Beyond Bardolatry

The Bible of Bardolatry

Yale humanities professor and literary critic Harold Bloom died last October. That makes me the biggest bardolator alive. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

We English Majors have been worshipping the Bard of Avon for a long time. In his succinct biography Shakespeare, Bill Bryson describes a student play performed at Cambridge University around the time of Hamlet’s London premiere:

The Return from Parnassus contained the words ‘O sweet Mr Shakespeare! I’ll have his picture in my study at the court,’ suggesting that Shakespeare was by then a kind of literary pinup.

It’s not just a crush on a cute writer. [Ed. Note: The cute writer.] It’s a lifelong crush on the works of William Shakespeare – the entertaining plays, the gorgeous poems, the supreme use of language, the inescapable influence on culture, the endless insights about psychology, art, literature, history, killing lawyers, humor…. The list goes on and on.

What sets my devout bardolatry apart from your garden variety fanboy is a shared timeline. Shakespeare and I were born exactly 400 years apart. That makes it easy to figure out how old Shakespeare was at each point in the chronology of his life and career.

According to the parish records in Stratford, William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, with April 23, 1564, traditionally recognized as Shakespeare’s birthday. I was born four centuries and a week later, on May 2, 1964. 

In 1587/1987, we were twenty-three years old, and lost.

In 1596/1996, we were thirty-two years old, and making a name for ourselves in the world.

In 1603/2003, we were thirty-nine years old, busy with our big city careers and our country homes.

In 1620/2020, Shakespeare had been dead for four years, and I’m hiding indoors from the plague.

English Majors are notorious for seeing themselves reflected in their favorite characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Professor Bloom tended to identify with Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra. But the greatest bardolators also find parallels in the few factual fragments about the playwright’s own life that historians have uncovered.

In my case, it’s not just the Class of ’64 timeline thing. Or theatre, or literature, or hostility to lawyers and bad acting. What little we know about Shakespeare himself is eerily familiar.

For example, Will and I each had two daughters and a son, born a couple of years apart. Our fathers are both named John. They grew up on farms, but moved to town where they became successful businessmen. 

Bryson identifies a key developmental milestone I share with Shakespeare:  “something severely unfavourable seems to have happened in John’s business life, for in 1576, when William was twelve, he abruptly withdrew from public affairs and stopped attending meetings.” In 1976, when I was twelve, my father quit his job in Vancouver. My parents moved to Utah and ruined my life. Totally similar to whatever parental blunder traumatized moody tween Shakespeare. (As a Gay Sitcom Dad raising two teen-aged daughters, I happen to be an expert in adolescent drama.)

Fortunately, both William Shakespeare and I recovered from our youthful traumas. As we entered our fifties, we walked away from successful public careers in the big city, and moved eighty-seven miles north to be closer to our families.

Shakespeare family coat of arms

My Bellingham doctor diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in November 2015. Earlier this month, I wrote in “Better-ish” about some of the recent improvements in my mental health:

Now I feel like myself, even when I feel unwell. The good news is that most of my fuzzy memories have finally snapped into place. The bad news is that my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It’s sorta like switching to Daylight Savings Time. Or like when England converted from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and eleven days were dropped from September 1752.

A few days later, after all the public libraries in Bellingham closed for coronavirus, I borrowed a stack of books from my mother. I’d recently finished her copy of Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants and passed it on to my pre-pre-med daughter, so I grabbed a few more volumes from Mom’s shelf of the complete works of Bill Bryson. (My mother and I tend to be completists.) 

Considering how many books about Shakespeare I’ve read over the decades, I can’t believe I hadn’t already noticed Bryson’s slim Shakespeare on the shelf. And I can’t believe I hadn’t already made this startling connection: 

Shakespeare was born under the old Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, which wasn’t created until 1582, when Shakespeare was already old enough to marry. In consequence, what was 23 April to Shakespeare would to us today be 3 May.

But wait, you point out, didn’t I just say my birthday is May 2, not May 3? However, I was born at 11 pm in Mountain Time Zone. Which in Stratford-on-Avon would be at 6 am on May 3.

So I really was born exactly four hundred years after William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616, at age fifty-two. Four centuries later, I didn’t die at fifty-two. Instead, I lost my mind when my employers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office placed me in an abusive and illegal “home assignment” in retaliation for seeking a workplace free from discrimination. 

It’s been four very hard and plague-filled years since April 2016. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, these days I’m doing better-ish when it comes to the things that matter most to me, like my family, my writing, and my mental health.

I’ll always be slow about certain things. I didn’t start any of the most important stuff in life until I was a couple of decades older than the prodigious William Shakespeare was four hundred years ago. If nothing else, that means it’s too late to compete with Shakespeare in the youthful fatherhood or romance departments. Like my other favorite author, Jane Duncan, hopefully I’m a late bloomer as a writer, too.

Still, William Shakespeare and I already have numerous traits in common. Two daughters and a son. A lifetime in theatre/gay men’s chorus. Ex-farmer fathers named John. English Major stuff. Disasters. (Nostradamus would say the Globe Theatre burning down in 1613 corresponds to a landslide destroying my dream house on Whidbey Island.)

If you survey the histories of our respective eras, you’ll also see how Shakespeare and I each survived multiple waves of the plague. In fact, just like Will and Kit experienced during the bubonic closures of London’s theatres four hundred years ago, as I write this paragraph it’s a typical Wednesday – but I can’t drive north for Vancouver Men’s Chorus rehearsal or for Show Tune Night. The border, the theatres, the chorus, the schools, the bars, the churches, and everything else in Canada and the States are closed because of a pandemic.

Regardless of our many similarities, there will always be two key differences between William Shakespeare and me:

He’s an immortal genius. I’m not.

He died at age 52. I didn’t.

Which means historians can argue over yet another intriguing fact about Shakespeare that no one will ever know for sure. Could he have made it to age 55 after surviving the Mormons, the gays, midlife Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, single parenthood, and a plague of dishonest lawyers? Because I did.

Here are links to more of my “Doppeler Effect” essays, describing other individuals whose lives have paralleled and/or crossed particular threads of my own story: 

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Gay Mormons" (9/11/17)

“I am Rob Lowe” (9/20/17)

“Chorus Minivan Dad” (3/6/18)

“My Best Friend Paul” (6/7/18)

“About my Yale Law School classmate Brett Kavanaugh” (9/24/18)

"Crossing Paths" (10/7/18)

"Crazy Mormon Mommy Bloggers"  (6/5/19)

Everything is Connected

Yale graduates read and write about whatever we want, and call it “law.” For example, the best class I took in law school was Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare seminar. Nevertheless, here’s something I never thought I’d put on my bucket list, let alone cross off:  the most important Supreme Court brief I’ve ever written ends with a paragraph from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book.

Here’s how the Supplemental Brief I submitted to the Washington Supreme Court last week concluded:

“The Answer to Defendants’ Petition for Review characterized this case as involving ‘two vexing perennial issues: the systemic challenges faced by under-resourced pro se litigants, and the decline in professionalism by members of the bar.’ Let us cease mincing words. Hand-wringing over a ‘decline in professionalism’ is a too-polite euphemism for the trouble caused by the increasing proportion of lawyers who cannot or will not distinguish between zealous advocacy and plain old lying.…

“In this case, the collective tragedy of the Attorney General’s Office, Ogden Murphy Wallace, Western Washington University, and Roger Leishman began with a few boneheaded Human Resources mistakes by the State’s top employment attorneys. Implicit and explicit bias made things worse along the way. But the saga became a disaster only when lawyers started lying, and then wouldn’t stop. The legal system is simply not equipped to handle this many lies from members of the bar. 

            “In his new book, Malcolm Gladwell focuses on ‘one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology’: 

why are we so bad at detecting lies? You’d think we would be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they are being deceived. Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn’t.

M. Gladwell, Talking to Strangers 72 (2019). According to Gladwell, humans generally benefit from defaulting to credulity, both as individuals and as a society. 

“Nevertheless, truthfulness still matters. Fortunately, lawyers and judges can rely on powerful truth-revealing tools, including the adversary system itself. Unfortunately, these traditional protections become increasingly ineffective when most ordinary people lack access to legal resources; when so many cases involve at least one pro se litigant, often from a marginalized community; when there is an overwhelming asymmetry between pro se parties and members of the gilded class with access to effective counsel; when too many lawyers fail to display candor to the tribunal, or to anyone else; and when too many tribunals lack the resources or the stomach to do anything in response to a plague of dishonest lawyers. 

“Honestly criticizing one’s own tribe is among the hardest tasks for any social species. It’s hard for lawyers and judges, too. But someone has to do it. Leishman respectfully requests that this Court affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals.”

These days I approach every legal task as a brand new writer/lawyer challenge. So when I drafted my Supplemental Brief for the Washington Supreme Court, I tried to come up with some fresh material. My fact-checking got a little carried away. I prettified some trusty old arguments, putting lipstick on Wilbur and making a silk man-purse out of Spider-Ham. The conclusion ended more in sorrow than in anger. My brief even cited a few new cases and statutes.

And I highlighted one sentence from a 1989 legislative committee report in the Washington House of Representatives.

The primary legal question before the Supreme Court is the proper interpretation of the “Brenda Hill Bill,” Washington’s citizen whistleblower protection statute. During the 1980s, Brenda Hill and her husband bought a home from a real estate developer. When the Hills tried to refinance their mortgage in 1987, they discovered the developer had not paid any excise tax for two years, imperiling the title to homes purchased by the Hills and three hundred other families. According to the House of Representatives committee report, “Mrs. Hill reported this violation to the Department of Revenue. As a result of the disclosures made to state officials, the Hills were sued by the developer.” 

While I was assembling the Appendix to my Supplemental Brief, I carefully went through the Brenda Hill Bill's entire legislative history for at least my fifth time. I flagged two items I’d seen before but never really paid attention to. One was the very next sentence from the legislative history. I underlined it for the Supreme Court:

Mrs. Hill asked that the state defend her, but was told that the state had no authority to do so. The cost of defending the developer's suit has forced the Hills into bankruptcy. 

Supplemental Brief at 11-12 (citing Appendix at 62). The Washington Legislature passed the Brenda Hill Bill to protect other private citizen whistleblowers from suffering the same fate as Mrs. Hill’s family. 

I began this strange journey of recovery, research, writing, and lawyering almost three years ago, after my life was transformed by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and dishonest lawyers. 

As I wrote last month in “Well-Picked Battles,” the most visible ring of the legal circus is my appeal before the Washington Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has both the authority and the resources to give these issues the attention they need. However, the circus also includes various other related and semi-related proceedings that are currently pending before separate courts and administrative tribunals, such as the Washington State Bar Association’s lawyer discipline system, the Executive Ethics Board, and the state’s Office of Risk Management. 

Regardless of the venue, this tragic story comes down to the same handful of fundamental truths: 

1.     Representatives of the State of Washington injured me, including the State’s top employment lawyers and the attorney-investigator they hired. See “My Story So Far”; Notice of Claim; Complaint.

2.     When the Washington Legislature passed the “Brenda Hill Bill” to protect private citizen whistleblowers, it did not intend to grant absolute immunity from civil liability for injuries caused by dishonest government vendors. See Leishman v. Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC, 10 Wn.App.2d 826 (2019); Answer to Petition for Review.

3.     Senior lawyers at the Attorney General’s Office acted unethically when they directed their investigator to interrogate me alone in his office after they knew I’d hired a lawyer to represent me in my employment dispute. See In re Discipline of Haley, 156 Wn.2d 324 (2006); Undisputed RPC 4.2 Violation Timeline; “Bar Discipline.”

4.     The Washington Constitution forbids the Attorney General’s Office from using tax-payer funds to represent private individuals, including State employees accused of unethical conduct. See Sanders v. State, 166 Wn.2d 164 (2010); Undisputed Timeline of Ethics in Public Service Act violations by Attorney General’s Office; “Toxic Entitlement.”

Eventually, even lawyers can focus on what matters.

All four issues involve the same increasingly common real-world situation. Procedurally, each issue arose out of an ordinary legal dispute where (1) there was a victim without an attorney; (2) all the other parties were well-financed institutions with access to a certain kind of lawyer; and (3) everyone was facing off before a busy legal tribunal. 

These are challenging times for Americans who can't afford to hire a lawyer. Forty years of powerful anti-democratic forces have resulted in the Donald Trump Administration, the Mitch McConnell Senate, and the John Roberts Supreme Court. Even when the outcome of a particular legal case doesn’t turn on some party’s power or privilege, any adjudication system is doomed when the decision-makers’ primary goal degenerates from getting it right, to getting it done, to getting rid of it. Power corrupts; bureaucratic power curdles. That’s why nations fail.   

Fortunately, the legal situation in Washington State is much less dire. We have a strong bench, vibrant voluntary bar associations, engaged citizens, and committed public servants. I’ve attended a lot of inspiring access-to-justice conferences across the state. 

Nevertheless, once I began seeking legal relief alone in the real world, I discovered all those earnest bar meetings were a complete waste of time. My personal experience with the legal system, while extraordinary in many ways, is utterly typical. It turns out the problem isn’t the number of pro se litigant who lack access to effective counsel. The problem isn’t societal inequality, or shrinking civil legal aid budgets, or over-burdened courts. The problem with the legal system is the lawyers. 

In Rex Stout's mystery novella Before I Die, my favorite literary detective Nero Wolfe describes attorneys as “insufferable word-stretchers”: “They think everything has two sides, which is nonsense.”

Above I listed four fundamental truths about my case. None involves a close call. Anyone who reads the actual evidence and the controlling legal authorities immediately recognizes that each question is a bona fide No Brainer. 

What makes a straightforward factual or legal issue seem close – and what lures many tribunals into getting things wrong, at least the first time – is the presence of too many deep-pocketed parties represented by lawyers who are willing to say just about anything. When the parties themselves are lawyers too, the plague spreads exponentially.

Practicing law can harm your mental health. I’ve repeatedly written about the dangerous relationship between lawyers and the truth, in blog essays like “Confabulation,” “7-Eleven Law School is accredited!,” “Lilies That Fester,” and “Some Days We Are All Less Smart.”

Even honest legal arguments involve too many words. So last year I edited my elevator speech down to one sentence: This case is about what happen when lawyers start lying, and then won’t stop. I embarked upon a new phase in my litigation and public education campaign, giving the lawyers from the Attorney General’s Office and Ogden Murphy Wallace enough rope to hang each other. And then I waited. 

The results have been gratifying. The State finally produced numerous incriminating documents in response to my persistent requests under the Public Records Act. In September 2019, the Court of Appeals emphatically reversed the trial court’s erroneous decision, and reinstated my lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace and its partner Patrick Pearce. In January 2020, the Washington Supreme Court agreed to accept review because this case presents important issues of substantial public interest that should be determined by the Court. 

Meanwhile, my inept and dishonest opponents keep creating more opportunities for me to underscore the same fundamental themes. Because, as the world sees every day with Donald Trump, what lying lawyers lie about, more than anything else, is their own lying.

Postscript:

As I drafted my Supplemental Brief to the Washington Supreme Court, I noticed one other interesting item from the Brenda Hill Bill legislative history. The government official responsible for the sentence I underlined for the Supreme Court was Representative Marlin Appelwick, the Chair of the House Committee on Judiciary. Thirty years later, Judge Marlin Appelwick was one of the three members of the Court of Appeals who reinstated my lawsuit against Defendants. 

If you haven’t noticed already, in my story everything is connected.

Click here for more information about my lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC and Patrick Pearce

Custom Frames

Every person’s story deserves a great frame.

Humans are driven to make sense of their experiences. Faced with a kaleidoscope of sensory stimuli, our powerful brains constantly look for patterns. Meanwhile our memories shuffle themselves in order to maintain a coherent model of our personal universe. Even when we can’t find any actual meaning out there, we usually manage to make something up, consciously or unconsciously. No matter how bad things get, I’d prefer to tell a “redemption story,” rather than be trapped in a “contamination story.” 

So how do we pick the right frame for our messiest stories?

  

As Dolly Levi might say, the real art lies in arranging things.

When I was in Seattle writing appellate briefs, I would inevitably reach a dithering Hamlet moment when I obsessed over some cosmic ordering principle – like whether to use Roman numerals rather than lettered headings, or to lead with the contract argument rather than the torts analysis. It’s lucky I began practicing law in the era of word processing rather than typewriters, because in prior decades I would have driven my long-suffering secretaries crazy. 

You don’t need to be a lawyer or an English Major to appreciate the overarching frame of Reason. It's central to science as well:  at what point in the story should we ask particular questions, or be prepared to answer others?

In contrast with the branching framework of computer algorithms and mathematical decision trees, a narrative describes a series of events unfolds like time in a fundamentally linear fashion from A to Z. 

Like the alphabet, raw narrative is pretty boring. Good storytelling therefore focuses on just a portion of the timeline. Extra fancy writers reject boring bougie sequential narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings. Go ahead, pretend you’re Homer starting things in medias res. It’s even more dazzling when you flip back and forth in time like Mrs. Dalloway, Memento, or the new Little Women movie. 

When it comes to legal writing, however, here’s a tip: you are not Virginia Woolf or Christopher Nolan. The judge or law clerk impatiently skimming your brief is not a Marxist semiotics professor. Regardless of where an auteur’s story would begin, your “Factual Background” section needs to be framed chronologically. That’s how human brains work best.

With geography, the default frame is a map. Each cartographer chooses the proper scale and selects relevant details:

However, the same basic information can also be framed pragmatically:

“Mapping U.S. rivers like a national subway system”

Or artistically:

"A Gorgeous Map Showing Every River Basin in the US"

With mental health, the starting place for any custom frame job is the DSM-5, or "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition," published by the American Psychiatric Association.

If you flip open a copy of the DSM-5, you'll be disappointed to see its lack of precision. Most classifications are pretty mushy. They're more like the menu from a classic Chinese restaurant – the doctor picks one from column A and two from column B, and the patient gets a tasty label.

Here's the DSM menu for Malignant Narcissism:

As with the Bible and the Koran, wars are fought over each edition of the DSM. For example, is homosexuality a mental illness? No. (DSM-III, finally). Does a PTSD diagnosis require evidence of physical violence? No. (But I can tell you from personal experience that not all healthcare providers have kept up with recent journals.)

I recently read several memoirs where the each of the authors agonized over their precise diagnosis. For example, in The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Wiejun Wang jousted with her therapist for years over the difference between "Schizophrenia (295.90 F20.9) and "Schizophrenic Disorder, Bipolar type" (295.70 F25.0). One of the factors that contributed to my childhood best friend's suicide twenty years ago was his discovery that a therapist had concealed Paul's borderline personality diagnosis. These ultimately arbitrary labels can make a huge difference in real lives.

Viewing mental challenges through new prisms can also bring healing. Last year I read a fascinating article on Slate, "Trauma in Plain Sight," which described the huge percentage of homeless people who suffer from PTSD. Including the author herself – who said getting a PTSD diagnosis changed her life, because she finally had a treatable problem.

I decided to write about Custom Frames this week because I recently published "Artificial Emotional Intelligence." Some of my social anxiety challenges paralleled the experiences described by highly-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum. 

I could probably game an online Asperger's quiz enough to get myself at least a Bill Gates-level diagnosis. But I suspect if I tried running these findings past my marvelous Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic, he would quickly point out where the analogy breaks down. 

More importantly, in sharing the various life hacks I've figured out so far, I do not intend disrespect to anyone who struggles with their own unique challenges. 

As far as I know, none of my healthcare providers has ever written down a mental health diagnosis on my charts with more specificity than "Generalized Anxiety." I suspect anything else would overwhelm the bureaucratic drones who process insurance paperwork. 

I don't mind, because my doctor's actual treatment is working. The real purpose of good frames is to hold lenses that will help you to see clearly.

Personality and Character

The Myers-Briggs personality type indicator uses neutral, nonjudgmental survey questions to map each individual along four temperament dimensions. The process sorts the population into a total of sixteen personality types, from ENFP to ISTJ.

As I wrote last year in “Astrology for Nerds,” every time I take a personality test it confirms my Myers-Briggs type is INFP. I’m an “Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiver.” Whatever that means. (Click here for pictures illustrating what INFPs are like, and here for pictures applying the Myers-Briggs personality types to everything from Star Wars and Game of Thrones characters to desserts and Disney Princesses.)

According to this Mormon blogger, Jesus Christ was also an INFP. However, the martyred founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, Jr., was an ESFP. Like Ronald Reagan and Miley Cyrus.

Recently I borrowed my mother’s copy of Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman’s magisterial biography of Joseph Smith. Bushman is a distinguished Columbia University professor who writes both as a faithful historian and as a faithful Mormon. Bushman exhaustively gathered and authenticated nineteenth century records regarding the church’s founding generation. His book elegantly presents the evidence in chronological order. Wherever possible he lets historical figures and their observers speak for themselves. Along the way, Bushman is candid about the thematic connections he perceives. 

Originally, I grabbed the book for the purpose of examining Bushman’s account of Joseph Smith's 1839 revelation about leaders who exercise “unrighteous dominion." Then I got sucked into the story. 

After reading the entire biography, I have a new respect for Joseph’s unique American genius. You don’t have to believe angels visited Joseph or that God told him to marry other men's wives in order to believe Joseph himself was convinced by his story. Similarly, Bushman didn't persuade me the Book of Mormon was translated from an ancient Semitic-American record, or that the Mormon prophet is God's sole authorized spokesman on Earth today. Nevertheless, many of Joseph’s revelations distill the same universal truths and come from the same corners of the human brain that inspired other visionaries.

Katherine Briggs was born in 1875. Her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers was born in 1897. Their personality typology and assessment tools grew out of amateur research and unscientific observations of child development, as well as from the exciting psychological ideas that were swirling around in the first half of the twentieth century: Darwin, Marx, Freud, behaviorism, eugenics, you name it. 

Katherine was particularly infatuated with Freud’s contemporary and rival Carl Jung – both with Jung’s psychology of archetypes as well as with the Man himself. The four personality dimensions revealed by the Myers-Briggs type indicator are loosely based on patterns described by Jung. Eventually Katherine met her idol when Jung was lecturing in the States. She was suitably impressed. Isabel was more meh.

Observing from the perspective of a century later, I’d argue that Myers and Briggs backed a winner. Freud’s enduring contributions are limited to his historical significance and the very broadest strokes of his psychology of the unconscious; the details of Freud’s sexual development stuff all turned out to be bunk. Similarly, behaviorism offers a poor model of the human mind and brain. 

Jung himself was undisciplined, and a creepy sexual harasser. But Jung’s insights about archetypes and the deep structure of human thinking still provide useful tools for analyzing psychology and philosophy. 

For what it’s worth, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers both were INFPs. Like Jesus, Mr. Rogers, and me.

Last month I read Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers: the Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Unlike Professor Bushman, Emre is openly skeptical of her biographical subjects. In fact, Emre begins her book by describing how she spent thousands of dollars to attend an official Myers-Briggs seminar in order to convince the keepers of Katherine and Isabel’s legacy that Emre could be trusted to see their private papers. It didn't work. 

As I confessed last year in “Astrology for Nerds,” I’m already familiar with the many criticisms of Myers-Briggs typology. Some individuals find they’re assigned to wildly different personality types each time they take the test, which undercuts Myers-Briggs’ claim to reveal permanent characteristics. The test also tends to amplify minor differences. According to Jungian theory, there should be a double-humped “bipolar” distribution for each of the four personality dimensions, for example with individuals clustering as either Extroverts or Introverts. Instead, statisticians generally observe a single bell-curve distribution. As a result, individuals with similar test answers may be assigned to very different personality types. Meanwhile, the sixteen Myers-Briggs boxes themselves only begin to capture the diversity of human thinking. On some level, describing INFPs as idealistic perfectionists is like saying all Tauruses are stubborn. 

And yet. 

While reading Emre’s skeptical biography of Katherine Myers and Isabel Myers Briggs, I had the opposite experience from my reaction to Bushman’s faithful book about Joseph Smith: I became less dubious about Myers and Briggs' claims for their personality typology. Meanwhile, I developed an increased appreciation for Carl Jung’s legacy, including the role of archetypes, synchronicity, and other connections. And I recognized how the Myers-Briggs prism can help illuminate our contemporary models of brain function, including the nature versus nature debate, as well as the mystery of individual personality.   

It’s only a model. Duh. As always, the question is whether this particular model is useful to us here in the real world. 

In describing the 20th century culture that produced Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, Emre observes the English language of their contemporaries distinguished between character and personality. “Character” referred to an individual’s permanent attributes, while “personality” referred to the carefully-crafted persona each individual presents to the world.

I prefer to reverse the two terms. As the parent of three adopted children who are utterly different from each other, I’m more convinced than ever that personality is hard wired. Regardless of the particular trait you focus on, from introversion to resilience, each human exhibits an individual personality that draws from a familiar repertoire of potential alternatives. The core aspects of one’s personality are discrete and immutable in the same way that one’s sex, religion, or sexual orientation is. These attributes are essential to individual identity. Each only changes – if at all – under extraordinary circumstances. 

As a result, personality is a big part of the hand you’re dealt. In contrast, “character” is all about how you choose to play your hand. And about how we as a society agree on the behavioral norms that govern how we all play and work together.

One of the strengths of the Myers-Briggs approach is its emphasis on pluralism and egalitarianism. The test is intended to be neutral and nonjudgmental – mechanically sorting individuals among the various personality types, without creating any hierarchies or preferences. The fun part comes when you try to figure out how different types of people will solve a particular kind of problem, or why you shouldn’t date certain personality types. Again.

Just as importantly, each personality type makes up a small minority of society. When we adopt rules of general application, they can’t be designed to benefit only the ESTJs among us. Or even the INFPs.