House of Eratosthenes

Last week Rogue Thinker found a favorite quote, one jotted down by a very smart guy. Rogue puts roman numerals at the ends of his post titles. What a screwball, huh?

Best Quote XIX

Some of us are willing to tolerate any sort of personal ridicule in order to avoid supporting the wrong decisions;

The rest of us are willing to support all kinds of wrong decisions, in order to escape any sort of ridicule.

Morgan Freeberg

An insightful comment on the difference between liberals and not-liberals. Freeberg calls it Yin and Yang, where Yin are the people who go out and build things, and Yang are the people who socialize and network.

The Yin theory is actually a very accurate description of my life. I’m a builder by nature; I spent my entire childhood playing with LEGOs or K’Nex. Yes, there was running around outside with the standard compliment of boy’s toys (GI Joes, Nerf guns, bat and ball), but I spent an equal amount of time making things. I didn’t bother developing social skills until I got to high school, and was well in to college before they were sufficiently advanced that I could deal with people normally.

What is critical to Freeberg’s theory is that for a Yin to make something, he has to understand how things actually work. If his knowledge of reality is wrong, what he makes won’t work. And he is forced by his experiences to modify his knowledge of reality. See engineers for further details.

The Yang, however, want to show that they have the right social connections. They have to show they are connected to the right people, and distinguish themselves from those who are not. But fashion and popularity aren’t really constrained by physics, so they can go in any bizarre direction.

Which brings us back to the quote at the top. Some people want the right answer, and some people want to belong. Very often we have to pick one or the other.

I’d rather be right than popular.

If documenting this theory means I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and the world will be left with a clear statement of what I mean, I’ve probably done a pretty lousy job of it. I don’t know for sure, of course; it depends on what people have managed to pick up. But I’d say this fellow’s pretty much got it.

I do think it’s important to note that liberals can be Yin and conservatives can be Yang. It can happen…although overall the conservative/liberal Yin/Yang correlation remains somewhat strong. What is important here though, is not the statistical outcome, but the concepts.

Conservative/liberal, of course, has to do with the opinions we form. Yin/Yang has to do with how we form them. Obviously, the latter is causative of the former.

One example of the upsetting of the clean pattern is the Palin Phenomenon. Sarah Palin herself might very well be a Yang; one indicator I’ve noticed of unusually high intellect, is that it becomes difficult to tell. Some of Palin’s followers, and I’ve noticed this because I’ve been among them, are hardcore Yang. They end up agreeing with me, but by means of a process I cannot understand. Some of them sound just like Obama people. You know…we’ve got to get ‘er in there, she’s the most charismatic person the world has ever known.

The Bastidge says I’m using the wrong terms with Yin and Yang, that these words have an ancient meaning — by using them with a mixture of correctness and incorrectness, I’m producing unhelpful noise. Well, he’s right. But the words come from an ancient world, one that predates the industrial revolution as well as feminism. If one side applies to males and is accustomed to giving orders, and the other side is female and accustomed to being meek and submissive…then, obviously, something is going to have to morph somewhere if the nomenclature is not to be retired altogether.

I’ve heard people object to these terms being used before, with the same sense of — how do I say it, what do I call it. It’s not anger and it’s not apprehension. But there’s something adrenalized about Bastidge’s objections, and I’ve seen it before. People who object in this way, with these points, tend to be Yang. And they call themselves that. I think what’s happened, is they’ve spent a great deal of passion being as male as possible…as outgoing and boisterous and jolly as possible…identifying themselves this way. And here comes my theory pointing out that Yang is chirpy and outgoing, true enough, but also in its own way rather disorganized and logically sloppy — and insecure. Can’t be! The Yin is supposed to be insecure. The Yang is supposed to be secure. And so they rankle at this because it is a challenge not to their worldview, but to their ego.

I’m not going to say this applies to Bastidge. That would be dolphin-logic. You know…”All fish swim in the sea, dolphins swim in the sea, therefore dolphins are fish.” Can’t make the call. I don’t know the man.

But he came up with a great alternative suggestion. It’s a Thomas Sowell product that somehow flew under my radar. Cranky Conservative quoted from it a year ago:

Peter Robinson discusses his interview with Thomas Sowell, where Sowell elaborates on his 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions. Robinson sums up the book’s major thesis:

:
Sowell calls one worldview the “constrained vision.” It sees human nature as flawed or fallen, seeking to make the best of the possibilities that exist within that constraint. The competing worldview, which Sowell terms the “unconstrained vision,” instead sees human nature as capable of continual improvement.

You can trace the constrained vision back to Aristotle; the unconstrained vision to Plato. But the neatest illustration of the two visions occurred during the great upheavals of the 18th century, the American and French revolutions.

The American Revolution embodied the constrained vision. “In the United States,” Sowell says, “it was assumed from the outset that what you needed to do above all was minimize [the damage that could be done by] the flaws in human nature.” The founders did so by composing a constitution of checks and balances. More than two centuries later, their work remains in place.

The French Revolution, by contrast, embodied the unconstrained vision. “In France,” Sowell says, “the idea was that if you put the right people in charge–if you had a political Messiah–then problems would just go away.” The result? The Terror, Napoleon and so many decades of instability that France finally sorted itself out only when Charles de Gaulle declared the Fifth Republic.

“If you had a political Messiah.” Hmmmm………..There’s a defining characteristic. Barack Obama doesn’t actually have superpowers. Nobody really thinks he’s better than anyone else; not really, not down deep inside.

I think what happens is this vibe, this “buzz” of “He Is The One,” becomes an overarching theme, one that is easily defined. As has been the case for the Yang all the way back to the elementary school playground, once you can fall in line behind something that has captured the passion and allegiance of some critical mass of your peers, the necessity of recognizing cause-and-effect just falls away. You don’t need to worry about how much current goes through this circuit with this much voltage and that much resistance. Similarly, you don’t need to worry about what happens to the unemployment rate if the minimum wage is raised by a buck fifty. You are now in a separate universe…on in which things…do not happen because of other things. Events just plain — happen. And their relevance is that they inspire you to “come together” in some forum in which “everybody” knows that this-or-that other thing is the next “Thing We Have To Do.”

Of course, people do not make all their decisions this way. Right now, people feel very much different from how they felt a year ago. That’s the conservative/liberal part of it. When conservatives win, it gives people a powerful incentive to start voting liberal — and vice-versa.

But the comfort zone remains static. People who are accustomed to Yang thinking, then forced to think according to hard logic like the Yin, can be prevailed upon to do that…but they feel mighty uncomfortable about it. Like they don’t know what they’re doing. Of course, when Yang decide things the Yang way they still don’t know what they’re doing. That’s part of the definition, you “feel” your way through a decision rather than think your way through it. So knowing what you’re doing is not related to comfort with the decision, or lack thereof.

It’s all got to do with the methods involved in getting the decision made. That’s the difference. The Yin has figured out the Thing To Do, Pillar III, based on the Opinions/Inferences he has formed, which are Pillar II. These are objects instantiated from defined classes, and he can sit down and draw circles and lines, connecting one to the other, effortlessly, because that is how they are stored in his mind.

The Opinions, Pillar II, in turn are similarly derived from the Facts, Pillar I. So the Yin knows what to do based on what he thinks he knows about what’s going on; and he thinks he knows what’s going on, based on what he has observed. These objects are derived from each other, methodically.

The Yang have formed, from early childhood, a way of neatly sidestepping that. But their method depends on other people being around. People who want to impress them, and who are willing to be impressed by them.

Dude, not to charge your ego or anything 😉 but ….

That is a damned good quote.

The Tea Party Movement needs to adopt it.
- philmon | 10/13/2009 @ 05:27
I appreciate that you’re not specifically categorizing me. I’m not particularly invested in this Yin/Yang definition argument emotionally, I simply find it interesting.

I do have some emotions invested in the idea that modern Western society is trying to make men act like women. I don’t have anything against women, I just think that we’re different, and it’s a disservice to both men and women to fail to acknolwedge that, even to punish that difference.

Particularly, there are times and circumstances where I don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of people trying to be inclusive and “emotionally intelligent”, to use a phrase from my current MBA program.

As for MBTI, I’m pretty consistently xNTJ, very slightly more ENTJ than INTJ, but partly (largely?) depending on my mood and context.

Also, on other tests of right brain/left brain, I’m slightly more left-brain but not extrenely so. I’m good with mathematics and hard science, and leaned that way when I was young, but by training I went a complete social sciences route (linguistics) after high school. I’m fairly musical (can’t sing worth a damn) but I now work as a network administrator/engineer. I scored the same on all four composite areas the USAF uses from the ASVAB.

I spend some weekends very social, and others I spend at home alone with a book, or like today, alone in the woods for most of the day. I’m often recruited for sales jobs, but I despise the work.

Make of that what you will, I don’t think it maps well to a majority yin/yang scale by either your definition or mine.
- thebastidge | 10/17/2009 @ 22:06
[…] Constrained or unconstrained vision. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/29/2009 @ 21:21

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Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXXIV
Monday, October 12th, 2009