House of Eratosthenes

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.

You’re definitely onto something here, particularly as regards the increasing percentage of Americans who simply cannot tolerate solitude. I think, and have thought for a long time, that this is central to the rise of idiocy in my lifetime. I was fortunate to be subjected to public school in the days before classes in enforced togetherness; even my kindergarten teacher noted that I got along with everybody OK, but was quite content to do things by myself.

This essay is a great example of what I like best about your writing – trying to dig out something that is difficult enough to identify and define that it’s gone without being identified or defined in the popular imagination. Your oft-defined (and criticized) prolixity is, I think, attributable to just this facet of your thinking: the real issues are hard to get at, but worth the time nonetheless.

As I’ve no doubt discussed before, I think the subtitle to your blog could well be “The Effable We Eff Immediately; The Ineffable Takes A Little Longer.”

Good one.
- rob | 10/03/2009 @ 08:14
Your theory’s alright, if a bit vague and rambling. But Yin and Yang have a specific meaning, and you’re using them more or less backwards.

Yin is a concept roughly aligned with the female, but the concepts covered in your theory- group consciousness, socializing, consensus, softness, weakness, emotion, passivity, are all associated with it.

Yang is roughly male, but also strong, factual, direct, resolute, hard, aggresiive, etc.

In their crudest, most basic form, yin and yang refer to the female and male sexual organs.
- thebastidge | 10/04/2009 @ 22:44
Dr. Melissa Clouthier pointed that out in these parts before, and so I checked it out.

You’re absolutely correct that Yang is male and Yin is female — that is how the Y/Y was set up. In ancient, Asian cultures…in these pre-industrial societies, men had the exclusive responsibility of using their social skills to read from & write to the community book of social taboo, while women were more or less shut in attending to home & hearth. It is perhaps noteworthy that in Europe, more-or-less exactly the same thing was taking place.

The industrial revolution, and feminist movement, supplied the force that flipped things over like a pancake. The Taoist use of Y/Y, of course, predates all that and so that is why there is this traditional gender alignment.

But of course any alignment in one direction or t’other is going to be chock full o’holes. Even now there are male Yang, even Hardcore, brittle, dedicated Yang, running around all over the place. Barack Obama and Joe Biden; John McCain; the late Ted Kennedy. The telltale sign is that these gentlemen babble away endlessly about what ought & ought not be done, but cannot be heard to utter so much as nary a peep about “if…then,” like IF you do this THEN that will happen. Instead, everything’s “just plain don’t!” Over the top. Beyond the pale. We’ve got to, we must, we should, we shouldn’t, we can’t. All cheerleading, all scolding, no cognitive thought.

So the ladies are way out in front in this “race” but they certainly are far from maintaining a monopoly.
- mkfreeberg | 10/05/2009 @ 06:50
Good point about the current confusion of Yin/Yang as expressed by modern male and female humans. I have to admit the apparent reversal of those principals in your post was my first thought, but then my thoughts went down the trail you’ve followed in your response.

Another characterization of Yang versus Yin is Action versus Contemplation, which leads even quicker to the thrust of your original post. Put another way, men are about Results, and women about Process. The feminisation of the culture in the recent past has done its best to erase that distinction, of course.
- rob | 10/05/2009 @ 07:15
Perhaps “masculine” and “feminine” would be better than “male and female” It’s an abstraction of gender, more than gender itself.

And in these cases, they are male without being masculine. Men who take on effeminate characteristics, even as our entire society slides towards emasculation. This doesn’t really change the concept of Yin/Yang. Every person has elements of both in their make-up, and traditional Taoist thought acknowledges a balance: where a man would me mostly Yang, and a woman would be mostly Yin, and they can only achieve balance together- they’re not meant to achieve perfect Yin/Yang balance within one person, but within society.

I agree with you that our society is out of balance at this point, with the feminine substituting as a mistaken synonym for “civilized”. The men are being made up evenly of Yin/Yang, the women are mostly Yin, and we keep pushing the boys to be more like girls. We’ve come to a majority Yin society, and that is not good.

I recently spent a subjectively long time in Iraq. Our ex-pat community there was VERY heavily influenced toward the male. Let me tell you, male society sucks without the influence of women. I went nearly 3 months without having an actual conversation with a woman- of more than the “hello, how are you” variety.

We need that balance, but it doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be a completely uniform solution or emulsion, it should be a lumpy mixture, with spheres of overlapping influence. Life is dynamic, not static. Just as in politics and technical solutions, we need a distributed system with lots of redundancy, spreading the intelligence and decision-making to the edges, keeping the decision loops short and relevant.
- thebastidge | 10/05/2009 @ 11:25
We’ve come to a majority Yin society, and that is not good.

But you’re not using the term the way I am are you? You seem to be stick in this pre-industrial mode of “yin==female yang==male”. With what I’ve defined here, yin is the custodian of a “kitchen” with closed borders to it, like the cloistered housewives of olden days; within the cloister, there is a place for everything, and everything in its place — and what goes on outside is unimportant. Actions are decided from reasoned opinions, and reasoned opinions are decided based on the observation of established, often empirically-observed, facts.

With that in mind, not only is a “Yin society” a potentially desirable development, but it remains a highly unlikely one. It’s the nature of “Yang,” who do all their “thinking” by reading from & writing to the community encyclopedia of taboo, to become control freaks; conversely, it is the nature of the “Yin” to leverage their thinking toward the creation and preservation of an enclosed system, and remain relatively unconcerned about what is going on outside of it.
- mkfreeberg | 10/05/2009 @ 11:33
Yeah, I still don’t agree with your definitions. You don’t get to make a word mean whatever, especially if you mean to make it seem the opposite of the commmonly and long-term accepted usage.

I have a pretty deep understanding of the concepts of Yin/Yang from years of immersion in Asian culture and study. If you want to parse your theory using straight Westner concepts and language, fine. But as I said, Yin/Yasng have meaning already, and you’re using them wrong. At best, you’re adding to the signal/noise ratio, which is confusing and counterproductive. At worst, you’re completely wrong.

Your latest example, of the kitchen, doesn’t make much sense at all. Yang acknolwdges that not everything is knowable or controllable. Yin desires that safety of the orderly hearth. Yang is good with uncertainty and risk. Yin is conservative about risk, fearful of chaos.

Not sure what “reading from & writing to the community encyclopedia of taboo” is supposed to mean, and yin is more tightly associated with “control freaks” than Yang. Yang is associated with mastery, in the sense of competence at hard skills and physical challenge. Yin’s version of control is sneakiness and to subtly influence as water wears the stone.

Anyway, if you want to inform and influence, best to start from a commmonly accepted basis and move towards more specific and distinct concepts. But hey- it’s your blog and you can talk nonsense if you like. I usually find you have some good points, even if you ramble a lot. But sometimes you lose it with the disjointedness and insular point of view where you make up your own verbal shorthand.
- thebastidge | 10/05/2009 @ 14:08
I have a pretty deep understanding of the concepts of Yin/Yang from years of immersion in Asian culture and study….Yin desires that safety of the orderly hearth. Yang is good with uncertainty and risk. Yin is conservative about risk, fearful of chaos. Not sure what “reading from & writing to the community encyclopedia of taboo” is supposed to mean…

Perhaps this is a western-culture thing, but when one desires to comment on the validity of an equation, it’s good to understand both sides of the equation and not just one side of it. I don’t pretend to possess a superior comprehension of this ancient and incompletely-documented incompletely-standardized nomenclature of Y&Y…and I’m doubtful you were personally present at its founding either. But I have yet to see a usage of “Yin and Yang” that failed to adhere to the standard of Yin energy starting at a perimeter and being directed inward, while Yang energy starts from an origin point and radiates outward. To my knowledge, they all have that in common. Naturally, if you think there’s some other terms I should be using that would be better suited, feel free to suggest them. But the primary distinction to be made here is one of securing a perimeter and applying a standard of order to an enclosed system — versus — engaging “seek and destroy” mode, targeting anomalies within a known universe of what’s visible, and laboring to set them straight. Like a conquering army, forest fire, or other outwardly-exploding “Yang” entities. So they’re female now and they were male before. I still fail to see how that matters. Alphabetizing a spice rack is a Yin thing to do. Converting as many people as you can find to a certain religion, would be a Yang thing to do. The distinction to be made is one set of tasks depends on a scope to be defined before they can commence, and other tasks, being “universal,” do not depend on such a thing. This seems proper, from what I know about it.

One thing should absolutely go without saying: If Yang has to do with maleness, and mastery and domination, and Yin has to do with femininity, quiet contemplation and yielding, any application of it to our modern society and its social norms is going to have to involve some alterations. I know it doesn’t come as news to you that we stigmatize strongly against men emerging completely victorious in a battle against women, or women yielding completely in any conflict with men. Who uses the “correct” product in a television commercial…family law…which parent in a kid’s comedy film is doing things all wrong…we just don’t like to see the male come out on top nowadays. But Bastidge says the Y/Y term cannot be used if the ancient concepts are to be modified, even slightly? The only logical solution would be to retire it until such time as our social protocols have changed, and significantly.
- mkfreeberg | 10/05/2009 @ 17:13
Long ago I watched a female scienists remove a two gram flask of testosterone from a freezer. You would have thought she was handling plutonium, yet she said any male could handle the container without ill effect.
The female-dominant society will not have the opportunity to even become self-correcting because it will be self-obliterating. We don’t really make all the rules that count.
- xlibrl | 10/05/2009 @ 18:34
Think of it in terms of magnets- each magnet has two poles. Opposites attract. A person contains elements of both yin and yang- they are not the male and female exactly, but abstracted qualities of masculine and feminine.

Yin/Yang, unlike a magnet, doesn’t require that the two poles have equal strength. In fact, it’s entirely natural that one person is pulled more strongly to one side or the other.

I’m not objecting to application of the concept including a modification of understanding. I’m saying that you’re using them in opposite of their meaning. It’s like people who confuse right brain/left brain. There are consistent meanings behind the common usage for a reason, and switching them up is confusing to people.

I’m not claiming either, to have been there at the beginning, nor to a special understanding beyond all other people. I’m just saying that my relatively confident assessment is that you’re using the terms incorrectly. I agree with you regarding the idea that yin is largely directed inward and yang outward, and there is some insight to be mined from that.

Your basic theory has some good points. I agree with you that our society has been pushing a feminizing influence on men, and that there is an agenda to change our basic natures, to something that women seem to think would suit them more (even though empirically, they don’t seem to like it as much as they thought they might.) It’s not that the fundamental principles of yin and yang have been changed (fundamental principles don’t change), rather that the relative influence of Yin and Yang within the person have shifted. On a sliding scale from uber-masculine to uber-feminine, caricatures at each end, we’re expected to behave more effeminately these days.
- thebastidge | 10/06/2009 @ 11:34
Well, I’m in a state of uncertainty about it. I’ve never been happy with the male/female reversal, and the finer details about the true original meaning of Y/Y are somewhat ambiguous. It depends on whom you ask. And I find the written descriptions, as authoritative as they try to appear, are something like family trees — they take careful note of the conclusions found, but leave unrecorded how exactly those conclusions were formed. You’re actually an example of this; you say you’ve studied this stuff, and there’s something control-freakish about the Yin, in a way not shared by the Yang. I’ve not seen that idea put out anywhere else.

You do seem to have something of a hanlde on what I’m trying to describe here though. What terms would you suggest?
- mkfreeberg | 10/06/2009 @ 11:57
“there’s something control-freakish about the Yin, in a way not shared by the Yang. I’ve not seen that idea put out anywhere else.”

I’m coming at that particular point from the idea that OCD is a reaction to insecurity. Secure and confident people are created through self-recognition of competence. The only way to become competent it to be active, and utilize one’s strength.

On the other hand passivity is a yin characterisitic. More and more we’re encouraged to be passive. To not court comeptencies. I think this leads all of us to be more classically woman-ish. Not that all women are incompetent, but that the yin/yang divide within the person would classify the active, competent component of the person to be yang, and the passive, fearful componnent to be yin, with each existing in each person to varying degrees.

Control freaks are inherently insecure people, trying to organize their environment as a means of creating safety. They don’t control themselves well, so they control environmental details and other people as a proxy.

A strong person will interact in an active way with their environment, but they are also willing to acknowledge those things which are objective reality beyond control. They are not threatened by being unable to control everything because self-mastery and competence are enough control for them to feel secure. This is a yang characteristic.

To attack the problem at a broader angle, you don’t make secure, competent, confident people (male or female) by swaddling them in cloth and denying them opportunity, by handicapping everyone to end the race at the same slow pace. We’re creating an insecure, soft, passive, and ultimately weak society by emphasizing and encouraging effeminate behaviour, while simultaneously punishing masculine behaviour. It would be fine to reward feminine behaviour, if we also rewarded masculine behaviour.

We’re confusing kids about their gender because the roles that come most naturally to them are being disincentivized in favour of dubious social experiments in eliminating the “social construct” that is gender. I’m not even talking about homosexual behaviour. Simply gender roles.

Now, within yin/yang, just like with the Chinese calendar’s animal motifs (year of the Rat, etc.) yin/yang are also influenced by the elemental types. So earth/yin is is different from air/yin. Fire/yang is not the same as water/yang. It gets really esoteric and less useful the more specific it gets, IMHO. After all, it is simply a metaphor.
- thebastidge | 10/08/2009 @ 16:52
Now, within yin/yang, just like with the Chinese calendar’s animal motifs (year of the Rat, etc.) yin/yang are also influenced by the elemental types. So earth/yin is is different from air/yin. Fire/yang is not the same as water/yang. It gets really esoteric and less useful the more specific it gets, IMHO. After all, it is simply a metaphor.

Yeah, I think they blew it here. One differential between the way the ancients used it and the way I use it, is that in my usage the “bell curve” is torn out in the center; my theory posits that people figure out which way they like to think in toddlerhood, and without realizing it make a life-pledge to solve all their problems the same way.

Think of Yin and Yang that go into sales, for example. The Yang will achieve an emotional harmony with the people to whom he is trying to sell his product; make them feel good, teach them to associate a good feeling with his presence. How well suited the product is for their needs, then, becomes irrelevant.

The Yin, on the other hand, will see the whole thing as a puzzle. Customers; requirements; products; features; terms of service contract; these are all just objects that fit together. You can do a fine job of building a sales career either way. But my point is that once people choose how they want to go about doing the job, they’ll end up always going about it that way. The tendency will be to exclude all other methods.

And we tend to work all tasks that way. Against the expectations you might reasonably have, there is a “Yang” way to program a computer. There is a “Yin” way to do stand-up comedy. They aren’t very likely and they aren’t very convenient, but they’re there. And people will use those methods if their personalities drive them to do so. It’s a “when all you have is a shiny golden hammer everything looks like a nail” thing.

A strong person will interact in an active way with their environment, but they are also willing to acknowledge those things which are objective reality beyond control. They are not threatened by being unable to control everything because self-mastery and competence are enough control for them to feel secure. This is a yang characteristic.

You’ve not specified what exactly it is you have studied to give yourself the background in this that you have — but it has not escaped my notice that your background material seems to have little to nothing positive to say about the Yin. So I’m not altogether uncertain about the characteristics of those who produced it…

I can smell this stuff a mile away. Reason why is — it carefully skirts around the subject of insecurities that might be felt by the Yang. And the Yang are extremely insecure. They use all this bubbly outgoing charm as a mask. For an example of what I’m talking about, look no further than Obama and His “transparent” government.

As far as the problem of confusion and noise, I agree with you. I’m concerned that the “classic” definition of yin-and-yang has so much in common with what I’m talking about, but at the same time has some concepts that are antithetical to it. But I don’t think I should be saddled with the blame. I think it’s on the ancients who wrote this stuff down in the original definition. The Yang are supposed to be more secure, more productive, more independent…but how do you be more secure and productive and independent when your very way of perceiving the world, depends on the assembly of a community that includes others? How do the Yin go about becoming controlling and sneaky when, in their ideal environment, there is nobody around to control or to deceive? Answer: These things simply don’t add up. They manifest a glaring inconsistency in the classic definition of the terms.

In the first couple minutes of “Braveheart,” Mel Gibson’s monologue says something about history being written down by the victors. I think that’s similar to what happened to the Yin Yang dichotomy…as it exists in the materials you have been studying.

Coincidentally, this subject came up over at Cassy’s place today, and I had some choice words there as well.
- mkfreeberg | 10/08/2009 @ 19:47
[…] Bastidge doesn’t like the way I bastardize the classic ancient Asian notions of “yin and yang,” claiming I am confusing and […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/08/2009 @ 21:26
Well, yes; the ancients were pretty mysogynistic. They ascribed all kinds of negative characteristics to the female force.

To bring some measure of balance to it all, they admitted that a woman wasn’t all yin, but that all people had elements of both the male and female principle within them.

And I don’t think the yin characteristic has anything to do with an environment that is ideally empty of others. The female principle is typically ascribed an affinity for groups, women cluster, make group consensus decisions, are passively sheep-like (which is almost by definition to huddle together waiting for someone else to act first.)

Again, no person is completely yin or yang, They are abstracted principles based loosely upon what the ancients perceived to be gender chracteristics that both exist in some degree within each person.

As a young airman, I was assigned the task of studying the Korean language. There is a very complex and subtle difference in the way that language is structured to express a certain world view very distinct from the Western, Anglo POV. It interested me enough to do quite a bit of reading such as Lao Tzu, Musashi, Sun Tzu, quite a bit of readings from Taoism, Shinto, Zen etc. I have a shelf or three dedicated to East Asian topics.

I’m no dedicated scholar of the eastern mystics, but I’m an interested amateur.
- thebastidge | 10/09/2009 @ 20:40
[…] decided the time has come to honor the advice of The Bastidge, and follow it. There is certainly a valid point to be made that the world, and therefore the […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/15/2010 @ 12:20

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The Hard YangSaturday, October 3rd, 2009

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Saturday, October 3rd, 2009