#n growing up i've never really let the outside world influence me too much. no i pride myself in really staying true to myself. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

enchantedbyhiddles · 3 years

Note

I'm from the US, never been to Germany, but from what I've heard of it, y'all are at the top of the list when it comes to being regretful about the Holocaust (appropriately so) and doing your best to take no backsliding about it. Of course the Jews weren't the only victims of it; black people were also very much targeted. So even if Germany is very homogenous, I would've expected there to be more care shown about racism by how much awareness is paid to past atrocities. I'm kinda shocked.

I think with you being from the US, as weird as it sounds, here the understanding about racism is totally different from yours.

One thing that everyone from the USA needs to understand is that you have to go by a totally different mindset. While you think that talking about differences helps being anti-racist, the official stance here is different. It is more about “we are all people, lets focus on that”. Talking about races is absolutely racist here. During the holocaust we saw the most atrocious crimes, murder and genocide, because people were divided into groups by their ethnicity and how they looked. So you’ll find nothing like that in Germany today. There are no official papers, where you can check your ethnicity or anything. The only thing that gets noted is your nationality. And that is a slippery slope, because you aquire German citizenship by blood-relation, not by being born here. There are nationalities that are non-German, but aren’t discriminated, while others are. Even though from the US-POV they are all white. (*There is something like “immigration background” what is often cited to say “Germans from foreign origin”, but this includes everyone, who has a parent with a non-German passport or being born outside of Germany and is not the same.)

Actually because of the holocaust and because people are really indoctrinated to be aware of the atrocious antisemitism, we developed the arrogance that we aren’t racist. “I heard about the holocaust for years in school. I know everything about it, so people shouldn’t try to educate me on that.”; ”Our constitution states right in the first few articles that we don’t discriminate. It is a written law, so it must be true.” Similarly “Antisemitism lead to people being killed, so something like the N-word or Z-word is comparably not bad at all, so people are too sensible and should shut up”. I hope you understand, what kind of thinking many people here developed? We are in the beginning and very much talking basics here. There are a growing number of people who “get it” and understand racism, systematic racism, micro-aggressions (like not always and not perfectly, but they are aware that such things exist and try to work on that), but there is still the majority for whom you have to really spell it out.

Black people weren’t actively targeted as a group in Nazi-Germany, because there were so few. Like while they were seen as “inferior” and faced incredible racism, it depended very much on the individual case, how they were treated. There are now much more black people (especially in former West Germany), because of immigration, but also to a certain degree because of US-soldiers. Black/mixed-race Germans of a certain age were for part of their lives seen as children of an occupational power. Black people from the US often face more discrimination than black people from Africa, because of that.

I know many US-Americans can’t imagine such a world, but as I grew up in former Eastern Germany, I saw the first black person where I lived, when I was 18. Most of the families have lived there for a few hundred years. They simply can’t imagine that people move to different places. You’ll always be an outsider in such a place, even if you are a white German. For people that have a different ethnical background such an area is the worst racist nightmare imaginable. Even those that are open-minded and positive towards a non-German, will throw around racist remarks by the douzen in minutes. And there will be no one to correct them.

While in the USA racism is often very much seen as black vs white, here in Germany it is most often that we all look very similar. If there was a group of 100 Germans and all look white and you make an antisemitic or antizigianist joke, you wouldn’t know that there is a Jew and a Sinti in that group. This stereotyping and racism is much more sinister. There are many, many minorities and the younger people with influence from the internet and other societies (like the USA), develop a different kind of conscience of what they find acceptable and what not. I mean, e.g. for the Roma, they are German nationals and lived here for centuries and German is their mother language. When they talk about themselves many will use the Z-word, because that’s the one they know. That doesn’t make it okay for German ethnicity Germans to use it. There’s an ongoing emancipation.

The biggest problem is faced by the Sinti and Roma. Like they’ve been here for 700 years, they are German, they have typical German names, and for all the time they faced horrible antizigianism. If you are from a different area, you wouldn’t know that this particular family is Sinti, yet in their area people know that they are and discriminate against them. There are still so many prejudices and they are seen as “lazy, only living from wellfare, too many children”. From a huge part of society.

They are the forgotten victims. Even after WWII, when everyone regretted the Holocaust, they were still persecuted, because they deserved it. They were “Asoziale”. They weren’t even acknowledged until the 70s or 80s. In school you learn about them being victims of the Nazis, but never in an explicit way. Like they are just part of the list with homosexuals, “disabled”, criminals, and “Asoziale”. (see the problem in that list?) So if it comes to Z* the idea that it is racist, is very much non-existent.

And this doesn’t even start on the racism that is faced by the many immigrants and their children. For US-Americans lot of that wouldn’t even be considered racism, because it is against Italians and Greeks, now people from Eastern Europe. Compared to the discrimination against Turks and people from the middle East and Northern Africa. From a German POV though, the discrimination they face is very much from the same origin. Those people were invited, because Germany needed workers. There is a great sentence by Max Frisch about that “We called for workforce, but people came.”

#this is very much nonsensical rambling #sorry about that #i'm not an expert #and there are mistakes we all make #these are just some thoughts #to maybe highlight a bit #how things are here in germany #tw racism #Anonymous

11 notes · View notes

mbti-notes · 4 years

Note

Would you mind explaining why you see Rey as ESFJ and Kylo Ren as INTP from the new Star Wars? I've always seen Rey as a stereotypical ISFP action hero (quick to adapt to new situations, hands on, a fierce sense of 'moral right' borne of self), and I'm undecided on Kylo, but thought he exhibited FP tendencies -- a struggle between self-identity and rationality, that indicates a F/T imbalance.

[con’t: In reading Leonore Thomson’s book on personalities, the Fi-dom section brought Kylo to mind – unless prone to developing Se/Ne, the IFP fiercely guards their sense of ‘identity’ / self against outside influences and becomes rigid. Isn’t that what he’s doing, in differentiating himself from his parents and refusing to see reality any other way than what he has decided it is, based on his feelings / experiences?]

Judging by the debates I saw online, there doesn’t seem to be any general consensus on either character, which is interesting. It’s a trilogy and the character development beats are scattered and difficult to piece together. And there were several blanks that I had to fill with my own speculation. I didn’t really enjoy the process of typing these characters, but I did it because I kept on receiving requests week after week ever since the first movie came out. I found the character development arcs shallow and poorly paced, and the resolutions were too pat to be very interesting. I reviewed the Kylo and Rey scenes several times, with different personality types in focus each time, in order to ensure that the function pieces fit together to my satisfaction.

***** Major spoilers ahead! ******

Kylo

Although I think there are weak points in her book, I don’t take issue with Thomson’s description of Fi doms. I mainly disagree with the motive that you ascribe to Kylo. I don’t think he’s being protective of his identity, I don’t think he cares about identity, in the way that Fi doms do. I will concede that he gives the impression of being a rebellious teenager in defying his parents/mentor/birthright, but defiance alone does not make him Fi dom. Pretty much everyone (even some animal species) goes through a stupid teenage phase of rebellion at some point in their life, and some people never properly get past it. To me, he looks like a stuck-in-adolescence INTP: entirely too full of himself and blind to everything else.

One little point made it difficult for me to settle on a type. Leia was absolutely convinced that Kylo was “manipulated” by Snoke/Palpatine to join the dark side, but there was little indication from Kylo, Luke, and Han that this was actually the case. Should we trust Leia, since the movie portrayed her as being much more powerful than meets the eye, or should we trust Kylo’s subjective experience of himself as being fully and completely the master of his own fate? I go for the latter. If anyone’s going to be prone to blind belief, it’s a mom who doesn’t want to admit that she’s lost her son to her enemies. And I see no compelling evidence that he is a person who’s easily manipulated, emotionally or otherwise, which is a big strike against F. If you see such evidence, please present it.

The most revealing aspect of Kylo’s development was found in the conflicting and exaggerated accounts about what happened with Luke that led to the destruction of the Jedi academy. If you grow up being fed a constant diet of legends about galactic warfare from the Alliance, you’re naturally going to think of the Jedi as the good guys and the Empire as the bad guys (as we, the audience, are supposed to). However, if you’re Ben Solo, you don’t experience the Jedi as good guys, at all. He was “abandoned” by parents who were too busy/neglectful/high-minded to properly care for him and he was “abandoned” by a supposedly saintly mentor/uncle who wanted to kill him (even if the urge was fleeting). Additionally, Jedi training is essentially martial arts training in that you’re not supposed to use it violently unless you absolutely have to, which leaves the Jedi looking like total wusses much of the time, politically, always leading from behind and allowing evil to get a foothold over and over again.

Therefore, my theory is that Kylo turned, completely willingly, because he saw nothing but pathetic posturing and hypocrisy around him. It was an extremely deep cynicism (the belief that “good”, “love”, “happiness”, or anything that makes humans noble, don’t really exist) that allowed him to fully embrace his own darkness to very powerful effect - no manipulation necessary. This wouldn’t work with Fi-Te but fits with Ti-Fe. I postulate that his conception of morality was extremely reductive and childish. Essentially, “good guys should be totally free of bad”, so any whiff of anyone feeling conflicted or making dumb choices and they no longer get the privilege of being labeled as a “good” person. Accordingly, any hint of conflict in himself cements the fact that he is bad, irredeemably bad, because he’s full of conflict.

But I argue that the reason he’s full of conflict is not because he’s bad or a Feeler, it’s because the way he was being taught was not well-suited to his personality at all, in fact, it was quite damaging to him, which pushed him into skepticism and alienation. Here’s the blank I’m filling in: Luke is Fi dom. Fi and Ti do not communicate easily. Being forced or shamed into being good with no proper reasoning process by Fs tends to really aggravate inferior Fe grip problems in young Ti doms (it’s a common relationship dynamic). Fi doms construct beliefs from their feelings and it’s easy for them to expect that everyone should feel-believe the same. How is a person supposed to react when you keep telling them to Fi everything but they simply can’t or have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about? External manipulation or not, I speculate that Kylo was already in a deep state of doubt about whether he was in the right place. Luke’s intense fear and disgust in that fateful moment only confirmed Kylo’s suspicions that he didn’t belong there, and that Luke was no “good” guy.

Seeing oneself as irredeemably bad is a big blow to the ego, so one must engage in self-defense. The fact that turning dark allowed him to realize the full potential of his force capabilities, to him, meant that the Jedi were completely wrong in their conception of what is “good”. Therefore, he doesn’t consider himself to be bad per se, rather, he believes that he has discovered the truth about what it means to be great - being great via T is better than being good via F. He was trying to discover his true self through dominant Ti, perfectly normal part of development, but he chose the wrong path, because it was a reactionary decision that was merely rebelling against all the people who were trying to force him into being F. This poor choice meant that he had to keep trying to sever his connection to everything good in himself = disowning F. In his mind, the Jedi were stupid, weak, and deluding themselves all along, but he knows what’s up, and that granted him a high degree of confidence in his decisions. He saw himself as the real deal because he was smart enough and strong enough to be brutally honest about what he is. In essence, he’s no faker, and that makes him superior. These mental gymnastics happen with Ti, not Fi.

When Fi doms (even just start to) see themselves as bad, it ruins them and renders them impotent and dysfunctional (see previous post about Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender as a great example). Yet I see no compelling evidence that Kylo’s identity, feelings, or conflicts held him back, rather, they only served to fuel his rise. Despite appearances, he didn’t lust for power and validation like Te loop/grip, rather, he was only interested in self-mastery, and was willing to do whatever it took to achieve it, because he had no other ideal outside of himself to believe in. Nothing could really stop him unless he decided to stop. When he was frustrated, he would let it out in a quick burst, and then continued on as though it never happened (Fe). He was actually very disciplined in growing his abilities by setting consistent and logical challenges for himself to overcome (Ti), and he always succeeded in achieving his goals and reaching whatever potential he had envisioned for himself (Ne). Furthermore, someone who is very “defensive of their identity” wouldn’t be able to change themselves on a dime, as he did at the end. When faced with the right counter-evidence, he did a whiplash 180 without hemming or hawing or performative self-flagellation or whining about “losing myself”, etc. Would that be possible for Fi-Te?

Rey

Is she introverted? She is unapologetically assertive, she gets involved even when it doesn’t/shouldn’t involve her, she never balks at interacting with people/objects, she always faces situations immediately, she has trouble holding her tongue, she has difficulty introspecting (as evidenced from Luke’s training sessions), and most importantly, she exhibits no sign of needing a lot of down time to recharge. I’ve never known an introvert like that, let alone an ISFP, as they often dwell in their feelings away from the world and dislike taking on too much responsibility due to inferior Te. If she’s introverted, provide me with evidence, since I seem to have missed it.

I don’t think that there’s any evidence of N. She’s resourceful to a certain extent, but she seems to rely very heavily on other people to generate positive ideas and possibilities for reassurance, because she starts to panic when thinking on her own about “what could happen” (low Ne). She doesn’t easily come to intuitive insights about anything, let alone the future (no Ni). One scene in particular made me LOL. Luke was training her and asked her to close her eyes to meditate. He instructed her to “reach out” (to feel the energy of the force), and she extended her hand out physically into the air. That is the exemplar of being too literal. Furthermore, she spent how many freakin’ years following the same set routine day after day, in the same crap dump of a town, waiting obediently for her parents to pick her up? That’s the exemplar of Si discipline. Would SPs be capable of that patience or living in the dreary past for so long?

I agree that she is primarily motivated by her feelings when making judgments and decisions, which means F. She had to fend for herself since childhood, so her skills are unsurprising. Yet she irrationally lacks self-confidence despite the fact that she’s proven over and over again to be quite scrappy and capable, and people even tell her as much all the time - this is likely to indicate an inferior T insecurity. She has great difficulty (i.e. is unconsciously resistant to) probing around within herself, which is common for inferior Ti in not wanting to feel one’s own darkness. The fact that introspection results in her discovering that her deepest, darkest fear is being completely and utterly “alone” as a “nothing” in “nothingness” is very compelling evidence for inferior Ti.

If inferior Ti, then dominant Fe is a must. I see lots of evidence. She is inexplicably able to communicate with anyone, of any species of bot or animal, with effortless empathic understanding? Her first stance is to give people the benefit of the doubt, no matter how strange or wayward they seem. She has a very naive trust in the goodness of people despite dealing with crooks all the time. She takes it upon herself to bring out the good in people whenever she is in a position to. I don’t think she’s always sure of her feelings (Fi-Ni), rather, she’s always sure that there is goodness to be found if one only looks hard enough (Fe-Ne). A lot of people have strong moral feelings and values, so I’m a bit tired of the lazy stereotype that Fi doms have the monopoly on morality. If you’re going to reference a person’s morality, go deeper to see what exactly it is they believe, how they came to those beliefs, and how they express those beliefs in detail, as that would be more revealing of their functions.

For such a goody-goody-two-shoes, her response to Kylo wasn’t the judgmental disgust that Luke barfed up (Fi-Te) but rather a scary desire to figure him out (Fe-Ti). She seemed quite UNcertain about her personal feelings about him (not Fi), which made their relationship one-sided for quite some time, as she struggled with the push-pull dynamic. ESFJs are often attracted to “dark and mysterious” people due to the unconscious yearnings of inferior Ti, even when Si-Ne warns them that these people are bad news. And it doesn’t get more mysterious than some powerful dude dressed in black donning a mask that shows up in random visions. When avoiding him was no longer possible, she made an admirable effort to dive deeper into his perspective, even when she rightfully feared losing herself in the process. She felt compelled to “get both sides of the story” in typical diplomat fashion before deciding what to do, in hopes of “fixing” Kylo through repairing his relationship with Luke.

Although there seemed to be constant teasing about the possibility of Rey turning dark, I never really saw any possibility. She gave no major indication of being afraid of turning, and it seemed that she never lost touch with her strong desire to be good. She only ever indicated a fear of failing to perform her duty capably (Si) and of failing all the people who were relying upon her powers to succeed (Fe). Discovering her true lineage didn’t really shake her because her parents were good in spite of their bloodline, so there was already an “exception to the rule” for her to follow and emulate. Turning dark would sever and betray her emotional connection to her parents - totally out of the question.

As far as I can tell, the only reason she survived her horrible childhood relatively unscathed was because she held on to the belief that her parents loved her enough to come back, i.e., emotional connection to others is her lifeline. I don’t think it’s an accident that, in her moment of greatest need, it was the connection to past Jedi and their encouragement that saved her butt. She was existentially SHOOK when Kylo claimed that her parents were horrible and abandoned her. And she was only able to find her footing again by inserting herself (i.e. “belonging” to) the Skywalker clan, essentially by being the model of a kid that Ben should’ve been. What self-respecting ISFP would be happy latching on to someone else’s mom, riding someone else’s coattails, and literally defining their identity through someone else’s name and legacy?

I’ve heard some people critique Rey as a flat mary sue character, and I see where they’re coming from. But which type is most likely to resemble a mary sue at first glance? She is supposed to be the hero in a fairy tale after all, so one would expect her flawedness to be minimized.

Relationship Dynamics

In the final movie, the audience is bludgeoned over and over again with the claim that Kylo and Rey are meant to be a dyad. This all but guarantees that they will be exact functional opposites, otherwise, there would be no strong sense of complementary forces pulling them together into one perfectly harmonized and united front. Although the chemistry between them wasn’t properly developed IMO, I think I saw on paper what was meant to be happening in terms of the writer’s intentions.

Luke was unsuited to helping either of them with questions of identity and morality because, being Fi dom, he took these things for granted, presumptive, already settled non-issues, which amounts to him being closed to any real questioning and discussion. As a result of lacking good guidance, what drew Kylo and Rey together was an underlying need to help each other make sense of themselves, with the unconscious suspicion that the other person held the missing piece of the puzzle.

Rey was only able to reach her potential by confronting the full extent of her own darkness within (inferior Ti), which was what Kylo forced her to do in incremental steps, as he kept nudging her to question her fundamental beliefs about who she is and what she stands for, presumably in the same way that he had done for himself. But it’s not as easy to twist someone’s sense of morality when F is at the top and healthy versus the bottom of the stack. By making it through his gauntlet of tests and critiques and facing down her fears, she was able to develop into a stronger and more self-assured person to eventually achieve inferior Ti closure. Don’t forget how her eyes would light up when hearing stories of Jedi masters and their achievements. It is mainly EJs who run headfirst toward responsibility rather than away from it. We see, in the end, a picture of Rey as a beaming, confident, and self-possessed person who feels like the world is her oyster, fully inhabiting her role in the hero story that she had always wished to be a part of. The audience is meant to believe that she’s the rightful heir when she finally believes in herself.

By questioning Rey’s identity, Kylo eventually had to question his own as well, since he was the one who wanted to believe that they shared a similar path to feeling lost. Kylo is stuck in adolescent cynicism as explained above, with Si loop resentment from the past preventing him from seeing other, better possibilities for himself. Late in the trilogy, I see in his face that he’s probably suffering from the sunk cost fallacy of thinking that he is past the point of no return. Perhaps he believes that he has no choice but to resign himself to the fate he has chosen (parallel to Vader) since Ti doms strongly believe in personal responsibility. He’s not wrong. If he wasn’t irredeemable at first, he certainly was after the profound destruction he had wrought. Ti doms are rarely wrong as their logic is usually impeccable, but they tend to lack perspective. E.g. He’s not wrong in believing that people are hypocritical because they really are (Ti factual judgment is spot on), but then he defines his terms too narrowly in dismissing all people as unworthy of being called “good” (Fe value judgment is very immature).

What finally broke the mental confinement of Si loop? IMO, three contributing factors: 1) He started to suffer the same skepticism about the dark side as he had with the Jedi, since Ti promotes impartial judgment, which opened him up somewhat to questioning his choices. INTPs deeply dislike sheep mentality and blind ideology, so being constantly asked to prove his “allegiance” and quietly “submit” all the time by his superiors only served to reveal their flawed mentality in the same vein as Luke, which gave him the logical justification he needed for eliminating one boss after another. 2) He was drawn deeper and deeper into Rey’s psychology, which backfired on him, because it proved to him, again and again, every which way, that goodness is indeed possible, as Rey easily aced every temptation and challenge that he was able to fling at her. For NPs(Ne), believing in possibility can’t help but create a strong desire to actualize it. 3) Leia intervened with what I’m assuming was one last-ditch attempt to communicate how much she truly loves him despite what he’s become, which perhaps served to expand his thinking about what it means to love.

In the end, he redeemed himself on his own terms (even if he was not fully redeemed for the audience). As a result, he discovered something resembling happiness in his last moments of connection with Rey. You can’t tell a Ti dom to be good “just because”, or take goodness as default without question, or present a fake and idealized image of goodness for them to live up to, because that will never satisfy Ti. At the same time, morality cannot remain an abstract concept or else it is very easy to twist upside down. Goodness must be deeply FELT in order to be a motivating force, and he, at long last, felt goodness in his bones, through his decision to place the greater good above himself - inferior F often means arriving very late to the feeling party. He finally caught a glimpse of what he could be and should be through Rey’s, and possibly his mother’s, eyes, which allowed for inferior Fe closure. He had always gotten by okay without love and only believing and trusting in himself, but he realized that he was far better off for opening himself up to something more.

That’s my take anyway. Or perhaps that’s what I needed to see to make the story more interesting for myself, lol.

#star wars #rey #kylo ren #fiction #fictional depictions #esfj #intp #ask

43 notes · View notes