Jack Hobbes Typology

When ENTPs on the internet talk about fictional characters who inspire them they typically point to Jack Sparrow, Saul Goodman, or Tyrion Lannister. Maybe The Joker if they want to be edgy.

These characters are obviously a lot of fun to watch, but IMO it’s kind of childish to relate too much to them because they are very deliberately written as vehicles for wish fulfillment. They always get the wittiest comebacks, always manage to improvise their way out of a sticky situation, and always have flashy scenes where they get to humiliate a stodgy ESTJ bureaucrat, talk down an ESTP tough guy, or brilliantly disrupt an INTJ’s elaborate plan.

In real life most ENTPs are nowhere near as cool. Most of us are pretty awkward, especially around sensing types who usually can’t understand WTF we’re talking about when we feel our most charismatic. Sure, I can pretty reliably crush an interview with an INTJ, seduce an INFJ, or become group leader of a pack of INTPs. But put me in a room full of sensors and I *will* look moderately autistic and scare the hoes at least a handful of times.

A lot of people appreciate us, but it seems just as many find us annoying. And when I visit r/ENTP it is clear why–a large proportion of ENTPs seem pretty lacking in self-awareness.

Part of the problem is a lot of us maintain a “burnt out gifted kid” energy long into adulthood. The gap between our potential and our results in life leads to insecurity and gives others the impression of unwarranted hubris.

Meanwhile we are very prone to self-sabotage. As teenagers most of us are underachievers who never get a chance to impress people with our wacky schemes because we’d rather spend all day arguing on the internet with randos. As adults we get our act together and merge into traffic with our peers by cutting corners and exploiting loopholes, but we also change jobs (and even careers) too much to build the mastery and reputation for competence we ultimately desire. By 40 or so the best of us become successful entrepreneurs, but not everyone makes the cut, and you see a lot of deflated middle-aged ENTPs living far below their potential.

While ENTPs are fantastic at achieving our medium-term goals, we have serious trouble not getting bored once the low-hanging fruits are plucked, at which point we’ll either burn everything down and start fresh in some new domain or stagnate in lazy disassociated mediocrity. Actually making long-term progress in life is difficult–mostly because we’re never certain what progress looks like! Fi blindness means our goalposts are perpetually shifting.

For instance, while an ENTP is great at making money, he’s a hell of a lot better at spending it. I doubt I’m the only ENTP who makes twice as much as his friends but boasts half the net worth because of this particular vice. Meanwhile in relationships we have a reputation for being flaky and unreliable narcs who disengage the second we get bored, and that’s hardly unjustified. When you love to engage in hypothetical speculation and play devil’s advocate you become really good at transgressing boundaries and gaslighting people without even realizing it.

All in all, a lot of our behavior is kind of embarrassing from a bird’s eye view.

This is why I love the Disney film A Bug’s Life, which features an ENTP protagonist *painfully* realistic in his faults but also uniquely inspirational in his virtues. His character arc shows a path to greatness for ENTPs that feels a lot more attainable than the Tyrion Lannister stereotype propagated in masturbatory internet memes. This protagonist tries and fails to make a difference and raise his status by being cleverer than everyone else, but in the end saves the day only because he has a certain kind of intellectual bravery I believe is the true calling card of ENTPs–far more than wit or raw brainpower.

The premise of the movie is that a colony of ants needs to gather grain every year to pay as tribute to a gang of grasshoppers led by Hopper, the antagonist of the film and a very realistic ENTJ tyrant.

Most of the ants are ISTJ bean counters who collect the grain in an inefficient and poorly optimized way that becomes incredibly prone to systems failure given a trivial disruption in expected conditions:

Our protagonist, an ant named Flik, is a nonconformist who recognizes this inefficiency, and deeply wants to help his community escape the servile hell dealt by the grasshoppers. He attempts to do this by inventing various gadgets and gizmos to help the ants collect the grain more efficiently so they can spend more time amassing their own food surplus.

The problem is that most of Flik’s inventions, while good in theory, aren’t implemented well and usually create more problems than they solve:

This scene reminds me of myself as a fresh-faced 23 year-old ENTP entering the workforce and inheriting a bunch of horribly optimized processes I was certain that I could improve. I was *obviously* much more brilliant than my bean counter ISTJ coworkers, and saw all sorts of possibilities they couldn’t. And during my first months on the job I was indeed able to make some very useful iterations and tweaks, and managed to save our department dozens of hours of work whenever the process was self-contained.

Unfortunately this made me wildly overconfident, and I began to suggest more substantial optimizations that would impact other departments. Now instead of ISTJ bean counters easily swayed by concrete KPIs, I had to deal with steely-eyed INTJ middle managers who saw big-picture flaws to my plan I was too immature to understand. These guys didn’t want to deal with teaching their boomer subordinates how to use SQL instead of Excel, they didn’t want to grapple for IT support when they needed it for other projects, and they sure as hell didn’t want some asshole kid eliminating the need for a big chunk of their departmental headcount and then bragging about it to senior management. A lot of these guys humiliated me in front of the COO, and looking back I don’t blame them for it!

Ultimately every hotshot young ENTP is taught the same harsh lessons in corporate America: 

Lesson 1 – See the Bigger Picture

Your idea is only as good as your ability to efficiently implement it at scale, which in turn is limited by your ability to convince a room of INTJs and ENTJs that your plan is a good allocation of resources.

Optimizing something in a silo is great, but when dealing with an integrated workflow what seems most optimal from the standpoint of eliminating internal redundancy (which Ti excels at) is often very sub-optimal from a time, budget, or cross-training perspective (more the domains of Te).

Generally speaking you’ll find that people with power live in the second world while impotent tinkerers and dilettantes live in the first. That doesn’t mean you need to think like an ENTJ to get climb the ladder, but you absolutely need to speak their language.

Lesson 2 – Respect Chesterton’s Fence

Many procedures that seem wasteful at first glance because they offer no short term payoff are actually necessary in the long term. Tradition becomes tradition for a reason–because it is the tested strategy that is proven to work over the long haul.

Consider the case of the cassava root. Cassava is a plant originating in the Americas which requires a complex and extremely labor-intensive treatment process to become edible due to its strong concentration of cyanide, which otherwise is useful in the tropics as a natural pesticide.

If you don’t treat cassava at all it will taste like shit, and probably kill you if you eat enough of it. If you boil the root, you will remove enough cyanide that it will taste delicious and won’t kill you anytime soon, but in a few years you will develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning like goiters:

If you go through all the necessary steps, including scraping, washing, boiling, and baking, you can remove enough cyanide to make the root essentially harmless. But it takes several days to complete–time that could otherwise be spent hunting, foraging, or building tools and shelter. Some Amerindian women would literally spend a quarter of their day treating cassava. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a giant pain in the ass.

Imagine you’re an ENTP chick in an Amazonian tribe and one day you just don’t have time to scrub the cassava, so in a pinch you just boil it before feeding it to your kids and husband. It tastes fine and everyone seems healthy the next day, but an aged ISTJ wise woman tells you that you’re making a huge mistake and are going to kill your family. Unfortunately in a society without writing she can’t show you any documentation that explains the reason for this process, and you are much smarter than her and when arguing before the tribe can make her seem like an out-of-touch boomer. Plus you can demonstrate that while other women are scrubbing cassava you are making improved spears for your husband’s hunting trips, and your family is eating a lot more meat as a result. You get a decent following and some other families copy your “optimization”.

Then in five years you all get big ugly goiters and your kids die a horrible painful death. The tribe concludes you’ve been cursed by the jungle spirits for not carrying out the necessary rituals, and for generations your name is used as shorthand for arrogance and disregard for vital traditions.

In this case the Si approach was the correct one. Sometimes you do just need to listen to your elders and benefit from their collected experience, if for no other reason than that reinventing the wheel each time is waste of energy. But sometimes you also need to shake things up with Ne ingenuity. Every proven tradition started out as a successful innovation, and it was probably ENTPs who experimented with scrubbing cassava in the first place as a successful venture to cultivate a hardy and pest-resistant crop.

Procedural innovation should therefore be seen as a *dialectic* between Ne and Si. Societies and business ventures need active debate between traditionalists and innovators to make decisions correctly. You need risk-averse people to serve as the control group and risk-tolerant people to experiment with new ways of doing things. Sometimes the ENTPs will be right and sometimes the ISTJs will be, but unless you run the experiment under a sufficient time horizon you will never know for certain.

Tradition is valued less these days because widespread literacy and the scientific method makes it easier to transmit knowledge on its own terms from generation to generation instead of appealing only to established practice. But I still think the cassava example illustrates why ENTPs would do well to approach seemingly inefficient procedures with a respect for Chesterton’s Fence, using Ti to rigorously examine why a practice might have originally become tradition before carelessly dismantling it. As you age you should also lean into your inferior Si and try to see things from the traditionalist’s perspective. This will likely come naturally in your late 20s when you get your own reports and become frustrated seeing them fruitlessly spinning their wheels on questions with well-documented answers.

Lesson 3 – Have Humility and Consider Political Obstacles

You probably ARE smarter than most people at your company, but you also weren’t the first one to think of your brilliant little optimization.

In fact, you can probably find a crusty unambitious INTP collecting dust in a cubicle somewhere who is much smarter than you and thought of the same thing five years ago. Maybe he never shared it with anyone because he correctly reasoned the extra work wasn’t worth a 5% vs 3% performance raise, and liked having something mindless to do so he could listen to podcasts all day. Or perhaps he privately automated his entire workload but instead of sharing/upscaling his code he uses it to spend all day playing Eve Online and masturbating to anime while VBA or Python does the shit work.

Or maybe your genius idea is just technical debt from a long time ago that was never resolved. Maybe everyone quietly ignores this because the PM who fucked up the implementation of this legacy process back in 2011 when he was going through a messy divorce has since made it into executive management. Maybe you’re exploring tombs you’d best stay out of lest you embarrass the wrong sociopath in the C-Suite.

The immature ENTP never considers these possibilities. He instead assumes that he at 23 is the most competent person in the entire organization, and that everyone should gather around his enormous brain to worship it and take his recommendations with the utmost credulity.

All of these lessons are very hard to stomach. Most of us grew up in a culture that constantly indulged us with images of some young hotshot outperforming all the old dinosaurs. That sets you up to be brutally humiliated when you learn this isn’t (usually) how the world works and inevitably step on the wrong toes.

Ultimately the path forward has three necessary steps:

1. Develop your Fe so you can better handle the nuances of organizational politics and read the room when necessary. This one comes naturally with age in my experience. By 30 you should be able to navigate the halls of power with much greater self-awareness.
2. Refine your Si so you are better at remembering the lessons of the past when you face the problems of the future. To that end I recommend journaling and making a deep and concerted effort to actually reflect on what you did right and wrong in various situations. Systematize your observations using Ti to create useful heuristics and save mental energy going forward.
3. Integrate your unconscious shadow functions. Get in touch with your unconscious Te to get a better sense for optimizing against external constraints instead of just eliminating internal redundancy. Develop your unconscious Ni so you have a more palpable sense of what could go wrong with your crazy ideas. You ultimately need to create a “work persona” that talks like an XNTJ during convos with executive management, even if you don’t think like one. The best way to do this is to find a trustworthy XNTJ you can collaborate with and use as a model to integrate your shadow functions into conscious use. Thankfully I had a series of fantastic INTJ managers who served me well in this regard, but ENTPs who don’t find such a mentor might continue to be annoying blowhards well into middle age.

With this better understanding of how an immature the ENTP can grow professionally, let’s revisit Flik’s dilemma. In the above scene our hero is trying to impress his manager and romantic interest Princess Atta.

I read Atta as an INTJ. I see other people typing her as an ISTJ or ISFJ, but I think they aren’t seriously examining her character and are just projecting the colony’s culture onto her. Atta’s character arc is about learning how to rule, and most of the movie shows her under extreme stress and suffering from tremendous imposter syndrome. She is trying to emulate her ESFJ mother the Queen and largely failing because she doesn’t have conscious Si or Fe.

Ni on the other hand she has in spades. In her vulnerable first act this isn’t shown positively, as Atta is paranoid and prone to catastrophizing, which causes her to micromanage subordinates and miss big picture vulnerabilities. But later in the film she proves to be much more forward-thinking in rule than her mother, and capable of leading the ants to a brighter future than the Queen ever could. Compared to an ESFJ, an INTJ leader will have a much lower floor and a much higher ceiling.

Atta’s character development over the film is largely a consequence of her interaction with Flik. As each other’s shadows, an INTJ and ENTP can provide visibility into the other’s blind spots and thus make a fantastic team.

But at this stage in the movie Flik and Atta are both immature, so their first major interaction (in the scene linked above) is a very realistic depiction of an overwhelmed and inexperienced manager failing to utilize a raw but talented subordinate because she is wasting time micromanaging her less talented but more experienced staff. She should trust her surly ESTJ foremen to execute the task and instead spend her valuable time streamlining the project, managing resources, and assessing risk at bird’s eye level. This would also give her the mental space to meet more regularly with ants like Flik and consider process improvements. Instead Atta mucks around in the weeds where she isn’t comfortable or capable and deprives the project of key oversight.

She also lets Flik get bullied by her foremen, tanking his morale. Any manager will tell you she screwed up here–Flik is a racehorse and you can’t use him like a mule. If you use him correctly he will be much more valuable than a standard employee, but Atta is too exhausted to do that and just lets him go to waste.

Of course, while Atta doesn’t come off great in this exchange, Flik looks downright buffoonish. The entire conversation begins on a bad note when Atta is directly harmed by Flik’s invention malfunctioning. Instead of reading the room and quietly extricating himself until his idea is ready to present, he self-indulgently uses the already embarrassing situation as an opportunity to showcase his ideas to the princess and her foremen when they aren’t yet finished (a huge mistake for Ne doms when dealing with Te types–you need to lead with results!), all the while casually appropriating the resources of other departments (the dew drop) to make himself look good.

Despite being the smartest person in the room, Flik’s horribly developed Fe makes him come off as an incompetent buffoon, and he is quickly admonished by the ESTJ ants to go pick grain like everybody else.

For an ENTP I can imagine few defeats worse than this.

But even in his most humiliating moment there is some redemptive subtext for Flik. While his showmanship was cringey to Princess Atta, he greatly charms her ISTP little sister, Princess Dot. In the second part of this scene Dot empathizes with Flik because she also isn’t taken seriously due to being so small. She doesn’t judge him for shitting the bed because to her dominant Ti his ideas are objectively cool and useful (note how obsessed she is with his dew telescope) and to her that is what matters–his failure to present them only when they’re ready and his inability to implement them at scale is irrelevant, those are just boring details for Te and Si people to handle!

Unfortunately in the following scene Flik is betrayed by his poorly developed Si and loses track of time just as the colony prepares to finalize the offering for the grasshoppers. Because of this he rushes to deliver his last few pieces of grain, and in his anxious clumsiness proceeds to destroy the colony’s entire offering.

Instead of showcasing his brilliant ideas to his superiors and winning acclaim for his contributions, Flik’s attempts at optimization just nuked the entire project because of his poor attention to detail.

On a surface this seems like a huge mark against him. But watching this scene as an older man with more life experience, I see so much more to this story.

Why were there no controls or safeguards in place to prevent this from happening? Why was the grain precariously centralized in one location on a cliff next to a puddle? Did management not even *consider* the possibility of a strong wind, let alone an earthquake?

If one blunder from a clumsy peon can tank the entire venture, there was clearly some negligence from management. People like Flik will never be good bean counters and can be counted to screw things like this up, but a competent manager will view his tendency to break shit as a potential asset and put the guy in QA. An Ne dom is just the one you want testing limits and pushing boundaries in a test environment so proper safeguards can be implemented in production to insure against human error and tail risk.

Really this is the fault of the foremen for not keeping some guys around to safeguard the grain and not let Flik near it while he has an unstable device that already hurt the princess (why wasn’t it confiscated???).

It’s the fault of Atta for letting stress overwhelm her into micromanagement. Her Ni could have been essential to developing a risk management strategy and proper controls; instead she became hysterical about minor disruptions and wasted her time on trivium.

Above all, it’s the fault of the queen for inadequately preparing Atta and pushing her into senior management when she wasn’t ready.

In the final scene of Act 1, Hopper and his posse arrive at the colony and confront the ants about the missing grain:

Hopper is the consummate ENTJ and perfectly fluent in the language of power. Princess Atta is unable to effectively negotiate with him and tries to pass off blame to Flik, but he cuts her off in an instant and gives her the most important lesson for a rookie manager:

“First rule of leadership. Everything is your fault.”

Hopper is 100% right about this and Atta knows it. But like any good manipulator, he jumps off this ironclad point to deliver a self-indulgent spiel about how it’s the natural order of things that the ants serve the grasshoppers. We are stronger than you (so Hopper claims…), so you must serve us.

He then demands that the ants prepare another offering for his gang before the rainy season arrives. When the queen objects that this is impossible because they need to gather food for themselves, Hopper proceeds to physically threaten Princess Dot.

It’s at this moment we see another side to our man Flik–the seed of the hero he’ll become by the movie’s end.

As Dot’s own mother and sister say nothing as she is abused, Flik steps forward and yells at Hopper to leave her alone.

Pay careful attention to what follows. On a surface level it looks like Hopper shuts down Flik’s rather limp objection easily enough through pure physical intimidation. But notice that Hopper physically deescalates and immediately drops Dot after Flik backs down. He then doubles his demand because the colony is “forgetting their place”, but doesn’t even listen to the ants’ response and immediately gets his guys out of there.

Why did Hopper leave so quickly?

And why did Flik feel like he could challenge Hopper in the first place?

Obviously it’s not because the nerdy and awkward Flik is some badass. Hopper would obliterate him in a one-on-one fight.

It’s because Flik is the only person in that room other than Hopper who sees that the ants outnumber the grasshoppers 100 to 1 and have them cornered in a tight space.

Hopper is too much of a badass ENTJ to show it, but he is terrified in this scene. Flik rattled him. Not by standing up to Hopper physically or by owing him with a witty retort or even by using some brilliant invention to save the day. He scared Hopper by having enough Ne to explore possibilities the other ants could never fathom and being willing to go against the grain (lol) of a ruthless power structure.

Now at this point in the movie Flik still has a totally unintegrated shadow, so his Ni is nowhere near developed enough to fully explore the point his Ne grasped out of thin air. But even if he did understand it, his childish Fe definitely couldn’t mobilize the ants into any kind of effective resistance. They are a docile people cowed into servile submission and not yet capable of standing up to the grasshoppers. That is why Flik had to back down–if he just yelled “everyone swarm Hopper now!” the ants would have hesitated and Hopper could have killed Flik instantly and quashed the threat.

Even still, Hopper has tremendous Ni and sees precisely what will happen if he lets the ants discover the emperor has no clothes. So he does the best thing he can do in the situation. He can’t look weak and needs to up the ante, so he casually releases Dot without making eye contact, and distracts everyone from this huge de-escalation (and implicit win for Flik!) by giving the colony an impossible demand he knows will send the ISTJ bean counters into a tizzy. Of course this works like a charm, and the ants become so fixated on the logistics of supplying double tribute while feeding themselves that they don’t read between the lines. They never examine why Hopper left so fast, and whether they have to give up anything at all.

But this doesn’t give Hopper any peace of mind. Later into the movie you have this fantastic scene:

Hopper’s men feel no need to go back, and just want to party using their enormous store of stolen grain. Hopper alone sees the bigger picture, and kills several of his own guys by crushing them in a massive flood of grain to send a message about the importance of keeping the ants scared.

Hopper knows Flik is different from the rest and is surely up to something. He is terrified that if he doesn’t return and humiliate the colony that Flik could succeed where he failed the first time and mobilize the other ants into rising up. None of his idiot lackeys understand the power dynamics and assume that Hopper’s propaganda about ants being weak and worthless is true, but Hopper knows the lie has to be maintained through repeated acts of propagandistic terror lest the helots realize they can burn down Sparta.

Luckily for Hopper, Flik is still far from ready to lead a revolution. He has the motivation, which is more than you can say for the other ants, but like any ENTP he needs to cycle through a bunch of terrible and fanciful ideas before finding one that works.

At this point Flik has some intuitive realization that the ants are stronger than the grasshoppers as a collective, but ignores the obvious answer to just tell Hopper to fuck off and fight them underground if necessary. It’s a shame Princess Dot isn’t grown up, because a smart ISTP would see that Hopper had put himself in a terrible tactical position and would have try to gank him the moment he threw away his own flight advantage. There is a chance that with her royal pedigree she could actually coordinate the mass of ants in a way Flik couldn’t, ending the movie 15 minutes in. But she is too little, Princess Atta is too stressed to think creatively, and the Queen is kind of useless, so our man Flik has to iterate through a bunch of crazy schemes before he figures out the right answer.

Because he is characteristically Fi-blind, Flik externalizes his obvious instinct to inspire physical self-reliance in the colony. His first idea is therefore to set off on a journey to find “warrior bugs” who will serve as mercenaries and fend off the grasshoppers, Seven Samurai style.

Instead his aforementioned Fi blindness and nonexistent theory of mind lead to a misunderstanding were he recruits a posse of circus bugs–literal clowns–for the task.

When the clowns return with Flik to the colony and figure out the misunderstanding they immediately try to run away, but end up masterfully working together to fend off a sudden attack on Princess Dot and the colony from a cute lil bird who is basically presented as a dragon. This dramatically strengthens their morale, and the respect they receive from the colony afterwards convinces them to stick around.

Meanwhile the bird attack gives Flik the galaxy brain idea to mobilize all of the ants’ energy into creating an elaborate fake bird wunderwaffe, which he figures will save the day since Hopper is terrified of birds.

In a sense this plot point represents progress for Flik because he is actually able to mobilize support for the project. He is definitely becoming more competent at dealing with people.

However, it’s also something of a setback, as he only succeeds by replacing earnest social incompetence with insincerity. Throughout the second act Flik is desperate to redeem himself, and he uses shallow and childish Fe to sell big empty promises to the colony based on half-truths. He largely succeeds by coasting on the social capital he fell into from recruiting the “warrior bugs” and being around them during the bird episode. In this respect many of his wins feel unwarranted.

He also benefits unduly from his flirtation with Princess Atta, who was buckling under stress and desperate for an easy out from an impossible situation. Halfway through the second act (and following some initial tension) she and Flik connect over feeling misunderstood and ineffective, forming an anima-animus bond as each other’s shadows that makes both of them significantly more charismatic and self-aware.

But Atta now makes the mistake of trusting Flik too much and delegating too much power to him, and this ends up screwing them both over.

There is a reason ENTPs aren’t frequently heads of government or CEOs of major firms. We make fantastic entrepreneurs and judges and guerrilla commanders, but as scale increases you get a lot less return from occasionally having fantastic ideas and a lot more return from always having decent ideas. At a certain point you need a Te dom in charge or you just get chaos.

When you give an ENTP absolute power over the productive resources of a civilization and absolute liberty to test their craziest proposals, that’s when you end up with someone like Mao Zedong. Unfortunately, Chairman Flik’s bird ends up being about as practical for the colony as the Great Leap Forward was for China.

Of course I exaggerate. While the bird itself fails to save the day, the process of creating it *does* seem to inspire the colony into thinking of themselves as capable of innovation and the execution of more complex projects. It absolutely gives them more confidence in Atta’s leadership and their own right to self-determination. In that sense Flik’s bird might be compared to a national prestige project like the Great Pyramids or America’s Space Program in the 1960s.

Unfortunately our hero’s fraud with the circus bugs gets exposed before they can even deploy the bird, and he and his clowns end up getting exiled from the colony by Atta and the queen.

Here Flik learns another painful lesson that ENTPs typically encounter mid-career: you might be smart and charming enough to bullshit your way up the ladder fast, but when it comes to power, easy come is easy go. The explosive energy inherent in riding your Ne around like a wild tiger can let you jump on opportunities quickly while tert Fe helps you “fake it till you make it”, but if you try to fake it more than your Ti is realistically capable of making it, you’re just gonna get thrown off the tiger and eaten by your own hubris.

Unfortunately Princess Atta and the Queen have no backup plan in place because they let Flick go whole hog with his crazy bird idea, so they just try to wash their hands of it and somehow get Hopper his due. This of course fails miserably, and when Hopper shows up and sees Flik is gone and there isn’t any food he just enslaves the ants and decides he’s just gonna take all their winter supplies and squish the queen.

Definitely a power move from Hopper, but here we see the first traces of unrestrained Te crippling itself. At some point maximizing your control will start to decrease efficiency and kill the golden goose. Stalin learned this lesson all too well in 1941 when his best officers were too busy getting tortured in gulags (or being dead) to stop Hitler from making mincemeat of his army in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa.

Anyway, Dot is able to escape the grasshoppers and tells Flik about their predicament, which convinces him to come back and try to save everyone. Naturally his first approach is to use his stupid giant bird, and it actually works fairly well for the first few minutes, but in the end Flik’s ENTP maximalism proves overdesigned and as vulnerable to unforeseen tail risk as the ISTJ maximalism featured at the beginning of the film. Again we see the need for a healthy compromise between tradition and innovation.

The fake bird catches fire and in the climax of the movie it appears that Hopper has won:

Once more our antagonist begins to physically intimidate Dot and Atta.

Once again Flik shouts “leave her alone”.

But this time his words have balls.

The first time he stood up to Hopper it was more of a desperate and unconfident plea. This time he’s commanding him. He is asserting himself as the true leader of the ants:

The bird was my idea–I’m the one you want!

Hopper naturally responds by having his scariest thug beat the crap out of Flik, and goes into another monologue even more narcissistic than his one from the first scene. The text here is very interesting:

Let this be a lesson to all you ants: Ideas are very dangerous things! You are mindless, soil-shoving losers, put on this earth to serve us!

Hopper’s not wrong that ideas are dangerous things. Flik’s ideas have continually caused problems for himself and the colony because they are half-baked, poorly-tested, and based on wishful thinking and half truths.

This is the moment Flik finally matures and lets his childish ego die. And this in turn lets him fully actualize as an ENTP hero. Not some adolescent Tyrion Lannister wish fulfillment vehicle, but as a normal, flawed, only-sometimes-competent guy whose main service to humanity isn’t his inventions but his ability to challenge convention and speak truth to power in a way that enables more mundane people to fully realize their potential.

His value consists in being the contrarian neckbeard willing to break the circlejerk and temporarily become public enemy #1 when he says shit too uncomfortable for normies to think about.

This happens all the time IRL too. A lot of people wanted platonic ideal ENTP Ben Franklin to shut up when he pointed out that the colonies have distinct interests from Britain and should be their own country, but eventually they came around to his position after he spent many years agitating on the colonies’ behalf in London and painstakingly dragging American independence into the Overton Window of acceptable political stances.

Same thing happened when he said slavery would tear America apart. Lots of positions now seen as uncontroversial had to be popularized by contrarian neckbeard ENTPs like Franklin first.

We are the risk-tolerant, novelty-seeking gentrifiers of opinion who launder unthinkable lunacy into mere hot takes. And it was ultimately this service that made Franklin a Great Man of History, not inventing the stove or whatever.

It is with this realization that Flik crawls out of the mud and succeeds where he failed before:

You’re wrong, Hopper. Ants are not meant to serve grasshoppers.

I’ve seen ants do great things. And year after year they somehow manage to pick food for themselves… and you. So who’s the weaker species?

Ants don’t serve grasshoppers. It’s you who need us!

We’re a lot stronger than you say we are.

And you know it, don’t you?

A beautifully-put Ti finger in the eye of Hopper’s carefully maintained but precarious Te power structure. And because Flik’s retort is humble and unpretentious and doesn’t seek to place himself above the ISTJ bean counters, but instead lauds them as the foundation of society, he manages to instantly mobilize the enormous crowd of hitherto docile ants into an army.

Hopper called the ants “soil-shoving losers”. You know what other group was famous for shoving soil and doing exactly as they’re told?

Needless to say, the ants rise up and effortlessly scare the gang into abandoning Hopper. He is left completely isolated and unable to negotiate with the ants.

Incidentally this happens a lot IRL to these brutal “results-based” ENTJs when they fail to actually deliver results and haven’t inspired enough loyalty to cushion them during a rough patch. Elizabeth Holmes is a great example in recent memory. Perhaps if Hopper hadn’t crushed a bunch of his dudes earlier to prove a point they would have at least attempted a fighting retreat?

Anyway, Princess Atta finally comes into her own as a leader and leads the ants in physically restraining Hopper, after which he is brutally killed by a bird and fed to its children. A fitting and poetic end for a great villain.

In the closing scene of the movie we see that the queen has retired and Princess Atta is now fully in charge of the colony’s operations, and no longer paralyzed by stress. Instead of micromanaging trivial details, she is back in control of her Ni and using it to improve the colony in a whole host of ways. Most notably, Flik’s inventions have been implemented at scale, but in an efficient and unobtrusive way that seamlessly builds on the existing ISTJ productive culture instead of Maoistly trying to supplant it like Chairman Flik would have done if left to his own devices.

I like to imagine that alongside their romance Princess Atta and Flik have developed a classic INTJ-ENTP working partnership similar to Nixon and Kissinger, with Flik specializing as an ideas guy who shows Atta the possibilities and internally optimizes processes to eliminate redundancy, and Atta using her more practical Ni/Te combo to determine which ventures are optimal given external resource and time constraints. With an unlimited legion of ISTJ legionaries to carry out their agenda the prosperity of the colony is all but assured!

In summary, I love this movie and Flick’s character because he isn’t the swashbuckling and hypercompetent ENTP we all want to be, but instead a very realistic portrayal of who most of us are. He is well-meaning but flaky and unreliable, he overpromises and underdelivers, and he is intellectually self-indulgent. When given actual power he wastes it on an overdesigned boondoggle that nonetheless has value by showcasing what the ants could be capable of given sufficient coordination.

Flik is a great example of the dignity most of us can hope to achieve in a world ruled by ENTJs like Hopper or ESTJs like Atta’s foremen. Flik saves the day and gets the girl, not because he has the biggest brain, but because he has the biggest balls (in an intellectual sense).

When I think back on the proudest moments of my career, most of what sticks out has nothing to do with being especially clever or charming. On the contrary, I am very confident I will never beat an INTP at technical competence or an INTJ at scheming or an ESFP at schmoozing.

Instead I think about being brave enough to tell my boss’s boss we have to let Compliance know we’re short-changing policyholders due to a bug in the admin system–something that caused a ton of short-term work and political headaches but probably saved the firm millions in punitive damages over the long term.

Or I think about helping my ISTJ buddy (who was literally a soil-shover, having grown up on a farm) in high-stakes salary negotiations against our ENTJ shark of a boss and winning a friend for life and permanent ally at work for my effort. Then when the bossman tried to buy me off while fucking my buddy over I quit the next month and helped my buddy escape the month after that. The boss’s two best employees were gone in the drop of a hat and his business was castrated for a year at minimum, all because he thought he could turn us against each other in some elaborate Te-Ni scheme to maximize short-term profit. Throwing a pie in his face for that shit gave me more satisfaction than a million promotions ever could.

Anyway, this poast has gone on more than long enough. But if you take anything away from this, I advise you to be approach the world with humility and give up on the need to be the smartest guy in the room as soon as you can.

Don’t be like Flik in the first act and assume you can improve every process without first understanding the reason for existing conventions or how your proposal would fit into broader organizational goals.

Definitely don’t be like Flik in the second act and just use shallow tert Fe to overpromise and underdeliver so you can get money and power and women you will inevitably lose because you won them through fraud.

Instead be like Flik in the third act, and realize the thing that makes you most special is also the thing that makes you kind of annoying.

The trajectory of growth for a young ENTP (especially young men who spend a lot of time online and orgasm when they hear themselves talk) shouldn’t be about learning how to use Fe as a blunt force tool to get what you want; it should be about developing Fe so you can stay true to your annoying self by better discerning who you ought to annoy.

It is your responsibility to society to irritate and humiliate tyrants and obstructionists and pedants. But you should resist the urge to piss off your mom or Brenda from Accounting just you can feel like the Special Big Brain Boy for a few hours.

When in doubt just emulate Flik and lock down an INTJ work wife.