now). So lets get juldi, juldi (Punjabi term) and finish off these thoughts . Next stop is music.

There are other avenues of me getting in touch with my individuality, as there are ways of me trying to stop thinking that I am here and my soccer team is on TV. One avenue is music and in the course of preparing and punching out these thoughts I came across Marina and the Diamonds (she apparently has dropped the Diamonds for some reason now) but her music is very interesting.

The first track of note is TO BE HUMAN and I like that her song is what is personally relevant and more relatable to her.

This song does not say "all the things YOU have done" it says "all the things I've done". This also speaks to me.

I also share Marina's view of human beings as Savages. Just because someone created the Internet does not mean that Human Beings are now evolved because we have access to it.

IMHO she has it bang on. We only have to witness the Madness of Media to know we are from being fully evolved individuals, never mind a fully evolved society. A society is made of its individuals. Yet society continues to work with making the group the primary thing.

As long as we define everything through the lens of the group, we will view media as a broadcast rather than as a reflective medium, where those who naturally think out aloud, can look at their own words.

That does not mean we remain apolitical. I appreciate her track "Man's World" very much. While she does talk in the term of "We Are" in Savages, she reverts back to the "I" form in "Man's World".

She introduces the feminine via the words "Mother Nature" so this goes beyond a song about her gender, and she is not bashing men, she is simply saying what is obvious, it is a masculine perspective that dominates leadership practice. There are things we refer to as "SOFT SKILLS" and we don't have the gumption or smarts to refer to that as "feminine leadership", and we should include the intuitive capacities that we all have including empathy as great feminine leadership skills, but that means embracing ourselves in the Yin-Yang kind of way - holistic thinking rather than pursuing arguments and logic, which is a western sport.

Just a quick peek on Google and shit, I missed Harry Kane's goal after 25 minutes. (At least Spurs are winning) and so more the reason to wrap up quick - would be very different if my team was losing now. Today I did send an email to a friend and it is not for anyone to know who since this was a personal conversation, but I offered the idea below of an Appreciation Mindset. Not "Appreciate Inquiry" but both the soft core and hardcore of appreciation.

I have also linked the pic with a video about gratitude. Gratitude is not appreciation. Appreciation is much bigger than simply adopting one form of appreciation. What I value about Appreciation in its full sense is appreciation of person but also appreciation in terms of value. So time for me to turn to football - and end with my Appreciation Mindset. I won't link the video above, it is embedded below.