On the Nature of the Socionic Function Se

This is an archival work, conceptually outdated in its details, with excessively broad interpretations of terms in places [author’s note, 07.2026]

On whether Se is associated with aggression and violence.

Some people in the socionics community believe that violence and aggression are Te because, first, they are actions (dynamics), and second, they transform the world (logic, Te). To this I can reply that, yes, any directed action is Te. Cutting down a tree, slaughtering a chicken and cooking its meat, striking someone who has wronged you - these are Te - but only insofar as the action in question involves a benefit: cutting down a tree to process it into boards needed for household use; killing a chicken to prepare and sell its meat; striking a person to make them stop doing something that harms you - provided that no other, more economical methods of influencing them remain [author’s note, 07.2026]. But planting a tree, building a shed for a chicken where it would be safe and feeding it, making a gift for someone dear to you - to some extent, all of these are also Te, since they involve conscious, goal-directed actions. In general, any action that can be named using a VERB is Te.

What, then, is Se?

To understand this, we must recall that Se is STATICS, i.e., something unchanging, a certain potential contained in every person. Ne, incidentally, is also a potential - only an intellectual one. Hardly anyone would dispute this. What kind of potential, then, is Se? I think it is what is also commonly called “vital force.”

Every living being is a certain subject that transforms the surrounding world to suit itself. Even if we are not physically doing anything at a given moment, our body is still constantly fighting the environment - the bacteria living inside it and entering it from outside. From the perspective of these bacteria, the effect of our body’s immune system on them is violence. I hope this is clear? Also, to survive, we must consume food. For the most part, this food was previously other living beings - plants or animals. Obtaining food literally means killing and destroying other life in order to survive oneself. This is violence again.

Even inorganic matter, minerals, water and sunlight, habitable space - all of these could also quite well become resources for someone else, which means that, by occupying and consuming them, we are theoretically also taking something away from potential competitors.

Let us proceed further.

A human being, like any living being, from the perspective of the material world, is first and foremost a genotype contained in their cells. Everything else is already a superstructure. Therefore, surviving in the surrounding world also means carrying one’s genes into the future. There are three strategies here: two individualistic and one collectivist.

According to the first, to achieve the maximum spread of one’s genes in the future, one simply needs to have as many female sexual partners as possible, so that they give birth to as many children with one’s genotype as possible. Obviously, this strategy is suitable only for men. The second strategy, also individualistic, can also be used by women: achieve the highest possible status in order to pass it on to one’s offspring. Then your children will be more sought-after in the market for sexual and marital partners, and it will be easier for them to leave behind still more descendants, and so on. Thereafter, the process is the same as in the first variant.

The third strategy differs from the first two in that, for some reason, a person understands that it will be easier for them to promote the spread of their small community’s collective genotype within a larger one (their family within a people, their people within the world), rather than to pursue the expansion of their own personal genotype within the population. The point is that, by being part of a group and its child, you already have much in common with it at the genetic level as well. Thus, by helping your group compete with other groups - whether by exterminating them directly or simply pushing them away from resources - you help your brothers and sisters leave relatively more descendants. And since your genotypes are similar, you thereby indirectly spread your own genetic patterns as well - because they are duplicated in your relatives.

Through this third strategy, monks, eunuchs, and indeed any person, however asexual, can realize their Se.

All three of the above-mentioned strategies are implemented by people largely subconsciously, and it is generally not customary to discuss them. Nevertheless, I have articulated them here because competition for sexual partners has also historically been closely associated with violence - both physical violence (more frequently employed by male logical types) and ethical-manipulative violence (more frequently found among female ethical types).

Thus, Se is the orientation of an individual’s behavior toward advancing themselves, their interests and the interests of their blood relatives in the material world, toward pushing competitors away from monetary or other material resources, including food and sexual partners. From the perspective of a person with strong Se, the entire world is a resource for ensuring the material well-being of their body, their genes, and also the genes of close and distant relatives (because, and to the extent that, these are also partly their own genes). From the perspective of a person with weak Se - because weak Se is coupled with strong УС-И - the world is an information system to which everyone can make a contribution and from which everyone can take what they need as they wish. At the same time, the role of the bodily and the genetic is secondary for a person with weak Se; such a person is prepared to sacrifice their personal material welfare for ideal goals.

In terms of an underlying similarity, Se is closest in meaning to the concept of mass. The mass of any body presses into spacetime and, in the limit, closes it in on itself. Strong Se, in terms of meaning, is a massive, large celestial body that makes smaller ones revolve around it, destroying and modifying their matter. Relatively weak Se, by contrast, is the vacuum of open space in which time flows, while light and electromagnetic fields pass straight through it without losing their directionality or distorting the information they contain. Put more simply, strong Se is “body,” “mass,” “matter,” “subject”; weak Se is “nothing,” “emptiness,” the absence of material subjecthood.

Finally, from a linguistic perspective, if Te and indeed any linear-assertive function is primarily a verb (process/action), then Se, like any ГР function, is a noun (object/subject). Through Te and Fe, people act, changing the world - Te in a directed, steadily advancing manner, Fe qualitatively, at the level of overall energetics. In essence, Te and Fe themselves constitute action. But Se and Ne determine the subject of the action and its goal. The subject of Se is a material body; the subject of Ne is an abstract entity. The goal of Se lies in advancing the material interests of the subject of the action; that of Ne, in advancing informational (intellectual) interests.

Jung’s account, according to which Se is only sensory perception of the external world, is, in my view, profoundly outdated. Perception of the external world is, by definition, an irrational-extraverted function. However, Ne is no less responsible for it, not only Se. Yes, more than the other functions, Se is responsible for the speed and accuracy of reading concrete information from the surrounding world - information behind which there are concrete material objects. For flexibility in switching between its different sources. But it is precisely Ne that is better at reading “subtle” information presented in the form of hints and probabilities. These properties of perception - both those pertaining to Se and those pertaining to Ne - are part of these functions’ toolkits and occupy important places within them.

However, one should not be misled: these are not the defining properties. Although the subconscious often carefully conceals from a person the true motives for their actions, survival in one form or another nevertheless underlies everything: individually or as part of a group, in the present or in the future, in descendants, as a genotype or as an informational entity, and so on. Different functions are responsible for different aspects of survival. The methods of survival, however, are secondary and depend on the environment.

And a little more about the gradation of Se and its social future.

As I have already mentioned above, all people have Se. At its most basic level, Se is immunity, i.e., the organism’s violence against harmful bacteria. All people have immunity, although in those with Se in the vulnerable function it is, according to Talanov, usually reduced. The complete list of Se needs is approximately as follows:

• violence against the organism’s bacteria and parasites - immunity
• violence against agricultural and household pests (insects, small rodents)
• violence against nature - clearing forests, destroying landscapes and transforming them into anthropogenic ones
• cultivation (restriction of freedom and, often, killing) of living beings (animals, plants) for food or to obtain other resources
• competition for (the best) sexual partners at the level of individuals
• competition among individuals, families and factions for society’s resources, for the right to own and dispose of them
• competition among societies for the planet’s resources - using the state apparatus of coercion

The higher the level of Se, the more willingly and readily an individual asserts their “I,” unabashedly pushing competitors aside in the struggle for vital resources.

However, excessively high Se often plays a cruel trick on its possessor. What is well suited to survival among savages is called “crimes” in a complex society, because, by provoking chaos, individual Se thereby reduces the competitiveness of society as a whole.
Hence, the conclusion is obvious: the further social progress advances, the more complex, developed and artificial society becomes, the more it will suppress its members’ most archaic, biological function - Se. This suppression will occur primarily through society’s collective Se, which, however, is not the leading function but is subordinate to the deliberative-rational Ti, Te and Fi.

Conversely, in times of crisis and degradation of complex societies, individual Se comes to the fore. Greatly weakened over the course of prolonged negative selection among the population of the metropolis, it usually remains almost untouched among the people of the most savage and backward peripheries. Therefore, in times of decline, when cultural and other barriers fall, we everywhere observe the expansion of the periphery, where more vital force remains - that is, that same untouched Se potential.

However, unlike Talanov, I am not inclined to assess the role of Se as exclusively negative - even in terms of its effect on social progress. The point is that a society completely deprived of Se will also lose its incentive for development at the most basic, individual level. This is that very ferment, the “basic instinct,” that makes everything turn.