Donald Trump is an Id pretending to be a Di. Because he is pretending, he is beyond easy to manipulate, and he insulates himself from that risk by being capricious: You can have Trump’s ear until you either bore or upstage him. Mattis and his Dc generals are perfect fits as courtiers: Walking cornucopias of fearful drama with very little Incandescent need to rob the president of his precious limelight.
Killing is not what Dc’s should be doing, mind you. Their role in the world of commerce is precise productivity, from back-end accounting to tool-and-die making. But put one in charge of an artillery unit and sparks will fly.
The best generals are Ds, but in a Ds world military leadership is an as-needed job – and Dc’s are master millwrights.
Mattis worried me simply because of the heightened homicidal need that Dc’s bring to the world. We talked about amiability with respect to marriage and other relationships. The opposite of amiability is irascibility: How much does our interaction anger me? How much does our ping-ponging anger make things worse? And how badly do I want to kill you when you block my access to my values?
I don’t know that any but the truly outraged actually wants to kill anyone, but I know we all feel that way when we’re not getting what we want. That’s actually predictable from your full DISC profile – where in a frustration loop the homicidal need will come out. Meanwhile, as you might guess, the more amiable you are, the less irascible:
But, of course, wanting to kill someone is different from getting the job done. Ci yearns to kill almost everyone all the time. That’s what all the simmering rage displays are about, summoning lightning bolts and conjuring up detailed smitations of the wicked. But to do real work, not just abstraction-juggling, you need real D, and, accordingly, the best killers among us are Dc and Cd.
Hence my fear of Mattis and the generals.
Donald Trump is an Id pretending to be a Di. Because he is pretending, he is beyond easy to manipulate, and he insulates himself from that risk by being capricious: You can have Trump’s ear until you either bore or upstage him. Mattis and his Dc generals are perfect fits as courtiers: Walking cornucopias of fearful drama with very little Incandescent need to rob the president of his precious limelight.
So I had worried that the generals were manipulating Trump into war – with North Korea, with Venezuela, with Iran, but especially with Islam.
Theocratic Ci cultures can endure – badly – but technocratic Ci civilization flames out in a holiness spiral, so the immediate future will be either Dc or Ds.
If it’s Dc, many millions of people, maybe billions, will die getting us back to a stable equilibrium. Avoiding that fate is what I’m doing – campaigning for Ds while we still can – and so far I have the undivided inattention of almost everyone. I do have a couple of things going for me, though.
First, no one wants to die. People can be pushed so far that they may want to kill someone, but nobody wants to be killed. Technically-sane people will effect graduated atrocities as expressions of their graduated sociopathy, but almost everyone manages to pull himself back from the brink – almost every time.
And second, I am a spy in the house of malice. I am Di, more reptile than mammal, the worst of the good guys, the goat of the bad guys. Di is the hybrid of the two hybrid motivations, and it may be the perfect DISC recipe for this very job: I am busy and loud, as every good sales-monster must be, but I also have one foot – the best foot in both cases – in each camp.
The D in me can see and admire Ds as no one does. And the I can deploy reptilian displays as well as any Ci or Ic. I can see what everyone is doing because I taught myself how to look, but I don’t know that anyone but a Di could have put everything together.
In any case, the experience has led me to watch for those kinds of DISC bridges between people. Opposites can attract, but commonalities bind. Accordingly, people who work well together over time will typically have one or both higher DISC priorities in common: Ds with Sc, for instance, or Is with Si. Dc and Cd create their own special grammar: Orders execution and executes orders.
The reason this works is simply mutual understanding: Your values and objectives are different from mine, but I can see them clearly from here, so we can meet somewhere between us. Ci with Sd shares nothing, so comity and compromise are a lot more difficult to achieve.
So go back and look at that chart. Both Trump and Kim Jong-un have a lot of dirty-looks in their chubby faces, but that’s really all they have – scowling and scolding. Mattis has the will to kill, and he never hides it.
But Mattis has D in common with Trump and C in common with KimFatty. He is in effect the perfect ambassador to explain each of these infantile pretend-kings to each other.
Could the warrior I’ve feared most since the election actually be the peacemaker? Let’s hope so…
