Last weekend, I had noted a very special morsel that had made it’s way into the editorial pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. Mark Morford had wondered if Barack Obama was an “enlightened being” and used a special term to describe him, a “lightworker”:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.

I had wondered if this Morford guy had been tapping into the Yin and Yang archives over here at the Blog That Nobody Reads. Well, it seems this was not the case. And I should have seen that coming, because Morford’s whole point is that it is exceedingly rare for a Lightworker to become a politician. Had he been talking about the Yang, as I thought, that observation probably would not have been made because politics is the most naturally Yang-y pastime or profession modern man has ever devised.

So Morford was clearly alluding to some way-of-communicating that had to do with giving off a “natural vibe,” some special quality that exists outside the purely verbal path of communication. Yet Morford himself does not seem to fully comprehend what it is. Which probably means he didn’t come up with this on his own…he comes out and says he didn’t. So where’d he get this? He says “many spiritually advanced people I know.” Who are those folks, and what do they have in mind?

A couple days later, via Ace, via DoublePlusUndead, we learned of Mrs. Peel who has figured out the genesis of this Lightworker stuff…or seems to have, anyway.

Mrs. Peel points to a fascinating fellow by the name of Steve Pavlina, self-help guru, motivational speaker, and former developer of shareware games. DP Undead later expounds on the idea with some additional research. Near as I can figure, the first epiphany goes to Peel…

[Pavlina] starts by asking if you are a lightworker or a darkworker. This post gives an explanation of “polarity.” Basically, you should choose either to serve others or to serve yourself, and dedicate yourself fully to your choice. Only thus will you attain the true heights to which you are destined, young Skywalker…er…

Anyway, a later article discusses lightworkers and defines them as cells in the body of Christ “Source.” (He doesn’t actually mention “Source” in this particular article, but it’s mentioned in other posts. It’s basically God, but Pavlina is much too enlightened to believe in God, so he has to call Him something else.) A lightworker is like a white blood cell. It seeks out sickness in the body of humanity and tries to heal it. A darkworker is like a cancer. It feeds off other cells to gain more power. In this article, Pavlina theorizes that because so many darkworkers are in power now (he doesn’t actually name President Bush, but it’s pretty obvious from this and other articles that that’s who he means), many people are feeling the call to become lightworkers. The body of humanity is diseased, and lightworkers must fight the disease.

Well if Morford did indeed copy his comments from this, he could not also have borrowed the concept from Yin and Yang; or if he did consolidate the two of them somehow, the concepts must have gone whistling over his head. What Pavlina describes isn’t even close to what originated on these pages…

Are You a Lightworker or a Darkworker?

Asking this question is like asking whether you’re a black belt in karate or jujitsu. Most likely you are neither, since most people never make such a commitment in their entire lives. Lightworkers and darkworkers combined probably account for less than 1% of the population. [emphasis mine]

Yin-and-Yang, contrasted with the above, maintains the opposite. Once the two extremes are defined, most of us are situated on one or the other. It is the no-man’s-land in between that is sparsely populated, and would account for a freakishly picayune sub-selection from amongst us. The rest of us are sitting on some extreme wingtip, or are headed in that direction. Yin-and-Yang, you might say, theorizes that we are “polarized” at birth or shortly afterward.

It would take a phenomenal expenditure of energy and concentration to avoid being a Yin or a Yang, because whenever you are met with a “complex” challenge you are forced to choose a method for solving it. And before you’ve labored toward the solution, you’ve begun to solidify further your allegiance toward one extreme or the other. Quoting myself in Installment Ten:

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 you can resolve this by drawing on the energy and consciousnesses of those in proximity, or relying on your internal cognitive resources. One or the other. So it’s intellectually non-feasible to maintain a middle ground here. You’d have to keep track…okay, last time I relied on others…this time I’ll figure it out for myself…now, last time I relied on myself so this time I’ll collaborate with others.

That’s not viable because we have an instinct to develop, maintain and augment the talents that are of greatest use to us. No, what Pavlina is describing is something different. It’s a bell curve. Ninety-nine percent of us hang around the middle, and the majority of them are in the center, the “Big Middle.” The one percent that remains…maybe less than that…”polarizes.”

What does it mean to polarize?

When you decide to polarize, you’re making a commitment to living a certain type of life. It is similar to making a commitment to a particular field that takes a long time to master, such as training for the Olympics, becoming a concert pianist, or becoming a grandmaster at chess. You aren’t just going to wake up one day to discover that…oh yeah…you’re a 10th degree black belt, nor will you suddenly wake up and realize you’re a lightworker or a darkworker. Polarizing as a lightworker or darkworker is a huge long-term commitment. It doesn’t just happen by itself in a flash of insight.

The decision to polarize is a decision you make with every fiber of your being. For some people it may be a natural choice, felt as a type of calling. Others have to spend a lot of time exploring both polarities to make the polarization commitment very consciously and deliberately. But most people never polarize.

If you polarize as a lightworker, you are dedicating your life to serving the greater good.

If you polarize as a darkworker, you are dedicating your life to serving yourself.

So Pavlina is sort of an Ellsworth M. Toohey, perhaps with more benevolent intentions, but with the same credo. Harmony and symbiosis with the common good, is good; selfishness is toxic and bad. The ego, therefore, becomes a cauldron of poison and evil.

I’m humbled and intrigued that Pavlina and I have come up with two theories so different, and yet, having so much in common. He used to write software; I used to write software (it seems his stuff was games, and my stuff was industrial-work automation type things, which is also interesting). I stopped and got into project management; he stopped and got into motivational speaking. He may still be writing software — I dunno — but I had my own reasons for finding different ways to earn a living, and they had a lot to do with the Yin and Yang theory. It’s credible to me that being a motivational speaker must be very different from developing software, although I’m experienced in one of those and am a complete stranger to the other. I suspect he had some kind of personal crisis similar to my own. Or it’s possible that he just appreciated the pay hike. But I strongly doubt that’s all there is to it.

Anyway, at this point in Pavlina’s theory about lightworkers and darkworkers, we run into some even more interesting things. Quoting DP Undead…

As I read this guy’s explanation of Lightworkers and Darkworkers, I realized, I’ve seen all this before! And in fact, video games may well have a role in this nonsense. I recognized this basic framework of this philosophy from a video game released for the X-BOX in 2005, called Jade Empire. I later came to the conclusion that he borrowed from a game called Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) which was made by the same development team before Jade Empire. Jade Empire was based heavily on KOTORs engine and gameplay.

Yes, this rings a bell. I have KOTOR — I never really could get too far into it. It’s a character development game, much like Sims. You define the attributes to your custom character and then you play. If the character customization doesn’t interest you overly much, you’ll find it a little boring. That’s why I couldn’t get into it.

DP Undead continues with Jade Empire…

In Jade Empire, you could either follow the philosophy of the Open Palm or the Closed Fist. Open Palm is a philosophy that argues one should always give aid to someone, be in tune with nature, and to know and accept one’s place in this world. Closed Fist is a philosophy that teaches self-reliance, to control one’s surroundings, and to try and be ambitious. Lightworker and Darkworker operate on similar principles. From Morford’s article,

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics.

Let me repeat Jade Empire’s Open Palm philosophy: Open Palm is a philosophy that argues one should always give aid to someone, be in tune with nature, and to know and accept one’s place in this world.

The reason you don’t see an Open Palm or Lightworker on the national stage is because philosophically speaking, they aren’t supposed to be ambitious. This is why Morford is so excited.
:
In theory, Lightworkers and Darkworkers operate on similar principles, but our guru [Pavlina] deviates and argues that true Lightworkers have no malevolent side, and Darkworkers are by their nature destructive, which as we learn is more like the concept of Jedi vs. Sith. Lightworkers work for the common good and to “raise consciousness”. Basically typical liberal hippie Marxist crap. Darkworkers are malevolent, in our guru’s world, and indeed Morford’s world, capitalist pigs, the Bushitler and Enron. He argues that both can get to the same place in terms of power, but that the Darkworker by his very nature leaves a trail of chaos and destruction in his wake, not unlike the Sith or Closed Fist. [emphasis in original]

There follows in Undead’s analysis, a procession of excerpts alternatively from Guru/Pavlina, and Morford. This is the evidence that Morford is recycling material from Pavlina, and speaking for myself I find it reasonably convincing. You be the judge.

But not before you get to the whoopass smackdown tidbit of evidence. And I promise…it is whoopass smackdown…

I thought it was a coincidence until I saw this. What is it I see? Look,

In your life story, you can choose to be the hero, the villain, or an NPC (i.e. non-player character, someone passive who watches the story unfold from the sidelines). Most people live like NPCs, but the hero and the villain have far more power to direct how the story unfolds. There are lots of heroes and lots of villains in this story, but there are orders of magnitude more NPCs.

All bold mine [DoublePlusUndead]. For those that don’t know, NPC is a term that is very common in role playing games (RPG), both of the tabletop and video game variety. If you’re not a gamer or D&Der, you’ve probably never heard these terms before. Upon seeing it, I think our guru based this stuff on KOTOR and Jade Empire! He’s selling dopey leftists like Morford a bunch of warmed over RPG themes! Talk about Darkworking!

I told you it was whoopass smackdown.

Priceless. There follows in Undead’s analysis a complete rundown of these role playing game features, complete with screenshots.

Let’s return to Yin and Yang for a second. One of the observations I made is that the Yang tend to have an instinctive compulsion to make all non-Yang more like them. They are recruiters. There can be advantages to this in certain situations, but it’s not a rational decision. Not a deeply rational one, anyway. They have the tendency to see “Yang-ness” as functionality; baseline functionality, the most elementary level required, to perform any task worth performing. Whoever doesn’t have the same PH balance is therefore defective.

In our information age this is especially tragic — because we rely on tools, indeed, multiple layers of tools, that can only be developed by the Yin. At least, with any reliability, and with any baseline threshold of quality.

I would imagine in the shareware game development field there would be, behind closed doors, some fierce culture conflicts between Yin and Yang. Games like these would involve an intensified and structured (deep but not broad) development of a capable and reliable engine — how pictures are displayed on the screen, how the players move around, how their location in a given instant is tracked, what’s absolute, what’s relative, how the hardware is interfaced to the software, etc. — an effort in which the Yin would enjoy an enormous functional advantage. This would be followed by a meandering and creative (broad but not deep) definition of the game itself. Placement of the objects which are the players, fields and obstacles. In this effort, the Yang could participate with a greater degree of influence and effect, with a favorable outcome. And then take over the lab culturally, as is their natural tendency. All non-Yang, convert or depart at once.

This is exactly the kind of thing that eventually drove me out. I found my software development skills were very much like a jet fighter with some powerful engines but with a bulky, non-aerodynamic shape. Headwind drag, you know…proportional to the square of the craft’s velocity. That’s basically what happened to me. I’d build something, it would work, I’d get promoted — and there arose a pressure to perform in a Yang capacity, a capacity in which I had never really brought too much to the table, and hadn’t pretended to have any capability for doing so.

I found myself contributing, with great effort, only marginally to some of these projects. I’d have been promoted because I had great success in some other area, an area in which I was no longer challenged. I remember vividly one example, in which a boss tasked me to figure out how to work some gizmo. And, very much like Dilbert’s boss, he’d manage step-by-step — come back in a few minutes and check up on me, with some pre-defined notion of what step I’d be on, what exactly I’d be doing, supplying mid-course corrections if that was not what I was doing. Well, waitaminnit…doesn’t “figure out how to do” something, imply an open-ended path? Unless he knew something already, that I was being paid good money to figure out, which I doubt was the case.

Nope, it’s the step-by-step approach. People like steps. I’ve learned, gradually, that people who have a habit of working according to step one step two step three, have a tendency to start looking at everything that way. They enforce it, in situations where it isn’t appropriate. Rather like assigning a taxicab driver to “find a way to get me to Brooklyn Bridge”…and then, four blocks into it…”hey, this isn’t the way!” You’ve outsourced the decision-making, or you haven’t. There are some jobs that fall into the “tying shoes” definition — they demand unshared authority. We’re sometimes slow to pick up on this. It’s just a simple human failing.

In this way, I began to find the new demands that were made of me, didn’t seem to have much to do with the actual success of the project. Challenges that were more my forte, on the other hand, were going unmet. Not only by me, but by the team as a whole. What was my major contribution? My specialties tended to be purely functional: Ordering hardware vendor interface toolkits, reading the technical documentation which was usually wrong, calling tech support, applying upgrades…getting the damn thing online. That’s what I did. There arose a prevailing viewpoint, and I never saw too much evidence to substantiate it, that this was unnecessary and my talents were in much greater need over here. Meanwhile, gizmos that we needed to be working, weren’t working, and I was isolated from any opportunity to continue my contributions to those.

It happened three times in six years, and I got out. I’ve since noticed this is a universal thing: People who engage the world through their personalities, their competence at collaborating with others, giving off & picking up “vibes” — and, executing those all-important steps according to pre-written scripts — want everybody else to do things that way too. This is, I think, why Pavlina is a motivational speaker. It’s like what they say sometimes about cops: If you get a thrill out of bossing people around and beating them up, a cop is a good thing for you to become, so a lot of cops & security guards are supposed to be bullies. Don’t know how much of a problem that is; I try not to spend too much time talking to cops in that kind of setting. But the principle is certainly a valid one.

And Pavlina does write like kind of a Yang-bully. Lightworker, good; Darkworker, bad.

My girlfriend and I watched The Fountainhead Saturday night. Gary Cooper, speaking as Howard Roark, covered the problems with Pavlina’s logic very well (although, according to legend, he confessed to Ayn Rand right afterward that he really didn’t understand what he was saying). It’s something Pavlina really needs to see. And you know, just on the off-chance he’s scanning these pages — you never know — it couldn’t hurt to excerpt the relevant passage. Ayn Rand, once again tapdancing on the boundary between what is real and what is silly…but this one’s an inch or two within bounds. All denialists will avoid, in abject fear, the object exercise of honestly sampling history to try to refute it.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrwed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building — that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.

His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power — that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself.

And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

Now, getting a scanner or optical jukebox driver to work with a document automation system, is a far distant cry from building motors or airplanes or power looms or anesthesia. But I’ve had twenty years to bear witness to such little skirmishes across the border of Yin and Yang, and it’s a constant that the Yang show this Pavlina-bullying. This gives rise to two mysteries to which I’ll try to offer some answers here: One, what motivates the Yang to try to rub out others who are not like them; and two, how do they ultimately succeed at this — even though, when they succeed, the rest of us lose things we in fact need.

Here are some ideas on how this comes about.

1. The Boundary

Picture Yin and Yang as two castles hundreds of miles apart, in two different valleys. From atop the keep of each castle, it is possible to see everything within the respective valley bowl, but of course, not one inch further than that. With binoculars, telescopes, whatever have you.

And so a person who lives in each castle, has three frontiers. Himself, the castle, the valley.

What makes the two castles different, is how the castle is cordoned off: There is a moat around the castle of Yin. In other words, when a Yin works on a project consistent with the makeup of his own character, whether it’s designing, inventing, implementing, cataloging…there’s always a boundary. It’s a closed system. And within any system, order must prevail or the system stops working. The Yin will place a great deal more priority on an object of disorder inside this “moat,” than a similar problem lying outside of it.

The Yang are missing this boundary around their castle. All things within line-of-sight, that are out of place, require adjustment. That means — the valley. You could say that the valley, to the Yang, performs exactly the same function as the moated castle does for the Yin.

This moves the Yang into a natural position to collaborate with others. People, universally, have a tendency to do what they’re told. The Yang police this valley, looking for trees and molehills and squirrels that aren’t adhering properly to some rule. They find something, and the conversion begins. That means a conversation begins. While this is going on, the Yin is not making himself visible. He’s toiling away on something, in his castle, behind the moat.

2. Myopia

With respect to the “castle/valley” analogy mentioned above — the Yang have to go beyond the boundaries of the castle, adjusting all things in the “valley,” or enclave demarcated by the line-of-sight, to some standard of orthodoxy. It’s sensible to presume this is an exhausting task. Sufficiently so, that even if there is a process of organizing whatever’s not-yet-complete against the available resources, much of the work will still have to be defered to a later time so as to not overtax the resources.

That is if there is a process of organizing the work against the resources. Even that, usually, is left undone.

No, it’s much more common for the Yang to just trip across this stuff as they wander around the valley, rap knuckles, and move on.

I noticed this with old girlfriends. They’d behave as if the world was coming to an end so long as I did do, or didn’t do, X…usually “show your feelings” or “be more sociable.” We’d bicker. Somehow or another, she’d come to an understanding that, as Popeye says, I am what I am…and duly show her disgust.

Next time she caught me in my bad habits, we’d have the conversation all over again, with the same urgency involved in reforming me, no new points made on either side — as if it had never happened before.

I know I’m not alone, especially among the guys.

Behold — the myopia. The Yang seem to exist in a state of exhaustion from patrolling the valley. They work themselves into a state in which they can look at something right in front of them, and not see it.

So they run things; and they don’t have much appreciation for what the Yin do, even though they count on it.

3. Migration of Work

Things that we use across a vast expanse of time, tend to evolve into multi-layered tools. Generally, the Yin are responsible for developing the lower layers and the Yang contribute more productively to the higher layers. Your most helpful analogy here is a road, with one crew bringing in concrete and gravel, which they then scatter around evenly after preparing the bare land for the road; and another crew trucking in asphalt, being sure to spread it around smoothly.

The Yin lose the limelight rather naturally, being the bedrock people; their work is easily forgotten, covered with asphalt. Really — they never had the limelight. When that bedrock is laid down, nobody’s around to see it except the people who are directly responsible for putting it in. Recall the comments about the role playing game, with the graphics engine, and the mappings. After the engine is built, major upgrades notwithstanding, it is forgotten in the same way as the bedrock under the asphalt. That doesn’t mean the engine is not there, or that it is not needed. It just becomes a piece of history…as does the graphics engine. The ongoing challenge of creating new maps, and filling in potholes in the asphalt, makes it easy to forget this important contribution.

We do this with everything we use. Cell phones, for example. Yesterday’s exciting innovation is today’s comedy relief — unless you really need it, in which case it is what we could call a “staple.” Very complicated technologies, ones that were thought to border on the impossible not too long ago, become sort of like a pencil. The damn thing works, or it doesn’t.

It’s a natural evolution of working with emerging technologies that are stacked up on top of each other; they work, because they make use of other related things. Our attention is drawn to the highest layer, the one that is still under development. The point is that when we forget what went into the lower layers, we de-value the processes and styles of thinking that were needed for their development — unless those processes and styles of thinking happen to overlap completely with what’s needed for development of the higher ones. That usually isn’t the case. So we have a very sensible tendency, in my mind, to reform our thinking energies to better conform to the task at hand. Unfortunately, that means where we need to release ourselves from our legacies in order to do this, we will. And we evolve much more expertly, in this way, when the work we are about to do is that of a social nature.

4. Compartmentalization

This is a continuation of the above. As we migrate the work and the energy of our thinking as we confront it, we have a tendency to place the contributions of the Yin into a sort of a box. Think, here, of your personal computer at home. Here it is 2008, and it’s a…browser tool. With maybe some custom birthday card printing programs on it…Google Earth…and some other stuff.

That isn’t really how you thought of it ten years ago. Back then, browsing the Internet was just another application. You used Calculator, you used Notepad, and you browsed. Then you had the “real” programs. But the point is, a decade ago you thought of it as the wonderful bundling of amazing technology that it still is. What you take for granted now, was a bit of a challenge back then. Swapping virtual memory into the onboard memory so it could be accessed by multiple applications, without locking up and taking your work into the Phantom Zone. That isn’t much of a challenge now, hopefully. There are hundreds of other things your computer used to do, rather unreliably, that now it seems to do effortlessly. Back then, you had tolerance for the failures to drive your video card without locking up tight…tolerance you wouldn’t have today, because you take the technology for granted.

And that’s the way it is with the power loom and the airplanes. It was once a miracle that heavier-than-air craft could fly. Now it isn’t. That’s the nature of technology. As we adapt to it’s use, we tend to forget all the complicated pieces that go into it. The pity is, we get distracted by other ongoing chores that are, in fact, much simpler. Loading a web page? There are some advanced security features, Active-X controls, cryptographic handshakes for secure web resources, authentication protocols. There are Java applets. But by-and-large, it’s all pretty much the same stuff. It isn’t nearly as complicated as the stuff that used to be a challenge, and is no longer…like…finding a hardware-independent, stable way to swap shared components among multiple threads and applications, some of which might be poorly behaved or trying to access memory that isn’t available to them.

And that, I maintain, is true of all technology. We have a tendency to be distracted by new challenges that seem to be more demanding than yesterday’s, when in fact they really aren’t. Working on a higher level, yes. Demanding greater levels of cognitive skill in their implementation and troubleshooting…no. If that were not true, it would be a sign that yesterday’s job was not successfully completed, and is still in need of a re-do.

5. Ritual of Collaboration

If there’s one singular defining characteristic of the Yang, it is a need to conceal the point-of-decision. In other words, their way of making important decisions requires the projection of an illusion that the decision has already been made, when in fact it has not been. The illusion comes from their taking active steps, visible by design, to fixate their names next to the decision; to associate it with their reputations. I want Obama to win, we just went to a Barbra Streisand concert, I’m a Boston Red Sox fan.

One tell-tale sign that gives them away, irreversibly, is for them to seek emotional confirmation and support that the decision is the correct one after they have used their individual identities to confirm that it was.

People who navigate the First Triad in proper sequence (fact, opinion, thing-to-do) have no need to do this. They have the facts, which are things that are known; they have the opinions, which are like digital picture images made up from the pixels which are the facts; there are the things to do (or not do) in service of a stated goal, and those things make sense in some way because of the opinions derived from the facts. For those mature thinkers, the time to collaborate with others is in gathering the facts and forming the opinions. The thing to do is decided by whoever owns the goal.

Once it’s done…collaboration is not only useless, but a trifle silly.

So the Yang make the outsiders, the non-owners, feel better because their methodology of decision-making defeats ownership. And people like to feel like they’re part of things, even if they rightfully shouldn’t be owning the decision. And, even if the decision has already in fact been made.

This magnetic pull on the general public toward putting the Yang in charge, is most powerful with matters that are in fact “owned” by the general public, or some membership standard that approaches that level of universality. Rock concerts, sporting events, and elections. With “decisions” like these, it seems fitting and natural that everyone should have a part in deciding it, that no one should be excluded.

What people tend to miss out on is that the need for fellowship, motivating people’s actions after the decision is supposed to have been made — it gives away a truth that those responsible, would just as soon forget. Simply put, the decision has not yet been made; and the passion of the participants, depends on the decision having not yet been made. If you don’t behave according to the facts as you’ve gathered them, then you have to be behaving according to established rules, and if the decision were already made then it would be a rule.

But the Yang make their decisions first and then seek emotional support from their peers afterward, which makes them more approachable…or creates the illusion that they are more approachable. If anyone wishes to doubt the tremendous pull that has on the rest of us, let them explain the avalanche of “girl videos” in which we are buried in this election year of 2008. Hillary Girl, Obama Girl and McCain Girl — have made their decisions about who’s worth supporting, and now seek emotional confirmation from the rest of us in those decisions:

(Via Hot Air, via Locomotive Breath.)

They’ve made their decisions by declaring which “side” they’re on. Yet they still seek the participation of others. It isn’t for consultation, it’s for affirmation. This makes them more inviting, by nature.

The deceit that takes place here, only partially by intention, is that they appear to be laboring toward giving power away by allowing invitees to actually decide things. In fact, they seek to suck power up from those invitees, since the important decisions have already been decided. Invitees are therefore invited to “participate,” perhaps do some hard-labor work or recruiting work, but to do little-or-nothing in the realm of actually deciding anything. This is a filtering that leaves intact all the obligations and burdens of ownership, while adroitly stripping out any authority that would be naturally associated.

6. Jealousy

Note DP Undead’s observations about open palm and closed fist…let’s repeat them one more time.

Open Palm is a philosophy that argues one should always give aid to someone, be in tune with nature, and to know and accept one’s place in this world. Closed Fist is a philosophy that teaches self-reliance, to control one’s surroundings, and to try and be ambitious.

Now, if you’re like me you’re thinking, Why would anyone have a problem with self-reliance and ambition? In the final analysis, there really is no good answer to that question. If you’re polarized as “Open Palm” and you believe you “should always give aid to someone,” this contempt for self-reliance makes even less sense because if you and I are facing a common disaster, and neither one of us have taken steps to be self-reliant, we end up in a trample-fest competing for finite resources. We each attempt to survive, at the expense of the other. If you’ve taken the trouble to achieve some measure of self-reliance — stockpiling things like a life raft, a generator, a four-wheel drive truck — you could help me out. Non-self-reliant people are not in a position to offer aid…at least…they usually aren’t.

Ah, but in all the things I’ve learned about people, minus what I was told when I was a child, Item #16 is apropos here:

16. People who are overly concerned about their emotions, don’t want anyone else to be overly concerned with thinking.

…as are Items #24 and #25…

24. People who imagine themselves as part of a group, with no individual identity, don’t want anyone else to have an individual identity either.
25. People who can’t solve problems because they don’t think rationally, work pretty hard to avoid acknowledging that someone else solved a problem.

7. Audible Confidence

This is not VOLUME. This is the tone you have to your voice when you’ve spent a lifetime “having the floor,” upon your request.

There is a certain futility involved in the egalitarian ideal of “making sure everyone has some say.” People like to think that’s self-enforcing, like waiting in line in a doughnut shop: It’s 5 a.m., the shop is open, there’s one cashier and five customers. People just naturally arrange into a queue. It’s a refreshing reminder of civilization.

Not so with taking turns having input in a group environment. The floor is yielded, easily, to those who simply expect the courtesy. You can hear it in their voices, that they expect it.

We tend to think of this as leadership. If it were leadership, though, the content of what’s said would have primary relevance as this priority scheme is worked out. That is not the case. There are reverberations, natural frequencies, pitches. Barack Obama has this kind of phony, auditory leadership. He begins to emit dulcet tones, and people “feel” like hearing what he has to say, before they know what it is (and with a rich track record, on his part, of talking a whole lot and saying very little). In truth, what they “feel” is a futility involved in trying to instigate a real dialog with him. You can tell by listening to him that he simply isn’t accustomed to it.

Another aspect to audible confidence is promptness. You have to speak up early, in order to be heard. Trouble with that is — the guy who investigates before speaking, is going to lose out every time to the guy who speaks before investigating. This is not always a disaster, and it’s not always counterproductive. As George Patton used to say, a good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow.

But on the whole, we do tend to have an unfortunate sense of what “evidence” looks like, when we’re looking for evidence of leadership. Audible and quick, tends to describe what most of us want to find. This is antithetical to understand what’s going on prior to settling on a course of action. And understanding what’s going on before settling on a course of action, is the very first requirement to solving complex, challenging problems, for the very first time.

8. Resource Reward

The Yang are far more receptive to re-distribution of wealth. The exploration of reasons for that, could drone on in a bulky thesis devoted to that subject and nothing else. We’ll not explore it in great detail here, but we can skim across the top and identify some key motivators. For starters, Yang are more sympathetic to re-distribution of wealth because they can afford to be that way. Think back on Pavlina’s “Open Palm” model; their world is already open, and re-distribution of wealth has everything to do, on a cosmetic level at least, with openness. Also, what concentrations of wealth are needed to do, tend to be efforts toward which the Yang aren’t terribly sympathetic.

There is an irony to this, though, because the Yang aren’t truly open. They excel at forming fellowships with people, of course; but a “fellowship” is meaningless if it extends membership to the universe, so for the fellowship to exist, some people have to be left out of it. This is unavoidable.

There is a spirit of egalitarianism where they congregate, but it isn’t borne out in reality. There are concentric circles involved. You might say, the moat the Yin have dug around their castle, hasn’t been entirely forsaken by the Yang, but used for other purposes. You see this in elementary, middle and high schools. People are on the “ins” and on the “outs.” There are events and methods people can use to hop over the fences, and when this happens, it’s a fairly rare occasion. There is difficulty involved in the fence-hopping and most poeple never do it — in one direction or the other.

Birds of a feather flock together. Our evolutionary history has made it so that we are accustomed to living in tribes. Once we gain control of resources, and the resources are in demand by persons inside and outside of our circles, we have a tendency to parcel the resources out to people inside the circle.

Being accustomed to interacting this way, the Yang are especially reliable in this. So the irony is, the egalitarianism is more credibly exercised by the Yin…and they aren’t trying to do it. You send a dirty joke through the e-mail to a Yin whom you haven’t contacted in awhile, and his response is going to be pretty much the same regardless of whether you were inside his circle or not. That’s a great joke or that’s a stupid joke; wonderful to hear from you; how’s the wife and kids?

With a Yang, your membership in his circle is going to determine the reaction far more than the content of the joke. If you’re in the fellowship, it’s an opportunity to reconnect, and you will so reconnect. If not — it’s — great joke. Got a call coming in. Keep in touch. Bye.

And so, those who work according to these concentric circles of trust, pour vast reserves of energy into making sure that resources are allocated to those who are inside the circles. It gets bad enough, often, that membership inside a circle comes to be thought of as a substitute for getting work done. Yes, it does. That seems like such a bad idea that nobody would step up and articulate the thought that maybe this is what we should do…no one would say that out loud. But the tendency is for this to become the way we behave. And this, in turn, tends to exacerbate the differential by which the Yang become more receptive to wealth distribution.

They become hostile to the idea that an individual should earn wealth, by independently getting work done. They become hostile to independence — even while relying on the fruits of someone who made the most of it. This is exactly what Howard Roark was talking about.

This inspires an echoing of something, at which I’ve hinted lately, regarding the Obama campaign. It doesn’t have quite so much to do with electing our next President, or electing someone who will “end the war,” or electing a black guy so we know everyone can grow up to be President. It’s not about that at all. It’s about a fellowship.

And a fellowship is meaningless if it doesn’t exclude someone. The circle is defined just as much…perhaps more…by what lies outside of it as compared to what lies within.

So our Obama people — whether they realize it or not — are really all about excluding people. They have to do this in order to give their fellowship meaning. What exactly they want to do with people outside the fellowship once their guy is sworn in, they themselves don’t seem to know exactly. But they certainly don’t want to give everyone a voice in what is going on.