"I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals... But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years... I have got materials toward a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax."
"I re-read Jonathan Swift's A Tale of the Tub twice a year, but that's to punish myself. It is, I think, the most powerful, nonfictive prose in the English language, but it's a kind of vehement satire upon visionary projectors as it were, like myself, and so I figure it is a good tonic and corrective for me". - Harold Bloom, literary critic (likely EIE)
Jonathan Swift is a fairly clean ILI typing.
The organizing principle of everything he wrote is cold Ni pessimism about humanity's long-term trajectory, a genuine constitutive conviction, held from youth to the dementia that finally silenced him, that human folly is structural and permanent. The fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver encounters the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos and concludes that humans are essentially Yahoos who have learned to disguise their bestiality, has struck every generation of readers as going way too far. Swift intended exactly that darkness. He wrote, he said, "to vex the world rather than divert it." Swift didn't want to cushion anything.
The philosophical thesis underlying the entire project is stated in a letter to Pope in 1725, alongside the famous declaration of his social orientation in the beginning of this post.
The final clause is the most typologically precise thing Swift ever wrote. The project of proving that man is not animal rationale — a rational animal, defined by reason — but merely rationis capax — capable of reason, but not essentially constituted by it — is the ILI pessimistic verdict on humanity expressed as a philosophical thesis. This is the intellectual architecture underlying everything in Gulliver's Travels, too.
The logical grounding gives the ILI its characteristic precision. Swift's satire is anchored in specific documented abuses. A Modest Proposal works because every element of its morbid logic is precisely calibrated against the real economic arguments being made about Ireland's poverty. The proposal to eat Irish babies is monstrous (although a small part of the author clearly delights at this destructive mental image), but the economic reasoning is impeccable — which is the point. ILI's Te rarely generate solutions or innovations; it applies cold analytical precision to expose the gap between what is claimed and what is actually happening.
The same "restructuring" (it's not for nothing irrational logicals are called "restructors") precision produces Swift's most compressed observations. "Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through." Here we see a pessimistic, it-is-what-it-is structural observation about how formal systems actually operate: not as stated, but in the opposite direction. "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Again, no moralizing: the system produces the opposite of its stated purpose, and this is noted with the flatness of an empirical finding. "I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed." The baseline adjustment of expectations that ILI characteristically makes: wickedness is the norm, so it's actually shame that is the surprising data point.
Swift's Ne was clearly not the weakest function — Gulliver's Travels has genuine inventive creativity: the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, the flying island of Laputa (the Spanish pun for "whore" was likely deliberate here), the immortal Struldbruggs, the rational horses. Each is a counterfactual world built to isolate and expose a particular feature of human folly. But the Ne is entirely in service of the Ni impressions, not enjoyed for its own sake. ILE's Ne generates possibilities because possibilities are intrinsically exciting. ILI's Ne generates possibilities because one of them might be the right angle from which to expose what the Ni already knows. You don't come away from Gulliver's Travels thinking "what a rich imaginative universe." You come away thinking "he's right about us, isn't he?.." At least, given his stated desire to vex people, that's what he'd wanted.
The relationship to science makes this distinction precise. Swift was not uninterested in science — he even managed to predict the existence of the two moons of Mars a century and a half before their actual discovery. But Alpha-NT science as a cultural project — the enthusiastic systems-building of the projectors — is what Swift found ridiculous. His description of the Academy of Projectors on Laputa captures it: there's an Academy of Projectors, from which flows a steady stream of projects, designed to let 'one man do the works of ten' and 'let the fruits of the earth come to maturity at whatever season thought fit'... Unfortunately, none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the meantime the whole country lays waste.
The joke is not that the projectors are stupid. It is that they are intelligent people whose intelligence is entirely disconnected from Te-style pragmatism. As George Orwell noted,
"...one might assume that Swift is merely the enemy of sham science. In a number of places, however, he goes out of his way to proclaim the uselessness of all learning or speculation not directed towards some practical end".
In his Tale of the Tub, Swift viciously mocks the three strands of Christianity — Catholicism, continental Protestantism and Anglicanism. While the latter (symbolized by the most moderate of the three brothers representing the three religions) gets off the most lightly, there's still nothing particularly positive to be said about his ability to preserve the coat (metaphor for initial Christianity) left to him by his father, it only escapes with the least amount of damage. Swift certainly had the negativistic orientation of the ILI type. It's not for nothing in so many Socionics schools, Ni as the imagination of metamorphoses and change in time is said to be, in itself, a "negating" element. No wonder Ne-ego Orwell wrote:
"The political expression of such an outlook must be either reactionary or nihilistic, because the person who holds it will want to prevent Society from developing in some direction in which his pessimism may be cheated. One can do this either by blowing everything to pieces, or by averting social change. Swift ultimately blew everything to pieces in the only way that was feasible before the atomic bomb – that is, he went mad – but, as I have tried to show, his political aims were on the whole reactionary ones".
Swift had the usual anti-collectivist orientation of the type. What the Lilliputians do to Gulliver no individual Lilliputian is evil enough to have planned. What England does to Ireland is not the work of individual villains but of a system that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. The "democratic" parts of Swift's thought were also appreciated by Orwell, who, with his characteristic precision, noted:
"Swift’s greatest contribution to political thought, in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State,’ with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralise popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a quite small part, for the feeble governments of his own day did not give him illustrations ready-made".
The people Swift loved specifically and intensely show his valued Fi. Stella — Esther Johnson — was the great attachment of his life, a friendship that began when she was a child under Sir William Temple's roof and continued until her death in 1728, when Swift was so devastated he could not bring himself to attend her funeral. The Journal to Stella, written during his London years and never intended for publication, is one of the most intimate documents in English literary history — conducted partly in a private playful language he and Stella had developed together, full of tenderness and daily particularity. His birthday poems to her show "a tenderness little in evidence elsewhere" in his work.
In the grotesque image of the Struldbruggs — immortal beings whose age only accumulates senility — Swift's Ni is taking the human fantasy about time (immortality = permanent youth and accumulated wisdom) and following it forward to its actual logical conclusion (immortality = permanent senescence and accumulated loss). The metamorphosis of the wished-for thing into its opposite through the action of time is characteristically Ni — the intuition that every state contains the seed of its own transformation into something unrecognizable.
The same pattern runs through Gulliver's Travels structurally. Gulliver himself undergoes a metamorphosis across the four voyages that is itself a Ni demonstration: he begins as an ordinary reasonable Englishman and ends as something barely human, unable to tolerate the smell of his own family, preferring the company of horses in his stable. The journey through time and experience has transformed him — but into something worse, not better. The optimistic version of the Bildungsroman says experience teaches wisdom. Swift's Ni version says experience teaches a misanthropic madness that Swift satirizes but which also carries the force of a genuine conclusion.
Notably, Swift kept a diary of his final mental deterioration so he could trace its progress — reportedly watching himself decline and noting it with the same cold observational precision he applied to everything else — is a remarkable instance of Ni self-observation. The future he had always suspected, a mind finally consumed by the folly it had spent its life cataloguing, arriving on schedule. Not surprised (unlike Ne, Ni is not a function of surprise, it predicted it all before), but watching.
The final gesture is the most characteristic. He left his fortune to found a hospital for the mentally ill, because, as he wrote in "On the Death of Dr Swift": "He gave the little wealth he had / To build a house for fools and mad / And showed by one satiric touch / No nation wanted it so much." St Patrick's Hospital still operates as a psychiatric facility. ILI doesn't make grand gestures toward an imagined better future. It makes cold, precise, permanent arrangements against the folly it knows will continue.
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