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“I can’t get no… satisfaction…”

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…)

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself yourself
My God! What have I done?!

So: I said:

D with S – mutual reciprocity. Y’all glow with it, so you know.

Jamie has a C-ish, introverted manner, but I liked him at Dsci when I met him in Orlando. I know you too-I-ishly, so that may crimson your hue in my mind: Sidc? I could swap the middle two for either one of you, and I would trust Cathleen more than me on the bubble. But if those two profiles are right, they make for a fun marriage: You would tend to enthrall and to ground each other perfectly, each when the other benefits from that most.

That sounds a little like astrology to me. It may seem even less plausible to you if you’ve never seen a happy marriage. But Jamie and Teri glow with happiness, and their us-before-everything bond is always in evidence.

That’s all there in their DISC profiles:

They are high-D and high-S, the way a happy couple should be. I cited mutual reciprocity, the opposite that attracts. We’ll see in due course why that matters. From first priorities to last, Jamie and Teri are opposite to each other in ways that inspire, excite, calm or comfort: Where he leads, she follows. When he’s feeling loving, she’s ready to dance. When he wants to protect them, she’s there to pitch in. And if he is ever at risk of flying off the planet – or off the handle – she’s there to ground him.

DISC is a map to a person’s character, and the (more…)

“You want to be seen? Dude! You can’t hide!” When someone is being his authentic, unaffected self, he will show you his DISC type by showing you his empathy strategy by showing you his social praxis by showing you his habits-of-mind by showing you his priorities.Translation: “We are what we habitually do.”Photo by: lee leblanc

At the start of the session, they handed out a little questionnaire, a DISC quiz. I read all of the questions in a quick scan, then drew a single straight line through all of the D answers.

Just that much was a huge eye-opener for me, to discover I am and always have been Driven with a singularly perfect Driven display: Maximal results, minimal effort.

That’s where I started to play. My theoretical grounding in old-school DISC was that class, but I was working with it as practical ontology, not something to be read about. I ignored all the nomenclature and the supposed distinguishing categories and simply focused on the correspondence of the model to reality.

Translation: I liked the predictive accuracy, but I didn’t trust any part of the validation. I glossed DISC without naming it in Chapter 10 of Man Alive, but I didn’t defend it until I could demonstrate it as ontology, in Nine empathies.

That much is cool, but it’s only necessary in order to establish the underlying causality of DISC-mediated behavior.

So we can talk about reptilian versus mammalian empathy strategies.

Or we can explore unilateral versus reciprocal social strategies.

Or we can simply focus on priorities, since this is what DISC is, at bottom: Your unique rank-ordering of life’s priorities.

Do you want the job done? Do you want be acknowledged for your efforts? Do you want to have fun with the other people doing it? Or do you want for it to be perfectly correspondent to the procedural plans and financial projections?

When you’re on the bubble – when you (more…)

When you say nothing, you say everything.

It turns out she treated her ‘top value’ like shit, which really should come as no surprise: She treated everyone like shit, especially the people foolish enough to submit to her vituperative blasts of rage.

A Cautious or Incandescent temperament in power will always move toward Cautious tyranny – with amplifying compliance displays where escape is blocked. Pope Sneakoff, as one reprehensible example, desperately wanted to be The Big O’s Intellectual Error, so he took a daily bath in Sister Mary Elephant dung. None so deserving.

I take no end of grief from people because I tend to regard all testimony as being unreliable. Until I know from experience that your word is good, I assume it isn’t. Nothing personal, but you are naturally tendentious and poorly educated, the perfect recipe for over- and under-statements.

But mere unreliability is less misleading – and more easily corrected-for – than is overt, intentional deception, so it pays to have a lens for predicting another person’s probity – for judging the relative reliability of the testimony of people you don’t already know well.

Testimony about personal prowess or competence seems like a useful proxy. If you have occasion to judge someone, you have some basis for judgement. An inquiry as simple as, “Tell my why you think this is a good resume” can tell you everything you need to know.

Take a look at this matrix:

Whatever it is we’re talking about, are you any good at it? That’s the columns, evaluating your ability to account for your own efforts.

Whichever answer you gave, do I think your response was accurate? That’s the rows – and if I can’t judge your competence, more fool me.

If you’re good at the task and you know that, your testimony is highly-likely to be reliable.

You say you’re not so good and I concur? At least you’re capable of telling the truth.

You say you’re not good but I know you are? (more…)

That Robert Tracinski is a hard-working carney!Photo by: Paul Sableman

Tl;dr, of course, but the gist is this:

Ayn Rand, who died nearly-penniless after having had most of her ‘investments’ devoured by currency inflation, was also the world’s greatest expert on business.

That’s just sad, particularly because it’s the only tune Tracinski ever plays:

Ayn Rand was the world’s greatest expert on everything – except for, you know, everything that matters in life.

So I thought I’d balance the scales with a quick look at how the world’s greatest expert on love, sex, marriage and family actually managed the actual motor of human civilization – marriage and family.

These are all matters of fact, so obsessively trying to ‘disprove’ them will give Rand’s harried Ci victims something to do. And while you may think it’s unfair for me to hold The Big O accountable for the wreckage of her marriage, it is beyond dispute that – unlike business or financial management – Ayn Rand was a world-class expert at wrecking marriages, her own and those of everyone who strayed near her for too long. The relative zeal of her inner circle can be quantified in divorces per decade of devotion to her. I wish I were making that up.

So: Herewith are the seven simple tactics Ayn Rand deployed with a methodical precision to assure that her marriage would be bleak, with both she and her husband miserable in it, that they would both die without issue, that she would destroy the marriage without permitting it to break, and that she and all her mincing minions would lie about all of this forever:

Ayn Rand’s 7 helpful tips for wrecking your marriage with a total, lifelong commitment.

1. Latch onto the first guy who can’t escape your clutches, even though you and he are temperamentally unsuited from day one.

2. Don’t let him have any children. When one of his brave warriors surmounts every obstacle set before (more…)