CelebrityTypes.com

First, let’s look at the direction of Tyson’s Feeling function. Tyson revels in drawing out his points in order to build verbal crescendos and climaxes for the audience. Introverted Feeling (Fi) is about sincerity and raw immediate emotion. A constructed, built-up crescendo, by its very nature, is not sincere and immediate, but in fact the very opposite of Fi. So Tyson’s Feeling function is likely to be extroverted.

Next, let’s look at Tyson’s manner of presenting information to his audience: There are no disjointed, free-vectored nuggets of truth. In fact, every single piece of history, detail or fact that he presents to his audience aligns with his agenda to form a coherent and linear narrative. If this is indeed correct (and Tyson uses Fe and Ti), Tyson’s use of Introverted Thinking (Ti) is likely to rank somewhat low in his function order.

Notice further how whenever Tyson presents a piece of information, the “correct” attitude (i.e. what he wants us to think about something) is already obvious even before Tyson reaches any conclusion or presents any actual argument. So Tyson’s Fe must rank as his first or second function, and Ti is indeed likely to be either his tertiary or his inferior function.

We are thus down to four types: ENFJ, INFJ, ESFJ, or ISFJ

All rules of thumb obviously suggest that Tyson is an iNtuitive, but his manner of expressing himself traverses upon Sensing as he saturates his narrative with facts and details and takes care to hammer home the point by repeating it over and over with different fact-oriented examples. Yet when Tyson uses facts, he uses them in an immediate, sudden and surprising way, like a rabbit springing forth from a magic box. Tyson’s use of facts is that of a performer and not that of someone who wants to archive the facts and to subdue them by putting them in their proper context and order, as an Si user might.

So Tyson’s use of Sensing is extroverted, and this leaves us with two types: ENFJ or INFJ.

Here the thing to note is that Tyson’s manner of presentation is entertaining, animated and improvised, and that Tyson himself makes eager use of body language while presenting. He appears conscious of his Se mavericks as if he anticipates the audience’s reaction to those shenanigans in his mind, even while he is in the midst of presenting them. Hence we posit that his Se must be conscious to some degree and that it is actually Ti that is his repressed function.

Thus he fits the bill of an ENFJ spokesperson uniting people (Fe) in the pursuit of a common vision (Ni).

Socrates: “I am by nature filled with desire [for worldly pleasures], but I have mastered and subjugated myself.”

Socrates: “I have examined your position and determined your utterances to be mere brain-farts. But even so, supposing you should try to think afresh, your thoughts will be better as a consequence of today’s scrutiny.”

[Seeing an old man who wanted to take up philosophy, but was embarrassed:]
Socrates: “Don’t be embarrassed to become better at the end of your life than you were when you begun.”

[Seeing an old man who wanted to take up philosophy, but was embarrassed:]
Socrates: “Don’t be embarrassed to become better at the end of your life than you were when you begun.”

[When asked what was most gratifying in life:]
Socrates: “Education and seeing what one has not seen before.”

On the face of it, many people seem to instantly recognize Hitchens’ preference for Se over Si. Some even take that Se to be auxiliary (ISP) or even dominant (ESP). Yet what we will posit in this article is that actually Hitchens’ Se is his least developed function, also called the repressed function or inferior function.

Hitchens in the midst of an Se binge.

The Difference between Dominant and Inferior Se
Dominant and inferior Se manifest very differently. When you use Se, you perceive things exactly as they appear to be and as convention would have you believe they are: A nice car is a nice car, a sexy woman is a sexy woman, etc. It is one of the extroverted perception functions (along with Ne), which means it’s about “taking it all in” (as opposed to the introverted perceiving functions, Ni and Si, which are about noticing certain reactions within yourself as you’re taking in data from the outside world).

Using Se involves no judgments, and indeed it abhors having to intellectualize in any way since doing so misses the point: You do things to do them, not to figure out some stale theory. A natural consequence of this take-it-as-it-is perception is an emphasis on being cool, sexy, dominant, a winner, the man, the alpha, and so on. You are what you are right now, and who wants to be a loser?

At the other end of the spectrum, though, Ni is the opposite of Se. Where Se revels in the obvious, the immediate, and the physical, Ni drives you (nags at you, really) to “take a closer look” and find the non-obvious, the fundamental, and the ethereal. When you use Ni, you specifically avoid perceiving things in their immediate state, and instead you seize on the fringes as indicators of something beyond the obvious.

Where Se encourages you to be the life of the party, Ni encourages you to slip out into the hallway and reflect. The dominant function is the one a person feels most comfortable using and in which their self-image is most thoroughly invested. The inferior function is the opposite of the dominant (Se-Ni) and the inferior function is simultaneously the one a person most conspicuously avoids.

Dominant Se types, then, are most comfortable when they are free to “take it all in” without having to speculate about hidden meanings, their future significance and suchlike, while dominant Ni types, on the other hand, are most comfortable developing (not to say belaboring) their own subjective perceptions of what is really “beneath the surface” or “the essence of things” without having to burden themselves with the immediate reality of the now.

Inferior Se as it appears in INTJs
The INTJ’s inferior Se frequently manifests in a reversal of the cool-sexy-popular program that the dominant Se-types (ES-Ps) deploy in social situations. The INTJ’s Se-in-inverse results in a sort of “bizarro Se” whereby not following current trends and fashions, being out of touch with popular culture, unphysical, and bookish are -from their subjective, belabored perspective- what really makes you cool and sexy, and where energetic and upbeat people who follow Se standards are insinuated to be mere brutes, if not downright losers.

If the repressed Se of INTJs had a motto, it would be: “I’m the man precisely because I’m not trying to be ‘the man’ in any way you commoners understand it.”

Cue Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens himself had much the same “bizarro Se” about his style, and if you’ve followed his activities, you may have noted the faint but unmistakable traces of an interest in animalistic dominance and sexual prowess that is sought manifest through florid writing and intellectualized innuendo. Here is a particularly famous instance of his habit of intellectualizing the sexual. He says:

“I won’t try to do it for you on camera, but there’s an attitude—with the head thrown back and the mouth wide open and the horseshoe of lovely teeth and the tongue on display and so forth—that is a bit of a surrender. It’s worth it for its own sake. And it’s a simulacrum of something even more worth it.”

So what is Hitchens doing there? As Hitchens observes the body language of others, he perceives not the object itself so much as the subjective suggestion it evokes in him of a broader insight into the way the world is (Ni).

In fact, Hitchen’s evocative interpretation of body language is much the same as reported by one of Jung‘s patients, whom Jung diagnosed to be an Ni dominant type. To repress and ignore the here-and-now in favor of being carried away by one’s own subjective associations is what it is like to have a dominant Ni preference. It is a way of perceiving things that is stimulated by anything that provokes a sense of something deeper (or in Jung’s words: more archetypical) than they evoke by themselves.

Christopher Hitchens’ Se
So we posit that Hitchens is an Se type, rather than an Si type. But how does he handle that Se? One thing that is immediately obvious is that Hitchens does not feed his drive to the sexually dominant alpha male by going to the gym or by any other obviously physical thing of any sort. In fact, his preference is much to the contrary.

Indeed, what Christopher Hitchens does is to talk up the importance of being witty, erudite, a raconteur; of being an intellectual buccaneer capable of quoting sonnets (like he incidentally is himself). And though such characteristics are well outside the core domain of extroverted sensing, the ends that Hitchens leverages his intellectual means towards are to position himself as the alpha male, and thus in fact the core domain of extroverted sensing.

Thus we say that Hitchens has a preference for Se over Si, but at the same time, his Se is an overstressed and mutated “bizarro Se”: The coolness and sexiness that Hitchens pretends to have made manifest with regard to himself comes across to his audience in an oddly damp and auto-erotic manner; as if Hitchens was “sweating on the inside” to appear to us as a person whom we will venerate and revere.

Se in INTJs: The Brain Trying to be the Muscle
Here is an excellent profile of Hitchens by the New Yorker. From start to finish (including the title and the accompanying photo—indulging in the sensual even as he neglects it) there are many points of contact with the standard profile of an INTJ. For our purposes, however, selecting one particularly poignant passage will do:

At times, Hitchens can look like a brain trying to pass as a muscle. He reads the world intellectually, but emphasizes his physical responses to it. [...] When Hitchens’s prose hits an off note, it often includes the visceral or the pseudo-visceral, whether in a paean to oral sex for Vanity Fair (“I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth”) or in commentaries on current affairs. [...] On these occasions, the bookish Hitchens is elbowed aside by an alternate self: a man as twitchingly alert as Trotsky at the head of the Red Army. [He has a perchant for] performances of masculinity.

“The brain trying to be the muscle” is a nigh-perfect phrasing of what it entails to inferior Se: Insecurities spring up as one struggles to assert mastery in a fundamentally foreign domain (Se). The impulse to assert oneself in that domain is largely unconscious; it takes the form of fleeting physicality, in an otherwise decidedly unphysical person, to the effect of giving off a stand-offish vibe that almost points to the threat of physical force.

H.L. Mencken, another INTJ, captured that same mixture of intellectualism and physical force perfectly when he said: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats.”

Se in IN-Js: “I Don’t Like the Binges but the Binges Like Me”
Finally touching upon what is perhaps the most obvious occurrence of repressed Se as it appears in INTJs, there is the childish and uncontrolled indulgence in sensual pleasures, especially food, alcohol, and tobacco (but not so much harder drugs, for some reason). Here, again, another giveaway of the fact that their Se is repressed Se is that their binges take the form of a repetitive, narrow-but-deep focus, i.e. they will eat an entire container of ice cream or smoke an entire pack of cigarettes without seeking to combine this with other sensual pleasures, as people with more conscious use of Se are wont to do.

Clinton: “My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out, because as we practiced [my inaugural speech] between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day, I was still changing it.”

Clinton: “I judge my presidency primarily in terms of its impact on people’s lives. That is how I kept score: all the millions of people with new jobs … the kids with health insurance and after-school programs … the families helped by the family leave law. … All those people have stories, and they’re better ones now.”

Steven J. Rubenzer: “One of the mysteries of Clinton’s personality has been his continued penchant for getting into trouble. … Few people doubt that Clinton is a very bright man, yet he behaves much like someone who does not think ahead or appreciate the consequences of his actions.”

Hume: “In [Shakespeare] we regret the great irregularities. … A reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold.”

Roderick Graham: “Hume was a law student, philosopher, merchant’s clerk, tutor, judge-advocate, librarian, historian, essayist, diplomat and civil servant …  atheist, bon viveur, wit, enlightenment figure, and darling of the Paris salons. No eighteenth century novelist dared to give his hero a life of such bewildering variety.”

Nietzsche: “Hume in [himself was] too bright, too clear … judged according to German value instincts, ‘too superficial’ … [thus Kant was more to their liking, though Kant was] nothing original.”

Nietzsche: “Kant [was] inferior to Hume in his psychology and knowledge … a dogmatist [without] the slightest breath of cosmopolitan taste … a delayer and a mediator, nothing original.”

Goering: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war [but] the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Goering: “We will go down in history either as the world’s greatest statesmen or its worst villains.”

Goering: “The political structure in different countries has different origins, different developments. Something which suits one country extremely well would perhaps fail completely in another. Germany, through the long centuries of monarchy, has always had a leadership principle … The position of the Catholic Church rests now, as before, on the clear leadership principle of its hierarchy. And I think I can also say that of Russia, too.”

[Responding to the rumours that he had set fire to the German Parliament:]
Goering: “I should be competing with Nero.”

Goering: “I would be able to defend my actions, no matter what [evidence] they had on me.”

Goering: “I think that women are wonderful but I’ve never met one yet who didn’t show more feeling than logic.”

Hitler: “When I talk with Goering, it’s like a bath in steel for me; I feel fresh afterward. He has a stimulating way of presenting things.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl: “[Goering] was more entertaining company than anyone else.”

Roosevelt: “The United States loves peace, but she loves her honor more.”

Roosevelt: “High-sounding orators [speak of] the ‘brotherhood of man.’ [It] is a purely Utopian phrase that means very little.”

Roosevelt: “America needs not only an administrator but a leader – a pathfinder, a blazer of the trail.”

Roosevelt: “[The] real Americans [are not those from Massachusetts but] those from the west and south.”

Roosevelt: “I am not temperamentally fitted to serve in the United States Senate. I do not think that I could endure the atmosphere of that verbose and eminently respectable social club.”

Roosevelt: “I sometimes wish I could find some spot on the globe where it was not essential and necessary for me to start something new – a sand bar in the ocean might answer, but I would probably start building a sea wall around it and digging for private treasure in the middle.”

Roosevelt: “I hope to God I don’t grow reactionary with advancing age.”

Roosevelt: “We are very prone to criticize the caste distinctions of India, without realizing that we have gradually and unconsciously built up quite as absurd distinctions between those who use a typewriter and those who use a tool. In the early days of our Republic, the village craftsman commanded quite as much respect from his neighbors as the village clerk, which is my idea of a real democracy.”

Roosevelt: “To rush blindly along the paths proclaimed as highways to Utopia by some of our friends would be to find ourselves hopelessly mired in the quicksand of untried political theories of Government. This would not be progression – it would be only demoralization and the only result would be such suffering and unhappiness to our country as we have witnessed in some of those countries abroad which have tried purely theoretical schemes of Government before they tested their soundness or practicability in small ways.”

Roosevelt: “The President of the United States must have a mind not single-tracked, but like a great railroad yard. During the course of each and every day in the White House he is confronting tasks with ten wholly [unrelated] problems, presented by ten uncoordinated government departments. [He must be] successful in jumping at half hour intervals from problem to problem [while] keeping his equilibrium.”

Plato: “Don’t force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.”

Plato: “It is beautiful [to wish to] add another’s light to your own.”

Plato: “When you admonish a wrongdoer, do so gently, that it may not lead to hostility.”

Mussolini: “Life … should be high and full [and] lived for oneself.”

Mussolini: “The reality of experience is far more eloquent than all the theories and philosophies on all the tongues and on all the shelves.”

Mussolini: “My political evolution has been the product of a constant expansion, of a flow from springs always nearer to the realities of living life and always further away from the rigid structures of sociological theorists.”

Mussolini: “I enjoyed [childhood fights] with that universality of enjoyment with which boys the world around make friendship by battle and arrive at affection through missiles.”

Mussolini: “I have never, with closed eyes, accepted the thoughts of others when they were estimating events and realities either in the normal course of things or when the situation appeared exceptional.”

Mussolini: “I am desperately Italian. [However] the American people … have touched, and touch, my sensibility. … The American nation is a creative nation, sane, with straight-lined ideas. … I admire the discipline of the American people and their sense of organization.”

Mussolini: “Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.”

Mussolini: “Napoleon put a term to a revolution whereas I have begun one.”

Mussolini: “The Truth … is that men are [tired] of Liberty. They have a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for.”

Mussolini: “It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle. It matters little who wins.”

Richard Crossman: “[Mussolini] is a myth-maker, he is, like Plato’s guardians, conscious that ‘the noble lie’ is a lie.”

Richard Washburn: “No one can spend much time with [Mussolini] without thinking that after all there are two kinds of leaders – outdoor and indoor – and that the first are somewhat more magnetic … and more boyish and likable for their power than the indoor kind.”
 

Clinton: “I was raised to love my God and my country, to help others, to protect and defend the democratic ideals that have inspired and guided free people for more than 200 years.”

Clinton: “If one of my brothers or I forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube, my father threw it out the bathroom window. We would have to go outside, even in the snow, to search for it in the evergreen bushes in front of the house. That was his way of reminding us not to waste anything. To this day, I put uneaten olives back in the jar, wrap up the tiniest pieces of cheese and feel guilty when I throw anything away.”

Clinton: “As a Brownie and then a Girl Scout, I participated in Fourth of July parades, food drives, cookie sales and every other activity that would earn a merit badge or adult approval. I began organizing neighborhood kids in games, sporting events and backyard carnivals both for fun and to raise nickels and dimes for charities.”

Clinton: “Surrounded by a father and brothers who were sports fanatics, I became a serious fan and occasional competitor. I supported our school’s team and went to as many games as possible. I rooted for the Cubs, as did my family and most folks on our side of town.”

Clinton: “I was taught to resist peer pressure. My mother never wanted to hear about what my friends were wearing or what they thought about me or anything else. ‘You’re unique,’ she would say. ‘You can think for yourself. I don’t care if everybody’s doing it. We’re not everybody. You’re not everybody.’”

Clinton: “Unthinking emotion is pitiful to me.”

Clinton: “Probably my worst quality is that I get very passionate about what I think is right.”

Clinton: “It says a lot about a person when the worst happens and they can get up every day and maintain a sense of optimism and good humor. … I think that certain personalities and temperaments are better equipped to deal with [pressure] … [and] keep going under the weight.”

Clinton: “I do believe in … not being constrained by ideological perspectives that blind us to what we need … [and in making] pragmatic decisions.”

Clinton: “I am someone who hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.”

Clinton: “Sometimes I get very upset and angry if I think that people are doing things that are stupid, or put other people at risk, or are breaking agreements.”

[Asked how she keeps her energy up:]
Clinton: “I try to schedule at least one day a week to catch up, to feel like I’m breathing again.”

Clinton [on abortion]: “I do think women should have a choice but also that women should be making responsible decisions. I think people who have been pro-choice have basically gotten lazy about it.”

Clinton: “American supremacy was the result not just of military might, but of our values and of the abundant opportunities available to people like my parents who worked hard and took responsibility.”

Clinton: “A family story [about how my grandmother refused to allow doctors to amputate my father's legs] we heard over and over again [taught me] a lesson in confronting authority and never giving up.”

Clinton: “My dad was highly opinionated, to put it mildly. … In our family’s spirited, sometimes heated, discussions around the kitchen table, usually about politics or sports, I learned that more than one opinion could live under the same roof [and] that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it.”

Clinton: “Both my parents conditioned us to be tough in order to survive whatever life might throw at us. They expected us to stand up for ourselves, me as much as my brothers.”

Clinton: “I was taught to resist peer pressure. My mother never wanted to hear about what my friends were wearing or what they thought about me or anything else. ‘You’re unique,’ she would say. ‘You can think for yourself. I don’t care if everybody’s doing it. We’re not everybody. You’re not everybody.’”

Clinton: “My parents raised me to focus on the inner qualities of people, not the way they dressed or the titles they held. That sometimes made it hard for me to understand the importance of certain conventions to others. I learned the hard way that some voters in Arkansas were seriously offended by the fact that I kept my maiden name.”

Clinton: “I loved school, and I was lucky enough to have some great teachers. … My second-grade teacher [challenged] us to write from one to one thousand, a task that little hands holding fat pencils took forever to finish. The exercise helped teach me what it meant to start and finish a big project.”

Clinton: “I clearly expected to work for a living, and I did not feel limited in my choices. I was lucky to have parents who never tried to mould me into any category or career. They simply encouraged me to excel and be happy. In fact, I don’t remember a friend’s parent or a teacher ever telling me or my friends that ‘girls can’t do this’ or ‘girls shouldn’t do that.’”

Clinton: “[In the midst of student protests in 1969] true to my upbringing, I advocated engagement, not disruption or ‘revolution.’”