I attend a religious service

Interesting rituals pervade the ritualized combat ... of baseball.

Take me out to the ball game,

Oh, take me out to the ball game! America's pastime is not only one of the most refined and elegant sports, but the home of endless rituals and symbolism. It could be viewed as the center of our civic religion, with politics a peripheral and grubby afterthought. And it is better than typical religions- a living ritual enacting the competitive spirit that truly characterizes American existence, enclosed within a lovingly maintained structure of rules, decorum, and tradition. Thankfully, my town recently acquired a ultra-minor professional baseball team, which is a joy to watch.

Ball games have a long history in the Americas as sacred events. Bats were even used in some prehistoric cases. In our modern game, the leading actor (i.e. the pitcher) stands on a central mound, reminiscent, if only in a small way, of the religious mounds of pre-Columbian America. This lonely figure faces the most trying test, from which he (or she!) will emerge either a hero, or defeated by Lilliputians sent up to hit against him. Surrounding him is a perfect square, the number four being highly significant in many cultures and mythologies, not to mention in nature generally. The opposing players seek to circumambulate the square, a common religious action, and while typically mark of respect, in this case it is an act of power over rival priests. It is a passion play of sorts, though the outcome is open rather than closed.

Take me out with the crowd;

We begin with communal singing- the national anthem, hands over hearts. Then it is on to chanting, clapping, stomping, waving, dancing, all in a re-ligio... sense of communal connectedness. An invisible being announces the service, keeping everyone onboard with a narration of key events and rituals. In between the enactment of the heroic contest in the main drama, spectators and miscellaneous notables come on to the field to take cameo turns, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, running races and other contests, winning boons, honoring aged or fallen heros. Altar boys, er bat boys, run out one of the priestly tools- the pitcher's rosin bag, and serve the heros unstintingly through the game. The seventh inning stretch brings on the classic baseball song in chorus.

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,

Then it is on to communal eating of characteristic tribal foods. The heart of Americana- hot dogs, corn dogs, peanuts, chili, ice cream. I guess nachos count as well- the mingling of native corn with the newcomer's dairy. Healthy? No. Spiritually nourishing? You bet. While no one makes claims of transubstantiation for these foods, they make and evoke memories of unusual strength.

I don't care if I never get back.

The admission gate marks a sacred threshold, entrance to the outer precincts of the progressively more sacred central field, square, and mound. Time is suspended, as baseball does not run on a clock, but finishes whenever the ritual drama has run its course by its own arcane rules. Nor does the accumulating score lead relentlessly to the final fate. It ain't over till it's over, to use the classic maxim, as pitching breakdowns can lead to dramatic changes late in the game.

Let me root, root, root for the home team,

While in many sports, each team has its partisan section cheering it on, (soccer hooliganism comes to mind), in baseball it is more customary for all the spectators to root for the home team only, at least in the sort of minor league game portrayed here. While this may be impolite to the visiting team, it creates a civically unified atmosphere.

The Greeks made athletic festivals central to their culture, as have many others. It was a form of divination, showing whom the gods favored, and whom not. Sport was one way to express and strengthen the civic cult, as well as to transcend it, in the setting of pan-Hellenic games, even though they didn't quite get around to replacing war with sport.

If they don't win, it's a shame.

These days, the rules- i.e. moral concepts of fairness and popular legitimacy- matter far more than theories of divine favor. As a civic religion, it imbues a fundamentally secular activity with many of the narratives and spiritual archetypes embedded in human nature.

The rules of baseball are just a little more sacred and tradition-bound than those of other sports. Thus the steroid scandal hit baseball particularly shamefully, though far, far more damaging derelictions happened elsewhere in the culture, as our leaders (one of whom had helped run a baseball team, oddly enough) started a gratuitous war, showered money on the well-to-do, and raped the poor, greedy, & unsophisticated with predatory loans, making way for the current economic crisis. Baseball itself became ever more besotted with corporate advertising, corporate stadiums, and a fixation on money generally. Rituals like baseball are inescapably connected with the trends afoot elsewhere in the culture. Demons can not be exorcised by ritual alone, but only by taking the lessons of the ritual- fairness, integrity, diligence, persistence, respect- into our wider lives.

For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,

The high priest and the low priest are having a stylized game of catch, with the all-white sacred ball. (I'm not going to get into Freudian theories about the bats, balls, gloves, etc.!). Does the batting team of priests from the competing civitas have the power to interrupt this golden line? If not, the pitcher has achieved a perfect game. If the batters do get hits, can the fielding team prevent the ball from touching the mundane earth? If not, can the fielders at least prevent the ball from escaping the sacred precincts, inner and outer?

Which team has greater occult powers, exhibited through their skill and luck? The trip around the square marks the stations of this passion play, with home the ultimate goal, just as it was for Dorothy. An umpire, of yet another priestly class, maintains the balls, discarding those sullied by contact with the earth. He also lovingly sweeps home plate back to its pristine condition and validates the golden line drawn between pitcher and catcher.

At the old ball game.

Who gets to play the hero? This is far more than a question of skill. The players represent their civic tribes, and represent the archetypal hero with occult powers. This is why breaking the color line in baseball was far more significant than it was in other sports, as baseball was and remains more civically identified and more archetypally powerful than sports like basketball and football.

One reason is that baseball has very little physical contact. The ball is the central mediator- between players and between teams. Even tag-outs are made through the glove, with the ball couched within, or at its most direct, with the ball directly held in the hand outstretched. Even in the extremis of the bean ball, the ball still mediates, showing its dark power. However, the bean ball is a serious breach of decorum, both violating the golden line and bespeaking a loss of control/power by the pitching team- a descent from civilized rules (i.e. sacred ritual) into barbarity.

It is hard to leave- to break the spell of the sacred service, space, actors, and drama. But it wouldn't be sacred if there weren't mundane life to provide a backdrop.

• Another author investigates the diamond way.
• Basketball is an OK game too: American ballet, to baseball's mystical drama.
• Character in the financial elites, or lack thereof. Do they really have to be psychopathic?
• "Worst states for business" are the best states for people.
• Is corruption becoming unstoppable? Does money have to ruin all public functions?
• Tom Coburn- standing up to the terrorists, a little.
• Law of the sea.. further unworthiness of the Republican party.
• This is the soul, which we can not remove.
• Krugman on global scorching/burning/warming ...
• Economics quote of the week, by Bill Mitchell, speaking of stagnation in the US, as well as the nature of intergenerational responsibilities.. are they real or are they financial?:

"The pro-cyclical government cutbacks have introduced a vicious circle of income loss, saving loss, wealth destruction, continuing real estate crisis, loss of state and local revenue, further cutbacks according to the application of their inappropriate fiscal rules (balanced budget amendments). 

The pro-cyclical nature of state and local government employment is one of the principle reasons the US recession has endured and will ensure the long-term damage to that nation’s vitality and ability to provide high quality services to its people. 

The reasoning in the public debate about the future consequences of government budget deficits is wrong-headed. The capacity of the US to provide for an ageing society amidst the long-term decline in its industry doesn’t depend on cutting in to public spending now – which is patently causing law and order to deteriorate, the standard of public education and health to slip. 

Exactly the opposite response is required. Schools need to be revitalised. Communities need to be sure the streets are safe so that businesses will have an incentive to invest. People need to be mentally and physically well."

• Economics bonus graph of the week: Krugman on middle class stagnation:

Star Wars and the hero's quest

The Star Wars mashup as a way to psychological, even spiritual, health.

I found the recent release of a full-length mashup version of Star Wars, composed of countless (actually, 473) clips from fan reenactments and animations, endlessly fascinating. As the Salon article that brought it to my attention mentions, it is a gloriously expressive outpouring of love. But is it healthy?

From the very first, Star Wars was an extraordinarily cheesy Hero tale. A journey by the fair-haired Luke from Potter-esque anonymity to savior of the galaxy, with a bit of magic (force) tossed in at highly convenient plot points, with luck and coincidence playing starring roles. Then the franchise went steadily downhill, but I won't go there!

As a fan of Jung, I respect the intricacies of the archetypal theory that surrounds this sort of tale, which goes into enormous detail about the typical hero, the helpers in the quest, the father-figure, the role of the underworld and its tests, the initiation ritual, the magic tools, and so forth. All this has its role. But one thing missing in the theory is its point ... why are these hero tales so gripping and perennial? Why do they emerge in every time and cuture? Joseph Campbell tries to explain it in his classic, the Hero with 1000 faces:

"The passage of the mythological hero ... fundamentally it is inward- into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space, but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power." ...

"What, now, is the result of the miraculous passage and return? 

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as the others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all."

In the spirit of simplification, what I would focus on is that the Hero tale, simply and plainly, is a way to model success. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success, and the psychological enactment of success- of reading the happy fairy tale, of cheering for a winning team, of watching the murder being solved on CSI, reading the superman comic book, and yes, wielding one's tin-foil light-saber, is more powerful than any Tony Robbins motivational pablum. Sure, actual success is the sweetest of all, but that is a rare experience, and anyway, we only know what to do with it and how to value it through the strenuous modelling of a childhood steeped in the hero tale (including Cindarella tales).

We are all by the nature of reality and life bound by countless fetters. Biological, physical, environmental, and above all social conditions hem us in on all sides. Life is an endless series of problems to be solved and desires to be satisfied in the teeth of implacable reality- even quite active competition & opposition. The mantra of "freedom" that rings through our political discourse is far from an existential promise, but a woefully limited proposition, relative only to our ur-political condition of total Hobbesian depotism. Now, we face, in political terms merely a tyranny of the majority, (or a majority of the money), moderated by a few constitutional rights, more or less observed.

Thus the sweetness and rarity of true success, where some magical tool or insight arises, perhaps spontaneously from the same place that is so insistent on the enactment of hero tales ... the unconscious, allowing us to cut an existential Gordian knot. While obedience to the ambient social norms may suffice for a "normal", discontented slave-like existence, we all aspire higher. Perhaps tragically, but also inevitably. The hero tale is the spur, the offering of hope, and the psychological preparation for that real quest.

How best to experience it? Clearly one gets out what one puts into it, psychologically speaking. Worst of all is the passive viewing experience, supine in front of a TV or theater screen. Next perhaps is the radio format, demanding substantially more mental attention and imagination. On par would be a live reading by a friend or parent, even if there are a few pictures involved. Somewhere in there would also come the solitary reading experience, which makes some imaginative demands, but is also a bit slow and dry. How about actual re-enactment and play? Here we get to some serious interactivity, intensity, mental involvement, and imagination. Indeed, the more crude the props and implements, the higher the imaginative involvement.

Lastly of course is actually carrying out a heroic experience, engaging in the hard work involved, the practice, the training, the schooling needed to be a professional musician, or join seal team 6, or cure cancer. But that takes forever!

One can easily imagine religion arising out of this process of devising and telling heroic tales. Adults and children alike thrive on such sagas. Perhaps one saga (Homer's, the Ramayana, the Mosaic tale, etc.) captures the mood and vitality of a culture particularly well, with close scrapes, awesome enemies, deep poetry, and triumphant successes. Perhaps, in its customary recognition of the overwhelming importance of the hero's unique inner resources (i.e. the unconscious), its heroes gain magical assistance or are themselves gods under mundane cover.

Perhaps this story becomes so psychologically compelling or ritualized in re-enactment that it turns from story into fact- a "believed" religious narrative. Some other ingredients may be added, such as a back-story about how the world is created, and some more or less rationalized doctrines about how the "super" powers and "super"-beings relate to each other to satisfy the more cerebral believers. But all these things can be added later on rather easily, as George Lucas has labored voluminously (if relatively vainly) to show. (L. Ron Hubbard had a great deal more success!)

And what about humor? In striking contrast to a story that evolves into religion, the Star Wars mashup is as much spoof as homage, yet is none the less loving for that. The original film used plenty of humor, particularly from C3PO, and the comically over-drawn villains. There are fine lines between modelling success and being successful, delicious in their plasticity. Also, fine lines between profundity and platitude, between bathos and tragedy, between meaningful myth and camp. Humor seems to signify our knowledge of those lines, our mutual conspiracy to experience greatness while wearing collanders on our heads. It also, in its better tenors, affirms existential hope over the various tragic means and ends of human life.

In this connection, Campbell tried to resurrect an ancient sense of comedy, far different from what is customary today:

"We are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable, as fun it is a pleasant haven of escape, but the fairy tale of happiness ever after can not be taken seriously; it belongs to the never-never land of childhood, which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough; just as the myth of heaven ever after is for the old, whose lives are behind them and whose hearts have to be readied for the last portal of the transit into night - which sober, modern, Occidental judgement is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. 

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. ... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
...
It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and 'unreal': they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs."

• Hope, confidence, and togetherness- also the currency of mega-religion.
• Inside the new hate.. or is it the same old hate?
• Our government is corrupt.
• Our media is corrupt too.
• What we need in a new political/economic narrative.
• Brief talk on place cells in the brain.
• Could it be that banks are really getting cut down to size?
• On the other hand, the Greek crisis generates even more financial innovation.
• The CBC's look at Occupy concludes, with a rousing call to democratize capital and downsize the FIRE sector (segment 3, minute 47 to end).
• Economics quote, from Robert Solow, via Bill Mitchell, speaking of conventional micro-based macroeconomic modeling approaches (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, or DSGE):

"An obvious example is that the DSGE story has no real room for unemployment of the kind we see most of the time, and especially now: unemployment that is pure waste. There are competent workers, willing to work at the prevailing wage or even a bit less, but the potential job is stymied by a market failure. The economy is unable to organize a win-win situation that is apparently there for the taking. This sort of outcome is incompatible with the notion that the economy is in rational pursuit of an intelligible goal. The only way that DSGE and related models can cope with unemployment is to make it somehow voluntary, a choice of current leisure or a desire to retain some kind of flexibility for the future or something like that. But this is exactly the sort of explanation that does not pass the smell test."

Jung and the fairy tale

A brief review of Jung and applications of his ideas

I'm a big fan of Carl Jung, twentieth century psychologist and head of a movement twinned with, and in internecine conflict with, Freud and the Freudians. The latter call themselves psychoanalysts, and the former, analytical psychologists! There are places Jung goes where I can't follow- he was a bit mystical at times, positing a new physical principle of reality (synchronicity), and maintaining a perpetual ambivalence whether religion was purely psychological, or whether his psychology touched on transcendent dimensions, indeed even put us in touch with God.

Like a true prophet, Jung's output was prodigous (22 volumes of collected works) and wildly uneven. Reading through even his best work, one is struck by a regular cycling between lucidity and obscure meandering. At his best, he is penetrating and eminently quotable. His therapeutic system offers a kind of salvation, which he termed individuation, that accomplishes the full flowering and maturation of human potential by coming to a balanced tension between the various poles of our psychic existence- conscious/unconscious, light/dark, male/female, etc. Getting there involves dredging up unconscious contents arriving through dreams and other avenues, and the involvement of the therapist in a sort of chiropractic realignment / inspired interpretation of those contents.

Noll's "The Jung cult" recounts even darker sides to Jung's life and legacy, and is on my reading list. But all that said, (and I'm no expert), I also find a great deal of good in his approach, including, in his more sane moments, a thoroughly psychological theory of religion as a sort of art form, and an appreciation of the spiritual impulses of humanity that, while irremediably supernatural in their psychological expression, have no supernatural origin. Jung was not really doing science, (at best, a sort of pre-science), but was developing a language to describe the psyche and its dynamics, drawing shamelessly on the mythologies and symbologies of countless other traditions, ancient and modern.

Along with Freud and many others, Jung thought that simply bringing unconscious contents to light is enough to set us free, like the gnostic theme of redemption by knowledge so common in mystical religion (not to mention modern science!). But what is in the unconscious was not just the nasty repressed stuff that Freud was so fixated on, but also beautiful, positive and powerful messages and themes that have healing power for a psyche out of balance. That is to say, it holds the fundaments of *meaning and of religion in all its senses, positive and negative. Jung also presented the idea that the unconscious provides a sort of counter-weight or corrective to the conscious stance, which can lead to harmony if only we listen to it. The phenomenon of PTSD might make one leary of such simplicity, but in the hands of positive cultivators and interpreters, a great deal of good can come out of such engagement with products of the imagination.

Though the psychological movements might partake in some ways of the forms of religion, their real significance is that they give us tools to understand all religion, and much else besides. Thus Jungianism might be termed a meta-religion, since, much like his student Joseph Campbell's work on myth, it works to lay bare the psychological, typically symbolic, language underlying the expression of human meaning in the arts and in the allied forms we call myth and religion. "Lay bare" might be putting it a bit too strongly. Perhaps it is better to say that Campbell and Jung used the kaleidoscopic range of its specific expressions to talk about the contents and dynamics of the unconscious (as did Campbell's student George Lucas). My view is that this work will re-emerge with time as cognitive science develops deeper understandings of mental function from a more reductionistic direction.

The foundation of Jung's system was an appreciation of the unconscious as a huge and deep edifice, with which consciousness is in constant dialog and tension. The layers range from simple cultural indoctrination to the deepest instincts like fear of snakes and other phylogenetically ancient patterns. These patterns, consituting an internal cosmos of sorts, are accessible or spontaneously expressed to different degrees, from Freudian slips to art, religion, and dreams. Whether dream content is meaningful is hugely controversial, and I don't take a firm position. But its imagery is very suggestive of messages with coded symbolic meaning, which have from ancient times been treated with high respect. Even if they lack intrinsic meaning, dreams are rich objects of interpretation, like vivid Rorschach blots that might be bent to positive or negative meaning, given one's frame of interpretation, itself the product of unconscious and social influences.

At any rate, the unconscious at its most lucid seems to speak in symbols and feelings, not in prose. Thus the arts are filled with symbolism and raw emotion, not to drive college students crazy with their layered lapidary depths, but to express the inner reaches of human nature. Included in the arts should be such pre-sciences as alchemy and astrology, with their incredibly symbol-rich, if data-poor, systems of thought. The iconoclasm of modern art has been a remarkable proof (in the breach) of this rule. We now miss the gargoyles of architecture, the warmth of representational painting, and the rhymes of lyric poetry. But we can not have them back, because they would betray too much of our humanity, which modernism has repressed after coming into such startling contact with its depths through the wars and psychological insights of the twentieth century. It would now be too naive, obvious, unironic, unrefined, and simplistic!

Religion also has felt the brunt of this modernist repression, where logic forbids giving in to superstition, however deeply felt and inescapable from a psychological perspective. So, we have to go back in time to find truly rich representations of unconscious currents- to Homer, to the romatic poets, to Raphael, to pre-modern art of all kinds.

One of the most interesting and perhaps surprising sources of unconscious contents in their most pure and concentrated form are fairy tales, such as those collected by the brothers Grim. I am working here (in extremely crude outline) from a set of podcasts by a Jungian therapist in Vancouver, John Betts. His segments on temperament/typology and individuation were relatively weak, but his segments on the interpretation of fairy tales were outstanding. He treated the tale "The Nixie of the mill-pond".

Fairy tales take place no where in particular, and no time in particular. Their characters are undeveloped and undetailed, existing only to further an archetypal story. Which is to say, a story consisting of themes and symbols all of unconscious significance. What details they do have are clearly symbolic, not realistic. Fairy tales have a superficial simplicity, yet are uncannily gripping and durable, being products of a long cultural process of pruning and selection. Their meaning is subtle and not obvious, but their lessons stay with us, because they speak to the inner self. Incidentally, they are ideally suited to the animated cartoon format, with non-realistic art matching their non-realistic content.

The drama of a fairy tale is one of individual psychological development, portrayed in an unrelenting stream of symbols- in this case, the pond, the golden comb, the moon, the old wise woman, the three heroic tasks, the magical flute, circumambulation, people turning into frogs. And on and on. The tale is told as a loosely connected set of symbols, which in this case have a strongly feminine tone (moon, flute, spinning wheel, sheep, crone, roe deer). Thus it seems that this tale, though its ostensible main characters are the miller and his son, is about their relationship to the feminine principle, embodied in the Nixi (a kind of powerful water-sprite, such as the Rhine-maidens of Wagner), and the son's wife.

The Nixie takes possession of the son in consummation of a deal the miller made with her after losing touch with his own psychological foundations (represented by a run of bad luck, a sort of midlife crisis). Enduring severe magical and heroic tests (whose solutions are communicated to her through a set of dreams), the son's wife saves him from the clutches of the Nixie by giving the Nixie a series of symbols of femininity, only to lose him again to years of amnesia. But the flute ultimately reminds each of them of their true natures (gnosis), after which they live united, happily ever after.

It may be possible to put other, more mundane interpretations on fairy tales. But to me the symbolic and psychodynamic interpretation, as a sort of waking dream with deeply psychological dilemmas and resolutions, seems far and away the best, plumbing the depths of the tale's dynamics, and explaining its power and meaning, expecially to those who are young and more psychologically open than adults. The reason why we treasure tales of psychological development and fulfillment, which are of course also the bread and butter of all kinds of narrative art- novels, sitcoms, cartoons, and films- is that this is what we seek in our own lives- not just material sustenance and success, but personal meaning found through the trials and tribulations of life.

• Arch-Freudian Edward Glover spits invective at Jung in 1953: "What sexuality is to Freud the number four is to Jung." (Jung was into numerology along with everything else mythic).
• Freud and religion
• Is peak oil a mirage? That would, frankly, be a terrible situation for the climate. And I doubt the rosy scenarios depicted here. US oil production continues to decline, despite all the technological wizardry.
• Gosh- whatever happened to IBM?
• Whence morality?

Politics of temperament

A temperamental argument for political resentment

Continuing last week's discussion of psychological types, the book Please understand me also has some trenchant things to say about the educational system. Following on Carl Jung's four-dimension system, Kiersey and Bates condense it into four basic types, mixing in a bit of Hippocrates to get the "Dionysian", "Epimethian", "Promethian", and "Apollonian" temperaments. To be crudely brief, the Dionysian (SP) temperament is experiential, impulsive, and freedom-loving, the Epimethian (SJ) duty-bound and methodical, the Promethian (NT) intellectual, curious, and self-directed, the Apollonian (NF) imaginative and highly empathic. Schools tend to be run by and for the Epimethian type, and teachers have a rather hard time understanding students who do not obey directions, line up in rows, seek approval, and do their work on time- a description of the Epimethian temperament. 

This regime serves the Dionysian type particularly poorly- the student who has to be active, who learns by doing and handling things, whose impulses must be obeyed and expressed, who, as the authors state, needs to "fly the plane, drive the truck, climb the mountain, toot the horn". These students lose interest quickly, tend to say to their neighbors in class that "this is stupid!", and run off to join the military right after high school, if indeed they make it through at all. They think about now much more than the future, and handle people, negotiations, and crises well. They make up over one-third of the population, and according to the authors are massively under-represented in higher education. Not because they are not intelligent, but because their style of learning is not suited to the dominanat style of teaching. One can easily make an evolutionary argument about this, but I'll pass on that now. Examples of this type, according to last week's political link, are John McCain and G. W. Bush- both impatient with abstractions, eager to mix it up, and who thrive on excitement and crisis.

Dionysians in our society live in a somewhat alien world that values abstraction and book learning, and many of whose ever-growing complexities are difficult to master in concrete, hands-on ways. Thus it seems that they are probable candidates for political resentment in US politics, forming a class of voters who resent the success of those who get the rewards of higher education purely because they can sit still, not because they are particularly bright- those who are the self-annointed elites, while it is the Dionysians who eagerly run the levers that actually make the world go around. Dionysians naturally appreciate leaders who, like them, denigrate pointy-headed pencil-pushers, and who "go with their gut" to make decisions. 

One problem is that, while the Dionysian has just as much native intelligence as anyone, there really is a point to sitting down and hitting the books. Impatience with abstractions can be fatal if key aspects of the world are best understood on exactly that basis. Important concepts and processes really are imparted in the precincts of higher education, though making people better leaders or more compassionate or moral are certainly not among them. This is not an argument for sending more students to college (let alone treating hyperactive students with drugs!). Indeed proposals to send all high schoolers to college are dead-wrong, sure to waste the time of both students and teachers. It is an argument to value those with different skills and temperaments by beefing up alternative hands-on education systems like trade schools, internships, apprenticeships, arts schools, etc., so that each person can flourish in the most congenial and effective way.

One can take this kind of typology too far, and no person is a pure type let alone just a type, but it seems beneficial to realize that people are different in deep ways, to the extent that they can be almost mutually incomprehensible. Thus it can be helpful to have explicit descriptions for (and appreciation of) differences that I, for example, as an Epimethian, would otherwise be oblivious to.