Extroversion is naturally internalising the object into the subject or into oneself, that an extrovert is more comfortable, content and happy with the process of internalising THAT which comes from the exterior world or the object, the introvert on the other hand, is the opposite; they typically project their internal, creative world out ONTO the external world or object, that’s why many introverts prefer creative expression through art, music or writing, because it essentially is projecting ones inner world onto an acceptable canvas for ones own fulfilment, meaning and happiness.
This is a very simple explanation of the object-subject relationship within extroversion and introversion, but, what I wanna do is go much deeper and try to explain – from my understanding – how typology is applied to the behaviour we see in the pandemic, with regards to things like: conformity, complete blind faith. healthy scepticism and radical scepticism. Obviously I want to be careful because the entire goal of Jungian typology for the individual is finding the sweet spot, working on their inferior function, finding the balance so that one does not overwork a particular psychological function which causes a neuroticism with it being either in the extroverted or introverted domain. What this video/article hopefully does is make some adequate observations of behaviour within the pandemic situation and applied them to how the 4 psychological functions which are: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition work within the dynamics of extroversion and introversion to see if there can be made, any objections to what are typically introverted or extroverted attributes to the 4 functions in relation to the divided pandemic behaviour. For the sake of newcomers I am not a Jungian psychologist so a lot of these ideas are just applied to my observations and are of psychological // philosophical extension.
Extroverted thinking mostly consists of, as I said before; internalising the object into the subject, internalising the environment around oneself into oneself, so a way this is done with regards to thought is that the individual, (if its their superior function) are likely to have a strict relationship with the things around them, things which they internalise from the world, but it can be the case that extraverted feeling types rid themselves of subjective influences, therefore flocking to the more communal areas which make more sense to them such as social settings which can lead into a less knowing of ones internal side, or even their true, internal personality, to give an example: rules and regulations or expected rules that they think they must follow from the external world that is placed upon them, this can relate from being an advocate for the general, typical, societal expectations of following the “norm” or the “normal” routine of life and fitting ones identity and personality around that external, extraverted expectation within civilisation, you could probably say on a general level that more extroverted feeling types are the more common type to typically have something like a mid-life crisis, especially if they are to rid of their own subjective influences of their own true internal identity, something like fashion is a very good example of pure extraversion because you are externalising the personality towards and into the outer world which can be favoured by the feeling function and forwarded by the object in the external world itself!
In relation to the feeling function within the extravert; what can occur is that the extravert can overly assimilate into the object with relation to themselves so much that through such an intensity the feeling function looses its quirkiness or its charm, it can become cold and materialistic and you get this with people who identify with the object completely in a neurotic way, they become materialists, literally objectifying oneself who lives FOR and AS the object, attaching objects and replacing them for their own being, plastic surgery to give the person confidence or to give the person the charm that they have made cold through overidentifying with the object. This all becomes very untrustworthy for others when trying to understanding the genuine personality within them, but, you mostly find people like this on trash TV, again, another way to assimilate into the object by becoming an object through television which I feel is a very tragic thing.
The extroverted nature of this individual will find authority more trustworthy, they will trust in people more easily, but may also be naïve due to their simple trust in others to the subject-object relationship inherent in extroverts, they would expect authority or people in power positions to be inherently trustworthy which means the extrovert is much more prone to accepting a narrative or accepting the general consensus due to them always internalising the external object and intellectualising mostly with what is made relevant by the object itself, and this, in relation to authority, is very interesting because if their extroverted thinking or even feeling function is overinflated in relation to all their other functions they can very easily fall prey to BLIND FAITH. That this “truth” is non-negotiable, “what the mass media is saying is completely unbiased”, “why would they lie?” “why would propaganda be involved?” “anything else is wrong and not worthy of investigation if the media doesn’t talk about it!” This is the fundamental concern I have with the mass media and things of this nature. because psychologically, its general reliance out of, what you could call: insidious convenience, nullifies extroverted intuition! Especially for people who are extremely high in extroversion, because, if extroverts have a higher reliance on the object for internalisation – like the mass media, acting as a shadowy convenience for information which is seen as good – reduces the intuited need for extroverted perception, for gathering information from independent sources that are more focused on the value of truth than a possible agenda or ideology, because, if the mass media does do this (which I think it does for MANY MANY people) it makes people dangerously susceptible and acceptable to mass media manipulation as objective truth without intuiting the actual need to externally perceive alternative information which focuses around the truth rather then half-truths and ideological intent.
Extroverted thinkers may not be as sociable or gregarious as extraverted feelers because feeling is a much more a playful thing, if an extraverted thinker was to associate their thinking function with the external object or authority that it works for they are more likely to invest that function for the power structure in relation to shaping society or the social world itself, for example: giving up ones life for the ideology like through regime’s, even though its a form of martyrdom its not true to ego death or out of ego death because they would be giving up their life for a false harmony which is narcissism and ideology and not for oneself like a more well balanced introverted thinker, therefore, a sense of feeling, most likely would be their inferior function.
But in relation to acquiesces or being intellectually non-critical to given information, we have definitely been getting behaviour like this from people with regards to accepting the mass media as a complete trustworthy source of unbiased information with regards to the pandemic, lockdowns and all the other things put in place by a lenses of blind faith when we know the mass media is and has always been biased and does use propaganda to fuel its funnelled ideal by who ever is funding them, for example: something the mass media doesn’t talk about EVER, from what I can tell and seen, is that regarding the strange phenomena of antibody-dependent enhancement with relation to the vaccine which is !!REALLY WORRYING!! or the fact that a protest might be happening somewhere and they purposely don’t report on it, on UK news, even conflating virus deaths with people who didn’t die from it’s related death inducements but died from other causes while having a positive test for the virus, all done only to increase the number that they display on the media for the sake of fear.
So, what’s on the other side? Extremely neurotic introverted thinking I would say, this is representative from the really radical conspiracies, because, the more radical you get with them, the more imaginative, creative and complex they become which is SOOO interesting because that is how an introvert works, its all about projecting the mental world onto the object, the really crazy theories which are built around stories of their own unproven reality, like, I guess the well developed story lines in some of the Qanon stuff and other numerous things, are very much developed out from a schizophrenic-like mindset because a psychic break is all to do with emotion, emotion breaks away from the dominant, left-hemisphere world of logic and makes an entirely alternative reality from what actually is going on in one way or another, this leads me to say that it would not surprise me to see if schizophrenics are generally more introverted then extroverted.
Thus, inflated introverted thinking types are more favoured to fit into that way of thinking because being a radical conspiracy theorist, and I mean RADICAL, makes one seem independent from the group-think of the majority and that is a massive selling point for really introverted thinking types, because most of the time; they like independence, projecting their reality into the world, thus also being quick to judge and you have that with the rashness of emotional, radical conspiracy which is similar to high agreeableness but also being weirdly high in openness, if you look at someone like Alex Jones, his high agreeableness and high openness to experience makes a strange paradox because he is passionate, creative… (definitely creative!) but also compassionate because he see’s himself as trying to find the “hidden truth” for the sake of the people, lets not forget, he probably has high neuroticism as well but if you have high un-agreeableness you usually are lower in compassion because of individualism but that itself doesn’t mean you won’t have compassion! The sage archetype is kind of like that, the individualist who is compassionate out of openness to experience and knowledge, the sage who guides others, who says something like: “the truth will set you free” so I don’t think something like compassion is completely based in agreeableness, creativity out of openness expands where compassion exists, compassion can then exist or live within creativity itself if their is a large degree of openness within the personality, but if that creativity is conflated with reality through introverted projection and overrides cause and effect you kind of end up with a blueprint to support or create radical conspiracy!? All in all, you can have conspiracies that are definitely worthy of investigation but the conspiracies that are extremely baseless are just in many instances, abstract creativity.
And of course, this can relate to the pandemic with the super radical conspiracies, but really, related to it or not; most people are conspiracy theorists, all people have a degree of subjectivity that varies between one another that influences how we think the world works, that’s one part of what philosophy is, to conspire up ideas about what we think is true, to mentally plot about the world, its obviously just how far that is that going to go.
When Jung was thinking about psychic epidemics it became of high interest to me because it relates to many different things we are dealing with today, and this is a possible theory that I feel holds true: that through lockdown, the mental strain it has had on people, the mental stagnation which has come from it has maybe allowed a higher acceleration in peoples superior functions to become neurotic and over expressed, a complete unbalancing in certain people with extreme polarisation, and this can be seen as the tension between the thinkers and the feelers, maybe even sum it between them as a master and slave morality dialectic, that the excessive feelers don’t want leave lockdown, enjoy narcissistic abuse by their government, don’t want to progress back into life as before, they maybe even want to forward their future lives into an Orwellian-like scenario of lockdown “comfort” using irrational justifications or people from the complete opposite, the excessive thinkers, but what each polarisation is missing are the opposites which they are avoiding or lack, the excessive feelers being within blind faith are lacking thought and the excessive thinkers are lacking feeling, there is no balance.
I want to end this on something conclusive about what I feel is missing the most in general with society today with regards to introversion and extroversion, this would be; the critical and independent examination that comes from introverted thinking, and I feel that this is true by looking at what is most dangerously influential today:
– Group-Think
– Cancel Culture
– The negative side of Identity Politics
– Mass Media
These 4 things function, influence, propagate and have succeeded by their being a lack of independent, introverted thinking and analysis by oneself, and what doesn’t come as a surprise is that these 4 things have succeeded in maintaining division between people, that these 4 epiphenomena’s succeed from the avoidance of introversion and rather in accepting the external object into the subject, identifying ones person with the politic, identifying ones identity with the group, identifying ones belief with the media without actually realising that the individual becomes the message or the agenda and not the personality analysing the message or analysing the ideology which they should be doing, a bit like possession, maybe when the introverted side is suppressed the extroverted side of you which becomes dominant assimilates into the object which is a very haunting idea, as the identity of the individual gets devoured and is replaced by something else.
So that’s something that I find missing the most; intellectual independence to a degree, because you can have too much of it as well, but this is especially the case when cancel culture is anti-independence and FOR group-think itself! which is shadow projection performed by extroverted people with an overly superior feeling function who have not made conscious the importance of introverted thinking leading them to project it onto people who resemble intellectual independence with added contempt and negativity.
Thoughts on Thinking 