The Cautious and Incandescent temperaments are wonderful. Just don’t bring them home.

After yesterday’s news, you might think I’m down on the Cautious and Incandescent DISC temperaments. There’s some truth to that, actually, but probably not as much as you’re imagining. In their turn, they don’t like me much, and it annoys them that I don’t wither under their withering scorn.

Dang. I’m Driven. I don’t take anything personally. You can’t lead if you’re not willing to turn your back on people, and that’s even easier for me: I know why they’re wrong, and they don’t even know they already lost the debate.

I use Facebook like a desk blotter, a space where I can jot things down so I can look at them. I wrote this this morning:

The Prisoner’s Dilemma in DISC:

C and I think D and S cooperate foolishly.

D and S think C and I betray suicidally.

That’s not just a joke, it’s a summation of two arguments:

1. By failing to take account of mutually-reciprocal empathy, the C and I predispositions introduce an error-cascade that leads people farther and farther away from truly-human values. Most tragically, as unilateral social strategies C and I cannot even conceive of storgic love – the love that can cooperate even into a known betrayal.

2. Because they don’t comprehend and practice storgic love, people with high(er)-C and high(er)-I temperaments will tend to damage long-term relationships over minor disputes. Accordingly, they will have fewer deep relationships, more broken relationships, fewer offspring and lonelier deaths.

Yikes! And it gets worse. Because of the Marxist Ci mutiny over what had been a Ds civilization, we live in a Ci world. Every bit of moral, social, career, family and martial advice will be C or I or both, never D or S. C and I ‘professionals’ don’t waste their time on gooey stuff, they grind away to their graves.

This is a triumph of juvenility, and this is why so many putative-adults waste their lives on juvenile pursuits. But in a sense, away from the workplace, all C and I activities are juvenile. To be anything but rigorous and exacting in the lab is wrong, but so is being painstakingly punctilious at home – where grown-ups put away childish things.

The C and I refusal to account for mutually-reciprocal empathy is itself an invalid superposition of a child’s idea of justice over a more mature understanding of the world, where both parties to a dispute can be right, both wrong and both aggrieved, all at the same time.

The consequence is that, for now, everyone is being led by people who are suicidally self-blinded – ‘professionals’ who ever-more-efficiently pursue and promote an ever-greater suicidal self-blindedness. The blind are leading the blind to an ever-more-intricately-detailed blindness.

Nice.

Fixing the culture is a big job. I’m working on it – and you can help. But the immediate problem is ridding your life of any ‘suicidal’ tendencies, I should think.

Hence the headline: Your C or I habits of mind may be hugely beneficial at work, but they’re killing your home life. Whatever you are on the job, if you can’t learn to be D and S in your marriage, in your family and among your friends – your ‘profession’ will be your only mourner.

Here’s good news: Easily fixed, two words simple: More Sociable.

Start by learning DISC my way. DISC tests are useless. Run the priorities game on yourself, and on your spouse if you have one. If you’re honest, you now know your priorities in order. My DISC profile is the least-effort expression of DISC:

D – Accomplishment
i – Appreciation
s – Affection
c – Accountability

Yours will be different. Here’s what matters: If you have C or I in the first or second position of your DISC profile, you very probably have way too much aggression in your social praxis: Too much of sneering, snobbery, insults, jibes, rejections, dismissals, anger, disapproval, barriers-to-access, et infinitely cetera.

In the nicest possible way: It’s good odds you repel people – the people you meet, but also the people you never get the chance to meet.

I absolve myself nothing, so you know: This literally goes double for me: I’m Di, so I’m good at repelling people I’m already perfectly happy to turn my back on. You gotta know who you are.

If you have C or I in the first position, you’ve got a harder way to go – but you’re probably not willing to listen to me, anyway. Even so, every man who is not Ds at home and every woman who is not Sd to her husband and family needs to move in that direction.

How? Two more words, with D and S reminders built in: Doing stuff.

I like doing stuff alone together for couples, but all storgic relationships are made from remembrances of mutually-reciprocal value pursuits – from memories of having done stuff together. If you want more and deeper storgic relationships, they’re made out of your time, your presence and your whole-hearted, open-hearted commitment to the shared objective.

A shorter statement: You become more Sociable by being more sociable – and in no other way.

If you have C or I in the first or second position of your DISC profile – and if you are not full-on scrupulous about leaving reptilian empathy, unilateral social objectives and aggressive displays and value-pursuits at the job site – these being the boons and the banes of the C, I and D temperaments – you will damage and ultimately substantially-destroy every loving relationship in your life.

What makes you a hero at work makes you a villain at home – if you don’t learn to leave C and I at work, and if you don’t master humanity – Ds – at home.