This is a story about not a vast multitude of women, but more than one. Let us call it a “plurality” of women. They have come to me, over a span of many years, asking for advice. Because they sought this advice in strictest confidence, it would be a betrayal to reveal the details about any individual chosen from among them, so I shall stick to those details they all have in common.
Women, I have noted on these pages that are broadcast to the innerwebs only on occasion, are different from men. If you are my age you were probably raised with a taboo against permitting yourself to think such a thing — but it’s true. Little girls can be mean to other little girls, displaying a hostility no boy will ever see. Not from them, and not from other boys. And so the women come to me hoping for some glimmer of knowledge about why their BFFs are showing signs of “breaking up,” ceasing to be their BFFs.
They’re discovering the Yin and Yang theory. In childhood, some of us build things and some of us spend that energy making friends. The parents make a common mistake in assuming that, since both of these activities are inherently positive, the details and events taking place within the activities must all be positive. But the truth is this is how children form personalities; Lord knows, once we grow up and start having to deal with each other, personalities are hazardous things.
The builders allow their social skills to wither on the vine, so they can work on their little projects.
The socializers allow their building skills to become atrophied, in like manner, so they don’t lose any precious time they could be spending on socializing with each other.
When the builder doesn’t get his way, he retreats back into his garage/laboratory and resumes work on his Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or Frankenstein Monster, or whatever.
When the socializer doesn’t get his way, he continues the ancient tradition of threatening excommunication against whoever offended.
The difference is, though, that unless the builder is a hardcore sociopath, he is ultimately forced to grow up. He is backed into a corner, throughout middle & high school, and eventually has to figure out sometimes he will not get his way. And so he begins to grapple with a daily routine, and then a weekly routine. The Frankenstein Monster will just have to lie there in pieces until Saturday morning.
The socializers, very often, don’t get corrected in this way. They become “Hard Yang.” Indeed, many of their excommunication threats are brandished, with no one seeing anything out of kilter in this scenario — against their parents! The ingredients are all there. Here is the “good” opinion all people should have, you aren’t sharing it with me, and so I have defined a differential between you and “everyone else.” You’re uncool, mom & dad. Better shape up or you’re going to be really uncool.
And so half of a generation learns to argue everything this way. Yellow lights and red lights — “Better get with it, or I will see to it you become a pariah” — and — “That’s it, you’ve had your shot, now me and my friends will just HATE you forEVER!!”
Tolerating this, particularly from our children, is our first mistake. But that’s a mistake that has been made for many generations now. The second mistake is more recent. We have begun to see the personalities we would like, and we have lately taken to identifying all personalities defined outside of this narrow scope…the builders…the Yin…as victims of something called “learning disabilities.”
Meanwhile, the Hard Yang cannot think. They cannot argue. When they monopolize decisions, the results are always disaster; we saw it last year with the election of Barack Obama. Again, all the ingredients were there. “Better get with it, or we’ll call you raaaaacists!” Left unexplored were two things: 1) Would an Obama Presidency, when all’s said and done, be good for America? and 2) If the answer to the previous is an affirmative, then how exactly?
Well, that is a bunny trail within a bunny trail.
The point is that a woman trying to get along with her friends, is subject to occasional abuses — let us call them “mid-course corrections” for that is precisely what they are, instructions about bearing and vector from a higher social authority — that nobody male will ever experience. God only knows why the women are coming to me for advice. The truth is, these women are being offered a choice: Continue to see reality the way you understand it…as the little boy building a Frankenstein Monster in his dad’s garage must do, for it is impossible to build things according to someone else’s reality…or, continue to be our friend. But you’ve been given a yellow light here, you face banishment, and the next light is a red one with no hope for you to ever redeem yourself.
The e-mails bring me more interesting things. An older relative is not amused by my spelling a French phrase “deja vous,” and is even less amused by my failure to confess to a mistake. Isn’t that what your blog is all about? Forcing people to admit their mistakes?
Good heavens, what an awful turn of events that would be. I know very little about how to interact with people, and what little I’ve learned about how to interact with them, I learned by watching them make mistakes. Why, if everyone were forced to admit their mistakes, who knows what would happen — they might stop making them. And then, with their armor all fitting together perfectly, no creases or holes in it anywhere, what could I learn about them? Perhaps, browsing over the 300+ Things I Know, it is more to the point to spot the mistakes and make a record of them.
Speaking of mistakes. Getting back to this learning-disability thing, in which we make the mistake of defining a personality type as being flawed, and using psychotherapy and medications to get rid of it, so that the entire upcoming generation is left chattering, bubbly, exuberant and unthinking. I sometimes dream of a world in which we make an opposite mistake of identifying all among our children who’d much rather play with other children than build things, and use our psychobabble to try to get rid of that. I am a biased judge here, but it seems to me that would be more sensible. We take steps to limit, after all, what our children do in solitude; but our tendency is to allow children to congregate and decide things in that round-table forum with no restraints whatsoever. Actually, we go far beyond not-restraining this. We send them to school to make sure they get a taste of this, and once they’re in school, we put them in group “problem-solving” activities in which they must learn to do this. Some among them reach maturity with negligible skills in deciding, on an individual, independent basis, what is truly so; or, even more importantly, reaching a decision about what to do in response to what is so. They do not produce patterns of decisions that speak well about the methods used to reach those decisions. They do not reach decisions that yield desirable results more often than random chance. They’d be better off drawing lots, or throwing darts.
Some among our children — and adults, for that matter — seem to have settled on a way of living life, that demands a certain number of familiar faces be around all of the time. In other words, they lack the capacity to deal with being alone. These kids are thought of as “normal”; in fact, some of us adults, tend to think of this as “leadership.” Because the little darlings are so forceful and assertive! Of course they are. They are dealing with an enviroment in which they’ve been ensconced since infancy. But they have become dependent on it.
That is what the Yin and Yang theory is all about, really; some among us, once finding themselves alone, experience something that isn’t limited to simple “loneliness,” but rather a devastating handicap in recognizing events around them according to the methods and tactics to which they have become accustomed. They perceive the world around them through a process that involves social interaction with other people. Their capacity for making good decisions, throughout their entire lives, has been evaluated and will continue to be evaluated according to the competence with which they engage in this social interaction…nevermind the outcome of the process, the decisions they make in the company of these others. And, the outcome of those decisions.
The Hard Yang live in a world in which, if “everyone” agrees two and two are five, then that is the correct answer. And there is never any need to look back on it. There is only a need to look back on those who arrived at a different answer, and force them to admit to their mistakes. If they do not, then offer them a yellow light, then a red one.
The point, that is. He looks only at numbers of persons covered, and infers from these that the new health care bill won’t change too much about our everyday lives.
The spokesman is challenging the qualifications of the House Speaker to opine authoritatively on military matters. He could be inferred to be acting out of sexist motives.
The activists are 
