House of Eratosthenes

One of the things I’ve learned about people that I didn’t have any clue about when I was a kid, is that there seems to be a little-talked-about but all-important division between them, all of them, such that we seem to have two distinct “villages” intermingled by mistake.

I did not invent this. This is a fantasy that is as old as mankind’s ability to write down stories. Adam and Eve were supposed to have been tempted by The Apple, and thus a distinction was made between what they became, and what they were intended to be. They, therefore, were then unfit to inhabit the environment in which they had been placed. The Myers-Briggs tests are based around the premise that there are three or four such divisions. In that exercise, each “piece” remains conceptually significant as each new “slice” is made, even though the slice itself may not be numerically important. Therefore there are sixteen personality types, each one worthy of equal comment although they represent vastly different quantities of membership. My own slice, INTP, is said by some experts to encompass about 1% of the total population.

Atlas Shrugged is about Men of Ability growing weary of living amongst Looters and Moochers, and traipsing off to a place called Galt’s Gulch whose location, nay very existence, they manage to keep everlastingly secret to escape further financial molestation by a dream-killing neo-socialist government. In Galt’s Gulch, goods and services are purchased with gold, so that even the banks of the “real” world must make do without commerce from the Men of the Mind. Team America: World Police has become an instant legend because of its long-winded epistle about all people in the world falling into “dicks, pussies and assholes.”

Even kid’s movies have this fantasy. In “Madagascar,” Alex the Lion attacks the desire of Marty the Zebra to return to the wild, and insists the island upon which they’ve been shipwrecked be divided into two halves. Melman the Giraffe wants to go over to “the fun side of the island” with Marty, and Alex bristles at this: “What– wait, no, THIS is the fun side of the island!”

We are surrounded by the not-so-subtle message that, no matter how great the temptation to separate, we must stick together. We must remember that all that’s needed for peace, love, and harmony is a little emulsifier. I must confess that I have come to doubt this is the case. There seems to be little reason to go on believing this axiom, that we’re intended to all live together. Other than a few half-hearted taboos against division, which nobody is even really stating outright anywhere, there’s little reason to doubt that we’re a tribal species, built to separate, everlastingly, by ideologies, loathe as we may be to admit it.

My approach to this differs from Myers-Briggs. I’m interested in cause-and-effect, therefore, numerically-insignificant slices like INTP are of little interest to me. Example: People may be divided as “extroverts” and “introverts,” and they may be divided as “thinkers” and “feelers.” What interests me, is the strong tendency of introverts to be thinkers and extroverts to be feelers. When we start talking about six billion people, of course you’ll find hundreds of millions who are introvert-feelers and extrovert-thinkers, but I don’t care…not until you find enough of those to make some BIG slices in the pie. Until then, I’m more concerned about the overall-lopsidedness. There is cause-and-effect, and that’s the focus of my interest. What makes an introvert a thinker and an extrovert a feeler? Does it go the other way? Do you have to be an introvert when you’re a thinker? Must you be an extrovert when you’re a feeler? Why is that?

What causes what, and what is impacted by what, could be a source of endless probing, so to keep the developing preponderances insulated from it I just use purely arbitrary names for the two halves: “Yin,” to describe those who think, and “Yang” to describe those who feel. The theory is that we’d be arguing about much more substantial and meaningful issues, and developing a lot less acrimony toward each other in doing so, if the two halves were separated — Garden-of-Eden style, or Galts-Gulch style. I have noticed people who are dedicated to one way-of-living, by their words and by their deeds, demonstrate very little desire to live with people indulging the other way-of-living. Or, to even acknowledge those other people exist.

I have noticed there are some people who, becoming aware there are other people who do things differently than they do, are immediately dissatisfied. Like the people from Lilliput and Blefescu in Gulliver’s Travels, they can’t stomach the notion that someone else somewhere wants to open eggs from the wrong end. I used to presume, childishly, that the “Yin” thinkers and “Yang” feelers were equally guilty of this. But then I observed some more. And more, and more, and more…you know what I saw?

We have some incredibly brave young men and women who have made a conscious decision to sign up for military service, with the express wish to end up in Afghanistan or Iraq. They have thought it out. Their critics, who feel we shouldn’t be there, are like the people of Lilliput. They want everybody to agree with them. They want everybody to think George W. Bush is stupid, and Stephen Colbert is funny. I have not heard of anyone in the military, or those “neo-conservatives” they’re called? — anybody who sympathizes with the people in the military, try to force other people to share their opinions. Oh yeah, I see them argue a lot. I’m in that camp too. But failing to persuade the other side, the “neo-cons” don’t scream or yell; all they do is roll their eyes with derision. That’s the very worst I’ve seen them do.

It would appear there is cause-and-effect taking place: If you’re a thinker, what I call a “Yin,” it is going to be very, very difficult for you to oppose the War on Terror — at least, it will be difficult to oppose it in concept. Because where strategy and policy are concerned, those who think must be concerned with which strategy nets the most and costs the least, whereupon the question must inevitably come up: What is the alternative? At this late date, no alternative has ever been offered, except for the status quo of passing paper after paper after paper, “deploring” this and “condemning” that and hoping against hope that the old Hussein regime would destroy weapons like it promised it would do. To anyone who thinks, and places importance on the objective of providing assurance that the old regime harbors no illegal weapons, this is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable by definition. Security is assurance. There is no such thing as guesswork-security.

To those who feel, on the other hand, it is absolutely out of the question to support the War on Terror, in any way. Just the name of it sounds bad. War? Terror? Ooh, so negative. And it costs X much dollars. And Y many Americans have been killed in it, along with Z many Iraqis. Those numbers are SO big!

Yeah, I’m being a little smarmy and sarcastic in describing the Yang here. I admit it; I have a lot of trouble understanding them.

The “root” definition seems to be how one goes about getting things done. Someone who is a “Yin,” like me, has a workspace going on. The first task is to define the workspace; anything outside the perimter of that workspace is outside of his responsibility, anything within it, he must maintain. If there is something within that boundary that eludes his efforts to control it, he will shrink the boundary to exclude that and then start over. Once some core objectives have been met, the workspace may be expanded…or not. The paramount concern is to get the system working the way it should.

To a “Yang,” everything within eyesight is automatically in the workspace. This is one of the reasons I think we won’t achieve peace until the two sides are separate. To a Yang, if you open your eggs from the wrong end, but you’re out-of-sight, all is good — disharmony ensues when they find out about you. They’re social creatures. “We aren’t listening to the radio right now,” they might say, “we’re gathering around the piano for a sing-along!” What you do, and how you feel, is their business.

They’re wonderful people, God bless’em. Because if they know anybody who’s unhappy, they’re unhappy, and they have an unfinished task so long as the acquaintance remains unhappy. The Yin like me, assholes that we are, would like you to kindly haul your crying, blubbering whiney asses out of our offices so that we can get something done.

But the flip-side of it is, if the Yang can’t control someone the way they want to, they themselves remain unhappy. And then, what I see them doing is spreading misery and unhappiness, even if they started out with the express intent of doing the exact opposite. The result: Bill O’Reilly has his fan club, but his fans will let the Bill O’Reilly bashers have whatever opinions they want to have. And on the other hand, as the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen found out, you had better not express your opinion that Stephen Colbert wasn’t funny.

I don’t think you can be too concerned with thoughts over feelings, and remain passionately interested in what other people are doing — sooner or later, you have to give it up and concentrate on your own workspace. Furthermore, I doubt you can long ignore what those around you are doing, if you’re concerned with feeling over thoughts. Feelings are contagious, after all. You have to control what everybody else is doing when you’re concerned about feelings, otherwise, there’s no point trying.

Here is a great example:

The Custom of Crying Marriage
:
According to elderly people, every bride [in the Sichuan Province in China] had to cry at the wedding prior to the liberation of the PRC in 1949. Otherwise, the bride’s neighbors would look down upon her as a poorly cultivated girl and she would become the laughingstock of the village. In fact, there were cases in which the bride was beaten by her mother for not crying at the wedding ceremony.

I must say I’m not sure how the cause-and-effect works. I suppose if you’re inclined to feel, and more prone to be crying yourself, you’re going to get pissed off when you see other people in the room laughing — so it’s natural to demand that everybody else laugh-on-cue and cry-on-cue.

I suspect in the American culture, even to the Yang who like to feel everything, beating someone about the head & shoulders for failing to cry might seem a little harsh.

Why are the Yin not equally controlling? Well, if you task yourself to get a system working correctly, you’re going to have to define what the system is. Concerning yourself with what is going on outside of it, will quickly become an unmaintainable and impractical chore. It will also be out-of-scope: The mood in the room is happy, the mood in the room is sad — why do I need to give a shit?

And yes, with what I see thus far, the Yin are Republicans and the Yang are Democrats. This is why Hollywood is so overwhelmingly liberal: It is in the business of delivering a specific mood to its patrons. That is what the movie industry does. When brave young people half my age start coming home to Dover in body bags, yes this makes George W. Bush look bad and they like that…but it also stimulates a debate about what our country should be doing. It stimulates a very Yin type of debate. Even habitual feelers, recognize there are people out there who want to kill us…they recognize these young people were done-in by crazy people, who simply want to make a political statement.

It makes people feel unsafe. And when people feel unsafe, they want to do some thinking. They’re no longer in the mood to go see a slapstick romantic comedy with Hugh Grant and Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts.

They’re also not in the mood to vote on fleecing thirty-something apartment rats to buy free medicine for rich old people with swimming pools and Winnebagos. Therein lies the urgency to bring the war to an end. Not to win, but just to get out, whatever the outcome. Just get that damn war off the front pages. It is incredibly hard to get people agitated and uppity, about cuts in Social Security that have, in fact, never actually happened.

I’ve visited Walter Reed, multiple times, in the thick of what’s going on now. When you share an elevator with a young man who still has acne scars, and he insists on pressing the button for his own floor even though he has hooks instead of hands, it changes your perspective a little. Suddenly, you don’t care if someone “feels” bad when you tell them so, but you’re ready for the rich old folks with the Winnebagos to buy their own damn Viagra. And that holds true no matter which tribe you’re in.

[…] A week later, on May 8 I posted Yin and Yang IV, inspired by the story of young brides in certain Chinese provinces being forced to cry at their weddings. This highlights something about the “Yang” I’ve been noticing my entire life, albeit consciously only for the last decade or so, maybe less. There is something controlling about them. There has to be. When you want to think a certain thing, which is the paramount goal at any moment of the Yin, other people can think whatever they want to think. But when you want to feel a certain thing, which is what the Yang want to do, your goal is obstructed when someone else feels the opposite. And so you cannot permit this. You want laughing, everyone else must laugh; you want crying, there will be crying dammit. Also in this installment, I repudiated the notion that I was the inventor of the concept of splitting people up, and listed several articles of world literature showing that this is a well-established and ancient fantasy, probably as old as mankind itself. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/03/2006 @ 14:26
[…] Yin and Yang VIII Yin and Yang VII Yin and Yang VI Yin and Yang V Yin and Yang IV Yin and Yang III Yin and Yang II Yin and Yang I […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2007 @ 18:40
[…] There’s something about the strongest Yang, and I gather it comes from the lifelong habit of viewing all challenging exercises to be social. They tend to be controlling. They tend to want others to resolve problems the way they resolve them. I touched on this somewhat in the Fourth installment, which was inspired by a story that mothers-of-brides in some Asian cultures force their daughters to cry at the wedding. There’s nothing inherently Asian about this, it’s universal. Yin think; Yang feel. The thinker is touchy about how he is allowed to do his thinking, nevermind what everybody else is doing — but the feeler must control the feelings of everyone in proximity. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/28/2007 @ 13:04

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Yin and Yang IVMonday, May 8th, 2006

Yin and Yang IV
Monday, May 8th, 2006