George Patton: SLE

"And looking forward I could see

Life like a festering sewer;

Full of the fecal Pacifists

Which peace makes us endure."


"So as through a glass, and darkly

The age long strife I see

Where I fought in many guises,

Many names, but always me.

...

So forever in the future,

Shall I battle as of yore,

Dying to be born a fighter,

But to die again, once more."


"Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance."

George S. Patton (1885-1945) is about as clean an SLE as the modern record offers — a man whose entire being was organized around combat, dominance, and the contempt of weakness. While many other military SLEs are mostly deciphered by their actions, Patton has handed down his inside story straight through poems. He is, perhaps, even better an example of a SLE general than Georgiy Zhukov himself, Aushra's nickname for the type.

Most striking is that Patton constructed his personal mythology in which war is man’s timeless state and he himself was forever the embodiment of it. In his poem “Through a Glass, Darkly” (1922), he portrays himself as the rebirth of a warrior who fought and died "countless times upon this star." It is SLE’s reverence for power and battle taken to the extreme in that it is not "I am good at war" but "War is what I am; life after life." The type's core orientation toward force and struggle is nakedly confessed here, and the fact that he reached for reincarnation to express it shows how total the identification was. The mysticism can be interpreted as "suggestive Ni", I guess — the weak, but still valued function supplies the mystical frame, while the actual application is a list of battles, with deep time rendered as a sequence of sensory and concrete combat scenes — the strong functions doing the actual work.

The other side of the SLE's coin is the despising of softness, and Patton had that too, in a flavor that runs from doggerel (the "fecal pacifists" post-WWI poem is, I have to say, quite inferior to "Through a Glass") to the infamous. That verse cursing the pacifists — the home-front cowards he held in scorn — is crude but diagnostic its dividing of the world into the strong who do and the weak who whine. The same impulse produced the episode that nearly ended his career: the slapping of two hospitalized soldiers he took for malingerers. It is revealing as a window into the type's relatively bad emotional control (one of the traits associated with "inert" F functions) and instinctive moral grid — strength is virtue, the failure of nerve is contemptible, and a man unmanned by fear is an offense to be struck. There is no Fi-ish accommodation here, no weighing of the individual's inner state; there is the SLE's hard, immediate verdict on where each man stands in the hierarchical order of the strong and the weak.

Some socionists interpret "Fi PoLR" as lacking any at all preferences, likes and dislikes (what would such a jellyfish person even look like?), but as we see with Patton, who's quite a typical SLE in most schools, it is not so. He certainly would openly tell you what he thinks about pacifists and pacifism. Rather, it is the refusal to engage with other person's internal subjectivity — the pacifists' ideological stance already condemns them, no further judgement needed. 

Patton's postwar political turn is a good demonstration of how a "pure" SLE reasons about the world, and it got him removed from command. As military governor of Bavaria in 1945, he decided that the denazification program was foolish, the competent German soldiers should be kept under arms rather than scattered, and the real enemy was now the USSR, which the West should confront immediately — "kick the communists' ass all the way to Moscow." He reportedly wanted to manufacture a pretext for the attack, and pointedly left Wehrmacht regiments undisarmed against the day he might use them. The wartime alliance, the political settlement at Yalta registered to him only as obstacles weaker men erected, towards which no sentimentality is needed. This is the SLE's relationship to the world, taken to the extreme: the ability to shift gears swiftly (the type notoriously lacks thought viscosity), an unclouded and near-amoral assessment of the balance of power, a disdain for diplomatic subtleties, and a willingness to move on it without regard for who will have their relations disturbed by the action. The Germans he liked because they knew how to fight ("manners, culture and the ability to fight"), while the Russians he mistrusted because they were on the rise; the rest did not matter to him.

His demonstrative aspects – the immaculate helmet, the flamboyantly foul-mouthed yet theatrical harangues to his soldiers, the carefully cultivated image of the dashing leader – were not the emotional broadcasting of an EIE or the affection-seeking of an SEE, but the projection of physical strength on the part of an SLE.

The "May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't" line is probably embellished in the retelling, but it is the kind of thing Patton said. There is no accent worth flagging here — Patton is the SLE with the dial turned to maximum, and his poetry only makes it plainer. 


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