Why do we live in the Age of Jester (part 1 of 6)

9 min readAug 6, 2021

The latest concept in futurology.

Introduction. MBTI

During the First World War, governments for the first time faced the need to quickly retrain millions of people. The war lasted much longer than planned, so it required a lot of resources.

Literally in the second year of the war, the accumulated stocks of shells ran out. The current volume of output was clearly insufficient, it was necessary to increase it. This means that additional machines were needed, where capsules for projectiles would be ground, as well as production facilities where substances for explosive mixtures would be produced, etc. But this is the final chord. After all, the shell capsules were made of steel. And this means that first it was necessary to extract ore, then to clean it, then to melt steel, then to release rolled products…

In general, all this required sending tens of thousands of additional workers to production. Of course, to train them quickly. But shells are not everything. The First World War allowed the debut of military equipment-tanks, airplanes, submarines. Their production also needed to be deployed. And it also required workers.

And someone else needed to fight. And war is a constant loss of manpower that needs to be replenished. Which is not always easy. Let’s say a pilot was shot down, so a new one is needed. Moreover, the first candidate who comes across cannot be immediately put at the helm. First, it must be taught. Because an untrained person will crash, along with an airplane, and this is a huge waste of money. Secondly, if the future pilot is categorically unsuitable for the case, then at least he will learn, he will still crash.

In total, the question arose: how to correctly determine who to put at the helm of an airplane, who to put to the gun, and who to put at the machine? A mistake in such matters was costly. If you take the wrong person to the wrong place, then at best you will have to teach him longer, and the front can’t wait. In the worst case, it will quickly fail, and in its place you will again have to look for someone and again teach. But there are no extra people in the war anyway. If you dress more people in overcoats and work overalls, then there will be fewer peasants left, and they will give less food for the front and factories.

And then the officials had the idea to involve science in the process of determining the suitability of people for certain occupations. So there was a career guidance.

Ford’s task. It is necessary to replace the letters with numbers.

The first career guidance methods were uncomplicated. It was believed that the logical intelligence of applicants should be studied. It is this idea that underlies the well-known “Ford problem”, where it is necessary to find correspondences between letters and numbers for a while. If you solve the problem in 15 minutes — you will be hired as an engineer at the headquarters. If you decide for 25 minutes — you will have to stand at the conveyor.

However, we all know stories about successful losers and unlucky excellent students. Apparently, they were relevant in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Therefore, over time, there was an understanding that logical intelligence alone is not enough. And this understanding divided the scientists into two groups.

The first group of specialists began to complicate the concept of intelligence. The concept of social intelligence arose; it meant whether you were able to be friends with the right people or not. The concept of emotional intelligence appeared. Now it is overloaded with a lot of unnecessary meaning, and initially it meant only that you easily panic or not.

At the same time, the magic set of intelligences that guarantees your success has not yet been discovered. The politically incorrect J. Trout even claimed that it’s not about intelligence at all.

The second group of scientists decided that career guidance should be based not on intelligence, but on character. This point of view began to make its way from the end of the 1920s, and then the Second World War arrived, and the front again had no time to wait. As I understand it, the officials were reluctant to understand the types of intelligence, because it is difficult, so they were open to new solutions. Preferably simple and scalable. The head of the American National Bureau of Standards, Lyman Briggs, had an inquisitive wife who created just such a solution. It is known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

This method of assessing personal qualities, which was finally formed in 1944, is considered the most popular career guidance test in the world. Briggs ‘ wife, as well as the daughter who helped her, were not professional scientists, so the specialists were not happy about their success. This is partly why MBTI has been subjected to continuous criticism since its inception.

It cannot be said that the criticism of MBTI is unfounded. The only thing is that it has not yet been possible to create a single methodology for evaluating a person that would be free from criticism. It is logical, therefore, that there remains a request for the appearance of new methods.

PMAI

And in 1991, a simple, but on the other hand mysterious Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator (PMAI) technique appeared in the United States. It was hurried to adopt… marketers — so far with varying success. Psychologists from different countries are experimenting with it. For example, in Russia in 2019, a PhD in psychology was defended on this topic. Finally, back in 2004, PMAI was adopted by the organization that owns the rights to MBTI.

The new method was invented by an American Carol S. Pearson, an expert in English philology and a follower of Joseph Campbell. The latter became famous as the main popularizer in the United States of the ideas of psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, as well as as the author of the concept of monomyph (or the hero’s journey). So we are interested in it.

Back in the XIX century, the Swiss cultural critic Jacob Burckhardt expressed the idea that people can live in their lives the plots of literary works. This idea was picked up by the founder of analytical psychology, Jung, and Campbell inherited this idea from him.

According to the concept of monomyph, every hero of the myth must live through the same stages of the plot. If without details, then there are three stages — exodus, initiation and return. If we look at this scheme more closely, we will understand that Campbell did not have to invent anything, but it was enough just to take Hegel’s triad about thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And it would describe much more accurately not just the plot of a myth, but in general any successful literary plot. And yet.

Pearson made some changes to Campbell’s scheme. It has preserved the main stages, but at the same time it has completely changed the intermediate ones. According to the latest version, which was published on May 6, 2020, they are called as follows: Idealist, Realist, Warrior, Caregiver, Seeker, Lover, Revolutionary, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Sage, Jester. Pearson then stated that each intermediate stage of the plot is a separate archetype. And that in a person’s life, one of these archetypes can manifest itself more vividly than the others.

The last thesis changed everything in general. I will explain. There were people like Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer. They could invent technical devices and at the same time draw pictures. It seems to be a contradiction — where are the physicists, and where are the lyrics? But if we assume that both were under the influence of the Creator archetype, then everything becomes logical.

Or here is another example. From the point of view of MBTI, what qualities should a forensic lawyer have? Should it be a logician and a rational? Or is it an ethic and an irrational one? Or an extrovert? Or an introvert? Personally, I have worked as a litigator for several years, and I can say that I have met very different subjects. And they all achieved success by adapting the strategy to their psychological characteristics.

There were those persons who knew the laws and all the sheets of the case down to the comma. And there were those persns who, without understanding the case completely, could chatter an opponent. In general, there were different ones. That is, knowing the types of MBTI will not help us determine who will be a good trial lawyer and who will be a bad one.

But the Pearson’s scheme will help. The trial is a duel. One will win, and the other will lose. Therefore, we need people who love fighting. And these are the archetypes Warrior and Revolutionary. In general, Pearson came up with a simple and understandable model that is easy to broadcast to people. And marketers with the filing of Margaret Mark began to broadcast it on the company. For example, what is the IKEA brand about? This is extremely simple furniture without pretensions, that is, the archetype is a Realist. And so on.

Journey of detective Sharapov into “Black Cat” gang

So, the concept of Carol S. Pearson is very simple. And this is enough to gain popularity. However, research honesty forces us to ask a number of questions:
* Do these archetypes really occur in some spaces, or is it just a successful invention?
* Are there exactly 12 of them? How is this confirmed?
* Do the archetypes actually go in the order that Pearson came up with, or not?

Unfortunately, the author herself did not pay due attention to the first two questions. For some reason, those researchers who wrote about PMAI also avoided this topic. They say that since the instructions for the questionnaire provide that there are 12 archetypes, then there should be 12 of them, and that’s it!

But aren’t the signs of a pseudo-theory looming here? If we are really looking at archetypes, they should appear, and quite often. Because this is the difference between archetypes and a successful invention: archetypes do not need to be invented, they are already present in space, they only need to be discovered.

So, I decided to dig into this topic. Here the most interesting thing began.

Where did Pearson get the archetypes from? From the concept of a mythological plot. As Christopher Vogler explained, the popularity of the “Star Wars” movie saga is based precisely on the fact that it is based on the concept of the hero’s journey by Campbell. Excellent. We take another popular work of fiction — the Soviet television series “The meeting place cannot be changed”. Is there an evolution of heroes from Idealist through Ruler to Jester? I don’t think so.

Theoretically, I assume that the plot of “Meeting Places…” can be shifted to Campbell’s monomyph: indeed, in the 5th series, Sharapov has an outcome (introduction to the gang), initiation and return. But, in truth, who is interested in Sharapov’s evolution? After all, the main character of the series is Zheglov. He pours aphorisms, he is superman, he detains Fox.

No, the Hegelian triad already mentioned is much more appropriate here. There is a thesis — Captain Zheglov from the Moscow Criminal Investigations Department, a representative of the forces of good. There is an antithesis — the “Black Cat” gang, the embodiment of evil. And there is a synthesis, at the very end, when it turned out that Zheglov was not such a darling at all, because he “framed” Sharapov by shooting the repentant Levchenko. And even before, he was not a darling when he wanted to close the innocent Gruzdev. In general, if you look into the darkness for a long time … wait, we got distracted.

It’s time to draw a conclusion, and it will be such that in most successful works, which in theory should confirm the stages of the hero’s evolution, we will not see how the Pearson’s archetypes replace each other in orderly rows.

But one day I got lucky. I did find a work where there is a long evolution of the character. During which I counted 11 Pearson archetypes out of 12. And later I realized that the 12th archetype is also there. And they went exactly in the order prescribed.

“Just one piece?” — you may ask condescendingly. Yes, just one thing. But what! The epic of Gilgamesh. I will tell you about what this means another time.