House of Eratosthenes

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, and is not written-up by anyone with a degree in psychology, anthropology, or any field of science or for that matter in anything else — had the temerity a couple of years ago to advance the theory of Yin and Yang. The theory could be thought of as a proposed extension to the axes of Myers-Briggs, in which people are categorized as introverts/extraverts, intuiters/sensors, thinkers/feelers and perceivers/judges.

A good argument could be made that the proposed Yin/Yang axis is synonymous with the introvert/extravert axis…which it really isn’t…and that it’s synonymous with the thinker/feeler axis…which it really isn’t.

From working with grown-ups and children, I have found it is relatively safe to shoehorn the biographies of all intellectually matured people — people who have come up with some kind of method of addressing previously-unknown challenges in their lives — into two distinctly different models. Yin, and Yang. The paradox is that these are symbols from ancient China for male and female. But they’re flipped around, for the most part, because of this unpleasant truth we don’t like to confront — we don’t raise boys the same way that we raise girls.

The Yin is dark, contemplative, introspective, quiet…not so much quiet, but unconcerned with how much noise it makes. Yang is boisterous and outgoing. When the traditions of the Taoist religion were being defined, it was thought that men were Yang and women were Yin, and that’s probably exactly the way things were.

But the way we use it here, Yin and Yang doesn’t have quite so much to do with how much noise you make — it has to do with how you think about things. People are confronted by complex problems, and they solve those problems in a Yin way, or a Yang way. The mold they have cast for their personal development, since childhood, will determine which of these two methods they will use.

The “complex” problem is complex because…

1. The nature of it demands a multiple-step plan;
2. There is no pre-packaged solution available that can be implemented with the resources at hand;
3. It is determined that any proposed solution, will involve some level of uncertainty and risk.

And this is where the two biographies come in.

The Yang mature earlier — and, the ancient Tao symbols notwithstanding, they are predominantly girls (although by no means exclusively). By the time they’re two or three years old, and probably earlier than that, they show a proclivity for achieving an emotional equilibrium with other persons present, which are usually their parents, before doing much of anything. They get lonely when they can’t do this. The Yin, on the other hand, fail to achieve this level of connection with persons in the vicinity and so they end up building things. After they have done something in solitude, then they may try to achieve this emotional connection now that they have a “token” to present.

You might say the Yang child says “mommy and daddy, look at me” whereas the Yin child says “look at what I did.” If you watch children very closely, you’ll see it’s very rare for a child to step out of one of those roles and into the other; they all tend to stick to one or the other. And the Yin and Yang theory simply says — people grow up that way.

The Yin makes a lifetime pursuit out of cognitive thought. The Yang makes a lifetime pursuit out of directing, and channeling, the emotional energies of people in proximity. These are both demanding skills. They are open-ended in level and intensity…like Jedi training. In other words, you can work at refining them for as long as you care to, and you’ll never reach an aphelion or point of diminishing returns. Much To Learn You Still Have — is the state of your development, in both cases, everlastingly.

This last part simply means that both disciplines hold our attention. Forever. So we spend our entire lives toiling away at one or the other.

And we very seldom cross over in exercising our options for this personal growth. We do it out of necessity. An adult who is Yin will show some skill at collaborating with a group over and above what he possessed at age five — this is the sum total of what he developed through the years under protest, when backed into a corner. Ditto for the adult Yang showing some skill at solving complex and challenging puzzles by means of cognitive, independent, rational thought. He will show some talent at this he didn’t show in childhood…again, it’s the fruit of his cumulative labor put in when other options were not available. Left to their own devices, however, the Yin will work in a solitary environment and the Yang will work in a collaborative one. Because that’s what they prefer to do. That is how they do their best work.

This part is exactly like handedness. You write with your right hand or your left hand. Teacher makes you practice, you practice with whatever hand is “dominant” — because you produce better results. So you keep practicing that way, and the dominance becomes more and more clearly defined throughout the years. Of course, with handedness, there is programming wired right into the brain. It’s probably that way with Yin-and-Yang as well. It gets tricky, though, because the brain has the ability to re-wire itself as it works. That, too, certainly plays a part with the Yin and Yang definition.

That’s the end of what I’ve been noticing about it. On what we should do about it, other than continually learn as much as we can, I’ve only managed to figure out one thing that we aren’t already doing:

I would suggest we should strive for a balance, based on each half’s respect for how the other half works. We’re not there.

The Yin do this because they have no choice but to do it. The first step to problem-solving in solitude, is you have to create the solitude. After that, you define the scope of your work; that is one of the defining characteristics. When the Yin define a piece of work they are doing, there’s always some strongly-defined scope involved. This thing over here is out of whack — it must be fixed or the integrity of a much larger body of work has been thrown into unacceptable compromise. That thing over there is messed up — so what? It is outside of the boundary. For the Yin, all tasks of any complexity exist as a two-dimensional matrix. There is a finite list of tasks to be performed (across) upon a finite list of components within the project (down).

The Yang labor under an inherent contradiction in their view of how to do these things, and because of this, there is a limit to what they can do. Because they solve complex problems on a collaborative basis, they depend on harmony. If the group becomes dysfunctional, they become dysfunctional, because they can’t accomplish much beyond what the group, such as it is, can accomplish. So disharmony is toxic to their endeavors. But they have a tendency to generate it, because they’re just as draconian as the Yin in demanding compliance with a defined standard but they don’t recognize a limited scope. All things within their line of sight must conform, especially people.

A defining characteristic of the Yang is to make the statement “We are doing X” — when this is not the case, because quite to the contrary there’s some guy off in the corner who isn’t doing X and he is the problem that has to get solved.

So this is where I think we’re being unproductive. It is the nature of the Yin that they can allow — they must allow — all who are laboring on other things, to labor on them in whatever way those others deem fit. The Yang, on the other hand, have to make everybody within eyesight exactly like them. For, like the Yin, they are toiling away on a system of interconnected and interdependent parts, but unlike the Yin, the system has no boundary. It is universal.

Now I’m admittedly biased on this, but I can’t help noticing wherever the Yang try to make everyone into more Yang, it seems an inevitability that ability and capacity are about to be short-changed. There are reasons for this. For starters, you can’t gather “with everybody” around a piano singing tunes, and simultaneously…fix that broken towel rack in the kitchen. Or defrost the freezer. Some things are Yin tasks. They have to be done, they can only be done by one guy working in solitude. And when they are challenging things, they require the talents of someone who has spent a lifetime building an aptitude for solving problems through a structured cognitive thought process. A yangy-yangy gift-o-gabber, who has spent a lifetime building problem-solving skills only under protest and only when alternatives are unavailable — is simply not going to be strong enough to do the job.

Now what follows is not substantial foundation for what is speculated above. But boy howdee, it certainly is suggestive of a foundation, and I find it to be thought-provoking.

Today’s issue of You Can, with Beakman & Jax, by Jok Church. You find it in the kids’ comics section of your Sunday paper.

Dear Jax,

What are emotions?

Lynda Elsomes
Vancouver, British Columbia

Dear Lynda,

Emotions are messages we send to ourselves — messages from you to you, using a language that is yours alone. No one else can have your emotions. They’re just for you. There are two parts to emotions. The first is the feeling you have. The second is how you respond to that feeling. A big part of growing up is emotional intelligence. That’s you learning how to respond to your feelings in ways that are good for your life.

All very reasonable. What follows, threw me for a bit of a loop, though…

Once you’ve learned that, you have what people call wisdom.

Well…yeah, I’d still agree, provided that “respond[ing] to your feelings in ways that are good for your life” means to shut the spigot off and open the throttle on thinking instead.

Feelings simply don’t channel into things that are good for your life…not with any potential greater than random chance. I suppose there could be some exceptions to that. One that comes to mind — smiling during a job interview, I guess? But that doesn’t work at all, because does it happen very often that you really feel like smiling during a job interview?

But if that throws you for a loop, this next part will grab you by the ankles and shake you upside-down until all the change falls out of your pockets:

Mr. Spock was born on the planet Vulcan in the year 2230. His people trained themselves to sit on their emotions, not feel them, not respond to them. It seems to have made all Vulcans kind of weird, with only a part of them showing — the rest locked up, hidden behind closed doors.

But in the years 2271 Spock found out even intense emotions should be felt. He learned by hooking up with a satellite named V’Ger. Don’t wait 40+ years to be like Spock. [emphasis mine]

There ya go. The Yang…very often…are caught trying to make the Yin — like them.

This is unhealthy. And I don’t think I have to explain why. It should be obvious to anyone who’s spent any amount of time, around people who are under forty, who’ve been making a point of getting those emotions shown.

It’s not as if we have any shortage of those types. They’re going to make Barack Obama our next president this year. Yeah sure, that’s supposed to fix all kinds of problems, and cause none. But nobody can explain how that’s going to work…

And it’s not lost on me that Spock was part of a television show produced during the nineteen sixties — a decade during which, like none other in recent memory, we were pressured to come up with emotionally charged solutions to our problems (and failed miserably, I would add). Furthermore, within this television show, it became a rugged and durable recurring trope that the Starship Enterprise, with hundreds of lives on board, faced certain doom and it was up to Mister Spock to save everybody…with his logic.

It took some balls to put out that message in the 1960’s. Balls, and no small quantity of truth behind the message. Of course, the real purpose to having Spock there was to put him in entertaining and interesting focused dialogs with almost-pure-Yang Dr. McCoy. Neither one of those two was designated Mr. Wrong or Mr. Right; the point of the exchange was to show how the latest problem confronting the Enterprise could be viewed rationally, and emotionally. It was fascinating stuff at the time, and in hindsight, a darn good idea for dramatic purposes.

But let’s keep that one thing straight, the thing where the fantasy of Star Trek happens to coincide so well with cold hard reality: Spock solved the problems.

Now I’m not going to sit here and type in some nonsense making the point Yang Suck, The Yin Have It Right, Hooray For Our Side, We’re Better. But I’ll definitely go so far as to say this: Complete Yang saturation, presuming it’s an attainable goal, cannot be a beneficial one. A lot of folks — like me for example — can’t contribute much that’s useful in such a world. We’re inherently boring, and we have dismal results in exciting people’s “feelings” into a desire to watch what we’re doing.

Such a world is bound to be brimming over with Obama-type solutions. You know, the kind of solutions that have lots of excitement generated around them and must therefore be the “correct” ones, and yet nobody can explain how they’re supposed to work or even if they’re likely to generate the results people are supposed to be wanting when they get so excited. That should concern everybody whether they’re Yin or Yang — because if you don’t know how a plan is supposed to work before you activate it, how can you possibly oversee it, to make sure it’s following the desired line of progress, when you’re in the middle of carrying it out?

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Yin and Yang XSunday, May 25th, 2008

Yin and Yang X
Sunday, May 25th, 2008