Concerto for Mankind

By Nonen Titi

How can people ever come to agreement if we are so different?

Not every person is born with the same set of natural talents. Just like an orchestra needs different musicians that together make the concert, humanity needs different types of people to create a harmonious whole.

This easy to understand comparison to music explains the 16 psychological types of Carl Jung, Myers-Briggs and David Keirsey, and allows you to understand not only how the functions of your personality create the unique person you are, but also reveals how you are different from the people around you.

So what kind of a player are you?
Do you need sheet music or do you like to improvise? Do you follow the rules or your impulses?
Do you naturally play ensemble or solo?

We are not all alike and that is what makes us great together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: N Titi Publishing
• Release date: May 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780987669827

Nonen Titi

I started my career in physical and mental healthcare, tropical nursing and midwifery, including an assignment with Medecins sans Frontieres to Columbia and four summers in a camp for children with type one diabetes. Those experiences still provide a lot of the material for my books. More recently I added hypnotherapy to my healthcare training.After my children were born, I changed to education and worked a few years as a Montessori teacher before opting to educate my own children at home. That was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. In the meantime we had moved from Europe and the UK to the USA, Australia and now New Zealand.Nearly twenty years ago I became interested in the theory of psychological types of Carl Jung (and of Myers-Briggs and David Keirsey) which has changed my perspective on life completely and which I have made my special interest of study. When my children went off to university, I decided to join them and get a degree in philosophy. Since then I have been a writer of both fiction and non-fiction books inspired by the inborn differences that influence the beliefs, behavior and natural talents of every person on Earth.Although I enjoy writing non-fiction books, I believe that fiction is best suited to help bridge those natural differences. Hence, my books portray human nature to a depth where the study of psychology cannot reach, each character an easily recognizable personality and together in pursuit of a positive future.

Book preview

THE MUSIC OF LIFE

Playing with Natural Talents: a descriptive guide to

discovering typenames

For everybody interested in discovering their typename, or that of a child, parent, colleague or friend. The four colour-coded guides each use a different perspective and each allows the reader to find another person’s typename within four to eight pages of reading the descriptions, simultaneously helping to understand what motivates this person’s actions and beliefs.

Concerto for Mankind: a musical analogy of human types

An explanation of the why? and how? of typological differences in people, using musical comparisons to make the psychological theories of Jung, Myers-Briggs and Keirsey more accessible for everyone; no degrees or certification necessary.

Homological Composition: a philosophical perspective

For anybody more interested in the implications than the psychology itself, these four essays form a comprehensive philosophy based on type differences as a necessary evolutionary development in humans – this is meant to challenge all of today’s philosophical beliefs.

Published September 2011

by Nōnen Títi

ISBN: 978-0-473-20288-0 (print)

ISBN: 978-0-9876698-2-7 (epub)

ISBN: 978-0-9876698-3-4 (mobi)

© Copyright 2011

All rights reserved.

Except for the purpose of fair reviewing, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Printed by The Copy Press, Nelson, New Zealand

Ebook production 2012 by meBooks

To Cal, for being there

The just man will not allow the three elements which make up his inward self to trespass on each other’s functions or interfere with each other, but, by keeping all three in tune, like the notes of a scale (high, middle, and low, and any others there be), will in the truest sense set his house to rights, attain self-mastery and order, and live on good terms with himself.

Plato, Republic: 443d

Preface

It has been twelve years since I was first introduced to the idea of typology through the books of David Keirsey, which brought me back to the original theory of Carl Jung and eventually to Isabel Myers.

Since then I have never stopped thinking about its possibilities and implications. It has opened doors I never knew existed, and without which I believed I was wrong for not liking what everybody else liked, for questioning authority or for wanting to write, since writing was for eccentrics and university for the rich and the smart. Normal people, my parents said, don’t make a spectacle of themselves.

Today, I no longer accept that there is something wrong with me because I don’t see the world like others do, or because everybody says so. Since I learned about typology, I realized that normal is a soap-bubble word; a word that is nothing but air, used for whatever purpose the sender wants to achieve; a word so ingrained in our daily language that we ‘know’ what it means until we are startled by an unexpected response of another person for whom normal means something completely different. Wrong is also a soap-bubble word, of course, as are most of the abstract words we use to express our beliefs and opinions. Yet we each interpret those words so automatically that we don’t for one moment doubt that our interpretation is correct and, therefore, that others must be wrong, and most people don’t hesitate to say so.

However, life isn’t about being right; it is about achieving progress and living together, which is only possible if we share our differences rather than fight over them or pretend that they don’t exist. Typology is the door to this sharing.

During the first five years of my acquaintance with the theory I discussed and read, but with its popularity still mostly limited to the US it was difficult finding connections. Seven years ago, when I realized that there may be a need for looking from a third person point of view, I conceived of the idea of writing a format in which people don’t have to read all the type descriptions to find their match or do the self-test using the MBTI® (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), because in some cases that is simply not possible. I was doing genealogy at the time and started wondering what had motivated my grandparents, who were no longer alive. My third person perspective allowed me, through directed reading, to find the type of my children, relatives, friends and colleagues, so that, even if they were not capable of explaining their behaviour, I could begin to understand it.

From there it was a small step to realizing that acknowledging psychological types on a global scale could solve a lot of our interpersonal problems (whether domestic, global or philosophical). However, many people, who do the indicator and accept the descriptions, are less inclined to read psychological theory, so that the why of type specific behaviour is not clear to them. Looking for metaphors to try and make the theory more palatable for those people, I came up with the idea of using a musical analogy, since music is something most people can imagine something with.

Thus came the idea of writing a two part book: a musical explanation of the theory and the guide of descriptions for assessing type from a third person perspective.

When I first started writing, most publishers, having never heard of typology, dismissed it with the message that it would not sell. I decided to carry on anyway. In 2006 the book was finished, but once again publishers either ignored my proposal or told me that this was not a topic the public would be interested in, even if by then there were already lists of typology websites and the indicator was being used in high schools.

I left my manuscript untouched for three years and in the meantime started self-publishing my fiction writing before deciding that my angle on typology should still be original enough to retry publishing, but this time for myself.

But I also wanted to respond to academic philosophy, which invariably turns typology down because it infringes on the accepted viewpoint that argument alone can lead to an ultimate truth.

So I restarted, and with that additional angle I ended up with three books that together form The Music of Life, and which do not have to be read in a specific order: The psychological theory explained in a musical comparison (Concerto for Mankind), the philosophy that follows directly from acknowledging type differences (Homological Composition), and the descriptive guide (Playing with Natural Talents) that allows readers to find their own type or that of a parent, child, mate or colleague by making choices between opposing letters while reading more and more specific descriptions (directed reading), which is an addition to the MBTI®, not a replacement of it. The indicator itself is still the best tool for those people interested in finding out their own type.

Together, these three books aim to merge two different reader perspectives: The academic who has been safely protected in a small world of like-minded people, and the layman who cares little for either psychology or philosophy, but who will be confronted with typology sooner or later and may want a basic understanding.

Concerto for Mankind

This volume, subtitled A Musical Analogy of Human Types, is a theoretical description of temperamental and functional typology, intended for those people who simply want to understand what is going on without getting lost in psychological abstractions. It is a compilation of Jung’s, Myers-Briggs’ and Keirsey’s theories and not intended as a comparison with the objective of selecting which is the correct one; they all are, each with a slightly different angle. It is simply not possible in the study of human behaviour to apply right-wrong thinking, since people are far too complex for such an approach. This book is my explanation of what I believe Jung, Myers-Briggs and Keirsey were trying to say.

After a general introduction (Overture), the first three chapters (Music, Musical Chairs and Composing a Type) comprise of a step by step explanation of typological theory. In the fourth chapter (Philharmonic) I look at the type (the person) in his environment. The next chapter (Intermezzo) is a discussion of easily confused or misinterpreted concepts; each ‘minute’ therein can be read on a need-to basis. The final chapter (Adaptation for Life) explains the changes I have made from the original theories for those who are familiar with those works.

The Encore comprises the bibliography and index, as well as a glossary (of Soap-Bubble Words), which lists the type dependent definitions of abstract words, as well as their one chosen definition for this work.

Response to Skeptics of Psychological Type

The reason for writing this book will be more obvious to some types than to others and those most likely to dismiss it will do so for reasons herein explained. I understand that there are people who don’t want to know their type or that of their children. They have a realistic concern, namely that it will limit them because they feel put in a box.

However, not knowing strengths and weaknesses can be equally limiting, because in a world that believes that every person should be able to excel in everything the neighbours are doing, some people are going to feel incapable. I accept your worries, but I believe that accepting the theory means having the choice whether to let it either limit or liberate you. And with its increasing popularity you are bound to be confronted with it sooner or later, since it may become part of job applications and school enrolments. My reason for writing this is to get everybody to become part of it. From experience I can say that knowing their typenames can help partners and children explain hurt feelings, quarrels and misunderstandings; it won’t prevent problems, but it sure helps to get over them faster. And it allows parents to give children their trust – trust in the child, not in what other people say they should be like – and so support what comes naturally to them.

Though typology may have been known among psychologists and philosophers, it wasn’t until the MBTI® that this became a subject all people could get familiar with, and it is now a popular tool used at schools and on many websites. That is, of course, a good thing; as David Keirsey said, we need to learn to understand each other and the only way to go about that is by making it public, which was, no doubt, also the objective of Isabel Myers when she designed and published the indicator. Consequently, many people get involved with the theory and each may have a slightly different interpretation (including my own), which should not be harmful for a solid theory as this one. It is and should be a work in progress – as is all human understanding – with every contribution equally valuable; a living study.

However, with its increasing popularity the quality and meaning of typology itself is at risk of being lost, not only due to inaccurate website assessments and chat room discussions, but because certain institutions are taking it as a popular tool to boost their public image without understanding its potential. I have seen the MBTI® used at high schools where the guest speaker was given a fifty minute slot to quickly introduce and have all the kids take the indicator, after which they were sent home with a four letter ‘typename’, but without understanding what it was for other than that certain job choices were better for them. At least two came home with a typename they later discovered to be incorrect. Of course, coming up with wrong answers is harmful for the theory, since people will not recognize themselves in the descriptions and dismiss it as inaccurate.

I accept the risk of typology becoming dogmatic (here and there it is already used in stereotypes), but you prevent that by acknowledging the problem and making it widespread knowledge. This is why (in the Overture) I speak of names rather than labels; our type can become an extension to our identification as individuals.

We have to remember, at all times, that a guide like this can never be objectively the same for every reader, because its very foundation is based on our different psychological experiences, and that includes the way we experience each other’s personality types. Thus, the way I describe a certain trait is not necessarily the way you may experience that trait, although I have tried to keep my descriptions as much as possible non-judgmental.

The problem with promoting a justified personal opinion is that the current academic climate dismisses that as not-objective – based on the assumptions of the neuroscientific approach they have grown up with, which acknowledges only one human nature to explain all people.

But typology deals with tendencies. A tendency or disposition is never an exact description; it is a probable rather than a possible. Therefore, the theory itself prohibits presenting this as a definite. It is a guide linking Jungian psychology with evolutionary and philosophical viewpoints, and it is an invitation to a different way of thinking without the requirement that you give up your own ideas. This allows you to read without feeling the need to shout I don’t agree all the time or listen to that little nagging voice deep inside you that worries, what if it contradicts what I believe?, even if that worry cannot, in so many words, be understood.

So relax. The text itself should explain which of my interpretations you may not agree with and why. I am not trying to convince you. I am only asking you to keep an open mind, since, from a typological perspective, we are different people with different psyches and different experiences and, consequently, different ideas about things.

Mine is simply one view and maybe it touches on yours here or there… if it does we have a connection; if not, you may enjoy the analogy anyway. If you take anything away from this book, I hope it is that what you took for granted is not so obvious after all.

Notes on the Text

As a self-published author, I am free to follow my own views on how to present the text and I do not always follow the customary reference and writing style, because my main aim was to make it readable. Therefore, I have used the following stylistic adjustments:

•    Since I personally dislike books where the flow of reading is constantly hampered, I have opted to put the in-text references in a smaller font, which allows the reader to ignore that information until needed, without having to leave his place to look for footnotes.

•    Since I personally dislike being unable to put references to other works into the context of their time (the original time and place of an idea rather than the latest publication date), I have added that information to my bibliography, symbolized by the Greek alpha sign (á).

•    Since I believe the division of Plato’s works into early, middle and late to be inaccurate for Plato’s personality type, I merely give an approximate date range for all his books.

•    I use the type letters as pronouns – for example, when I speak of Ps, I mean all people with that letter in their typename – and to prevent confusion, the typenames and typename-letters are always in bold face, even if some people consider that not proper for a non-fiction book. The function exists, so I use it.

•    I don’t specify gender. Where possible I use third person plural, but occasionally third person singular, in which case I use he. It is cumbersome to include the feminine form and I simply expect the reader to be smart enough to understand that.

•    I do not follow the advised order to describe the types, but move from ESTJ to INFP, because they oppose not only in their four letters, but they form the outermost accord groups.

•    Because this theory deals with people’s motivations and behaviour, simple conceptual explanations and descriptions often fall short of touching the deeper meaning. Throughout the text I try to come up with fictional examples for situations so the differences may be recognized, but it takes more than a few lines to demonstrate how relationships grow and interact subliminally, which is why fictional books are written (mine included) and to truly understand interpersonal relationships those provide the better insight.

•    Some examples of books and movies I have picked because they provoke a strong type bias – as in, some types strongly dislike a story while others delight in it. I did this in the hope that those people who are still skeptical, may compare notes with a friend or relative and from there start recognizing more type differences.

•    I mostly refer to movie characters rather than real people for two reasons: Firstly, fictional characters cannot be insulted; the references remain my interpretation. Secondly, because everybody can go and see a movie, while real people are seldom met or only seen in artificial situations. For this reason I have added a movie list in the bibliography.

•    I use Spartans and Hitler as regularly returning examples of history, simply because they are easy to use for demonstration, not because they are the only examples.

•    Many sections have a paragraph that starts with: In philosophical terms. Despite the other book – which focuses on the philosophy of typology – I decided not to keep the philosophy completely separated, because people’s philosophical views can be explained by their psychological type. Therefore, this book deals with the psychology of philosophers.

•    The reason I use extensive descriptions is that I try to attack soap-bubble concepts from as many as possible angles, exactly because their interpretation is highly individual, so as to get as close as possible to what I mean. Philosophy claims that the best way to write an essay is to be concise. The problem with being concise with abstract concepts is that you invite assumptions. For that reason I use many not-concise angles.

•    The work mostly uses examples and references of western thinking, but I neither favour nor dismiss any belief system, whether religious, cultural, philosophical or scientific. All of them are equally compatible with typology, which is merely descriptive with regard human behaviour and does not exclude any person’s basic existential beliefs.

•    Many of my references come from popular sources (including Wikipedia), since I neither accept nor reject anything without cross checking. For centuries the churches owned and controlled literature and libraries (and education), while today’s edifice of knowledge is owned by universities. In my mind, to assume that, because the writer has no badge of approval, the work is not guaranteed to be correct is to accept academic literature on faith. As stated, science is a work in progress and, therefore, cannot be taken at face value.

•    I have accepted the percentages of type distribution among the world population as I understand them to be correct for all of today’s societies, as well as in view of an evolutionary and historical context.

•    All the descriptions and references are my own interpretations of the original texts of Carl Jung, David Keirsey and Isabel Myers unless otherwise stated. Thus, apart from the changes I describe in chapters five and six all credit for the content of the psychological theory goes to these three people. Any other information that shaped my view on this subject has come from twelve years of intense discussions and observations.

•    All the musical information is from Roger Kamien and from the dictionary, since I know next to nothing about music and I apologize for the simplification.

•    I have tried to merely describe and to keep my own views of right and wrong out of it. If I slipped here or there, I apologize.

Acknowledgements

I have not enough words to credit Carl Jung for what he brought the world. When first presented with his work twenty years before I started typology, the textbooks on human behaviour merely mentioned Jung’s four personality functions as one psychological description among many others, and its importance never dawned on me. I will be forever grateful to Katharine Briggs, who managed to see its potential and to Isabel Myers for creating the MBTI® and so take the first step to making it accessible to the world.

I am equally thankful for David Keirsey, especially for the amount of work he has put into making a stand against the mislabelling of natural personalities as syndromes in school children, and consequently medicating them with dangerous drugs to keep them obedient.

In that light I want to express my admiration for Maria Montessori for what she has brought children all over the world, as well as Howard Gardner for his view that all human gifts should be equally valuable. My respect goes to Jim Flynn for his opening people’s minds with regard intelligence and his own open-mindedness to unpopular ideas.

There are many others who helped me formulate my philosophy – too many to mention them all here – but my all time favourite must be Plato, who long ago wrote about inborn dispositions and its ethical and political implications, including the realization that a society can produce happy people if it allows each to follow his own natural gift, and which, together with Jung’s theory eventually shaped my metaphysical understanding of our natural heritage and the evolutionary necessity of humanity’s different types of people.

Additionally my thanks to Suzanne and all the people at The Copy Press for helping me get published and for their support, Lianna Gonlag, as always my reliable proof reader, Neil Smith for the wonderful cover illustration, and to Pat, Alya, Cal, Kate, Astrid and Herman Jan for their advice, patience, and years of listening.

As proposed in the Overture, all of us have a typename, so that, without creating inequality, we may extend our personal identification. Therefore, all responses are welcome; I will remain open for suggestions and discussion, and I hope to have been clear.

Thank you for reading,    Nōnen Títi, INFP

www.nonentiti.com

Introduction

Overture

A Name or a Label

A Name or a Label

An overture is the orchestral introduction to a dramatic musical work.

As this book is a musical allegory introducing inborn gifts, it makes sense to open with Mozart.

Mozart’s gift existed of a good sense of hearing, a good sense of rhythm and melody, an ability to translate what he heard in his head to notation, to play it on several instruments, and to repeat a composition flawlessly after hearing it only once. We say that he had a talent for music, and since he was four years old when he wrote his first composition, we mostly agree that he was born with that talent.

When we look at other musicians, we see the same characteristics grouped together: they all have a sense of rhythm and melody, play well, easily read and write musical notation, have excellent sound discrimination (hearing), and a good auditory memory.

But the music of these different musicians is not all the same. Each musician has his own style, and even though each uses the same musical components, countless different compositions are written. Music lovers recognize Mozart’s style instantly. But how do we recognize the musician when he is not playing? What does a musician look like?

Not like me: I cannot recognize a composer unless I know the piece; I have only a vague idea about musical notation and absolutely no skills for playing it – other than putting a CD in the player. You could label me amusical.

Yet the musician’s talent is no more written on his forehead than the lack of it is on mine, and even if his job description said composer, that would tell us nothing about his music.

This book is about discovering the inborn dispositions that are responsible for all the gifts and talents people have, and for which the musical talent will serve as an example.

Have you ever tried to peel a price sticker off a book? Do you remember scrubbing at those last bits of glue? Do you think the person who put it there had as much trouble as you did or wonder why they put in such a stupid place, like right on the front near the title?

What about labels in garments? Do you cut those out or do you simply tear and hope the material is strong enough? Do you read them and follow the instructions with regard washing the clothes, or do you put everything in one big heap? When cooking, do you follow the recipe to measure your ingredients or do you estimate? And what about warning labels like flammable or handle with care – do you pay attention to those?

Sometimes it is necessary to label something. If you cannot see on the outside what your garment is made of, you have to rely on the label’s washing instructions. If you do not want to swim in boiled rice, it helps if you know not to put half the bag into the pot just because those uncooked grains look so small; it helps to know that rice absorbs water. But the price sticker on the book tells you nothing about what is inside. Not even its title does that, because even an impressive title can hide a mediocre story: as the saying goes, you cannot judge a book by its cover, and the price sticker merely tells us how cheap it is.

Washing instructions are written by experts who know something about the product that cannot be seen from the outside. Those labels exist because we know that not all garments are made of the same material; we expect them to be different, so we look for the label. On the other hand, warning labels exist because we expect every product to be the same (not flammable, not breakable), so the label has to draw our attention to how it is different from the norm; these labels have to be overt to be noticed.

Similarly, if there is something about a person that cannot be seen from the outside, they get a label written by experts – labels like depressed, autistic, criminal, homosexual; labels that inform others that there is something different about this person.

Our society is full of labels. At least half of us carry a big roll of price stickers in our pockets, and at least half of us cannot live without knowing what everybody else is worth. And we, as parents and teachers, are standing in line at the label-maker’s in order to have our children properly priced. In order to explain their behaviour, we go to people with titles to buy labels with impressive-sounding syndromes to stick on our children so we can explain to the world why they are ‘different’. We buy the labels with fancy names rather than instruction labels since ‘children are children; they don’t come with instructions’, and the recipe for raising children is like that on every rice package: put in a pan and bring to the boil. Yet, some rice turns out sticky, other rice comes out dry, and some takes much longer to cook.

Funny that, isn’t it? Funny that a book like Harry Potter is so popular. Harry is not very handsome – is it not always the kid with glasses who gets called names in school? He is not super smart either, and he almost literally has a label on his forehead, a label which reminds his legal guardians every day about how different he really is. But despite the fact that he hasn’t had a very pleasant life so far, countless children today wish to be Harry Potter. Why?

Because he has powers; because he is capable of breaking out of that label. Because his being different is acceptable and even admired. The same goes with other superheroes; mutations become sought-after special skills that everybody wants to possess.

Do you remember your history lessons about Sparta? What did you think the first time you learned about how babies were checked for perfection before being allowed to live? Spartans had to be physically perfect; they had to match the ideal image of the athlete. There was no place in Sparta for the physically weak, intellectual child. Spartan experts, who probably started with simple health measurements, would have slowly begun using more specialized standards until there was no room for those who were a little taller, a little smaller, a little paler or a little heavier, with as a result that normal became a very small percentage, contradicting its own definition.

Imagine yourself as a parent in Sparta. What if the specialist rejected your child? Would you feel physically or genetically imperfect? Would you agree that your child was not normal? Would you have accepted that the standard could not possibly be wrong because the experts based it on years of research?

Today we no longer believe that it is right to kill babies for their physical imperfections; today we consider the Spartan standard arbitrary. We say that they simply set their expectations too high and that normal was misconceived.

Today we are slowly starting to realize that too many of our own young people are ‘dieting’ themselves to death because of a false picture of teenage perfection. Today’s experts no longer support the idea of perfect bodies.

Today’s experts, who previously advised parents spare the rod, spoil the child, are now proclaiming hold the criticism, give lots of praise, hold the physical responses. They advise parents to follow the new trends in positive coaching and all those who don’t abide by these new guidelines run the risk of being labelled less than perfect parents.

Of course, there is nothing more difficult than to stand up for your own or your child’s individuality if everybody else thinks they know better than you and give unasked advice, often with unspoken admonition regarding your ‘different’ behaviour. It is easy for the pitiful looks, the whispers and the frowns on the school playground to cause you to start doubting yourself.

Today’s parents feel guilt, shame, or disappointment if their child drops out of high school, is not a team-player, or if they don’t socialize with their peers, because those contradict what is written in the experts’ recipe of the perfect child. What they forget is that those experts are also people who live in this society; people who are trying to keep their customers satisfied. They are also afraid of failure: "If all the other counsellors use these labels and I don’t, they may think I don’t know enough; parents won’t trust me. Therefore they read the latest research and accept the descriptions of certain groups of characteristics as syndromes" because ‘the experts say so’ and then pass on their own ‘expert’ knowledge as fact, based on the assumption that if it is scientific research, it must be correct.

By now, at least half of the readers will have looked for this author’s credentials, some mention of scientific merit or a title, some proof that will allow them to accept the words in this book at face value (or discard them), proof that the society has sanctioned this view. Many others will have looked for other information: name, gender, rough age group, ethnic background, anything to help pre-judge whether to, yes or no, accept the ideas (possibly before even reading them); anything to have an expert’s stamp of approval. – Before you discard the book when I tell you there will not be such evidence, please consider if you could not trust yourself to decide whether it makes sense to you.

So why don’t we label Mozart and his companions with ‘musical syndrome’? A syndrome, after all, is the definition for a group of characteristics that appear together. Why don’t we ask a counsellor why we are burdened with a child who excels in music or mathematics?

Perhaps for the same reason that Spartan parents did not worry about their athletic children, even if those children could not read or write: If our child does not succeed in everything that is considered valuable today, we feel like failures. It causes us to force our children into every subject at school even if they hate it. It causes us to run them to all available extracurricular activities because the neighbours are doing it, and it causes us to expect everybody to go to university and to look down on those who don’t.

And not just our children; how many relationships fall apart because we all want to be the ideal partner (emotionally and sexually and mentally and socially) or else go into therapy to mend our ‘failure’ of becoming superman or superwoman? We pride ourselves on the belief that we are all equal, since we have ‘solved’ racial inequality and gender inequality. The result is that even mentioning a skin colour is now considered racism and that women feel not good enough if they want to be mothers and not get a job.

What we have in fact come to believe is that equal means identical. We have interpreted the idea of equal value for a woman’s work as meaning that women have to do the work of men; we have mistaken emancipation for the belief that there is no difference between women and men, and so we believe that different talents don’t exist because everybody can get an education.

But one approach in child rearing or education can only work for everybody if all people are exact copies of each other to begin with, only if we believe that people are born blank slates on which the environment can write its instructions.

But we are not all alike. Every parent who has more than one child knows this, knows that their children were different from birth. One cried more, another crawled earlier, a third ate better, the next one had easily irritated skin – they were even different when still in the womb. Brought up in the same home and with the same rules, one child is obedient, another is a handful; one loves sports, the other prefers reading; one never stops talking, the other doesn’t talk about anything. We even pride ourselves on our kids having their father’s eyesight, their mother’s sensitive skin or a gentle disposition, and we know that despite glasses or creams and potions these ‘traits’ cannot be changed; they are inborn.

So it is with our talents. A talent, a natural gift, is something a person does without having to be prompted; it isn’t a chore and they naturally delight in it, exactly like Mozart took naturally to the piano the first time he was introduced to it; he discovered his ear for music. Would he have been introduced to another instrument, he may have preferred that instead; his musical gift did not specify pianist. Yet other children are made to study for years and never rise above mediocre regardless of which instrument they are given; they simply don’t have an ear for music.

And so, inborn strengths cannot be changed no matter how many years people spend in universities trying to learn techniques, and no matter how hard parents or teachers try to influence a child’s behaviour; at best, they can become average.

So why then, if we know all this, do we feel so guilty about having a ‘different’ child? Why do we ask experts to label our children with disorders, syndromes or words like easily distracted or difficult to raise? Why do schools that value individuality send every child that isn’t a perfect copy of his peers to counsellors for ‘mending’? Why do we not notice these contradictions? Why do we do exactly what the Spartan parents did and accept the standards of the experts – who today measure in academic skills and brain functions – and let them condemn our children, give them labels, syndromes and medications for their natural talents, unless those talents happen to fall in the perfect child category, without wondering if it is the category that may be wrong?

What this book is about could also be called labelling, of course. In a way it is, but don’t we all have a name? Doesn’t every book, even those without price stickers, still have a title? Do we call every book with a title cheap? Do we call every person with a name different?

No, of course we don’t, because if everybody has a name, it won’t affect their lives in a negative way. They won’t be outcast or drugged to change who they are.

That, I think, is the difference between a name and a label. A label is put on by others to mark somebody as different – to mark them as wrong, broken, weird or difficult, and thus, abnormal. A name is a means of identification, there so that we don’t get confused, so we don’t mistake somebody for somebody else, so we know who we are talking to, and so we won’t insult someone by calling him a girl when they are male and vice-versa. This is why I speak of typenames when referring to the sixteen personality types Jung and Myers have introduced to the world. There is a typename for everybody and all are equally valuable.

But words like ADD, Aspergers, HSP, bi-polar or borderline personality disorders – and whatever else they have recently invented – are labels; they are a stamp that says faulty, in need of therapy or medication, in need of normalizing.

And invented they are. Yes, there have been some cases of hyperactive children, but those are psychiatric cases; those children don’t even make it to school before it drives their parents to seek help. Children who would rather ride their bikes or climb trees than sit still in school are not hyperactive; school life is hypoactive. The kids are not faulty; the schools are.

Yes, there are children with autism, but autism is not something that is first noticed by teachers, since these children cannot communicate with the world so that a normal family life is impossible. Imagine the examples of Tommy in the rock-opera by The Who, Raymond in the movie Rainman, or, in a milder form, Bea in Breaking and Entering, all of whom excel in one specific skill while being isolated from society. What they label autistic at schools today are children who have little interest in fashion, parties, sports and soap operas – they don’t socialize easily. These children were actually expecting to learn something at school and instead have been given labels that say they were wrong.

Yes, there are highly sensitive people, but that is not a disease. It is a function of their inborn personality; it is who they are. However, if who they are is labelled wrong by those who don’t understand them, they will gladly accept an ‘official’ syndrome if it means they don’t have to feel guilty for who they are anymore.

So we might as well face it: We fall for labels, for fancy names, because it gives us an excuse for our failure.

What we need to realize is that it is not we who are failing; it is our expectations that are failing, exactly like the Spartan expectation that all children could be athletically perfect.

This book is about being honest with ourselves. It is about leaving superman, -woman and -child in the fiction where they belong. It is about admitting that we are not smarter and better parents than the Spartans were. It is about stopping our children (and adults) from feeling inadequate and, thus, from seeking consolation in drugs or falling into depression. It is about admitting that people are not identical, that there are people with white skin and people with black skin, that there are men and there are women, and that there are people with different inborn strengths.

Some of those strengths have been accepted as talents, like Mozart’s, and some have been labelled syndromes, but those are arbitrary distinctions made according to what we have been made to believe and, in a society that prides itself on its equality, we have been made to believe that everybody can learn to be anything they wish.

But just as there are natural-born painters, athletes or musicians, so there are natural-born surgeons, judges, plumbers, sales people, mathematicians, editors, teachers and parents. And as soon as they try to venture into each other’s field, there is a risk of the quality of those fields diminishing just a little. And, as soon as we try to strive for what our natural talent does not support, there is a risk of feeling like a failure.

Please, anti-determinists, postpone your judgment until you have read all of this. Just as nature and nurture both play a role with regard to intelligence, so we should understand inborn gifts. And humane egalitarians, please allow me to explain what these gifts really are before you accuse me of elitism.

Whether a person is called a soprano or a tenor is due to their natural vocal range, but musical voices can be practiced; vocal cords are muscles that can be trained, and each voice has a huge scope.

If I am not deaf, I can hear whether or not it is quiet. I have a value relation with the world of sound. If I am deaf I do not have that value relation with the sound world. Therefore, being deaf is a qualitative