The independence you crave is freedom from Cautious tyranny – and only the Driven can deliver it.

Posted on July 3, 2017 by Greg Swann

Here’s a fun tweet from me (well, fun for me, anyway):

That’s just me stunting, showing off. I think it’s fun that I can summarize the entire history of The West in 140 characters, but, so far, hardly anyone but me cares about the work I’m doing here. Plus which, I didn’t even deliver on the promise. I showed you the what but not the how. That’s here:

Sister Mary Elephant always blows her top for this simple reason: Only the Driven can lead.

Photo by: Alisha Vargas

That’s better – the whole argument, plus a chance to gloss all the jargon. But, still, this much:

Until now, Ds has had no good defenses against Ci

is still not quite true. The offending words are “until now.” Closer to the truth would be “until lately.”

Until lately, education was not awful – very much the contrary. We are having this discussion – we few! we happy few! – because there remains a residual intellectual independence amidst the wreckage of Cautious/Incandescent educationism.

Until lately, educational philosophy was Driven/Sociable, expressed as varying forms of the Loyolan curriculum, begot of the Roman trivium, itself begot of Greek pedagogy. I can do that story in DISC, too:

Di Loyola sent Dc Xavier out with a bible in one hand and a sword in the other and the two of them built an enduringly prosperous Ds love one schoolhouse at a time.

And to this very day, the only decent education to be had, for most kids, is in explicitly-Jesuit schools or in countries where the Union Jack still flies.

Why does education suck everywhere else? And why does everything else suck, more and more, everywhere education sucks? I can answer those questions with one of my all time favorite tweets:

And that’s not all-the-way fair, either. Marxism is just a species of Cautious tyranny, after all. The specific charge is true – Marxism is the temporary and catastrophic mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven. And, of course and obviously, for Marxism to reign, education – like the family, like fatherhood, like any non-Marxist redoubt or consolation – must necessarily be destroyed. But all Cautious tyrannies work that way.

Why must this be so? In preferring the ideal to the real, the Cautious-in-power, if not checked by Driven resistance, will in short order graduate to preferring perfect compliance to free will, and, eventually, dead people to those ceaselessly-enervatingly-non-compliant living specimens. The uncontradicted record of history is a footnote to the predictable consequences of recursive display amplification: Unabated rancor grows more rancorous with each iteration through the loop.

And why must this be so, as well? Sister Mary Elephant always blows her top for this simple reason:

Only the Driven can lead.

The Cautious are uncontestably the best at what they’re best at: Idealization and accountability. But they can’t even manage to inspire themselves, much less anyone else. The Incandescent can only lead anything that isn’t actually going anywhere, like a Conga line. And a Sociable in power makes everyone miserable – starting with himself.

Only the Driven can actually lead people in such a way that they lead themselves – without resentment, rancor, resistance or rebellion. Accordingly, only the Driven can lead without resort to ever-escalating rancor loops – the Sister Mary Elephantine bullying bossiness we are told is “normal” in leaders.

Thanks to Loyola and Xavier, especially, until lately we lived in a Driven/Sociable civilization, with the Loyolan contribution being decisive in that centuries-long democratization of Greek ideals. Like this:

Socrates spawned Ci Plato and Dc Aristotle. Di Loyola wed Sc Jesus to Dc Aristotle, spawning the Ds Angloshere.

While Driven/Sociable education was still hugely results-oriented – still very Dc in its objectives – humanity thrived. In terms of the actual flourishing of actual human beings, Driven/Sociable civilization was the best thing to come along since the idea of “best” was first invented – by daydreaming Greeks, of course.

What happened to ruin everything – not just education, but everything? Cautious tyranny in the form of Marxism – the temporary and catastrophic mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven. Cautious tyranny seeks to obviate and neutralize human autonomy – all the way to the mass grave if left unchecked. But every bit of Cautious tyranny – leadership by any but the Driven and where escape is blocked – will serve over time to destroy humanity while piling up its contraries.

Does that sound like hyperbole? Think again the next time you find your find yourself raging about your idiot boss or about some obviously-counter-productive policy or just about not being able do something your own way instead of by the proscribed and annointed procedure. You are bristling against Cautious tyranny – leadership you don’t look up to, respect, admire and crave union if not communion with – and the resentment you are expressing (rarely with anything but White Mutiny) is your territory – as represented in your own unique, life-long, self-sculpted DISC profile – bristling against the other guy’s clearly-erroneous map.

You are free because you cannot not be free. There is no alternative to the existential, and you are necessarily a free moral agent as a manifestation of ontology regardless of what anyone might say about that. The map is not the territory, and the territory is not/has not been/will never be constrained by the map. So long as any one of us can still say the words Socrates might have said, at the end – “I choose to die a man even if you refuse to live as one” – humanity can never be destroyed and you can never be enslaved by any hand but your own.

So how is it that you came to be so bound up by rules, proscriptions and prohibitions? I expect the secret to my popularity is to be found in answers like this one: “It’s your own damn fault, dumbass.” I’m betting you’ve known better all along, but, even if not, ignorance of the laws of reality is punishable by death – with your sentence having been mercifully self-commuted to life in a prison of your own devising: Your every word a graduated deceit, your every deceit a reproach to the deceiver.

Am I making that up? Ask your mirror. Ask your scale. Ask your boss – if you care. Ask your spouse – if you dare. Ask your kids – if you can. Ask your self: What IS man?

In a Cautious tyranny, the ideal man is a mannequin: Everything but the messy reality of the real. You crave freedom because you must be what you are, because you cannot/must not/will not/will never be what you are not, no matter what. You will be what you have willed yourself to be because you are a kind of thing – unique among entities, so far as I know – who wills himself into being. You are a self, and a self cannot not be a self. All of human history – right down to last-night’s silent quarrel over dinner – is a mutiny against that one simple fact.

You say you crave Independence with a capital I, but it’s the freedom from that prison of your own devising that you’re actually shaling for – that magical place where, even if you’re bossing everybody else around, nobody rains on your parades. That would be only right and proper, of course, since your own DISC profile is the only one that is actually correspondent to reality – even if you’re gracious enough to keep that news to yourself most of the time. Am I making that up? Is that not the theme and plot to your every grumble?

It’s not freedom from abstract tyranny you crave but everyday independence from actual, real-life Cautious tyranny in every form.

You want to be free to be you.

Ahem. Who doesn’t?

We’re all of us anarchists, you know. You’ve just been bad at it so far.

That’s what we’re doing: Beefing up your kids’ anarchy bones: Making them more independent by making them ever-more independent. Big duh, huh? We’re reinvigorating fatherhood in the process – but self-responsible husbandry is the practical expression of human independence, anyway. And we’re revivifying Driven/Sociable education by building in Dc defenses against Ci mutiny. But those are secondary consequences, just so much gravy. Here’s what we’re actually up to:

The Driven are putting down the Ci mutinies of Marxism and Islam, ideally without bloodshed.

Here’s another tweet, one never far from my mind:

When the Dc put down a mutiny, rivers run red. Humanity cannot forever survive the homicidal amplification loops of unchecked Cautious tyranny, and yet it cannot retain its humanity by resorting to tyranny itself. It was Socrates’ Leadership, Jesus’ Performance and Loyola’s Accountability that taught us that, by the way. Gotta love them Thrivers. My goal – our goal – is to restore Driven/Sociable leadership of human civilization without having to relive the bloodshed of the last 3,000 years – or, worse, never getting back to a truly human civilization ever again.

I’m talking to Toddlers, oh, yes. But I’m talking to them about the self-responsible pursuit of truly human goals – about improving the territory, not embellishing the map – and in consequence I am cultivating the Ds leaders who will restore and ultimately eclipse Western Civilization.

What they want now is what you’ve wanted always: The freedom to be who you cannot refrain from being. Only the Driven can lead you back from the mutiny of Cautious tyranny, because only the Driven can lead. And only Driven leaders who are also very Sociable can do that job affectionately – so that everyone thrives, not just the most-efficient killers.

Now you know everything, the whole wide-open “conspiracy” – my master plan:

A Di is cultivating Ds in the victims of Cautious/Incandescent educationism, all as a means of restoring Driven/Sociable civilization, pushing back the incursions of the Ci Marxist and Islamic mutinies.

The bad news? It’s a big job. I need your help.

The good news? There is no time travel. I been working on these specific ideas for the past three years, but I only recently started detailing them for other eyes. If there were such a thing as time travel, Cautious tyrants from the future would have killed me the day before I got started.

Meanwhile – in the real, the here and the now – the independence you crave is the consequence not of this law or that promise but of civil order itself. You live in a Cautious tyranny, whiling away your days pining for a Driven anarchy instead.

Only the Driven can lead, and only Driven/sociables can lead all people to better lives – lead each one of us toward ever-better expressions of our own self-sculpted humanity.

Accordingly, if you want to be free, you should be following – or, even better, leading – me. Together we’ll make a better map back to a much better territory.

This entry was posted in ThriversEd. Bookmark the permalink.