the Wakefield Doctrine

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This Wakefield Doctrine is not just a fun thing to do while you are:  at work/and are supposed to be working, at school/and really should be paying attention, waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store/ and really need to be thinking how to better provide for the family, making love/and how can you possibly be thinking about that problem at work, apologizing to your boss/when you know that were it not your family you would be telling him to stick the job in an inappropriate spot, sitting in traffic/and unable to let go of the past… nope! absolutely not the only thing that our little personality theory is good for!

The Wakefield Doctrine is a very useful tool to aid in that increasingly difficult and frustrating task of ‘being a better you’. Sure, you have a great track record working on the obvious things, the ‘lose that Holiday weight’, the ‘get into  better physical shape’, getting better grades, earning more money by working overtime, etc…etc and etracetra. But, what about the things in your head, in your heart… you know the kinds of thing (about yourself) that you barely speak of to anyone else (and if and when you do, it always comes with a laugh line). What about those?

The Wakefield Doctrine is very useful with these …issues. Starting with the fact that ….issues (like these) are shared by others, even when, by all appearances, they. (these other people who you know… your friend, your spouse, that woman who seems to have it so together, what with 5 kids and a job, your relative… even your kids and spouse!) What the Wakefield Doctrine offers us is this:

1. we all start life with the potential to experience it in one of three ways: as an Outsider (clarks), as a Predator (scotts) and as a Herd Member (rogers)
2. that at a rather early point in our lives, we settle into one (of these three) and it becomes our reality (personal reality, nevertheless real…reality)
3. our ‘personality type’ is simply a reflection of the coping strategy that is best suited to the reality that we are experiencing as we grow up
4. …we never lose the capacity to experience the world of ‘the other two worldviews’

…so when you look around and wonder how on earth does that other person act like they don’t have a care in the world, cheerful and enthusiastic each day, …despite their dead-end job, or that women with the sick parent and the ill children, looking peaceful as she waits patiently in line or that young man who sits 3 cubicles away quietly working, always with a kind thought…when he thinks no one is looking. They are all experiencing life in one of three personal realities… as clarks or scotts or rogers and you have that same capacity.

….coolest thing about the Wakefield Doctrine as an aid to self improvement and ‘jeez! I got to stop doing this to myself!’ ?  You don’t have to learn anything new. All you need do is ‘see the world as the other person is experiencing it‘. Know that what they seem to find simple, is also available to you.

* (this was what started me thinking, yesterday, that I totally could write a Post a day ahead… I was wrong! lol  however, I still like the sound of the subtitle with this expression in it, so in keeping with the Truth in Blogging Law, here is a (preliminary definition of the term): handpuppet friend, (n) you’ve been friends for as long as you can remember, but increasingly over recent years, it takes you to ‘make the call’, (once the conversation starts, it’s just as it’s always been…like no time has passed.) You wonder if it’s worth the effort, sometimes you berate yourself for continuing the charade, but there was so much history and still, even when you know that it’s only because you insist on holding onto the past, you enjoy the interaction…. letting go is an option, not a requirement.)

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

I really wanted to participate in the Finish the Sentence Friday that our friend Kristi ( motto: ‘no, I’m the clarklike one!’) who is one of the co-hostinae at that bloghop. FtSF is the first bloghop I participated in and remains to this day, the second best bloghop in the whole damn ‘sphere! Unfortunately,  I could not come up with a decent post and, even though I might otherwise write something about the Doctrine, not having participated, (in FtSF), for a while, I wasn’t comfortable writing my normal…. ‘yeah, but it does relate to the Wakefield Doctrine because….’ Post.

So, since I’m obviously up for a Post, following is a reprint Post from way the hell back in 2011.

Hey!  Cyndito!!  Remember last Saturday, we were talking about rogers having a writing style that makes them identifiable on the basis of a writing sample?  Well, this reprint has 2 block quote sections, one is written by a roger (in fact, the progenitor roger) and the other by me. Can you see the stylistic differences??  rogers do that ‘well-rounded words’ thing so well.

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‘Bill before Congress to Mandate Liposuction for Over-weight Teens’

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Sunday.
Day of Rest.
Quick and Easy Post.

To keep all our little reddit friends from getting too disappointed that this Post is not as outrageous as the title might imply, and thereby running the risk of having a bunch of rogers wearing the finest clothes from the Virgin-Geek Fashion Line ( from the renowned House of Atari Couturiers).  Hey, this is not a true story! This is a ‘made-up’ story. As in not true. Does anyone out there read complete stories anymore?

But lets have a quick Wakefield DoctrineLesson of the Day: Today’s Post was submitted to one of those referrer sites (rhymes with ‘geddit’) today. Got lots of hits and actually got Comments…angry and shocked Comments from Readers who felt hurt and injured by the attack on over-weight people. Of the three which is/are most likely to be offended:

• clark:  nah, not paying enough attention, unless the clark in question has decided that the problem is mean people who need to be taught to be nice, then perhaps (the clark) might formulate a plan of action…nah…never get out of the formulating stage;
• scott: nah, too short an attention and the inability to focus on abstract concept of people submitting opinions via email on a thought expressed on a blog Post about personality theory…unless they was naked pitchas;
• roger: bingo!! we have ourselves a Winner, the most likely to be offended by…by…well, truth be told by nearly everything is the rogerian Reader of tabloid blog Post titles.

Well, that certainly was informative and might throw them off our trail, if the Niceness Police show up, tell ’em to go to Mel’s house.

(I know, lets do a ‘re-print’ from within this here Doctrine blog here).

Once upon a time, in a land not very far from Clark’s house… there were three atypical college friends who engaged in many of the atypical activities of their day. They went to school; they played guitars at ear-splitting volumes in dorm rooms, and sneered derisively at those who objected; one drank too, too much; one not at all, but subsisted on Oreos and Coke. One became a Baptist with a capital ” B”. They played in rock bands, worked all sorts of jobs, one got married way too soon. They all wrestled with the Issues Of Their Day, with varying degrees of resolve and/or success.  And in spite of all the atypical ups and downs, they managed to form a very unique bond. And , to their surprise, the bond has lasted much longer than any one of them might have thought. Longer than some marriages, jobs, bands, or Baptist dogma. And after many hours of conversation about just about everything turned into years and decades of same, there came to be what was, and is now, referred to as … the Wakefield Doctrine.

Psychology and psychiatry texts  make constant reference to type A/B/C personalities and their interactions. We are somewhat along those same lines. For us, those references have evolved into our Wakefield Doctrine, which we have found to be much more palatable. To err may be human, but to create a categorization system that explains all of human behavior in a somewhat cryptic nutshell is absolutely divine. And, we have noticed along the way, a heck of a lot of fun. In an “improvisational academia” sort of way, we gleefully invent terms as we go along to describe conditions and situations that may not have existed previously. And yet, our system also works perfectly well when taken perfectly and totally seriously.

The basic premise is that there are three fundamental personality types; and much can be known and discovered about oneself ( and any other aspect of life ) by learning to identify your own basic type; how to identify the types of others; and then consider all the ramifications of the interactions. In short…this explains everything, but only from a point of view that holds human dynamics as the prime component.

The Wakefield Doctrine is predicated upon the idea that everyone experiences the world/reality differently, from one of three overlapping but distinctive perspectives. It also proposes that our personalities are but  a result of our perception, of our habitual responses to the world. The Wakefield Doctrine maintains that this characteristic perception of reality can be grouped into three distinct types, called for reasons stated elsewhere, clarks, scotts and rogers.

Born with the potential to view the world in one of these three ways, all people possess the characteristics of all (three) but soon (by age 7 or so) ‘become one of the three.  Put another way: we also possess the potential to see the world as aclark or a scott or a roger. It is only the predominance of qualities from one (over the other two) that makes us what we are. No one is only clarklike or scottian or rogerian.

The value of the Wakefield Doctrine is that once you can see the world ‘through the eyes’ of another, behavior becomes understandable. If a scott sees the world as a predator (would) then all action is predicated on interacting with the world as a predator. This is distinctly different from a roger, who seeing the world as a social being, predicates action and reaction on the basis of a world in which the intereactions of the herd is the dominant theme.

The above notwithstanding, following is the ‘eureka moment’ for the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers (the Wakefield Doctrine):

At one time in the past, Scott (the progenitor scott) worked at a music store doing, among other things, repair on equipment. Visiting him one day I witnessed an interaction with a customer that was to be my eureka moment.

A customer came into the store and presented to Scott a ‘double cassette recorder’  This machine had dual volume tone controls (for each cassette) and it had one master volume control.   The customer said to  Scott, “this thing is brand new, it worked for a couple of days, then it stopped working entirely, I can’t figure out what is wrong”.

Scott looked at the recorder briefly, took some electrical tape from under the counter, carefully put the tape over the master control volume (which he turned back up), slid the recorder over the counter and said to the customer, “there its all right now”.

The customer  tried the recorder, ran it through it’s paces, saw that it worked like new and walked out of the store without another word; totally satisfied that his cassette recorded had been fixed.

From this point to the present day, I have been watching the behavior of others with the thought in mind, “What kind of world does that person live in?”

Mr. B? We are all a little tired from last night’s call in…a little la musique des dinosaures?