In my sophomore AP Psych class, we learned about different personality tests, and we all took the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator): a test that through a series of questions about your thoughts, feelings, values, and behaviors tries to identify what combination of the main four personality traits you possess. The MBTI then characterizes which of the sixteen personality types you belong to.
To a lot of people, this sounds like astrology. They brush it off as the usual mumbo jumbo that only sounds accurate because people are only listening for the things they want to hear, the things that confirm their previous assumptions. The great thing about MBTI, though, is that it’s not predictive. It’s based on your actual traits and only describes how each particular combination of traits tends to play out in a human being -- habits and hopes that are pretty accurate because they’re based on your own admissions of values and tendencies.
So when we took that quiz and started reading off the descriptions of our personality types, there was a chorus of “ohhhmygod!”s as they rang eerily true. Some of us went on to read the depictions of the types’ strengths and weaknesses, common careers, and famous and historical figures who were of the same personality type; as an INFJ, I was thrilled to see Martin Luther King Jr. listed as the same type as me--and significantly less pleased to see Adolf Hitler on the same list. After the shock wore off, though, I started to wonder how two people with such completely opposite motives, goals, and legacies could be composed of the same features, the same thought processes, the same values.
I think this says something significant about the potential people have, and the great capacity to do good or ill within us. I think it says something about how vastly outcomes can differ, the bizarrely parallel and yet opposite trajectory that can come of the same initial set of traits. To me, it’s crazy how the same patterns and skills can evolve into two such people we would probably never even consider in the same context.
Hitler and MLK: both renowned orators, influencers of multitudes who revolutionized the world and are widely remembered for how profound their impact on humanity was, one in a wonderful way, another terrible. This theme is seen throughout literature (and no, not just Harry Potter, although especially there), of two characters who are nearly identical in skill and habit, but make different choices--two characters whose lives begin the same way but choose completely different paths, a testimony to the idea that, “It is our choices that define us, far more than our abilities.”
Basically what I mean by all of this is that it amazes me how broad the future is, and I think it’s intriguing to consider how closely light and dark can sometimes mirror each other.
