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The Ayn Rand Institute has been paying special attention to me lately. I’ve been on their radar since I started picking on them for being champions of the worst of all genocides, abortion.

(Ci Blind? If you just had a rejection reaction – dismissal by scoff, grimace, wince, etc. – you just might be at war with reality.)

But they’ve really tuned in since I started telling them precisely why their lives are so miserable, their romances so unsatisfying and their nurseries so barren.

They’re all Ci, of course, and big-O Objectivism is a Ci Blindness cult: You are accepted – and acceptable – to them and to yourself – to the exact extent you deliver the expected Ic displays of compliance in response to the implacable Ci compliance displays of anyone above you in the hierarchy.

As we just saw with James Damore and Google, every compliance display is in fact simply a demand for either fear or fascination in response, so there is actually nothing of either mamalian empathy or abstract human conceptualization in play, nothing but those two purely-reptilian currencies.

In that respect, there is no such thing as an authentic big-O Objectivist: It’s all a Kabuki theater of Ayn Rand-imitation. They can’t officially know anything she didn’t know – which was a lot, starting with her own ugly Ci habits of mind – and they cannot permit themselves to say anything she wouldn’t say.

Which leaves them sputtering about me, as you might guess. I’ve told them several times how I’m putting them on tilt, yet they can’t stop themselves from tilting away anyway. Poor Yaron Brook hasn’t had a settled gut in more than two years, and I can only imagine what Pope Sneakoff is hearing from the donor base:

“You talked me into killing all of my children and you turned me into an hysterical, vituperative repulsion-bot?!”

That isn’t happening, of course. Ci Blindness is its own best protection against (more…)

When I was young and stupid, I used to think totalitarianism had an insuperable cost-control hurdle: The problem, as I saw it, was not just Juvenal’s quandary but that each prisoner in a police state would impose an overwhelming burden in overhead and staffing expenses. Plus which, innovation leapfrogs regulation, so I used to say, “They can’t enslave us if they can’t catch us.”

What’s wrong with that analysis? It assumes that the guards and the prisoners are different people. “Who will guard the guardians themselves?” What if you could get the guards to do it to themselves? Continuously. For free.

Each prisoner his own guard! Now there’s a manifesto for the totalitarian age. “Constable, incarcerate thyself!”

But the twentieth-century totalitarians couldn’t manage that. They gave us The Big Lie – forcing you to mouth known lies to demonstrate your subservient compliance, then changing the Big Lies all the time, to spotlight any deviationism. And they gave us Political Correctness – self-selected full-time volunteer Big Lie-enforcers. But as every brave act of anti-totalitarian defiance demonstrates, human beings cannot be ruled from the outside.

But they can be ruled from the inside…

Who is most-totally enslaved by a totalitarian creed? Not its victims but its victimizers. They need the doctrine to rationalize their ever-newer, ever-more-gruesome emotional wounds – the proceeds of seeing themselves behaving monstrously in their service to the dogma – but they need it simply to feel right about themselves. What they are, by then, IS the doctrine, and what they must police most vehemently is their own deviation from it.

Suppose you have a moral ideal. And suppose you say you subscribe to it in every particular. Guess what I know about you? You don’t measure up. How do I know that? Because no one who claims to subscribe to a moral ideal ever manages to live up to it in every detail.

So now what? If your moral ideal is a religion, you and other (more…)

Picking up from yesterday, let’s put a finer point on what we’ve learned so far.

So it doesn’t get lost, here’s the big news:

I can quantify love and marriage.

I can troubleshoot and optimize any social relationship – but so can anyone else who works my way.

What matters most in the pursuit of human thriving is that you and your best-beloved can work together to get better at being best-beloveds to each other: You can get better as a couple at being encoupled, better at best-beloving.

Better egoism through practical ontology. How cool is that?

So we looked at every potential DISC cross yesterday, even though many of those are unlikely as marriages. The active pursue the passive, the dominant lead the submissive – pins poke cushions – so most marriages, both better and worse, will be D or C men pursuing S or I women.

O, sweet mystery of life: At last I’ve found you! Green is the color of thriving, and those green marriages are full of love – and full of loved ones. Looked at that way, you can see the goldenrod as a sort of weediness – and the red as barren turf.

Urf.

Still, if I’m right about the relative amiability of DISC profiles, a distribution like this is going to fall out: Kind people make the people around them more kind, cruel people more cruel. This is obvious, of course. It is worth reporting only to make it that much harder to have affected to have pretended to have denied it.

As we saw last week, the ideal marriage, in the abstract, is Dsci/Sdic: Perfect lovers, perfect mates, perfect parents, perfect partners forever. They fit together in the way that all other organisms somehow manage to fit together without maps. Accordingly, they have the most and the best-raised children. When you hear people say, “You can’t fake good kids” – they’re talking about this couple.

But that’s a hard target to hit, and all (more…)

Well, I’ve had a fruitful fortnight: Robert Tracinski went all Irrational Hagiographic on Ayn Rand and I segued that into a math of marriage. That’s impressive to me, at least, like juggling knives and incidentally carving the Thanksgiving turkey. If I make it look easy, that’s because it is.

I’ve put all the new marriage posts into a new category, so you can read them all, if you want. I have a book here, but I have three books this Summer, plus a few movies and a lot of other stuff. I understand human motivation better than I ever have before – which means better than yesterday and much better than last week. When the rest of the world catches up, amazing things are going to happen.

How do I know that’s so?

Because I can trouble-shoot marriages – by DISC profiles.

The work we did yesterday, establishing a rank-ordering of relative sociability by DISC type, also gives us a quick tool for predicting the future concourse of relationships according to the DISC profiles of the people making them up.

Don’t call me Doctor Marriage. All I have so far are mad-scientist theories built from LegoNumbers™ – from scaled estimates of human priorities. But: Still: The fallacy of reductionism results not from reduction but reduction to the inessential. When you have reduced to the essential, what you have is not fallacy but formulae.

So: Let’s get formulaic and see if we really can map the dance of marriage.

Start where we finished yesterday, with a rank-ordering of relative sociability among DISC types:

Another heading for that chart could be “Relative Amiability” – who will be easier to get along with, going forward, in any recurring social context – marriage, home, work, play, world-at-large? Working from the bottom up, who will require special handling to keep the relationship alive?

Accordingly, yet another heading could be “Relative Marriageability” – who will be a better spouse, right out of the box (more…)

Yesterday, Cathleen cautioned me about being unfair to the high-C and high-I temperaments. I understand and share her concern, but it was fun being chastised in my own language, anyway.

Very few people are fluent in this notation system, so far, and Cathleen is by far the best of the bunch. That’s only fair: I’ve been making her talk to me in DISC-my-way for ten years now. She’s been there for every new idea, and she contributed a lot along the way – especially, as here, with beneficial resistance.

So: First: What you are is what you are. You chose your value priorities before you could choose reliably in fully-conscious self-awareness. You woke up as a human being already practiced in the habits of mind that have driven your choices ever since – and chances are all of this is news to you.

Your will is free, but your DISC predispositions are formidable, and they will express themselves from long-standing habit in every real-life circumstance where you do not explicitly, consciously override them.

You get into the same jams again and again – the snags that never seem to snag anyone else – because you respond in the same way to the same situations over and over again.

If you insist that I cannot possibly know what I’m talking about – typically a Ci chaos-rejection display – I can poke you with rhetorical sticks over and over again, until your rejection amplifies into outrage. Why would you be outraged if I’m wrong? Ahem.

As we’ve discussed, the Cautious and Incandescent temperaments can be mission-critically invaluable at work, but they are devastating to human social relationships.

Why are nerds so often celibate? Why is it lonely at the top? Too much aggression in the social strategy, too little reciprocity in the value pursuit – both of which imply too much reptilian empathy.

I can quantify all of this – in (more…)

[From September of 2014, an early take on the reproductive nightmare that is Ci culture. —GSS]

I wrote about the de facto anti-family stance of broadly-defined libertarianism a while back, but I understand the issue much better now.

So: Why are libertarians so hostile to marriage and family?

For the same reason they’re libertarian in the first place: Because they’re Cautious, as a rule, in their empathy strategies.

“Say what?!”

In my book Nine empathies, I rehabilitate a personality-type assessment known as the DISC assessment, itself a quick-’n’-dirty way of figuring our what people want and how they will go about getting it. By re-examining the DISC motivations as a matter of empathy strategies, I was able to illuminate the ensuing relationship dynamics in my next book, Shyly’s delight. I’m going to explain all that jargon in a minute, but first please take note of this fact: I am the only source of new theory in a host of disciplines of interest to people seeking less government. If you’re reading anyone but me, you are wasting precious time to your own peril.

Okay, start with empathy: In Nine empathies, I distinguish among two types of empathy – both based in our heritage as non-conceptualizing animals – mammalian and reptilian:

Mammals play and cuddle. What do reptiles do? They bask in perpetual fear. A reptile’s management of its own life consists of the obsessive micro-management of its environment. Reptiles pursue opportunities by avoiding risks, all as the result of genetic winnowing – fitness to breed – happening after birth rather than by mate selection.

If love is the default mental state of mammals, with the temporary interruption of playing (more…)

I can’t imagine how I could stick my chin out any further. I am making hugely bold claims in hugely bold ways, and I am stunned that I’m getting away with everything, so far.

I’m not spoiling for a fight, and I am not arguing with you in any case. But it would be easy to throw all my favorite insults back in my face: “Greg, you are being be awfully Cautious in your Driven defenses – and how is this not reductionism?”

I smile. I have the game theory of everything, but theory is just a map. The work we’re doing here – right now, day by day, philosophy without a net – is interesting because my new map better-corresponds to reality:

DISC my way encapsulates everything beneath it, explaining phenomena that cannot be accounted for with other models.

So the other day, I demonstrated that, since all of official life is Ci, the official opponents of Ci Marxism cannot triumph. Worse news: It wouldn’t matter if they could. Ci is Ci, and, waving red flags or blue, a technocratic Ci culture will depopulate itself out of existence.

I’ve been talking about this for years – why libertarians, for example, don’t breed. I can explain this easily in DISC terms, and we addressed it yesterday in talking about The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

I take huge liberties with academic game theory games, so Ci’s can refuse to listen even harder, if that seems wise. Meanwhile, the relative lack of fecundity of every social and cultural strategy except for Ds is easily inferred from this chart:

Am I not playing fair? Mainstream game theory reduces relationships to interactions and interactions to transactions, even as it iterates events ad infinitum and refuses even to admit the possibility of escape – of free moral agency.

Every bit of this is false to the facts of human existence, so that sort of game theory ends up looking like robot theory to me: What would robots do if they didn’t take all those gooey, messy human diversions?

Another way of saying (more…)

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 (more…)

Yikes!

That’s the picture I made the other day of the hypothetical marriage of Inferox to Facinatox, the least Ds, most Ci couple I could imagine. If Gaius and Gaia, the counter-vailingly hypothetically perfect married couple, are most-perfectly fecund – most likely to have a lot of kids who have a lot of kids – Inferox and Facinatox are the pair least likely to breed, or even to bond in any kind of storgic relationship.

I was writing about Ayn Rand’s awful marriage, and we’ll come back to that. This is what I said about my two botched lovers: Inferox “is every way the opposite of masculine ferocity,” while Facinatox “is in every way the extreme presence of feminine ferocity.”

You can see these two as the central characters in the song “Creep.” He’s fat, slobby, schlubby, scruffy, awkward and shy – an involuntary celibate. She’s sleek and shiny in every way, repelling him like raindrops off a mirrored windshield. How could these two ever work as a couple? She’s a big star and he’s her dog-like devoted manager/driver/valet. That’s not a marriage, but it could last anyway.

I thought about them some more Sunday, in much the same way I might peer with wonder and revulsion into a skink’s lair: This is alien to me, but it’s interesting and informative, even so.

In notes on Facebook, I said:

This is Oneitis, among many other bizarre couplings.

Swap the genders either way and it’s “Fifty Shades of Control Freak.”

Uncouple it from actual coupling, or at least bonding, and you get polygamy/polygyny – along with involuntary celibacy, porn and dutch-wivery.

Divorce it from actual reality and you get a Farah Fawcett or Betty Grable poster with an entourage composed of a million drooling eunuchs.

Back to real life, I can see this as a marriage of mutual beards, or any blatantly-uncommitted marriage, gay or just twisted.

This is a “love” built on compliance and fascination – unilateral both ways, with as little reciprocity as possible in either direction.

This is the “love” portrayed in all those vampire, zombie and drug/sex/attention-addiction movies.

This is the “love” (more…)