On Merry and Serious Values

Part One. What Is “Merriness”?

Themes in art and life most closely associated with the socionic Merry pole (ascending, subjectivists):

• Stories of perfect Love - merriness + ethics + questimity [author’s note 07.2026]
• Global fantasies, imagining Worlds - merriness + intuition
• The aspiration to encompass the Universe in thought, to create a “Theory of Everything” - merriness + intuition + logic + questimity [author’s note 07.2026]
• Gloomy, sublime mysticism of walking the boundary between life and death, reason and madness - merriness + Ni
• Primordial wild nature, the mystery of the bodily connection of all living things through the chain of generations - merriness + Si
• The horrors of the primordial struggle for survival in the world as a wild forest filled with predators - merriness + decisiveness + irrationality
• The romance of distant wanderings, of departing into unknown reaches without return - merriness + irrationality + Ne
• Carnival culture of universal celebration, with its enthusiasm uniting the masses - merriness + De + positivism
• Revolutionary struggle aimed at shaking the foundations and uprooting the old world (“The Twelve” by A. Blok) - merriness + statics + negativism
• Imperial pathos, claims to world domination - merriness + decisiveness + aristocracy
• Heroization of war, military feats, and self-sacrifice - merriness + aristocracy + declatimity [author’s note 07.2026]
• The frightening fury of mortal combat - merriness + decisiveness + irrationality + declatimity [author’s note 07.2026]
• Obscene language in its expressive component - merriness + more likely, decisiveness and irrationality
• Monuments and images in a monumental style that visually oppress through their scale and ponderousness - merriness + Se
• The solemnity and pomp of rituals and surroundings - merriness + aristocracy + tactics
• The beauty of military parades - merriness + sensing + declatimity + positivism
• State propaganda and censorship that eradicate any dissent through total violence - merriness + aristocracy + declatimity
• The totalitarianism of regular systems (including abstract ones - fundamental philosophical works claiming the sole possible Truth) - merriness + rationality
• The monumental beauty of global destruction, the romance of ruin (“Black Dog Petersburg…”) - merriness + irrationality

Part Two. What Is “Seriousness”?

Themes in art and life most closely associated with the socionic Serious pole (descending, objectivists):

• Love for shortcomings that have become habitual (“he may be no hero, and his trousers may have a hole, but at least he’s mine, my own”) - seriousness
• Privatization; the culture of the physical inviolability of personal space and private property - seriousness + questimity
• Small, cozy, idyllically calm worlds frozen in the homeostasis of their traditions (“The Country of the Blind” by H. G. Wells - a view of such a little world from the position of a “Merry” person who happens to find himself in it) - seriousness + aristocracy
• Caring for loved ones while remaining indifferent to what is happening in the world as a whole - seriousness + Si
• Petty-bourgeois urban culture, inclined toward irony and post-irony as a defensive, devaluing reaction to any initiatives imposed “from above” - seriousness + democracy + Ni
• Earning a living not through co-optation with general laws, but through exploiting incidental local loopholes in them - seriousness + irrationality + democracy
• Cultivating the surrounding physical space, making it comfortable and safe, but also emotionally empty (“Return from the Stars” by S. Lem) - seriousness + rationality + judiciousness
• Eradicating depth of meaning from art - everything that can shock or evoke emotional awe; instead, flattening plots and reducing them to cultural stereotypes polished to perfection - simulacra (“children’s Bible-comic style”, “business-comic style”, “pin-up”) - seriousness + rationality
• Concealing everything primordially stirring, and therefore capable of eliciting a mass response, behind “fig leaves” (euphemisms); requiring politeness and the suppression within oneself of the “indecent” animal principle - seriousness + rationality
• Playing with “fig leaves” - moving them aside in order to glimpse natural essence, distorted by culture into forms subjectively perceived as funny and shameful - seriousness + irrationality (with judiciousness, this more often takes the form of self-irony; with decisiveness, cynical sarcasm)
• Replacing a single information space with a single language of concepts understandable to everyone by a multitude of “information bubbles” with their own subcultures and semantic dialects - seriousness
• The loss of global order and the “readability” of the world as a consequence of the universal pursuit of immediate advantage (typical manifestations: populist, ideologically empty democracy in politics; so-called “crutches” in programming; “spot development” in urban planning, etc.) - seriousness + dynamics
• Simplifying all manufactured products for the sake of economy and commercial gain, eliminating “excesses” and “useless embellishments” - seriousness + Te
• Parody as a genre (unwillingness to assume the risks of original creation, and instead skillfully playing with already existing templates whose demand has been confirmed) - seriousness + Ne + declatimity, De [author’s note 07.2026]
• Caricature as yet another secondary genre based on devaluing stylization - seriousness + intuition + creative ethics caricatural perception is associated only with Ne [author’s note 07.2026]
• Cloying sadism, oriented less toward physically “trampling” an opponent than toward “bringing him down” in the eyes of those around him and his supporters - seriousness + decisiveness
• Diminishing the significance of what is happening for the sake of self-reassurance (“ostrich position”) - seriousness + judiciousness

Part Three. On Large and Small Worlds and on People

In addition to the division into good and evil (with a multitude of intermediate states), humanity also presents itself as a pillar, where, moving from bottom to top and from top to bottom, we observe people living in worlds that differ in scale and semantic content.

At its summit, the global laws of the universe reign, knowable by the methods of philosophy and science (Ti), while people are driven by the most acute feelings, understandable to all beings in the world, associated with fundamental things: death and the continuation of oneself into the future through love (Fe).

What awaits here those who, overcoming the inertia and resistance of their immediate surroundings, climb upward?

Very often - only the ringing emptiness of loneliness and universal incomprehension. Only the cold of perfect numbers, God, and death.

Others, who do this together with someone else, having climbed to the summit, more often hear the roar of human crowds and the grinding of the millstones of history, grinding nations and states within themselves; they feel the warm wind of change that gives hope, or the heat of revolutionary passions that burns everything to the ground.

Descending the pillar, we observe people living first by the problems of Worlds, then of nations, then of cities and countries, and lower still, of clans and companies, enterprises and families.

What, then, is at the bottom, at the base?

Here we enter a world of various accidental irregularities in the arrangement of the immediate environment that can be exploited for gain (Te), as well as small shameful secrets about personal vices, past mistakes, and other unattractive aspects, carefully hidden from “outsiders” and knowledge of which forms the basis of closeness with “one’s own” (Fi).

This is the kingdom of philistine pettiness, narrow-mindedness, and fussiness. Of everyday cunning, for which cobbling something together for sale out of rehashes of other people’s work is always both easier and more pleasant than inventing one’s own.

Here everything is aimed solely at obtaining one’s piece of bread, no matter how (no, do not misunderstand, preferably with black caviar), and then, having brought it home, sharing it with those close to oneself - but not with those far away. It is not at all certain whether those distant people even exist - so why think about them?

Ordinary trifles and small shameful little secrets of little people - that is what is discussed here in kitchens.

“Gave a birthday card - that means he loves her, that means everything is fine.” “You know, Masha’s son finally found himself a wife; she’s a dreadful fool and a boor, doesn’t say hello or goodbye, but he loves her; yesterday they saw them hugging on a bench, he was giving her flowers.” “And our neighbor Pavel Petrovich has stomach trouble, just out of the hospital after surgery; they said he shouldn’t exert himself for at least another month. How is he going to feed his family now?”

And in the end, after a succession of such everyday trifles, if everything settles down and if one is lucky - the quiet happiness of those shut away in their dollhouse (or a cottage costing umpteen million - however things happened to work out). The happiness of those who have closed their eyes to unpleasant truths, to everything terrible that exists in this world, but also to everything that excites the mind and the blood, which is sometimes discovered by those who find within themselves the strength to look a little higher than where they are at the moment.

What, then, can be said in defense of the little man living at the foot of the pillar?

Everything in the world has two sides.

Those who strive upward, into the world of strong passions and global laws, are cruel deep in their souls.

No, this is far from always the cruelty of a villain wishing to violate another person’s life out of purely sadistic motives. It is a different cruelty - toward everything that a person considers insufficiently ideal to be further broadcast to the crowds and become a seed from which new worlds will grow.

It is the cruelty of a genius toward his insufficiently perfect novel, which will ultimately burn in the furnace.

The cruelty of an actress who wishes to create an ideal stage image for the ages toward the natural imperfection of her real body - which is subjected to violence through diets, exhausting training, and the surgeon’s knife, solely in order to look fashionable and desirable to an unlimited circle of admirers, at any age.

The cruelty of a scientist toward the stupidity of the masses, which, in his opinion, is leading them into the abyss - up to the desire to keep fools away from decision-making, or even somehow learn to identify and kill the most harmful among them in the womb.

But also the cruelty of a professional warrior toward the weakness of spirit of ordinary people, his readiness, with voluptuous sadism, to beat “these urban degenerates, hippies and drug addicts who sold themselves for State Department cookies” - so that in the end they clear a place in the sun for “real men, faithful sons of their Motherland.”

The little man is free from this demand hanging over him - to be perfect in his essence. He does not want to be an arbiter of destinies, a judge and prophet, or in some other way an ideal being; he simply wants to live. And therefore - he is much more tolerant of imperfection, both his own and that of others, and thereby more democratic.

Unlike idealists, forever squabbling with one another and sometimes prepared to tear the whole world to pieces merely to prove their exclusive rightness, beauty, and primogeniture, he is much more often prepared to make exceptions.

Prepared to close his eyes to global truths, so long as conflict is not allowed to take root in his immediate circle.

Prepared to shelter and pity someone who has stumbled, someone ugly, someone stupid (if he is kind); to deceive and rob, but not finish off a simpleton (if he is not very kind) - it will be a lesson to him, and perhaps he will learn something.

Prepared to seek a common interest with any other person as one private individual with another private individual, regardless of what group that person belongs to or what views he holds. And not to try to exterminate everything that currently appears vicious and wrong (perhaps it, too, may prove useful for something).

From a certain point of view, such an approach may appear much more humane toward everyone, and capable of creating a more viable society. However, if only everything were so simple…

Part Four - Summary. Global and Local

Thus, let us draw an interim conclusion.

Merry types link their fate with global laws and currents of history. They rebel against petty-bourgeois orders that turn the world into a swamp where every hummock has its own sandpiper with its own quirks.

In such a world, everything is so cramped, finely divided, and tangled that a person with large goals has no room to act. The moment he moves, he is already driving onto someone else’s garden beds, and their owner puts sticks in his wheels, and each time these are some new sticks with new incomprehensible squiggles that have to be dealt with individually.

Merry types are disgusted when everything is done by crooked paths, when communication is reduced to ritual tinsel made of polite words, while to understand their real meaning one has to eat a pood of salt with a person, otherwise there is no way. Emancipation and the road into the big world, in order to stand at the origins of the future and transmit their values to the masses - these are their principal and most cherished desires.

Serious types link their fate with local peculiarities, exceptions to global rules, and bypass loopholes that allow them to prosper without thinking about anything unnecessary.

They hate the imposition of everything unifying and totalitarian (both state systems that violate bodies and will, and scientific and philosophical codes that “violate minds”). They hate revolutions and abrupt historical shifts that destroy their cozy little worlds and tear apart business and family ties built on compromises and skillful omissions. And therefore they seek to devalue all of this, to “bring it down,” ridicule it, declare it insignificant, and present it as the stupidities and selfish motives of particular individuals - with the same small, private goals as their own.

And if that is impossible, and the global has already arrived and, more or less cruelly, nonetheless combs the masses with the same comb - they try to hide behind a mask of irony and to obstruct initiatives “from above” at least through silent sabotage and the creation of shadow accounting “for their own,” according to which all real business continues to be conducted.

Comments on the illustrations.

On the male and female characters:

1. Images in the Merry style are created so that one can fall in love with them immediately, passionately, in a Fe manner. One cannot fall in love in this way with characters created in the Serious style: at first they evoke irony or even seem colorless and bland, and only by immersing oneself in their personal story (that is, by looking at them through the prism of Fi) can one eventually come to feel sympathy for them.
2. Mary Sues (if you do not know what that is - Google will help), undoubtedly, more often come from the pens of Merry authors - those among them who are not too versed in the intricacies of weaving plot threads and therefore cannot give their excessive drive toward idealization any realistic form at all.

On interiors:

Besides whether an interior is filled with a multitude of tactical ornamental details or is strategically laconic, it can always be assigned to one of two types. Either, through the overall regularity of forms and freedom from extraneous details, one senses space (Ti) filled with emotional solemnity (Fe). Or the details diminish it, turning it into a cozy place for gatherings within a narrow circle (Fi) or for business negotiations (Te): “this is the teapot you and I drank from, this is the chair we sat at last time, this is the outlet where we plugged in the smartphone charger, remember?”

On humor:

The humor of Serious types can be generalized as follows: “everything is smaller and simpler than it seems to you, ha-ha.” The humor of Merry types: “you thought everything was simple? yeah, right, don’t break your head over the depth that has opened up, ha-ha.”