Oops, we maxed out intelligence but minimized wisdom
Listen, D&D stats are at least as good as Myers-Briggs, okay?
My friends from high school and I have a long-running in-joke about our “stats,” a metaphor stolen from role-playing games. See, in things like Dungeons & Dragons, your character starts with certain statistics (stats) distributed among some set of canonical attributes like strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, charisma.
In these sort of games you begin with some total “point buy” wherein you can buff up stats at character creation. Often, players will adopt a strategy of trying to “min-max” their character stats, which means to dump (minimize) a particular statistic in order to improve (maximize) another. In D&D, which as intellectual property is used widely across computer games now, decreasing a stat to ~8 is considered “dumping” the stat, and buffing up a stat to 17 or 18 is considered “maxing” a stat.
Back to the joke. Which is that, in our friend group, at birth all of us “min-maxed” in unique ways. For instance, my constitution is incredibly low. I’m a big broad guy, yes, and I’m pretty strong too, but I get sick easily. I sniffle all winter. After taking up running, I had knee problems for years. My back aches from sitting in a chair too long. I get tired if I’m out too late and don’t do well on little sleep. Etc. I clearly minimized constitution. It’s an 8 out of 18, and now I have to suffer the consequences my whole life as I sneeze and ache my way through the decades (mine is a character build sometimes described as a “glass canon” in D&D parlance).
Another friend of mine—very charming, smart, handsome—trips all the time. If you invite him over for a drink, he’ll break a cup. It just fumbles out of his hand somehow. I’ve never seen him catch anything thrown at him. He once rented an apartment with a balcony and I literally worried he would one day just tip over and fall fourteen stories to his death. He clearly dumped dexterity to buff a perfect jawline and mental stats.
I’m well aware, by the way, that the stat joke is both unabashedly nerdy and utterly unoriginal. In fact, it’s not really even funny… unless you’ve been making the same joke for twenty years, and then it’s hilarious every time. So thank you for your patience, for I am actually going somewhere with this. Which is that I’ve found the stat framework, as middle-school-esque as it is, turns out to be surprisingly useful when applied not just to individuals, but to culture in general. It reveals things much deeper than the frame itself. We can even ask: what stats have we “maxed” and what have we “dumped” as a culture?
Working our way toward culture as a whole, you can, for instance, obviously apply the framework to celebrities. Picking one randomly: Jack Black clearly has an unearthly charisma score. He’s literally a bard. He’s so good at singing and performing that it all becomes basically a joke, almost a subversion of the thing itself. It’s why he can do things like this on live TV with a toy saxophone.
Absurdly high charisma allows him to enact a very old archetype: that of the fool. There have been Jack Blacks throughout the ages—in centuries past he would have been a court jester, speaking truth to power in rhymes and songs, auguring the future with riddles spoken upside down, eventually beheaded.