Tag Archives: INTP

The New Mills

They had to be discrete. Tongues will wag. For their idea is a slow idea, not well accepted in the world even today.  Their slow idea on the human element, Hu, analogously called latent heat in physics and chemistry, generated a lot of heat by others, full of sound and fury at the time, for these other people vigorously opposed the idea: On Liberty – moral|economic. It wasn’t the fast idea at the time:  the conventional wisdom of Victorian, Anglican, England: the idea of nationalised merchantilismtariffed moral, economic, political, and social trade: locally culture restricted and centralized regulated trade of ideas and things: Oh Britannia.

The New Mills: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill

Green ideas sleep furiously: latent heat

Continue reading The New Mills

A Master of Us All

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.Albert Einstein

This garden universe vibrates complete,
Some, we get a sound so sweet.
Vibrations, reach on up to become light,
And then through gamma, out of sight.
Between the eyes and ears there lie,
The sounds of color and the light of a sigh.
And to hear the sun, what a thing to believe,
But it’s all around if we could but perceive.
To know ultra-violet, infra-red, and x-rays,
Beauty to find in so many ways.

Two notes of the chord, that’s our poor scope,
And to reach the chord is our life’s hope.
And to name the chord is important to some,
So they give it a word, and the word is OM.
Graeme Edge, Moody Blues

euler_mosaic

There have been many times I have heard an individual say something to the effect: I hate (don’t like, don’t do) “math.”  Shame on our ignorant “math” educational system, but now with the Khan Academy there is no excuse for such a lament from our kids.

I always enjoyed “math” — hey, I am a nerd from the sixties.  But I “hit a wall” in mathematics in the second-year of college. And even modern “mathematicians” have to “specialize” because the “difficulties” of “mathematics”. Practically all believe that mathematics, even for the “mathematicians,” is too vast and large to now to “see” the whole elephant (so to speak).

In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
— John Von Neumann

Someday information science [in some form of Formatics] will encompass all of math and science, but until then:

The religion of Mathematics is a Master of Us All.

Except when in the 1700’s,
Continue reading A Master of Us All

A Mistake Was Made

Oops — by me

Well, and there were mistakes made, but not by me 😉

The remarkable thing is understanding never stays put. It is important always to get a new understanding … … … understanding can be improved
Saunders MacLane

She was misunderstood by many people: for she discarded the traditional political philosophy’s conceptual schema.

Hannah Arendt employed the famous phrase about “banality of evil” in her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Now almost a cliché, it is easy to forget the storm it once generated. As a former victim of Nazi persecution in Germany who had later worked for the Zionist cause in Palestine, many Jewish writers had expected Arendt’s book on the trial to reinforce their own conviction that Nazism represented a radically new type of evil. To her own surprise, Arendt was unable to oblige.

Conventionally Eichmann was viewed as a “evil monster”.  However, after Arendt studied Eichmann during the trial and after, she did not see a demonic force but a mediocre personality, that she concluded, who inhabited a thought world of platitudes. A banal obsession with process and following orders, not some special, radical type of evil, had enabled him to commit crimes on a massive scale. Arendt’s critics had misunderstood her if they ever thought that her Zionist past meant she was going to play the part of the “good Jew” in approaching Eichmann’s crimes.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.  — Margaret Thatcher

Some of her critics did not read much or any of her writings.  Some of them probably based their criticisms of Arendt on what their own cohort had said.

Based on their personal experiences with totalitarian regimes in their youth, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand were two individuals who pointed out the hypocrisy of the established Western World intellectuals.  They spoke truth to power, and were criticized, ignored, or ostracized because of it.

stalin-hitlerUnfortunately my blog about Hannah and Ayn had a flaw it it.

Watch what they say and do, if you can — don’t rely on second and third sources.

I knew a great deal about Ayn Rand, having read about and following her for decades, and reading a couple of her books since I was a kid.  I had studied Arendt to a degree, but not enough.  I made a mistake.  NO, my mistake was not on what their ideas were: Hannah and Ayn were very articulate, and had well formulated their prose.  Those who don’t have their political, economic, and cultural religion blinding them can easily understand their point of view and their message.

My mistake was of a differing kind.  I was mistaken in what Hannah Arendt’s personality type was.  I had hypothesized that Hannah Arendt was a Mastermind Rational, same as Ayn, [Contending Rational (INTJ)], but Hannah Arendt not a Mastermind (as I later discovered, after my blog was published), rather, based on listening to an extended interview (in German, with subtitles) was it was clear to me that she was Architect Rational [Accomodating Rational (INTP)].

Architect Rationals need not be thought of as only interested in drawing blueprints for buildings or roads or bridges. They are the master designers of all kinds of theoretical systems, including school curricula, corporate strategies, and new technologies. For Architects, the world exists primarily to be analyzed, understood, explained – and re-designed. External reality in itself is unimportant, little more than raw material to be organized into structural models. What is important for Architects is that they grasp fundamental principles and natural laws, and that their designs are elegant, that is, efficient and coherent. [Please Understand Me II]

Mastermind Rationals do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don’t, aren’t, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency. Problem-solving is highly stimulating to Masterminds, who love responding to tangled systems that require careful sorting out. Ordinarily, they verbalize the positive and avoid comments of a negative nature; they are more interested in moving an organization forward than dwelling on mistakes of the past. [Please Understand Me II]

Most Rationals are reasonable human beings as long as they don’t have to suffer fools.  This attitude made them appear as both an arrogant human and a humble human at the same time.  Masterminds are not concerned with ideas, for their own sake, as much as the Architects, but rather are interested in ideas for their use and utility in reality. Generally, the Masterminds are looking for interesting answers and Architects are looking for interesting questions.  Architects must understand their field of study, use of those ideas by others and reality is secondary.

“That’s mere reality.”
David Keirsey

Both Rationals are arrogant, Architects are the most arrogant in the natural way: all you have to do is ask them ;-).

Hannah Arendt’s prime directive to herself was to “understand.”

Wir mussen wissen, wir werden wissen.
(We must know, we will know)
David Hilbert

“Never accept an idea as long as you yourself are not satisfied with its consistency and the logical structure on which the concepts are based. Study the masters. These are the people who have made significant contributions to the subject. Lesser authorities cleverly bypass the difficult points.”
Satyendranth Bose

openquoteThere are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.closedquote — Hannah Arendt

Other Architect Rationals include: James MadisonSrinivasa RamanujanEmmy NoetherPaul DiracRobert RosenDavid KeirseyAlbert EinsteinLonnie AthensDavid Bohm

Rational Maverick

In Memoriam

It is the first anniversary of my father’s death.

david_keirsey_in_library
Professor David West Keirsey
(August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013)

I always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library — Luis Jorge Borges

I was born into even a better paradise.  My father was wordmeister (a studier of words) and a personologist (a studier of persons), and a book reader: A Rational Maverick.  And I was just like him — well sorta’.  He was born in the 20’s and I was born in the 50’s.  Two ages of innocence:  he after WWI and me after WWII.

He had different upbringing than me, but we were of the same Temperament (Rational), Role (Engineer) and Type (Architect).  A kind of a natural science and engineering type of person: a nerd, in modern argot. I naturally graviated towards being a scholar in quantitative reasoning and the use of words, because of his and my mother’s library of life. He had naturally became a scholar in qualitative reasoning and the use of words.

I began reading when I was seven. Read (most of) a twelve-volume set of books my parents bought, Journeys through Bookland. Read countless novels thereafter, day in and day out. I educated myself by reading books. Starting at age nine my family went to the library once a week, I checking out two or three novels which I would read during the week. Then, when I was sixteen, I read my father’s copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. I read it over and over again, now and then re-reading his account of some of the philosophers. (Long afterwards I read his magnificent eleven volumes—The Story of Civilization. I also have read his The Lessons of History many times, this being his brilliant summary of the eleven volumes.)

I mention Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy because it was a turning point in my life, I to become a scholar as did Durant, thereafter reading the philosophers and logicians — anthropologists, biologists, ethologists, ethnologists, psychologists, sociologists, and, most important, the etymologists, all of the latter—Ernest Klein, Eric Partridge, Perry Pepper, and Julius Pokorny—of interest to me now as then. [Turning Points, David West Keirsey, unpublished]

When I started to discuss (and soon to debate) things with my father, we discussed logic and the use of words.  I had become a reader too, rather naive and ignorant as children are, however.  Luckily, my father had learned what it meant to learn.

The second turning point occurred when there came a sudden, drastic, and permanent change in my life. In May 1942 I was drafted. I quit school immediately and joined the Navy to become a fighter pilot. Why fighter pilot? Because as a child I had read every book I could find about the fighter pilots of the first world war, finally resorting to 5 cent pulp books, many well written (I have no idea why these planes and their pilots fascinated me). So when called to war I could not imagine my engaging in any other kind of warfare. Not that I wished to go to war. Far from it ─ I wished to pursue, not the enemy, but college studies. Even so, I found flight training fascinating but challenging and hazardous, many cadets failing to pass the frequent tests at each stage of training. Incidentally, it was during flight training that I learned the crucial difference between education and training. An educated person has acquired knowledge; a trained person has acquired skill. An effective person has acquired both. [Turning Points]

He was able to go to college on the GI bill, renew his scholarship, and to continue “action” research (as he called it) when the War ended.

In January 1946 back to college. We lived in my wife’s parents’ home in Costa Mesa until the summer, at which time we moved to Claremont, this because my wife’s parents let us live in their (refurbished) garage. Indeed, we chose Pomona College in Claremont, not for its many merits, but solely because we had a place to live in. What a stroke of luck! Claremont was a college town housing no less than seven colleges, each unique and well known, one of them being Claremont Graduate University, my place of study for thirteen years, I resuming my interrupted life as a scholar.

 …

I attended Claremont Graduate University—the fourth turning point in my life.

Claremont Graduate University had a clinic in which I practiced counseling troubled persons for four years.

Pursuant to writing my masters thesis I studied ten persons said to have high blood pressure without physical disease or defect, then called “essential hypertension.” Met with each person many times for many months, using personality inventories and what was then called ‘associative anamnesis’ in which they told me the story of their lives while I asked them to go into more detail about their more disturbing experiences, taking copious notes all the while. No one had ever paid such rapt attention to them and tried so hard to understand how these experiences affected them, or accepted everything they said without criticism. It was on the basis of this method of interviewing that Carl Rogers built his notorious career, he giving the method names such as ‘non-directive counseling’, ‘reflective listening’, and ‘active listening’. Practicing the method early on and thenceforth gave direction to my career as a counselor of both troubled and troublesome children and their parents and teachers, and as a trainer of those who would practice such counseling, and finally as a writer on personality, counseling, and madness.

I found all ten persons to have the same personality, what I would much later call the Guardian. It was this long study of persons’ lives that set me on my lifelong career course. Thus I became a person watcher. Wrote Personality in Essential Hypertension for my MA degree. [Turning Points]

My father would go on to be a clinical school psychologist for the next 20 years, collecting and inventing corrective intervention techniques and developing Temperament Theory.  We would discuss experiences and his ideas, and many of the ideas that he got from the hundreds of books in his growing library.  Then there was:

The Book

Bates and I wrote three books, one of them titled Please Understand Me, the contents taken from transcriptions of my lectures and conversations with Bates, she the scrivener. When Bates died I gave the manuscript to her sister to have it published. Her sister did nothing about it for a whole year, so I then retrieved and rewrote the manuscript entirely and, finding no publisher, published it myself in 1978—a turning point.

The book had a strange history. It started as sixteen separate “portraits of temperament”, these being expansions of the sixteen “psychological types” of Isabel Myers, a novelist who was devoted to Carl Jung’s ideas on personality. Had the college book store print each portrait separately on typing paper, sixteen sheets clipped together, put in a manila folder and sold in the college book store. Sold five thousand copies the first year (1975). When Please Understand Me was written, the sixteen portraits were in its appendix, probably the reason the book still sells thirty or so years later and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. [Turning Points]

He would go on the write or contribute to more books: Portraits of Temperament, Presidential Temperament, Please Understand Me II, and Personology.

He never completed Dark Escape, his magnum opus on Madness, a manuscript that he worked on and off for 60 years.  Some day I would like to publish it or a subset in some form.  Some of the work is at his blog site that I created for him,  http://professorkeirsey.wordpress.com

I continue to wander in the library of life, sometimes reading or rereading books that my father wrote or read: with thought in new regions that my father never could go to, but wondered about.

Architecting History

James Madison

Thomas Jefferson, [Architect Rational,] served two terms as President, and like Washington before him decided that two terms of its “splendid misery” were quite enough for any man. He was eager to return to a life of study and to have his old friend, the gentle and scholarly James Madison, [Architect Rational,] succeed him in the White House. There was little opposition to his choice and “Little Jemmy” Madison, who stood about five feet, five inches tall and weighed in the neighborhood of 100 pounds, won the presidential election of 1808 handily, and was sworn into office in early 1809. Though he was pleased to have become President, Madison intensely disliked the ceremony and celebration that attended his inauguration. He was quick to announce to a friend his reaction to the gala inaugural ball: he would rather be in bed.

Another quiet, privacy-loving Engineer Rational had taken the helm of the ship of state. [Presidential Temperament]

Continue reading Architecting History

The Number

1729

I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen.

No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways”

— G. H. Hardy

Euler Function on the Complex Plane

Yep, it is ALSO the first absolute Euler pseudoprime.  Unique.  Sui Generis.

raman

  Just like The Man Who Knew Infinity:
 Srinivasa Ramanujan:   Sui Generis

Continue reading The Number

Mondays with David

Editor:
[This is a tribute to my father by Dr Randy Cima, also posted by Dr. Randy Cima to his blog, Your Kids Aren’t Sick]

Mondays with David

Dr. David West Keirsey with self portrait.
Dr. David West Keirsey with self portrait.

It has taken me more than a month to write this.

My friend, David West Keirsey, died July 30, 2013. He was 91. I’m so proud, and fortunate, to call him my friend. Up until a few years ago, he was Professor Keirsey to me, and I hadn’t seen nor spoke to him for 30 years.

As far as I know, Dr. Keirsey was humankind’s last Gestalt psychologist, and that’s something you should know. His ideas are historic, and I’ll be writing much more about them, and similar things, for the rest of my life. First, though, before I tell you more about Dr. Keirsey, I want to tell you about my friend, David, and the loves in his life.

David loved his country. He was a proud veteran of World War II. He joined the Navy in 1942. After flight training, he took his commission as a Marine fighter pilot and flew several missions in Japan towards the end of the war. He wrote in some detail about his military experience in his autobiographical essay, Turning Points.

Those times, and the depression before the war, had a lifelong impact on David, as it did with everyone from the greatest generation. He believed we were morally obligated to fight World War II, and he knew many who gave their lives protecting our freedoms. He considered himself lucky to come home, and grateful, for the rest of his life, that he did. Thank you David, for your service, from all of us.

David loved questions. For the past 18 months or so I’ve been meeting with him on Mondays for three or four hours, often with his son David Mark, talking about temperament and psychology, and many other things. I often took notes on my iPad. I put them in my “Mondays with David” file on my computer. I love asking questions, he loved answering, so our friendship grew. We had much to talk about, and it was always fun. (You can read more about this from a prior blog, here.)

At times he became frustrated, his memory sometimes needing more and more of his depleted energy. More than once, when I arrived for a visit, I’d ask, “how was your weekend David?” He’d reply, with a smile, “I don’t remember, but I’m sure it was fine.” Once he added, again with a smile, “. . . although I could try to retrieve the information for you if you wish.” It takes energy to retrieve information. At 91, you have the privilege of choosing where you want to spend your energy. It was a polite question anyway. I always knew where he was every weekend. He was with his wife and his family. He cherished his weekends.

 Once we started talking about something he was interested in, he became focused, taking his memory to task, retrieving important ideas, if triggered by the right question. Precision, more than anything, was his forte, organizing and analyzing ideas to a depth only a very few can imagine, simplicity his reasoned pursuit, efficiency always a welcome bi-product. He never stopped “tinkering,” often spending hours at the computer, changing single words at a time in his many essays about temperament and “madness.”

I put madness in quotes because, well, David wouldn’t have it any other way. Professor David West Keirsey was so much more than Temperament Theory. His humane, holistic, and thoughtful explanation of “madness,” is above all else, his legacy to humankind, as far as I’m concerned. His seminal work, Dark Escape, provides our species, for the first time in human history, a way out of the “madness” of modern day psychology and psychiatry. I will be writing much more about this.

David loved to read. He read everything. I mean everything. I mean anything, and everything, and that started when he was a seven year old, and it never stopped. The last time I saw him he was reading a favorite novel, for the fifth time. Why? “I might find something new – and I like it,” he said. This wasn’t unusual. From Turning Points:

I began reading when I was seven. Read (most of) a twelve volume set of books my parents bought, Journeys through Bookland. Read countless novels thereafter, day in and day out. I educated myself by reading books. Starting at age nine my family went to the library once a week, I checking out two or three novels which I would read during the week. Then, when I was sixteen, I read my father’s copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. I read it over and over again, now and then re-reading his account of some of the philosophers. (Long afterwards I read his magnificent eleven volumes—The Story of Civilization. I also have read his The Lessons of History many times, this being his brilliant summary of the eleven volumes.)

I mention Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy because it was a turning point in my life, I to become a scholar as did Durant, thereafter reading the philosophers and logicians—anthropologists, biologists, ethologists, ethnologists, psychologists, sociologists, and, most important, the etymologists, all of the latter—Ernest Klein, Eric Partridge, Perry Pepper, and Julius Pokorny—of interest to me now as then.

So, I said to myself, who better to ask questions than someone who has read everything – over and over? He had so many useful answers. I’ll be sharing them with you too.

David loved words. Not as a wordsmith or author, though he was certainly both. He loved words as an etymologist – the only one I’ve ever met. He often said he may be the only one left. David studied words. From Turning Points:

I became a scholar, one of three boys in the scholarship society in 1942. I took a course in word study. I have studied words ever since, even during the war, pasting lists of words on the bathroom mirror wherever I stayed. Why etymology (word signs) instead of linguistics (word sounds)? Because word sounds shorten with use becoming only remnants of what they were, while word signs are written and therefore remain the same. My interest was in what is written, not in what is spoken.   

Many times on Mondays, triggered by something we were talking about, we’d go upstairs and sit at his computer in his comfortable, book-filled library – me to his left, him behind the keyboard – looking at an online etymology site, researching a word. He called it “fun” and, wouldn’t you know it, so did I.

David loved kids. He started working with troublesome teenagers at the Verdemont Boys Ranch as a young psychologist, figuring out ways to manage these boys, and to help their families. He worked in schools most of his career, doing the same, training thousands of teachers and counselors and psychologists in methods that work, not theories that don’t. He began collecting the many techniques to manage and counsel adults and children that was to become the core of his unique and highly successful Counseling Psychology graduate program at California State University, Fullerton.

He wrote some remarkable essays in defense of children, and every parent and professional should read them. So, please, do that. You can read Drugged Obedience in the School  here, and The Evil Practice of Narcotherapy for Attention Deficit here, and The Great ADD Hoax, here. There are many other important and useful essays you will find at the same site.

His solution to helping troubled and troublesome children? “Be nice to them, and keep them away from those drugs.” We had a lot in common about kids. I’ll also be writing about useful child management techniques, from a temperament point of view..

David loved his family. David Mark, his son and lifelong companion, joined our Monday morning conversations often, and I cherished those times in particular. A gifted computer scientist, David Mark called his father “Daddy.” He honored his father.

The two of them could, and often would, debate an obscure, yet important idea with the same passion as when the debate started 30, or 40, or even 50 years earlier. His father honored him too. Often, when it was just David and me, he would boast about his son Mark, as fathers who love their sons often do. How lucky they were to have each other. I envied them.

Every weekend David and his wife Alice went to Del Mar to meet with the rest of the Keirsey clan and, when they didn’t, family members came to their home. David and Alice traveled and vacationed with their children and grandchildren. The two of them together made sure they gave their family the best gift you can give to people you love: wonderful memories.

Mostly, David loved Alice. What was the first thing this returning WW II veteran did when he came back from the war? He married his junior college sweetheart, Alice. He admired her so. “Alice has done such a wonderful job of keeping our family together and close over the years,” he often said, with much pride.

When you walk up the circular stairs of their beautiful home you will meet all of the family. Alice has dozens of family pictures and other mementos adorned on the walls and on the stairs – and everywhere else throughout their warm, loving home. This, you can tell, is a family that cares for each other, and they are grateful to have each other to love. I recognized their family quickly. I come from one too.

Alice – he called her “babe” sometimes – from they way he like to tell it, was a dynamo of her own when she was working in elementary schools. David said she was always the head of a department or committee or project, or part of some other crusade to care for all those kids for which she loved and cared.

They never quarreled, he told me, more than once, because, he said, more than once, “we were made for each other.” That certainly proved to be true. They were married in December, 1945. I was two months old.

Why did it take so long to write this, and anything else, for that matter? Well, honestly, I’ve been mourning my friend. Just a few days before he died, my wife and I visited David and Alice at their home. As we were leaving, I leaned over, gently grasped his hand to say goodbye, and to tell him, “I’ll see you soon, David. I have another two or three thousand more questions to ask.” Without hesitation, he replied, “Good,” and added, “I have two or three thousand more answers.”

His spirit, more than willing, his body, so weary. During some of our best conversations, he would remind me, and David Mark, “there’s still much work to be done.” Lucky for me, he trusted me with all that he has written. The answers to my questions are all there, and that’s good. I will be doing a lot more reading. It’s not the same though, and not nearly as much fun, as asking my friend, David, just a few more questions.

You can tell a lot about a person when you know the loves in his life. I admired him. I loved him too. I miss him, very much.

Mondays, for me, will never be the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I just want the world to understand, there’s no such thing as ‘madness.’”

– David West Keirsey

The Exceptional Twins

They varied in creed and circumstance.

They were the same in Temperament and interest.

They were exceptionally invariant in their passion.

They were the exceptional invariant twins.

invariant_twins

You don’t chose your passion, your passion choses you — Jeff Bezos

Passion breeds talent — Stanislas Dehaene

Passion requires Temperament — David M. Keirsey

Continue reading The Exceptional Twins

One Ring that Binds Them All

rings_that_bind

They were her boys.

And she revolutionized the way to they thought about things.

And she proved it.

No, not a physical proof, for there is no such thing.  But a Mathematical proof.  Ironclad, never changing — Well almost.

To imitate, but not too much, if our discipline is not to become a marsh, a large one to be sure, but stagnant, with neither life nor movement. First imitate to learn, and then renew ourselves. … I love, at least when I am able, to regard science from a personal point of view, and always, again when possible, go beyond current opinions and look at the problem from a new perspective. I have the impression that some ways must be left behind, some mental habits must be abandoned, if we are not to clip the wings of progress. Even to science we must sometimes repeat Charon’s cry: By another way, by other ports, not here, you will find passage across the shore. In my role as teacher I hope to be able to show you other ways, if not other ports. — Giuseppe Vitali

Emmy was a teacher too.  And she fabricated some mathematics that binds them all, as they sought their own passages and ports of call. The Rings that Bind.

For she had had obstacles and a vast ocean to cross in her own passage in life — she was able to reach another shore and dwell for only a short while.  But her perspective and rings will live on forever.

Continue reading One Ring that Binds Them All

We ought not to die, before we explain ourselves to each other

Adams-Jefferson

“…that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other…”

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote these words in letters to each other, after both had retired from public life. Each was a founding father of the United States of America and each served as President. Jefferson, an Architect Rational, was a Virginian, tall and lanky, and a brilliant writer, but middling speaker. He relied partly on John Adams, an arrogant Fieldmarshal Rational from Massachusetts, pudgy and cantankerous, but a brilliant bulldog of a public speaker to persuade others.

This combination of the two was a very powerful dyad. The theoretical and Engineering brilliance of an Architect and the pragmatic determination of the Coordinating Rational has been seen in other pairs such as Lincoln and Grant,  Einstein and Bohr, and Ulam and Teller. In this combination, these two founders helped shape the United States from the beginning based on both their temperament and character, a unique combination of personality at a crucial time in political history.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams’ reelection bid for President of United States. It was the most acrimonious election of the country’s young history, and is considered the starting point of political parties in American politics. This was an unexpected situation given that a few years earlier, Jefferson and Adams had worked well together in the framing of the Constitution and were two people tasked by Congress to write of the Declaration of Independence.

In Washington’s two terms of office was when Adams and Jefferson parted company, their visions for America differing.   They became political opponents.   Adams became very bitter when Jefferson defeated him in the 1800 election.  Adams retired to a Massachusetts, they didn’t communicate until Madison’s second term in 1812.  Their friend Benjamin Rush wrote a letter to Adams, hoping they would reconcile.  Time and retirement of both seemed to heal the wounds.  Adams sent the first letter and with that they proceeded to correspond for the rest of their lives: both dying on the Fourth of July, Independence Day, 1826.

So how was it they didn’t understand each other?

“On the question, ‘What is the best provision?’, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging it’s errors.” [emphasis added]

They were Rationals, interested in theoretical solutions to practical problems. Once the United States was on a seemingly solid basis, the two began to differ in their vision of how the government of the United States should proceed. Adams was not trustful of the republican democracy and was a Federalist — more concerned with creation and protection of wealth and strengthening the central government, whereas Jefferson was not trustful with the aristocracy in the form of Federalists and preferred a more representative and more autonomous version of the electorate, Agrarian in nature. Jefferson had supported the French revolution. He even said to Abigail Adams, John Adams’ wife, in a letter: “I like a little revolution now and then.”

Jefferson explained “our difference of opinion may in some measure be produced by a difference of character in those among whom we live.” But I think that Jefferson, the Engineer, more a libertarian in nature, had a faith in the rough and tumble of local politics. He had more of a distributed notion of democracy in the form of States rights and individual freedom. But Adams, a Coordinator, viewed the educated man and the man of inheritance as equal combatants in the balance of power between different branches of government. Realizing the common man had little or no interest, or skill to be involved with government, Adam had worried about unchecked democracy.

As Jefferson surmised:

 “We acted in perfect harmony through a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, though neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. If we do not think exactly alike as to it’s imperfections, it matters little to our country which, after devoting to it long lives of disinterested labor, we have delivered over to our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it, and of themselves.”

So both Adams and Jefferson had confidence in the American Temperament to prosper.