A question, which you must answer instantly: which is more important - mercy or justice?
One of the world's largest management consultancies asks its recruits that question to decide whether they are thinkers or feelers, and separating them accordingly. It then asks the two groups firstly to describe themselves, and then to describe the other group. It finds that thinkers invariably describe feelers in pretty much the same language as the feelers use when describing themselves: they are compassionate, caring people who allow their hearts to govern their conduct.
In other words, thinkers - though disagreeing with feelers - are inclined to think well of them. Feelers, however, when asked to describe thinkers, generally used extremely hostile, even vicious language: right-wing, uncaring, laissez-faire, devil-take-the-hindmost. In other words, the people who think of themselves as being most compassionate are actually extremely uncompassionate towards the very people who tend to regard them with compassion.
This is because feelers usually consider themselves to be morally superior to those they disagree with. In an orderly, democratic and law-abiding society, such ethical egotism is just one of those many dynamics which are controlled through schools, the media, courts and parliaments. It is when those protective institutions are removed that some feelers become dangerous people, with no check upon their emotional urges and their boundless self-righteousness.
Nazi Germany was a great festival of feelery, with the Führer leading by example. The Nuremberg rallies, the heathen cult of the SS, the anti-Semitism that increasingly infused German life: these had nothing whatever to do with "thinking" and everything to do with "feeling". Yet having emotions-driven policy did not exclude genius. After all, the governance of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1941 was among the most brilliant in world history - if you go in for that kind of thing, that is.
Revolutionaries, like fascists, are feelers: hence Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, Guevara. This is why the division between "left" and "right" is essentially bogus. It is said that the concepts of left and right resulted from the position in which members of the assembly took their place after the French revolution. However, I suspect that the notion of "right" predates that. The right of the line in battle was reserved for the most loyal knights of the king: that was where the heaviest blows inevitably fell, because the advancing enemy, being right-handed swordsmen, were inclined to wheel to their left, falling on the enemy's right.
Is the right of the line held by thinkers or feelers? Loyalty is surely an emotion, and therefore a feeler's quality. On the other hand, a thinking man will realise that his personal interests are best served by conspicuous devotion to the ruler; so the right of the line can be held by either thinkers or feelers. In other words, categorisation as feeler or thinker doesn't always lead to opposite destinies.
Politicians tend to be compulsive feelers - Bill Clinton spectacularly so. Fianna Fáil is considerably more a feelers' party than Fine Gael - indeed, the appearance of empathy is a defining characteristic of Fianna Fáil, and is what makes Bertie Ahern such a formidable political force. The Labour Party is ideologically constructed on "feeling", though Pat Rabbitte is far too thinker-argumentative to appeal to the insatiable Irish appetite for a feeler-leader.
About 60 per cent of journalists are feelers, and I suspect that 90 per cent of columnists are. Most priests are feelers. Interestingly, nuns - and 85 per cent of management consultants - are thinkers. General practitioners are feelers, psychiatrists are thinkers. However, the thinker/feeler division is not a simple binary system but a spectral one: the issue is really one of degree.
Which extreme tends to predominate in the analysis of and resolution of problems? Thinkers don't form lynch mobs. They don't write impassioned or denunciatory letters to The Irish Times. They don't get nasty or personal in debate. They don't feel hatred; in their most extreme position, they are without any moral or emotional dimension at all.
Werner von Braun, the most brilliant scientist of the 20th century and the inventor of the V2 rocket, was a classic thinker. So too was Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess grandmaster of all time. He was so without feeling as to be apparently autistic - indeed, some think that autism is merely an extreme form of mechanistic, "thinker" cerebration.
On the other hand, great scientific theorists cannot be thinkers alone. Isaac Newton had a very powerful feeler side, which he expressed in venomous enmities. No unfeeling thinker could have devised the theory of relativity - and Albert Einstein was at times passionately pacifist, passionately Zionist, passionately socialist.
Women are much more feelers rather than thinkers, which perhaps explains why so many women get angry during arguments, as if there were a moral component to a difference of opinion. Such intellectual sexual dimorphism might also explain why autism is so rare among women: one woman suffers from the condition for every eight men. Perhaps this is because women's genetic inheritance from the Neolithic was based on bonding and consensus-formation within the family group, while the male hunting party were off thinking just how to catch up with and kill that bloody great mammoth.
So: what did you answer to the opening mercy-justice question? When I was asked, I instantly said justice, which apparently means I am a thinker (for without justice, there can be no mercy). Feelers always say mercy, even if they don't mean it, as anyone at the receiving end of a feelers' froth-flecked frenzy can testify.