One axis of temperament theory and it's intersection with the Internet revolution

The Internet is excellent for complaining about the world around us. We live in systems, not of our making, and nothing seems to make sense... at first. But, as we learn more about the world around us, we start to understand uncomfortable truths that underpin how the world works.

There are two types of personality temperaments on one axis in David Keirsey's temperament theory: affiliative and pragmatic. Affiliative types favor community harmony, whereas pragmatics favor being sensible, realistic, efficient, and preferring what makes sense. A label of one type indicates a preference over the opposite. For example, an affiliative person can be pragmatic and vice versa.

Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. The pragmatics strength is finding solutions to real problems. The affiliative type's power is reaching a consensus across the most significant number of people, which is not a minor task. The weakness of the pragmatic types can be their ability to communicate their solution to the group. In contrast, the fault of the affiliative types is to ignore uncomfortable realities, which might lead to consensus around the wrong solution.

The Internet has enabled us to hyper-select for similar personality types. So pragmatic types find and start hanging out with other pragmatics. Then these communities help enforce the perception of those specific communities, highlighting the differences between the personalities.

The affiliate types are the more common temperament in the population. Their perception is that harmony is essential and that if they could convert or excise the non-harmonious, we would have less strife. We would have fewer battles; if different temperaments did not exist, there wouldn't be consternation. And the pragmatic types reinforce the view that everyone is different and wrong, and we will fix everything. Their perspective might be correct, but if you entrusted the world to a bunch of creatives and intellectuals, this might run better in some ways but worse in others.

Before the Internet, our social groups and collections of temperaments we have to interact with may have been more varied. Still, now that we can hyper-select for similarities, our experiences dealing with different types of people have deteriorated.

The Internet also lowered the consequences of being rude and snarky. You aren't going to get physically injured as a consequence of your words like you are in the real world. Lowered consequence means how we interact with people outside our communities could be much better.

The Internet and global communication are not going anywhere. We could choose to opt-out, but you're not going to get everyone around you to opt out as well. Our quality of interaction in real life and online has deteriorated and has been affected by this technological advancement.

Ultimately we need to be aware of and accept certain realities about our situation. There are multiple temperaments, and they aren't like to be changed. And with the boundaries of global communication being what they are, snark isn't going anywhere. But we can understand each temperament better, understand their strengths and weaknesses, so we can value the role each one plays.