Bad Scene

After reading this entry on Metafilter (yes, 99% of you can stop reading now) I started thinking about ways of classifying human beings. And as about four seconds of research will tell you (much as it did me), the methods available to the average denizen of the Internet are legion.

Let’s start at the base of the pyramid — nowadays anyone with a LiveJournal or, hell, an email account gets deluged with personality quizzes which people incessantly link to over at Quizilla or OKCupid (or as I like to think of them, “occupied”). This method of classification — besides being, shall we say, far from standardized — is really quite erratic and silly, and all too often merely fodder for lonely 13-year-olds (though not in every case).

Then we have the quasi-scientific super-complex psychological tests along the lines of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter and the Enneagram. I’m sure this is quite interesting for people who find Tarot a bit too simplistic and predictable, but finding out I’m a 4w5 and an INFP “Questor” (though lacking tapes) just didn’t mean much to me at the end of the day. Still, if this is up your alley, check out Similar Minds for a bevy, yes a bevy of such tests. And you could check out Antonio Zamora’s homegrown scientific personality test, or just tour his penthouse! You know you want to.

Somewhere I’ve decided is in between these two realms is the realm of the Four Humours (as mentioned in the first link of this post), a spectrum of classification which stands out for three reasons: it’s simple but not simplistic, the results are in fact not easy to map onto just anyone, and humans have been using some form of it for millennia. As such it qualifies as a Thing That Never Goes Away, like big hair, armpit farts, and listing things in threes. Even Myers-Briggs/Keirsey has its four main groups, no doubt from an early stage of the test’s development before the heavier drugs could be shipped cost-effectively. And above all, it’s really compelling. Just read this treatise on an exemplary, bulletproof four-way classification system.

But even so, that’s not the only game in town. And put down your Four of Pentacles, because this goes even deeper than Tarot. Behold: the brilliant but homepageless novelist Jonathan Lethem, in his book The Fortress of Solitude, has taken a modern archetype, the Beatles, and given us another fourfold path to understanding our fellow human beings. An exuberant tip of the hat to Mr. Lethem for his outstanding work.

And for those of you who adore those erratic and silly tests all the same, The Fab Four await.