Category Archives: In Memoriam

Famous personality, Four Temperaments, General site information, In Memoriam, Keirsey Awards, Leadership

Keirsey Temperament Awards

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The Keirsey Temperament Awards for 2011

Each year an individual is awarded from each of the Four Temperaments: Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, and Rational.

The awards are given to individuals who are “famous” (if possible) and have significantly impacted the world, to illustrate and highlight the Four Temperaments.  Keirsey Temperament Theory maintains all four Temperaments play important roles in society and we need all kinds of people use their talents.

The selection is difficult, for sometimes Temperament is hidden because we are looking at these individuals from a far. We don’t know the individuals personally, and only through the media are we familiar with these people. The Keirsey Temperament Forum serves as a nominating committee. I am the judge and jury.

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Famous personality, In Memoriam, Rational

Naughty Boy

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As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words “Naughty boy!”

He had been actually somewhat gracious in his reaction. That wasn’t his normal reaction, he being a direct and blunt “public intellectual:” he is not known for mincing his words or being upstaged by the Iron Lady.

Using his words as weapons, he had ripped into his opponents with relish: their station in life or credentials didn’t matter.

He loved to talk, preferably as part of an argument.  Most public pundits no doubt would be intimidated by him: he was articulate and extremely knowledgable, and Oxford educated. His encyclopedic literary and historical knowledge was unmatched in public discourse.

Skeptical and Cynical, he was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger.

Not a mainstream pundit.

My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, anyplace, anytime. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.

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Famous personality, In Memoriam, Leadership, Rational

Of Complex Character

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Gaia is a tough bitch.

Hot Cold Passion: a passion for science.

She was a Scientist, first.

And she was a Character — a very interesting, and complex character.

Having entered the science community as a woman, when men still dominated science, and being charmed by a huge scientific ego, Carl, she luckily had to explore the backwaters of evolutionary biology at the time, bacteria, not getting much support from him or her male contemporaries.  Of course, like all good science, that estuary of knowledge contained biological riches totally ignored by well established conventional scientific community.  Like Darwin before, she was sui generis: a driven, feisty, no holds barred, idea brawler — an intellectual maverick — by necessity and choice.  Initially ignored, she generated a fair amount of hostility from the conventional scientific community when they were challenged.

And intellectual mavericks, with persistence, are the only type to challenge the major ideas of conventional science, and win — somewhat.

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Famous personality, Guardian, In Memoriam

Of the Greatest Generation

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He never wanted to talk about what he had seen.

He was typical of his generation, they just didn’t talk about it.

That is strange because he made a good living by talking. Or more accurately, reporting what he thought. He was a writer above all else. He was probably the most famous curmudgeon of all time.

He would complain. Like clockwork. For nigh thirty three years, every week, for a few minutes. Probably the best and funniest complainer on American TV.

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In Memoriam, Leadership, Rational

The Master of Innovation

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The founder of Apple Inc. and CEO of the decade Steve Jobs has tragically died today as he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer.  Jobs was an imaginative genius and innovative business icon, and his death is certainly heartbreaking and unfortunate news.  Rather than dwell on the negative the best thing to do is honor the legacy of arguably the greatest and most influential Inventor Rational of all time.  Indeed Steve Jobs is the quintessential Inventor, with his name on over 230 patents.  Most notably the iPod (304 million sold as of 2011) iPhone (100 million sold as of March 2011) and iPad (15 million sold as of march 2011) Jobs inventions have undoubtedly changed the world.   Jobs is largely known as the heart and soul of a company that was briefly the most valuable in America.  Steve’s visionary leadership and innovative genius have revolutionized the way we think about technology, and the world will certainly not be the same without him.  Visionary, rebel, and icon, Steve Jobs is the American Dream at its greatest and will be sorely missed.

Dyads, Famous personality, Idealist, In Memoriam, Rational

What Dreams May Come?

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Number 137.  Was this the key to understanding the Universe?  Or was it an impossible Dream?

It was a kind of Dream Team.  One was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics.  The other was an internationally famous psychiatrist.   They both were interested in Dreams.  Other than that, they are an odd pair.  So was their relationship.

He had felt like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  He didn’t know what to do about it.  He was a Rational.  He was a scientist, and the leading scientific skeptic: the gadfly of quantum mechanics.  He had the ear of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg – the supreme Rationals of the day. They put up with his caustic wit for he was good at finding problems with their theories: the Mephistopheles of Physics. Successful professionally, but his private life was a mess.  What was he do?

By the day he was about Science, at night he had frequented the bars of the red-light district of Hamburg: he knew his relationships with females was out of control. His Mister Hyde — he hid this from his colleagues –  he was embarrassed.  He felt he was in crisis. He decided to consult with that famous psychoanalyst, Carl Jung – secretly.

Carl Jung was interested in the “mind.” He viewed himself as an intrepid explorer of psyche.   He had adopted Freud’s interest in analyzing dreams, but he had his own unique, and lucrative techniques.   Those rich female European ladies of Vienna and Zurich had money to burn and all the time to talk, and maybe other things.  “Archetypes” was his word, and the “collective unconscious” was his game.  What did all those dreams mean?  Symbols, myths, intuition, ESP — what was the truth? The Idealist, Carl Jung was eager explore and analyze The Rational, Wolfgang Pauli’s, dreams.

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