House of Eratosthenes

Mike LaSalle, editor of Men’s News Daily, has taken note (as few others have) of the tedious six-chapter epistle called “Yin and Yang.” This is a theory I’ve been entertaining, and writing about, and refining from time to time, about why people behave the way they do — specifically, in regard to each other. Why does this co-worker annoy me so much, when this other co-worker can’t get enough of him. How come I get along so much better with my second wife than with my first wife. Yin and Yang explains ALL, although it’s not perfect. I should hasten to add that Mr. LaSalle has demonstrated no enthusiasm toward agreeing with me on each point; wouldn’t want to slander the poor fellow. Nor could he show such fidelity if he tried, since nothing is carved in stone. I’ve confessed from the very beginning that this is a nascent theory, and like all theories lacking maturity it must flex as new realizations reverberate through it. To put it another way, now that I’ve noticed something, I’m learning new things about this thing I’ve noticed all the time. The skin hasn’t formed on this pudding.

This nascency does two things. One, those who think there’s something to it, can only agree with the core realizations, as the marginal cognitions slither around like the tentacles of a wriggly octopus. Two, it makes it necessary to periodically jot down what’s been learned. And so I shall. This would be a nice thing to do for folks lacking time to read the preceding six windy chapters.

1. Central to the theory is that there is a fundamental bifurcation among mentally capable people in civilized societies. Generally speaking, there are those who make a point to continually refine their cognitive abilities but possess mediocre or deficient social skills, and see little point in doing anything to mitigate such weaknesses. Simply put, they work on socializing better when they’re forced to. Arbitrarily, we call these the Yin. The counterparts are the Yang whose cognitive abilities are lackluster at best, developed out of necessity, exercised when forced and to no personal enjoyment. But these people possess highly refined social skills, and excel in communicating ideas with other people.

2. A common trait among the Yin is that they can differentiate between what is certainly true, and what is almost certainly true. They are adept at keeping track of what has been proven, what has merely been supported, what has only been suggested, what speculation is suffering from a logical problem, and what has been logically refuted.

3. A common trait among the Yang is that from early on, they can communicate with a plurality of other people non-verbally. Also, they can capture and retain the attention of people who otherwise, just going by the substance of what the Yang have to say, would be disinterested. The Yang enjoy the exclusive ability to hold court; they are confident that they “hold the floor” at all times, because they simply do. They presume that whatever they say, people are interested in hearing what it is, because this has historically always been the case.

4. The Yin solve puzzles. The Yang rally large numbers of people around a common cause. There is difficulty involved in making use of the talents of a Yang when there is a thing to be built; the talents of Yin become an awkward fit at best, when that thing needs to be sold.

5. Very intelligent people, with a reasonable stretch of experience, can eventually achieve competence with both these sets of skills and these people tend to grey the boundary between Yin and Yang.

6. However, if you get to know these people well, you will find they’ve made a bastardization in the course of achieving competence in a field that doesn’t really hold their interest. For example, a Yang who learns to solve puzzles, has little interest in solving them if nobody knows that he’s solved them. A Yin who manages to achieve adequate communication skills, has done so by viewing people as just another puzzle to be solved, and usually doesn’t value the social activity as anything beyond a means to an end.

7. The dividing line between Yin and Yang is very clean when you look at how people use their energies on a daily basis, to work at acquiring more skills to complete tasks they have not yet completed. To build a rain-resistant woodshed when one does not yet know how, can be an inexpensive task if one is willing to learn to solve puzzles or an expensive one if it is to be pursued socially. On the other hand, to negotiate some kind of pact between large groups with different interests, and some animosity between them, can be difficult if viewed as a puzzle but very easy if viewed as a social exercise. Nevertheless, the personality of the person who owns the problem — his “Yin/Yang rating” you might say, is what determines how a given task is to be completed. The nature of the problem has far less to do with the chosen solution than what we would like to think. To bottom-line the point, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

8. A surplus of desperate problems, perhaps some of them life-threatening, tends to create a churning effect that causes the Yin to rise to the top. When such danger looms, the mediocre communication skills of such leaders and leader candidates don’t seem to injure them a whole lot. In such situations, successful leaders seem to have it in common that their strategies are well thought out, and in tactics, they are “blindsided” very rarely and with minimal damage.

9. A dearth of such crises or dangers, creates an environment in which the Yang rise to positions of leadership if too long a time goes without new challenges being recognized and pursued. Such an environment settles into “maintenance mode,” and when this happens leader candidates are valued for their abilities to communicate. At such turning points humanity has a demonstrated tendency to choose a wholly different class of leaders.

10. Animosity seems to be inevitable when commerce, synergy, administration or love must transcend the divide between Yin and Yang. One of the most reliable ways to see this coming is when people feel a reluctance to delegate critical tasks to each other, after they’ve come to the realization that everyone in the group doesn’t share a tendency to solve the same problems using the same methods.

11. There is a distinct tendency for men to be Yin and for women to be Yang, which is unfortunate since this seems to have had an effect on the divorce rate.

12. Some very young children seem to have been locked into a “Yang” way of interacting in the world, before the age of two. By the time they’ve settled into the “Yin” mold they’re usually much older, somewhere between four and seven. It seems this “Yang” identity is a reward for developing maturity very rapidly.

13. Both sets of skills work by means of a cycle of achievement and reward. A Yin is a quiet child who interacts with his parents very little; when he has something to show them, it’s usually something he drew or something he built. A Yang Child’s message is “Look At Me,” whereas a Yin Child’s message is “Look What I Made (or did).” This could explain the gender disparity: One-year-old girls are just more pleasing to the beholder, more captivating to the audience, and more assertive in seeking out that audience, than one-year-old boys.

14. Cause and Effect is mostly lost on the Yang. When they’re very young and at an age where they could form the ability to recognize such a thing, it’s useless to them in their daily lives. They live for the attention of their parents and peers, because they’ve not had problems getting it. Beyond stimulus/response exercises involving those around them, there is no cause and there is no effect, and so this skill atrophies.

15. Similarly, since the Yin fail to find incentive to interact with those around them in childhood, their ability to gauge the “vibe” of those in their presence, likewise atrophies. Their finger is not on the emotional pulse of their parents or their peers. As they mature, they go through life this way. They are handicapped when placed in situations where they are forced to anticipate the concerns of those around them.

16. The Yin are introverted socially but extroverted in vision. The things they want to do, have to do with things that other people have not yet done. They lose interest in taking on exercises that simply repeat what has been done by somebody else; they chafe at following rules they don’t understand, particularly when nobody else in proximity understands the rules either. The Yang are extroverted socially, but introverted in vision. When they have a vision, it is not so much to make things bigger, but cleaner. When they want to change things, it almost aways has to do with some contaminant agent, and the project they have identified is to sanitize an object of this contaminent. There is an attribute of universality in this object. It’s either “our office,” “my home,” “our town,” “society” or “the world.”

17. The Yin are builders of systems. They work by defining a perimeter to a mechanism, and controlling everything within that perimeter. Inside that perimeter, they behave very much the way the Yang do with the universe — they have to get it working “just so.” However, to the Yin the process of perfection is but a means to an end. Things have to run clean enough so that something else can happen. Once things are brought within those constraints, there is no point to making them any cleaner. The Yin are annoyed when being forced to recognize something outside that perimeter of the system to be managed. To the Yang, there is no perimeter; the system that has to be managed, is everything known.

18. The Yang are vulnerable to many frustrations from which the Yin have an easy escape. One of these is the Bathosplorative Crash. Since the Yang are enthusiastic about cleaning things rather than building things, after prolonged success they eventually run out of things they can do. The yearning for that sense of achievement only multiplies, and since the actual achievements must necessarily shrink as the ideal zero-point becomes closer and closer, this yearning eventually goes unfulfilled. The Yin always have another task to be pursued after something has been cleansed, since the dependent task is what made the cleansing necessary in the first place.

19. Another frustration for The Yang is that since their sphere of responsibility is infinite — or rather, extends as far as their sphere of knowledge — there is usually something happening that is going to upset them, outside of their control. When the Yin are engaged in removing an impurity from a system within a defined perimeter, and success eludes them indefinitely, they can always re-design the system and reduce the perimeter.

20. Which personality type is better prepared at dealing with life, depends on where life is. The Yin are self-engineered to deal with perplexing problems that can be solved only by a narrow band of elites, upon which important things depend. As a society matures, they have trouble finding a purpose. The Yang are self-engineered to hold court with large numbers of peers, who in turn, have little unsettled business to cause real concern. They have trouble getting the attention they crave, when the energy of those around them is focused on pressing problems which can only be resolved by someone with a different skill set.

The Yin/Yang “Foxworthy” Ruleset: These are guidelines, not rules. But they hold true, much more often than not.

1. You might be a YIN…if you like to fish.

2. You might be a YANG…if you like to talk.

3. You might be a YIN…if you solve puzzles.

4. You might be a YANG…if you “hold court.”

5. You might be a YIN…if you like computers because all your friends live inside them.

6. You might be a YANG…if you don’t like to frown.

7. You might be a YANG…if you’ve posed for a picture, smiling into the camera, with a cell phone pressed up to your ear.

8. You might be a YANG…if you have been known to ask non-rhetorical questions, with lackluster interest in finding the answer.

9. You might be a YIN…if the problems that resurface in your life, seem to spring from the wellspring that is your reluctance to draw attention.

10. You might be a YANG…if you find yourself frustrated, often, that other people don’t do things the way you would do them, if you were they.

11. You might be a YANG…if sitting in a meeting, watching someone else be the center of attention, is like having an itch you can’t scratch.

12. You might be a YIN…if sitting in a meeting, watching other people interrupt each other, when you’ve got work to do, is like having an itch you can’t scratch.

13. You might be a YANG…if, as a little kid, you ordered other kids around, or joined groups of other kids who were being ordered around.

14. You might be a YIN…if, as a little kid, you played with blocks, Lincoln Logs, Leggos or Erector Sets while the other kids ordered each other around.

15. You might be a YANG…if, liking something that almost nobody else knows about and nobody will understand, you feel an impulse to shroud this in secrecy.

16. You might be a YANG…if you’re waiting to find out where “we” are all going, and when people grumble about the lack of an actual plan, this disturbs you.

17. You might be a YIN…if you’re the guy grumbling about the lack of an actual plan, and the lack of that plan is disturbing to you.

18. You might be a YANG….if loneliness is painful to you.

19. You might be a YIN…if crowds give you hives.

20. You might be a YIN…if people often complain they don’t know “what’s going on in your head.”

21. You might be a YANG…if people often complain you don’t shut up long enough for them to answer your goddamn questions.

22. You might be a YIN…if a direct challenge to your opinion ticks you off, but you might get over it if the argument is well-thought out.

23. You might be a YANG…if a direct challenge to your opinion ticks you off, bur you might get over it if the argument makes you laugh.

24. You might be a YANG…if you have often indulged in the habit of making fun of people to get them to stop doing something.

25. You might be a YIN…if you have noticed people making fun of you for doing something, without having concrete reasons to offer for you to stop doing it.

26. You might be a YIN…if you are distracted often, misunderstand others often, forget things often.

27. You might be a YANG…if you rarely misunderstand things or forget things. Rarely…but NEVER quietly. Everything leads to a conversation.

28. You might be a YIN…if you are good at hitting deadlines, but have to write things down or else you forget them.

29. You might be a YANG…if you can remember things well but are often late.

30. You might be a YIN…if you have an insatiable desire for freedom and opportunity.

31. You might be a YANG…if you have an insatiable desire for security.

32. You might be a YIN…if, when you’re alone and bored, the first thought in your head is how to get something done.

33. You might be a YANG…if, when you’re alone and bored, the first thought in your head is where everybody went.

34. You might be a YIN…if, when spending time around people for business reasons, typically you’d much rather be somewhere else. You know this and everybody else knows it too. Good manners dictate that no one says this out loud.

35. You might be a YANG…if, when you do things, typically you aren’t very concerned about accomplishing anything and you’re much more concerned about being seen doing it. You know this and everybody else knows it too. Good manners dictate that no one says this out loud.

So there ya have it. There really isn’t too much that’s new about this theory. One timeless old joke goes, “There are two kinds of people, the ones who divide the world into two kinds of people and the ones who don’t.” And there are many ways you can divide people in half. This particular way, this “axis” if you will, this one slice across the big ol’ pizza pie — it seems to be more important than all the others. The laws of probability would determine that some of us are only affected mildly by the division, selecting as our place on the pie, some point very close to the knife. Thus it is with all the other dissections — we have liberal Republicans, effeminate males, outgoing introverts, bi-curious heterosexuals, silly-serious people.

Not so here. People seem to work, with every waking minute of every able-bodied day of their lives, to cement themselves further and further into the mold of “Yin” or “Yang” depending on which pattern they selected in toddlerhood. Nobody is close to the slice itself. If they try to get there through a mastery of both worlds, they fail at one or the other, and if they keep trying repeatedly they end up destroying themselves.

I love your work. Yours is the only blog that I check EVERY day, no matter what constraints on my time. I just have one favor to ask. It’s little. It’s easy.

Purchase a copy of “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. Read the sections on commas. Seriously. They are not, in fact, decoration; they have a particular use. Sometimes your placement of them changes the meaning of the sentence, and I have to re-read each sentence trying to understand what you meant instead of what you actually said.

Perhaps if you made your blog a wiki page? That way, people (you could control who does it, too) could come and remove the extraneous commas….

Other than that, great post, as usual….
- muttley | 12/04/2006 @ 13:50
Morgan,
I don’t know if you’re busting stereotypes or what, but in Chinese Medicine the Yin is female energy and Yang is male energy.

You might be Yin if McDonalds commercials make you weep.

You might be Yang if you cry because no more X-Boxes are available.
- mclouthier | 12/06/2006 @ 21:36
Melissa,

That’s a great comment, very insightful point, and thanks for it. With apologies to the memory of Reagan, I’m not busting the stereotypes, the stereotypes are busting me. The terms are borrowed from ancient Chinese philosophy and metaphysics, in which Yin is the darker, inward-turning, contemplative half and the Yang is the outgoing, jovial side. It seems in an agricultural society our women become quieter and methodical in their daily chores while the men get together on the collaborative efforts, their happy-talk, wit-and-wisdom exchanged at the local pub. All that manly, jolly, blah-blah-blah.

Nowadays, of course, it’s not an agricultural society anymore. Perhaps that is why our ladies are filled with the gift of gab, and it’s up to the men to step out on the back porch and smoke a pipe, lost in thought…maybe developing ulcers from keeping their comments to themselves across the decades, while their wives and girlfriends keep the warm interiors lively with the echoing sounds of their alto and soprano voices. You really don’t have to go too many years before the industrial revolution, to get into the days where it was backwards. Even in the western hemisphere a respectable lady kept her silence until she was addressed; the constant emitting of gutteral sounds for their own sake, was a pastime left to the bridegroom, and if he was too quiet to take this on he might have been regarded as effeminate, or at least derelict in his duties.

But where my theory really breaks off from the classic “Yin/Yang” is this: In the classic use of these names, interdependency is supposed to be key. Yin can’t exist without Yang, and vice-versa. Many of the Taoist emblems are illustrated with a tiny dot in the head of each of those tadpole-things, to represent each half has a tiny bit of the other within it. Now — perhaps that DOES in fact hold true in my own observations based on modern events…but I can’t help noticing this basic human instinct, even more essential than Yin/Yang stuff part of human nature. And it has to do with intolerance. We seem to be wired to exist in tribes; with an overriding instinct grooved deeply into us, to eradicate people who aren’t made exactly the same way we are. Thoughtful people are disturbed, whether they admit it or not, with the realization that everyone isn’t necessarily thoughtful. Talkative people are likewise unsettled with the epiphany that there are people who aren’t talkative, and have no desire to become that. Each half sees the other as dysfunctional. Each half, family attachments notwithstanding, would be tickled pink if the other half would dry up and blow away. And yet, each half has managed to learn how to go through life being exactly the way it is, and being the happier for it. As I’ve said before, they are disturbed when forced to deal with each other. Up until then, life is generally okay and stress-free.

I’m thinking perhaps this ascention into a techno-industrial frontier, while it switched the male/female roles around, also afforded everybody the luxury of fantasizing that someday, the world can be rid of other people who aren’t exactly like them. In an agricultural society, nobody can afford the luxury of thinking that way. Not in either hemisphere.

By the way, none of the above is an admonition that you should withhold your comments because you’re female. Yin/Yang is all about what I notice; what I think should be done about it, is a separate issue entirely. But I’m delighted you took the time to open an account and comment, and hope to see you back here often.
- mkfreeberg | 12/06/2006 @ 23:08
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- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2007 @ 18:50
[…] In general, a bright color means you’re firing on all cylinders in relating to the world around you. A greenish tint means you’re Yang, and you tend to relate to the world as part of a community; you could compare this with Installment Seven of the Yin and Yang essays, the “Foxworthy Chapter,” which is here. a purplish color means you do this more in solitude. Red represents an eagerness to achieve your goals, that “zest for life” we talked about earlier. The blue axis will correlate roughly to your Intelligence Quotient, insofar as it’s a decent test for your ability to solve problems when there is no one else around to help you or walk you through them. Share This Article With Others:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/20/2007 @ 10:45

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