Ne != empathy.

It is not uncommon for fans of the Myers-Briggs test to confuse extroverted feeling for empathy, confining introverted feeling to the realm of self-interest or delusion. Were this a valid tendency, we should have to conclude that Camus, Kierkegaard and Kafka all derived their philosophy from their own autism, and we might also have to consider that Joseph Goebbels was a heyoka. (While I am relieved to find my suspicions corroborated by IDR labs, namely that Goebbels was an ENFJ, especially since his psychological influence surpasses that of others listed in dark boxes on that website, I derive little satisfaction from this except for intellectually.) In Truth, extroversion does not lend itself to empathy, and while extroverted empaths exist, as well as narcissistic introverts, it’s not as though half of introverts are empaths and the remainder narcissists. While these extremes in empathy do exist, the quality in which feeling is directed is largely independent of them, except perhaps where changes in empathic power might alter the course of feeling in an individual who has adopted a neurotic conscious attitude based upon ignorance of the opposite extreme. Whatever the individual’s capacity, however, the direction in which he or she feels empathy varies based upon temperament; at the most, empathy is but one factor in this, if it is at all causal, and it favours neither temperament, where feeling is concerned, to the exclusion of the other.

Extroverted feeling, as a rational function in the strictly Jungian sense, (by this I mean Jung’s words exactly, both in print and a recorded interview) is that Avenue by which the conscious ego makes decisions. Accordingly, a preference for extroverted feeling does not necessarily represent the capacity to which an individual perceives or judges feelings in others (“reading a room”, for example) but rather the place that these feelings hold in one’s own rational process; it is effectively a political rather than a psychological leaning. Conversely, empathy as a unit of measurement represents the extent to which one perceives feelings in others, but those others may be regarded EITHER collectively OR individually, usually depending upon the individualism of the perceiver, and in the case of the extremely sensitive introverted feeler (the “psychic sponge”, as it were) these perceptions may be interpreted as one’s own feelings. It follows accordingly that while extroverted feeling types tend to prioritize propriety and group thought over personal feelings of righteousness and entitlement, individuals in whom introverted feeling predominates tend to sympathize more so with deviants and outcasts, often at the expense of diplomacy, and they derive their sense of security from a theoretical, at times even metaphysical, order rather than social dynamics. On the narcissistic end of the spectrum, introverted feelers can be histrionic and self-entitled, though they are much too easy to identify as this by contrast with extroverted feelers afflicted with the same narcissism, who will often rally the group against the minority, as well as the sovereign conscience, for their own personal benefit, often regarding everything in their vicinity as an extension of themselves. The finest counterpoint by which I can think to illustrate this fact is in the polarity between Hitler and Tolkien. No question can be raised that the former, an INFJ whom Jung himself identified as a “medicine man”, regarded the German people as an extension of himself. But proto-Fascists of all walks of life have three fingers pointing back at them if they mistake Adolf Hitler’s “common good”, represented so persuasively (before that biased audience which had produced him) by his Minister for Propaganda Josef Goebbels, for the felt altruism of a man like J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien felt no tangible affiliation to any political party, and even his kinship to his fellow Englishmen was mythological and academic, born out of a purely personal and not at all nationalistic interest in linguistics. Yet what one may identify within this man, without fail, is his ability to speak out against any sort of inhuman device, no matter the extent to which the common good has been used to rationalize it, almost always on behalf of the underdog and invariably in defense of the opressed. Introverted feeling remains a channel by which empathy is expressed to individuals everywhere, whereas extroverted feeling tends to work best when what the general public wants is, in fact, good.

Dm.A.A.