Elimination and the Path to Wholeness
My brother is a small-scale farmer and one of his complaints is how people lack nuance when discussing complex subjects - this is bad, this is good. This creates an all or nothing, black and white thinking that if left unchecked, can lead to more misinformation and careless practices.
When you talk about personality types with people, they like to ask if their type is bad or good. It's an innocent question, but it reveals how people's minds work. The thing is, things aren't as simple as they seem. There is no one type or thing that is 100% good.
When you call somebody an introvert, you mean that he prefers an introverted habit, but he has his extraverted side too. We all have both sides, otherwise we could not adapt at all, we would have no influence, we would be beside ourselves.
— Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology: It's Theory & Practice
MBTI, created during the Second World War by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, came from Jung's theory, which became something of a "fun" topic for discussion. The famous dichotomy of introverts and extroverts, feeling and thinking, and intuition and sensation, have all become ways in which individuals would distinguish themselves from the rest. Many have even started to call themselves ambiverts because according to them, "I'm a bit of both". Yes, honey, EVERYONE is an ambivert, by saying that, it doesn't make you sound smarter, because according to Jung, EVERYONE is a mixture of all of the functions, as all of the functions work in synergy.
Synergy isn't just found in the different functions in typology. They can be found in all aspects of life, especially in the domains of health and nature.
Elimination in the Health Domain
From a health aspect, certain supplements need to be taken at different intervals in the same day in order to function effectively. The ignorance happens when individuals consume supplements without considering that other Vitamins are needed to support the synergetic relationship between various Vitamins, resulting in wasted effort and money.
When we are sick, many of us are given antibiotics to kill bad bacteria. It works because it's aggressive and shows no mercy. But it comes at the cost of killing the good bacteria that is needed for absorption of nutrients and maintaining gut health. Of course, I am not a health advisor nor am I your doctor advising you to throw all your antibiotics away, but you can see here that with every elimination, it comes with a cost.
Photo by Drew Dempsey on Unsplash
Many individuals frequently use sunscreen as a prevention of skin cancer due to sun exposure. Every dermatologist stresses on the importance of sunscreen and how it will help with aging and dark spots. Many Asian women in particular, are so scared of the sun that they would go to certain lengths to avoid it. Some women even go to the extent of applying sunscreen in the confines of their own homes while avoiding the sun completely. The importance of Vitamin D and how it's connected to our overall health is thrown out of the window and beauty precedes health. In an effort to eliminate the risk and probability of cancer, humans have conceded into harming themselves in the long-run.
Elimination in Nature
In nature, many of us forget that everything about nature is connected: from our trees to the land and the various bodies of water, nothing you spray or pour remains at one spot. Many conventional practices that produce high yields of juicy and succulent produce bring damage and havoc not just to the soil but also to our bodies, the same bodies that we love to flaunt on social media for external validation. In an effort to eliminate the bad, horrible pests, companies have chosen to lure farmers into the trap that they need more chemicals and whatever pesticides they can think of. To them, less isn't more, and more is more.
Elimination in Dietary Trends
We also see how elimination works in dietary trends. The popular one being Veganism. Vegans attempt to eliminate all animal products from their diet, but do they know that crops thrive the most when given food waste from animals? And in their attempt to serve a market demand for "healthier" products, companies have substituted animal products with chemicals and substances that are far worse for the body. Many former Vegans had to stop following the Vegan diet because it was killing them slowly, depriving them of the key nutrients that can only be found in animal products. While some Vegans are strict with supplementation, any diet that requires you to take a copious amount of supplements isn’t sustainable in the long run, as it attempts to fill in the gaps of something which shouldn't have been eliminated in the first place.
The same goes for the Carnivore diet, where it works for those who have chronic food sensitivities, but most people would be better off having a diet that includes more than just meat.
Elimination in Social Groups
The elimination theory can also be applied to social groups and the people in our lives. When you hate people who are weird or strange, you're essentially also eliminating the creative people in your life, so choose your battles. Of course, I'm not saying you should keep a psycho in your life.
Elimination works on a short-term basis but it's not a viable long-term solution - all elements need each other to work in tandem. When we try to eliminate the bad things in our lives, we need to be careful that we don't also eliminate the good things in our lives.
The Strive for Wholeness
Jungian psychology's main aim had always been to guide individuals into wholeness, unlike mainstream psychology which aims to eliminate and diagnose, even though that may not be their original intentions. Oh ADHD is bad - here's a pill for you. Depression is bad - here's another pill. Now, I'm not saying that all pills are bad or that you should completely avoid pills, but just know that whatever you put in your body comes with many risks that you should be well aware of.
The Importance of Labels
In order to approach elimination wisely, we first need to understand the importance of labels. Ah yes, I can already hear the crowd decrying labels while being ever so willing to slap a label on themselves.
It is no use at all putting people into drawers with different labels. But when you have a large empirical material, you need critical principles of order to help you to classify it. I hope I do not exaggerate, but to me it is very important to be able to create a kind of order in my empirical material, particularly when people are troubled and confused or when you have to explain them to somebody else.
— Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology: It's Theory & Practice
According to Jung, labels help to clear confusion and aid in explanation, especially when you are dealing with a large pool of data, or in this case, humans. It is definitely helpful to categorise using labels in order to distinguish between different types of individuals. Jung understood that labels can be both helpful and unhelpful in different contexts, which is why Jungian psychology doesn't aim to diagnose individuals but rather understand the deeper psychological context of a person. Here's the thing about labels: people can sometimes get overly attached to their labels when it is their environment or the company that they keep that enables and further supports the narrative of that label. Unlike personality types that are milder as compared to diagnoses, mainstream psychology can be quick to slap a label on someone, which in some cases can be helpful, but poses its own risk.
Some labels have also proven themselves to be redundant when an individual changes their environment and company. Case in point, some individuals who have an issue of gluten intolerance report not having any allergic reactions when they consume bread in Europe, possibly due to stricter laws that ban the usage of certain additives and chemicals; someone from Northern Europe is less likely to be labelled as cold and antisocial in their region as their culture values honesty rather than fake enthusiasm. To them, small talk and general cheeriness is more likely to come across as trying-too-hard and borderline suspicious. But someone from America or South-East Asia might see them as cold and uptight.
As mentioned previously, certain labels have also been heavily lumped together with other clinical terms. Words like antisocial have been thrown around whenever someone prefers their own company more than the company of others, when the clinical term also refers to someone with an antisocial personality disorder. While such labelling isn't technically wrong, its careless usage neglects the fact that out there, there might be someone who actually has the disorder, further erasing the gravity of the terminology.
Besides the efficiency of labels, labels help to correctly identify what are the elements needed in a synergetic relationship. In MBTI, everyone has all eight cognitive functions: intuition, thinking, feeling, and sensation. Each function is expressed differently according to either an introverted or extraverted orientation. And if we look at how the functions are organised, each type utilises all eight functions but prioritises them differently, which also explains why some individuals feel that they don't fit a single dichotomy or type. As even between two individuals of the same type, a single function can be more pronounced for one person. Regardless, it still does not change their core personality type, as all functions in their correct order form a piece of the puzzle.
At the end of the day, while humans eliminate with the goal of attaining the unrealistic goal of perfection, we should instead strive towards wholeness.
In various domains like food, architecture, interior design, music, art, and writing, you will find layers and textures coming together to form a synergetic whole. In such domains, there will always be something that is deemed as unpleasant or bland, but when they are fused together with various other layers and textures, they become a cohesive whole. And that should be the human goal: to become a person who integrates the messy, ugly, and unpleasant, to become someone with personality, so that we can build something that represents a synergetic whole.