Shared Human Values Are a Lie - Socionics Proves It
Jul 31, 2025
Prologue — “Bifurcation Point ’95”
Mid-nineties. I’m a twenty-two-year-old anthropology major walking the freshly white-washed corridor of our faculty building. Sony Discmans hiss in the background, the computer lab is experimenting with its first HTML pages, and a never-ending debate about “universal values” frames the year that will become my personal bifurcation point.
We were sitting in a cheap cafeteria across from campus. Armed with lectures on cultural evolution, I kept repeating my favorite refrain: “Humanism is universal; respect is natural to any society.” My friend, already a senior in psychology, listened silently and then, almost without inflection, said:
“The universe you’re talking about exists only in your imagination. People navigate different maps of the world, and each map has its own sacred points.”
Her words triggered an inner dissonance. It felt as though she was undermining the very foundation of my worldview. Instinctively, I reached for familiar arguments—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Enlightenment principles, academic etiquette. Yet as the conversation deepened, an unsettling detail emerged: for many cultures those “axioms” are merely outward badges of belonging to the global modernist crowd, not the core of their value system.
Late that evening I opened my ethnology notes and, for the first time, saw a crack instead of confirmation. Field reports from Melanesia, the Sahara, and Scandinavia suddenly resonated differently. The old message “all people are alike” was replaced by “likeness and difference are two variables of one equation, and their weight shifts with context.”
That episode launched a journey that eventually led me to Socionics. The theory of information metabolism gave mathematical footing to my growing skepticism toward universalism, offering a language where difference doesn’t mean chaos but follows the strict logic of functional distribution. It took time to admit that the cafeteria dispute wasn’t a trivial collegiate sparring match. It was the ignition of a life-long research project—a project to decode human diversity before the engineering mind of the future begins building bridges of mutual understanding across it.
The Myth of Universalism and the Cultural Lens
When Western audiences discuss “shared human values,” they usually point to familiar markers: individual rights, equal opportunity, empathy as social glue. In anthropological field notes, however, those same words dissolve into context. Among the Hattam of Papua, “respect” is embedded in a complex ritual of yielding one’s spear. For the Guaraní in Paraguay, humanism shows up in the refusal to accept a gift, avoiding indebtedness to the giver. Universal-looking ideas display very different “densities” the moment culture changes the lens.
EII (INFj) and LSE (ESTj) illustrate how Socionics tracks those discrepancies. For an EII, “respect” lives in the quality of the relational bond, powered by a dominant Fi. For an LSE, the same word is parsed through outcomes and efficiency, driven by a dominant Te. They can recite identical humanitarian slogans, yet run two non-overlapping scripts.
The myth of universalism thrives on cognitive economy: the brain prefers assuming “everyone is like me” over constantly redrawing its map of reality. But when value systems collide, that shortcut leads to attribution error. Each side projects its own hierarchy of importance onto the other and meets what looks like irrational behavior. In Model A terms, it’s a data-transfer glitch: the sender encodes a message through a base function; the receiver decodes it on a vulnerable or role function, and meaning skews.
Decisions about war and peace, hunting and conservation, showcase this clash. Where a high-energy Se/Te pairing such as SLE (ESTp) sees resource control as necessary, inherited humanist rhetoric can ring hollow. From the perspective of an EII, the same situation threatens the bedrock value of relational safety, triggering an Fe-based mobilization against violence.
Cultural variety doesn’t eliminate shared human potential; it makes that potential a statistically distributed variable instead of a constant. Socionics turns that fact into an engineering permit: we can model which TIM pairings generate the highest delta of misunderstanding and insert “compression channels” in advance—be that a mediator with a complementary type or an algorithm that translates a Te-coded efficiency pitch into Fi-relevant story form. Universalism isn’t a lie so much as an inconvenient data format. To stop clashing with reality, it must be normalized to the bit rate of our psychic interfaces, not imposed wholesale on everyone else.
Field Journal: Seven Years of Cross-Cultural Observations
Year 1—New York City. The subway turns “respect” into Te-precision: stand right, walk left, never stall the flow. My EII baseline craved Fi-attunement, yet the city’s dominant Te field treated courtesy as throughput. Every attempt to slow the pace for emotional nuance met a politely impatient: “Help by not holding the line.”
Year 2—Helsinki. Here trust anchors itself in Ti-clarity. A stranger with one grocery item moves ahead because the rule says so. The local over-representation of LSE and LII types makes logical transparency a public good; warm Fe is optional, structural fairness compulsory.
Year 3—Bangkok. Heat mixes with the Fe-rich wai ritual. Sellers smile to lubricate crowded interactions. For an IEE the display feels natural; for my Fi-driven filter it verges on signal inflation—too much outward emotion to parse intent. The city teaches that high-context Fe can be as standardized as New York’s Te.
Year 4—São Paulo. Carnival energy bleeds into weekdays through Se-saturated street commerce. A vendor’s presence presses inward; space is never neutral. My diary notes the classic Fi–Se clash with passing SLE personalities who view territory as an extension of vitality, not a negotiable border.
Year 5—Kyoto. Silence becomes etiquette. Si-aesthetics rule: tatami hush, soft voice, exact gesture. Respect here means “do not disturb the ambient signal.” The symmetry strikes me: New York demands “don’t slow the system,” Kyoto “don’t ripple the stillness.” Different functions, identical goal—entropy control.
Years 6–7—Synthesis. Across continents, “respect” proved a variable keyed to the dominant function of each cultural field. Socionics converts qualitative notes into a semi-structured matrix: which function is canonized, which marginalized, how that layout shapes public behavior. The journal stopped being travelogue and became a troubleshooting map—pinpointing where the myth of universalism cracks and where adapters must be installed before future technologies attempt to automate understanding.
Socionics—A Map of Psychic Biodiversity
Socionics invites us to view human diversity the way a biologist studies an ecosystem: not through a “us vs. them” lens but through the stable distribution of functional niches. Model A outlines eight information channels—Fi, Fe, Ti, Te, Si, Se, Ni, Ne—that pair up into sixteen types (TIMs). The pattern looks like a genetic code: four “nucleotides” of logic/ethics and sensing/intuition combine into predictable “triplets” of behavioral algorithms.
At the individual level each TIM is a specific bandwidth configuration. The base function acts as a high-frequency receiver, giving a person a sense of “native terrain.” The creative function reshapes the stream and modulates behavior. Role and vulnerable slots mark cognitive stress points through which culture trains the individual to interface with the group. Two people can voice identical values, yet their internal logic runs on different processing centers—much as a predator and a pollinator share one food web while performing dissimilar tasks.
Quadral dynamics scales the picture to communities. Alpha favors idea exchange and Ne–Ti equilibrium. Beta channels Se–Fe energy through ritual and hierarchy. Gamma converts Te–Fi resources into a marketplace of mutual benefit. Delta cultivates Si–Ni stability, generating long-term trust. In this frame so-called “universal” values lose their absolutist tone and become localized survival strategies for a psychic landscape.
Here Socionics becomes an engineering tool: it lets us calculate communication overload points, predict which function will become the bottleneck in cross-cultural contact, and decide where to install adapters—be it a mediator with a complementary type or an algorithm that re-codes a Te-driven efficiency pitch into Fi-relevant relational language. The biodiversity map shifts from metaphor to compatibility protocol, useful to organization architects, AI-assistant designers, and anyone building systems aimed at sustainable dialogue among psychic species.
Intertype Mechanics and the Ethical “Compatibility Protocol”
Socionics treats communication as a data exchange where meaning is encoded by the sender’s dominant function and decoded by the receiver’s role or vulnerable slot. When an EII (INFj) asks an LSE (ESTj) to “respect coworkers’ feelings,” the message rides on the author’s base Fi and lands on the addressee’s vulnerable Fi. Instead of resonance, a cognitive distortion appears: the LSE detects a gap in its algorithm and defensively pivots to Te metrics of efficiency. Behaviorally this looks rational, yet under the hood it is classic interface mismatch.
The intertype grid translates such collisions into relationship topologies—duality, activation, conflict, super-ego, and so forth. A dual pair like EII and LSE forms a closed loop in which each partner’s base and creative functions supply the other’s deficits, so signals meet minimal resistance and the interaction feels “natural.” By contrast, a conflict pair—say, EII versus SLE (ESTp)—creates a feedback loop of noise: Fi collides with Se, and Ne finds no port in the SLE’s Te-PoLR. From the outside it reads as irrational aggression, but it is simply algorithmic dissonance.
An ethical compatibility protocol rests on the fact that each function has an optimal entry mode. Fi needs privacy and nuance; Fe thrives on public context and amplitude; Te demands verifiable facts and tempo; Ti wants structural clarity and time to parse. Environments that impose a one-size-fits-all communication style unintentionally throttle parts of the psychic biosphere. Team architects translate these requirements into process rules—dedicated channels for synchronous versus asynchronous traffic, staged conflict-escalation steps, facilitator roles. Values lists alone cannot substitute for such architecture.
In practice we deploy “adapters”—people or AI modules fluent in multiple functional dialects. When an LIE (ENTj) rolls out a Te–Ni strategy and a team dominated by IEE (ENFp) asks “Why should people care?,” the adapter re-codes Te arguments into an Fi-centric narrative while preserving the original logic. Type data sets the formal spec: depth of abstraction, emotional framing, and outcome metrics that will satisfy both sides.
This moves ethics from lofty ideals to an engineering discipline that minimizes cognitive packet loss much like TCP handles data. In a hybrid world of human and machine agents Socionics becomes middleware, mapping port numbers, connection speeds, and buffer sizes for every psychic interface. Universalism shifts from presumed moral right to an explicit multi-version contract—complete with dependencies and a graceful shutdown routine for moments when words no longer match their internal addresses.
From Hunting to Engineered Empathy: The Tech-Ethics Vector of the 21st Century
Human history began in a raw Se logic of pursuit: space was measured by spear range, and every living creature was judged by its value as food or defense. The industrial age merely upgraded the spear to Te-powered machinery—same algorithm, new tooling: extract until the cost curves break.
In the twenty-first century the KPI flipped. Survival now favors integrators who preserve the ecosystem where people, algorithms, and non-classical agents—drones, digital forest twins—co-exist. On a Socionics map this shifts weight from the Se–Te bundle toward Fi–Fe, where life’s worth is coded in perceived autonomy, not utility. Engineers design systems with an “empathy feedback loop”: sensors track an animal’s stress, an AI module translates the signal into Fi patterns, and the dashboard displays that emotional metric beside conventional Te telemetry.
The same logic scales to traffic engineering. When a LSE (ESTj) traffic manager drafts a signal plan, a consultant who is an EII (INFj) joins to sense where pedestrians feel vulnerable. Their hybrid Te–Fi algorithm cut accidents without reducing throughput in a pilot by the MIT Sensible City Lab.
Tech ethics raises the resolution of moral choice by turning it into engineering criteria. Banning hunting in a reserve stops looking like sentimental charity; it becomes Te–Fi optimization that saves the cost of eco-restoration. A jaguar’s collar broadcasts stress, blockchain logs the spike, and the park interface throttles tourist access. The system “shows empathy,” yet runs pure Te code.
The global ESG wave and Humane Tech initiatives form a quasi-Delta-quadra culture where Si–Ni resiliency and Fi relational ethics outrank Se expansion. Start-ups pitching “Uber-for-safaris” now clear funding only after proving an adaptive Fi model of wildlife impact, and investors routinely request a “stress-to-resource ratio” alongside EBITDA.
Engineered empathy doesn’t cancel power and efficiency; it repurposes them. Every extra watt of energy becomes a lumen of understanding among ecosystem agents. Socionics supplies the port map: which message types flow loss-free and which need translation. Se energy remains the engine of progress, but it’s routed through an Fi substrate that turns dominion over life into stewardship of it.
Psychic Hygiene of the Future: A Personal Practice Stack
Conscious mind-management is moving from the realm of esoteric techniques into an engineering task. Once Socionics pinpoints the bandwidth of every function, a person can assemble a “mental DevOps pipeline”: the base function sets the core process, the creative function supplies rapid adaptation, and the suggestive slot becomes an overload sensor.
An EII starts the day by pinging the quality of connections: a three-line journal note capturing the day’s intent and likely relational touchpoints. The same interface closes the loop at night with an echo read-out of emotional signals. Ten minutes total, yet the routine lowers the background Fi anxiety that flares when calibration is skipped.
An LSE builds a different dashboard. Te thrives when metrics are visible, so the morning check skims a panel of project KPIs plus body telemetry—heart rate, sleep score, step count. Creative Si layers in comfort data, from room temperature to breakfast density. Fusing objective and subjective sensors turns self-care into an analytical board legible to a logical cortex.
An IEE, living on Ne impulses, anchors hygiene around option expansion. A “micro-idea every hour” drill works like interval training for attention: every sixty minutes a fresh use case is jotted down, no matter how viable. A week later a visual cluster map reveals which theme is ripe for prototyping and which one can be shelved—keeping creative Fi from drowning in novelty.
Strong Se, meanwhile, needs a regular kinetic “bleed-off.” Fifteen minutes of slow, resisted movement at the start of the workday bring focus into present-moment muscle feedback. The practice tempers territorial pressure on less sensorily charged colleagues.
Across types, a universal module is the monthly “interface audit.” Set aside two hours for a self-interview using Model A: note traffic that hit overload, spots where the base function faltered, and tasks that slammed the vulnerable slot. Log incidents in a table and add a patch list: what environmental knobs changed, which negotiation tactics helped. After half a year the personal knowledge base lets you predict which task/partner mix drives growth and which triggers cognitive faults.
The personal practice stack thus resembles modular architecture, each function backed by its own service layer. Socionics acts as the wiring diagram: it shows where to add stabilizers, install fuses, and surface metrics so drift becomes visible in time. Psychic hygiene stops being a soft promise and turns into code you can deploy—keeping the mind resilient under information overload while open to a diversity of values that once seemed incompatible.
Post-Homo animatus: A Chance to Move Beyond Instinct
Humans long operated under a raw Se “hunting logic”: stimulus–response, win–lose, seize–consume. Even after civilization donned humanistic rhetoric, the old circuitry of need and fear stayed active beneath the surface. In the twenty-first century that circuitry hit its efficiency ceiling: aggressive resource extraction wrecks ecosystems faster than technology can patch them, and spiraling emotional polarization erodes the trust that holds financial and information systems together.
Socionics offers a language for rewriting the species’ firmware without amputating its energy. Each Model A function carries evolutionary potential once it stops serving purely reptilian survival scripts. Redirected Se shifts from conquest to prototyping, powering engineering boldness; liberated Fi grows trust networks where the “other” becomes a carrier of extra data, not a threat. When base and vulnerable channels receive programmable throttles of awareness, they form a distributed social nervous system able to absorb shocks without reflex relapse into violence.
Technology is not the antagonist of this shift but its catalyst. Machines that read the crowd’s emotional telemetry and algorithms that forecast conflict probabilities off-load the brain stem, freeing the cortex to parse nuance instead of burning resources in score-settling. Cloud assistants tuned to a user’s “socionic frequency” modulate information flow: LSI gets minimal chaotic Ne-noise yet keeps a spark of novelty, while IEE sees the data’s structural skeleton without oppressive Ti-regulation. The environment turns types from mutual dampers into mutual accelerators.
Under this configuration, the future is no arena for emotionless super-humans; it is a habitat for post-Homo animatus—a being that still feels the adrenaline surge but invests it like capital rather than looting with it. Remote sensors tracking a neighborhood’s stress curves trigger architectural “sound-dampers” before a shout becomes a fight. Forestry robots keep Se-activation in check so young growth can root. The same principle scales to diplomacy: a platform spots Fi- versus Te-coordinate drift faster than the word “sanctions” reaches a press release.
Thus Homo sapiens, retaining muscle and limbic fire, learns to act as a distributed cognitive ecosystem where instinctual energy is routed through an ethical layer of conscious engineering. Socionics supplies the wiring diagram—how much voltage each cognitive “bus” can bear, where to place stabilizers, which loads to split across parallel channels. Crossing the threshold beyond instinct proves less a moral feat than a measurable tech upgrade: the ancient hunting flash no longer triggers a destructive chain reaction but channels into an engineered impulse for creation.
Epilogue — Gratitude for a Debate and an Invitation to Evolve
I can still picture that cafeteria: pale halogen light, the smell of cheap coffee, and the fierce confidence of a twenty-two-year-old who believed humanism was universal. Back then, righteousness had to be loud, arguments had to bulldoze doubt. Thirty years later, my gratitude for that debate runs deeper than any “proof.” It wasn’t a bruise to the ego; it was a lever that shifted my worldview and exposed layers of psychic diversity that demand a different lens.
Socionics turned an intuitive hunch about difference into an analytical tool that calibrates dialogue more finely than traditional psychology. Each time I list my own values in the language of eight functions, it’s like lifting the hood of consciousness: I see where tension builds and where hidden resonance lives. That clarity let me realize the 1995 argument wasn’t about who’s right but about how to link the seemingly incompatible without violence or mutual devaluation.
To the American reader—whether business practitioner, researcher, or technologist—I offer no creed to memorize, only an experiment. Spend an evening “pinging” your own Model A: note which topics ignite your base function’s appetite and which ones slam your vulnerable slot shut. View colleagues through the same lens and you’ll see how clashes often hide behind shared vocabulary, surfacing only when a project hits stress or ambiguity. Those pressure points are exactly where Socionics aims, not as a labeling scheme but as engineering specs for relationships.
The paradox of the new humanism is that it’s built not on abstract “love of mankind” but on respect for the architecture of the mind. This humanism is tested not by manifestos but by how gently we handle meaning channels. The sharper the calibration, the lower the energy loss—and the greater the chance that ancient instinctive aggression converts into creative drive.
I thank my long-ago opponent for daring to question my foundation. And I invite anyone reading these lines to repeat the experiment: audit your own axioms with the Socionics map in hand. Not to discard beliefs, but to chart their borders and learn to build bridges to the beliefs of others. That is evolution—moving from surviving beside one another to living with one another, where the diversity of psychic codes is not a threat but an architectural fact of a complex system that can grow without waging war on itself.