Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
Today’s Post is one of those Posts that are written for a couple of semi-different, not un-mutually reinforcing reasons. The two reasons are:
- to continue our discussion that started in the Comments to yesterday’s Post, about whether the Seven Dwarfs, (in Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs), represented a scottian or rogerian or clarklike worldview. In addition, there were differing interpretations of the worldview represented by some of the other characters in this story (and in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’)
- to demonstrate the fact that disagreement and discussion with interpretation of the worldview of people (including fictional characters) is not only allowable, it is totally desirable… (this is prompted by Stephanie’s Comment expressing concern how her disagreement with my conclusions might be met, in this, she is to applauded. I suspect many people have disagreed but few have had the temerity to say so…at least that was the case before last year, before the Doctrine acquired a more… astute, talented, headstrong bunch of Readers
- …notice the ‘and’ in Item 2? notice it’s underlined and everthing? totally serious there… we all learn by hearing from each other what we see as expressions of clark or scott or rogerian behavior, attitude, posture (physical and rhetorical), characteristics, but the emphasis in on the sharing of impressions, understandings, interpretation and other things we see in people in the world, Doctrineistically-speaking, i.e. “I gotta go with scott, do you see how the appetite combines with a clear impersonal view of the humanity of the other characters” sense.
the Wakefield Doctrine is a perspective, it’s a way we can choose to look at the world around us, the people and the things that they do. As a perspective, the Wakefield Doctrine does not have ‘An Answer’, it does not presume to say, ‘this is the nature of Man and Woman and Life and Such’. No. It does not. What the Doctrine does say is, ‘hey you know what? If you can imagine that reality is not just the everyday, ordinary common sense thing, but that reality, at a certain level of experience, is…personal, then what if there were three kinds or styles of personal realities? And these personal realities are real, ya know? The three personal realities (lets call them worldviews, ok?) are:
- the reality of the Outsider (in which you are different, and there is a gap between you and the world around you and there is an un-stated imperative that you not allow yourself to be identified as the different one and there is, an equally un-reconciled drive to distinguish yourself, to not be ”un-noticed’)
- the world of the Predator ( where each day is all that is real, that your appetite is your only certainty and while you strive to keep the civilized company of those you encounter at work or at school or even your own family, you are willing to surrender all in service of this need you have to dominate or take or bring into a personal relationship…a pack, if you will)
- the life of the Herd Member (you don’t question any of this Doctrine, it makes sense to you, not by virtue of it’s accuracy in reflecting the inner world that you experience, rather you are coming to see the Doctrine as another form of ‘referential authority’, which is the foundation of your decision-making as you live your life to the best of your ability, to share in the knowledge of correct action is your highest goal, confident in the rightness and order behind the world as you see it)
And these are…real realities, not just a choice I might make one day, only to decide to do something different a week later. I grew up in the worldview, (personal reality), of the Outsider, for example. I did not decide in my 4 year old mind, ‘I think I will feel and act like I did not belong anywhere and everyone around me is different and I better not admit to any of this’…I so did not! The fact of the matter is, I found myself in a world in which I was, by the natural order of things, an Outsider. So I did my best. To deal with it and, more…way more importantly, I figured out how to best cope with the world I found myself in… as we say at the Doctrine, ‘I came to relate myself to the world around me as would an Outsider.’
Pretty simple, isn’t it?
Now, about those frickin dwarfs!
I’m likin scott for the character of the 7 Dwarfs because, as I relate to the story, they existed independently of the other characters, including Ms. White. They were self-sufficiently and content to be Happy and (sometimes) Grumpy and (after a hard day’s work) Sleepy, (without a self-distorting drive to improve or educate themselves), Dopey and (with a unself-conscious acceptance of their own natural, animal natures allowing them to be free to give expression to urges and drives like se…) Sneezy and even if, made self-conscious by these urges, free to be Bashful or …er or give in to a secret ambition to secure a higher level of formal education up to an including earning a Doc(torate)
you know, as a group, the Seven Dwarfs represent the simple, here and now, eat, sleepy, ..etc life that is the foundation for the scottian worldview.
About clarkscottroger
I absolutely love how you explained your thinking about the dwarves ….its just too bad theyre Rogers.
yeh, The NOTORIOUS 7 are Rogers!!! as Zoe said, , but good try. Also, did you notice that your audience (not to diss us, but still… and not to diss you either, but still) was FAR more interested in cartoons than in Hamlet?
does this tell us anything we want to know about anything? ??? what conclusion to draw here?
I am “just sayin’ <– voted the second most annoying phrase of 2013, first was, "whatever". FYI.
jeh
Go Stephanie, having the guts to challenge you!
I have not put any thought into the dwarves, ’cause they’re a cartoon. I’m way more consumed with trying to work with/understand/change (ha!) my clark 15 year old. How do you people make it in this world? :)
Christine
Great question!
by being careful of…. er what’t the word
“…..Go Stephanie, having the guts to challenge you!”
lol we are a well-meaning people and we like our scotts
do we like our scotts “straight up or on the rocks”?
jean xox
Oh very clever sir. But no. They aren’t.
Christine, we make it because even though we constantly teeter on the edge of failure and of being found out, we strive to ‘appear’ NOT failed. We protect ourselves by appearing to succeed, and in doing so, success happens, although we sometimes (often) don’t *feel* successful.
Your 15 y/o is doing HUGE THINGS. Like driving and getting a girlfriend and managing the next stage of his education, and he’s been found out a couple of times, and has worked hard to ensure that he catches up and once more presents an acceptable front. I reckon.
Lizzi
lol one of the things that I really like about you is that in this situation (of Replying to Comments) a reasonable person ( yeah like a roger or even a scott) would have read all the other Comments before I replied to Christine… but (this is the like thing) your Comment reinforces what I was saying (only I don’t always say things as …er directly as you do) …like time travel only sideways!
Lizzi, clark never responds to me! what is with that??? Helloooooo???
Jean
no, not a not responds to… but today seems to be particularly difficult keeping my Replies straight… I dropped in at lunch and saw and responded to Christine’s and Lizzi but did not remember that I had not replied to yours (and zoe’s) first thing in the morning Comments!
My apologies for the inadvertent impression of rudness on my part.
Dear clark, I know perfectly well you are not a rude person, Quite the opposite.
My thought was I talk too much!!! xox jean
Jean
thank you, you are very gracious, I will re-double my efforts to sty focused and organized in these Comments, as all of you, in your Comments are producing some of the most interesting discussions we’ve seen on the Doctrine.
Thank you, dear clark. I know you know I am here. xox
Christine,
What Lizzi said. I do believe this explains some. I hear there is a small front of people from RI proposing a change of nomenclature to “The Clark Syndrome.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
HAHAHAHA!!!
zoe
what kind of scott was it who came up with the name!?! lol I totally get the condition and I will admit to it… but, and there’s got to be a cool word for it, what is it that take something a person would benefit by (their) association with, or attribution of and stick a name on it that would have the intended beneficiaries walking away ” oh! so I’m an imposter? but it’s a good thing, right? sure”
lol
Dunno if its a good thing but its not catagorized as mental illness cuz it afflicts everyone….hows that fer a positive?
when I went crazy the one time I had a same for a mental syndrome– It never caught on so you guys can HAVE IT. I shall bestow it up you. If you like. It is Nthers. That is people who are at the top of whatever, The Nth degree. zoe and clark…eh? ehhhhhh? I won’t explain it further because then I might have to go back to the hospital. love, jean (it actually had to do with a form of autism and a theory I had, which still makes sense to me I am sorry to say).
NOT bestow it up you. upon you. good grief what the humanities!
lol
lol
(punchline only): “…the psychiatrists collect the rent”
I so see a definite rogerian aspect with the dwarves as well, as I have mentioned yesterday. Can you imagine these 7 dwarves living separately, one on each of the seven hills? They are somehow a unit, a scottian society (clearly outside the “mainstream”), but still a unit.. The funny thing about yesterday’s post was that I had thought about the individual character’s world views while reading it, and when I came to the end, I had it totally different from you :-) Maybe our own world views also come into looking (and classifying) others..?
Stephanie
ayiee! to have learned to type back before it was necessary! lol
You are raising some very interesting (and enlightening) points: a) can a group of people be characterized as (collectively) relating itself(the group) to the world as a clark or scott or roger (a more concise way to say thing might be: can a group present the inter-relationships and dynamics that are characteristic of one of the three worldviews as and in the same way that an individual does? I believe yes, yes it can.
(the next necessary question then is): as we must with individuals when we are trying to future out which of the three types they might be, how do we infer the worldview of the group?
hey… the answer should be: the same way as we do with individuals (warning!! I am about to possibly introduce a new variable to infer worldviews…) (wait! no, I’m not, I just thought it through…nothing new) (phew!!)
to infer the worldview of a group we must look to: how the group relates itself to the world around itself! what is the group doing, how does it ‘feel’, what are it’s goals…
I’ll be back.
oh! Our worldviews do not affect the worldviews of the people we are trying to understand, but it (our worldview) certainly affects how we go about the process…
The Dwarves are;
a) a sleeper cell from an old Soviet satellite
b) a gay underground biker gang ( not that there’s anything wrong with that…)
c) a pack of scotts experiencing various middle-age crisi (s)
d) rogers
THIS is really funny!
Hey! Coyne: you’re worth your weight in gold. Get it? :)
Sadly, Ms. Pretty, that would be a considerable amount…
AHahahahaha!!! jny
yeah but that’s just dwarves… we’re talking about Dwarfs!! lol
more to follow!
um. D.
what? no, nothing….just a little experiment to make the blogosphere a better place and such, hold on (gotta get just the right mood) yeah, that’s it!
I wanted to reply to your “the dwarves are” post, but I couldn’t, so here’s a separate comment. I actually liked the Snow White version with Julia Roberts as the evil step mother. In that version, the dwarves were a group of outcasts that lived together as robbers (clearly scotts, justifying their actions that they had the right to take what they wanted since everything they once had was taken from them) in the woods after being outcast from society for not being “pretty”.
What I meant to say when I posed the theory that our own world views affect how we see other’s is not that it actually changes other’s world views, but simply how we analyze them (especially if people like me are not as knowledgeable in terms of the doctrine than you are, Clark) :-)
Stephanie
I did a video post, but it is kind of late to add it to the post… hey! wait, I’ll just add it here!
Despite the awkward presentation, the two points I was trying to make, which I read your comments as indicating that you are thinking along similar lines, the best way to determine the worldview of a group is to do what we do with individuals, i.e. observe behavior and try to in infer how they (the group or the individual) is relating themselves to the world around them… and the second thing was, to get back to the basics is the emphasis that the insights (afforded) us into the behavior of others is a value only to us, not to them. This was one of the early ‘insights’ of the Doctrine, reflecting on how often people find a ‘personality test’ in a magazine and the second thing you hear them say is “oh honey!! come here!! you really have to take this test…”
lol