Why are we such losers?

I used to do a lot of direct action protests which was fun. I think the police, FBI, etc., kind of expect these kinds of things to be organized by hippy / artsy types. Not construction / electronics engineer / security engineer / materials scientist types who always wanted to be spies growing up and pretty much got there. That's me. So after a thousand hours or so of surveillance, planning, bugging various offices and residences, and training a crew of 20 people, we took over a building. We burst in at 3 am during the local police change of shift and barricaded the building with engineered barricades. Then I picked all the locks in the entire building and we filled the entire first floor to the ceiling with furniture which we zip-tied together with something like 30,000 zip ties. Then we swapped clothing every half-hour. The police thought there were 120 of us due to the clothing swaps. There were 10 of us inside. So departments from the entire west coast came down to aid the local police. We decided not to resist them and it still took them 24 hours to break through to us.

A tactical police crew eventually arrested us, but since there were around 30 departments there, their communications were fucked and none of the police kept any records of where and why they arrested us (there were about 100 people outside as well, some got arrested). We also had inside help at the local department. Therefore they had to let us go with no charges. That was around 10 years ago and I was just a kid then. There was a point to this and more details, but I shouldn't give out much more. Although my name and face don't appear in any photographs or publications or interviews despite wide media attention (another neat trick). Afterwards, a conspiracy went around that we were a paid crew hired by some left-wing ultra elite or something.

This direct action was just one of many and we had a powerful organization going which I had a big hand in. The Occupy movement may have been a less organized offshoot which happened just a few months after I left the scene. So I would say yes--INTPs are fully capable of making waves and it's not even that hard. Now that I'm an adult, the stakes are a bit higher. I'm also much more skilled now. But I sleep a little better knowing that I can make changes if I need to. I play by society's rules because I have more important, interesting, and constructive things to do than to rock the boat. Well I am, but just in AI-specific hardware research. It's nice to know that if I need to overthrow a government or two, it's not much of a stretch to think I could make that happen. All the people who hold the fabric of society together are just average folks doing their jobs. They're no match for a serious attempt at turning the world upside-down.

What I got from this experience, and others, is that with enough skill, I can just bowl through society's expectations. I don't have to care about the rules. So I take the jack of all trades, master of all of them approach. Which means there aren't really situations that I need other people to handle for me and since most of my value is in skill and knowledge, it's very difficult to control and punish me. I don't really care about my job or my education because I produce valuable results regardless of my relationship to those institutions--their expectations are far below my standards. So the rules aren't as important. That doesn't mean I'm going to go fuck everything up. It means that I'm free to find optimal solutions to problems without regard to societal standards and expectations.

/r/INTP Thread