​IEI

IEIs are esoteric. She has an attraction towards hidden knowledge, symbolic systems, secret meanings, and things accessible through symbols, intuition, myth, ritual or hidden systems rather than ordinary surface observation. Instinctive temperamental attraction towards tarot, paganism, divination, alchemy, archetypes, ritual, and omens in its darker expression takes the form of the occultic. The distinction from EII is that, where EII can become interested in the esoteric because the EII likes mysterious objects, here, the esoteric quality of IEI contains a Dionysian sublayer into something living, irrational, dangerous, destructive, fertile and continually becoming. This expresses her underlying experience of reality. Order is a thin surface. The state of nature in its most elemental form is will to power, as that force which over time transformed a once relatively harmless, vegetating ape of the African Savannah, into a broad-shouldered, lean-torso’ed two-legged Apex Predator of the Pleistocene.

IEIs are penetrative. An ego for depth means that she doesn’t merely know what people want but she penetrates beneath what they say they want into the contradictory drives underneath; the wound beneath the ambition. She instinctively looks behind the presented personality and deals with the hidden motive rather than the declared one. Layers are perceived without needing to simplify them. This is a sharp contrast with the reductive style of ILI. Here, there is no hard stop at scientific dogma and no pretense of disdain for imagined ideas. Contradictions reveal openings. Animal passions and private vulnerabilities operate underneath the costume. She has intimacy with darkness. Envy, sadism, lust, vengeance, cowardice, domination, self-destruction and hatred are perceived without needing to look away or immediately moralize them out of existence.

IEIs are visionary. She is not primarily the person who conquers but that her distinctive power is that she can see a possible order hidden inside the disorder of the state of nature, including the conflicts, exclusions, sacrifices and destruction that would accompany its creation. She sees what the terrain could become. Her vision isn’t administrative but she thinks in large human forms and brings symbolic meaning to raw events. She imagines an order, not merely a victory. Every order privileges some possibilities and forecloses others. She can envision an order whose creation requires defeating rival powers. Her vision takes on tragic dimensions in that she can perceive that establishing one order may destroy another and still decide that the transformation is worth the cost. Temporal and counterfactual describes part of her intelligence.

IEIs are discriminating. A defining form of her cognition is the capacity to perceive differences that less perceptive people collapse together. Her capacity for grasping gradations forms an important distinction from the pseudological archetypal thinking of the EIE as well as the tendency of the SEI to superficially reflect the interlocutor’s perceptions. Although she uses archetypal framing, unlike the EIE, she doesn’t completely confuse the symbol with reality. The reality produces the archetype rather than the archetype dictating reality, still allowing her to draw clear separations between the essential from the incidental, cause from symptom, real enemy from convenient enemy, the strong from the apparently strong.

IEIs are alchemical. She sees latent properties and perceives psychological potentials that haven’t yet become action. She understands that human emotions can be transmuted and mixes opposites, for instance, combining love with jealousy to produce hatred. As the catalyst she doesn’t supply most of the energy but understands that the people involved already contain it. She understands reaction chains, such that sometimes only a small intervention is required: a remark, a revelation, insinuation. She isn’t merely exploiting a preexisting situation but sees unrealized forms inside the situation, as if she were asking “What could these symbols become if combined correctly?”

IEIs are combinatorial. People can thus become ingredients in a witch’s brew:  this person’s vanity, that person’s resentment, another’s ambition, another’s fear. She understands that power rarely moves in straight lines but she arranges human passions so that people themselves become the machinery that produces the future she imagines. If she takes a wicked form, she causes bloodshed three moves downstream by arranging the conditions under which other people collide. Her power is in understanding chains of motive. Through the interaction of ingredients outcomes emerge from her efforts that could never be accomplished through brute force alone.

IEIs are willful. In contrast to the more impractical EII, she refuses to allow her vision to remain merely imaginary and expositional. Once she sees what can be, existing reality begins to feel intolerable. She consequently pushes, nags, seduces, provokes, shames, inspires, manipulates, challenges, or pressures her interlocuter towards action. She doesn’t merely offer the vision, as in “here’s an interesting possibility.” She insists, this must happen and grows impatient with inertia. Contentment enrages her. She lacks executive force but not volition. Her willfulness can take on an imperious form, seeing what could exist, she will not stop pressing reality until someone makes it exist. Her vision makes demands upon other people’s action. She places expectations upon powerful people. “You could be greater than this.” When direct requests fail, she activates the interlocutor’s pride, ambition, competitiveness, jealousy or significance. She knows what will make him move. Stability doesn’t satisfy her. She sees unrealized possibility everywhere and experiences tremendous internal pressure towards a future she cannot personally materialize.