Farmers & Artists

It seems Meyers-Briggs is in the air.  Seven days did an article just days after I posted specifically about Farmers and Meyers-Briggs.  I stand by my post re Myers-Briggs Directly preceding this, but wanted to add a few thoughts after having seen this article. 

I don't think it's any accident that this is focusing on farmers, or that the term psycho-analyzing was used.  The brain/mind/soul of the farmer is the great unknown continent in the same way that artists used to be before post-modernism.  The fruits of that era (yes, pun entirely intended) was that we all knew the psyches of artists.  "He's a Jackson Pollock / Crafter sort of thing."  It is all eminently categorizable.  It is almost as if the corollary of not knowing the authorial intention made it easier to box the psyche of the artist/product thereof.

NOW, flash forward, a product that we do not understand at all how it is produced (time to mention sub-corollary of pomo: we are all artists): FOOD, specifically the stuff that comes from the Earth.  The Dark Mysterious farmer is upon us.  Rock Star Farmers soon to follow (hopefully they won't have to die first to be famous like artsits). Time for me to get back in the game.

Meyers-Briggs

So, as I've been going through my job change i was talking with someone whom i respect who reccommended taking the myers-briggs.  He knew a bit about me and figured that i wouldn't like being classified and he was right.  Still, at that time (a few weeks ago, before I had a job, and was hence nervous, and hence perhaps a bit more suseptible, a bit more wanting of reassurance (of what, more later)) I thought about taking it, and had I been figured out how to do it online might have.  But I couldn't and so it sort of faded out of my consciousness.

Then, yesterday, another friend I respect listed on facebook that they were working with myers-briggs, and I know that they have done so many times before and love the results they get from it (not love the group they are in, but love the help knowing the relationality of themselves to others).

As I was taking my walk today it occurred to me (and this is the deep thought I've been working towards all this time) that myers-briggs is much like the kind of question we (everyone, right?) encounter continually on facebook: Which character on M*A*S*H* are you? etc. etc.  I would posit the way in which meyers-briggs brackets personality types is the same way it brackets a world (or set).  I.e., basically as limitted. 

So, you pre-limit the world and then this test makes sense.  As long as everyone has to be someone from M*A*S*H*, then everyone will be someone from M*A*S*H*.  Even MB purist allow for change over time.  You can have been a Klinger in your youth but a Burns in your adulthood (tho I have to admit exploring thisas even making sense might be confusing), but you can't be someone walking off Mork and Mindy into this thing.  There will always be someone from Mork and Mindy walking into this thing in my opinion.  The list of personalities even if you do want to use one (and they do have a funcionality you can argue for (argument?)) is historical and changing I would think, there being an unknown future and all.

But this kind of fitting yourself into a world is obviously popular, and probably makes sense that it's more necessary as we expand into new territories or whatever you call cyberspace.  In fact, if nothing else it's staking out that territory.  I guess the reason I've been reluctant is just that, I'm not that interested in staking territory MB has to offer, now on the other hand, I'm totally Hawkeye.