I grow regardless.
I am apt to say “Oh, well” or “Dang.” I’ve know forever that the only reader I can count on is me. I can diagram world history or solve everyday personnel problems (optimal OTR truck driver? Sc, which practically unpacks to “reasonable and prudent”), but I can’t even manage to stir up a “How’d you do that?” along the way. That would be sad for me if I cared more, but it’s very sad for you, regardless: I ain’t lost.
I’ve covered a lot of ground in the last three weeks. I can’t even imagine the word count, but it’s a lot. I did all that in my spare time – but I don’t sleep much to begin with, even less when I’m burning up from the inside out. I know most of this will have been obvious only to me – you almost never see what you’re not already looking for, and no one told you I was knocking down every last outhouse in philosophy – but we rolled up everything along the way:
I showed why Plato and Aristotle were both in error in Man Alive, but now all of that is fixed, as is is-ought and the wedges it drives. I can demonstrate why Ds is the optimal cultural strategy, and why the two major alternative strategies, Ci and Dc, are sub-optimal even disregarding their progressively-less-sustainable inferiority in fecundity and human capital. Even better, I invented a praxis to restore Ds civilization, with built-in protections to make it less-fragile this time. And I fixed education – so far mostly just in theory.
That’s not three weeks of my life, nor even just the last three years of it that I’ve spent thinking about Toddlers – thinking about people-without-guile and what they do with it once they get it. (For DISC is guile, at bottom, the affected, exaggerated display I put on – to escape this crisis or to reap more of that bounty – that ceases to be affected by coming to be habituated instead.) This is my whole adult life, everything I’ve done since I was nineteen years old.
Who cares? I do. Why bother? Stubbornness, to say the truth. There are machines I’m fixing and machines I’ve abandoned. I never found a way to walk away from the discipline everyone else affects to hate – philosophy – and I’ve had good results working on it all my life. I’m not done yet. I’m just done erasing the blackboard of thirty centuries’ of error. Now we can start over – at least I can start over – working from a much better map of human nature.
I am Di and man-o-man! am I Di, and I love being Di even despite the tax I pay – and the many taxes I inflict – in Sociability. Di easily unpacks to indomitable and exuberant, and I was using those words to describe my style of mind long before I had ever heard of DISC – not DISC-my-way but old-school DISC. But seeing the world my way, I can DISC my own self-creation, which is just so much whipped cream on my sundae:
Baby boy, second-born, my sister older by 20 months – where <18 = virtually twins and >30 = practically roommates but in between creates DISC-competitive friction among any two siblings. Both of us were hugely C-rewarded by our mother’s father and his extended family. Second-born kids often can’t keep up in a C-ish world – not from lack of in-born ability, they are just unavoidably behind on the prep-work – so they may deploy I or D displays to compete for attention.
Boys are brain-built to be more Driven while they’re still in zygotopia, and my all-time favorite car game is called “No, I’m the most competitive,” so I deployed D and I tactics on C displays: There first, there funniest, there with the most. (I did that all through school, for what that’s worth. It’s what I’m doing here, everywhere, all the time. That game works like this: You can’t win if I already did.) Meanwhile, our mother was squirming out from under her father’s very-S-ish Dc thumb, and, accordingly, she was very proud that I was a big boy who could dress himself and brush his own teeth and put away his toys all buy himself – that is, she hugely rewarded D displays.
And behold the man. What I am now is what I chose to be then, and to the extent that any choices I make now are made in seemingly-thoughtless error, the error was made first then and has simply been mindlessly duplicated ever since. Habits-of-mind can be hugely beneficial. But they can be very efficiently self-destructive, too. You need not – and cannot – think every choice through every time, but if you can’t say for sure why your choice is not a mistake, it almost certainly is: You’re following your DISC-based ‘ideal’ ‘reality’ right off a cliff.
It goes for me, too, only double. I am absolved of none of my sins just because I can see them so well – and see where they came from. Instead, my redemption can only come from changing my habits, going forward, to be more affectionate – more consistently-kind – in my interactions with other people.
Same for you, perhaps with a twist of the DISC quadrant: If you get stronger where you’re already strong, that’s good for you. If you get stronger where you had been weak, that’s good for everyone around you.
And that’s all one, just me having fun. I’m glad you’re here. I wish you weren’t so timid. But I am Di, indomitable and exuberant – a living, breathing Energizer bunny. I will repay your effort, if you make one, but I will grow regardless.
