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

easily one of the most challenging aspects of the Wakefield Doctrine, the ‘everything Rule’ lies at the very heart of our view of personality types.  Lets remind ourselfs how the Wakefield Doctrine views ‘personality types.

the Wakefield Doctrine maintains that we are born with the potential to experience the world as one of three characteristic personal realities (aka worldviews) and, at an early age we find ourselves in one (our predominant worldview).
A three year old confronting a world in which life is a constant (and beautiful) struggle, his/her very reality demands quick reactions and constant alertness,  the child’s relationship to the world is that of the predator. Everyday life is both a challenge and a celebration, the child learns that the only way to cope with the world is to remain ever in the moment …alive, un-distracted by the abstract, eschewing the internal world of self-questioning and introspection, thriving in the concrete and objective world.  For this child-soon-to-be-an-adolescent-then-adult, life is simple:  eat, sleep, play, hunt. This child will grow up with what we call the scottian personality type. ( Of course, the ‘other two worldviews’, the children living in and contending with those realities will develop the social styles, the coping strategies, the compensations that reflect the reality of the Outsider/clark and the Herd Members/rogers).  The Wakefield Doctrine does not really concern itself with favorite colors, preferences in food, most desired mates… all we need to know is, ‘how does that person relate themselves to the world around them?’

the (three) personality types of the Wakefield Doctrine represent the (individual’s) best effort to cope with the world, as they experience it. The reality of the three worldviews is essential to understanding and effectively using the Wakefield Doctrine as a tool to better understanding the people in our lives.

Ok, so you’ve learned the characteristics of the three worldviews sufficiently enough to allow you to identify the predominant worldview of the people you know and encounter everyday: the girl at the supermarket with the streak of purple in her hair, the boy who sits behind you in History class who always says something that makes you laugh (but no one else seems to hear him), the guy at the gas station with the odd, pressed-lip-smile, the husband who traces outlines of the tools on the pegboard in his workshop, the daughter who is so pretty but insists on spoiling a perfectly good outfit with such odd accessories, the nephew who is so intelligent and yet is getting straight ‘Cs’, the wife who is so sexy and while you’re glad everyone at every social occasion compliments you, sometimes you feel left out.   All these people you can now recognize as being clarks and scotts and rogers.  It’s tempting to think,  ‘My cousin is a carpenter and he’s a wild man I wonder if being a carpenter is a scottian job?’  or maybe, you reflect on last Summer and recall, ‘everyone was so excited about the family vacation, except my daughter, who seemed to be going out of her way to express her indifference, could that be a clark thing?”

‘the everything Rule’ states that: ‘everyone does everything, at one time or another’  

The Rules establishes two things:

1. (it serves to) remind us that anyone can be a firefighter or a policeman, an accountant or a groundskeeper or a librarian, a physician or a chef
   
2. (insists that) it’s incumbent upon us to put ourselves in the worldview of the person we are (trying) to understand and see what it means to be: a cop or a firefighter, a stay-at-home-mom or an insurance adjuster,  from the other person’s perspective, from within their worldview (not ours).

While we all know that scotts have a certain natural…. enthusiasm for an occupation like law enforcement and, therefore tend to excel at it, (what’s not to like for a scott?!!  chase people! drive cars really fast while making a lot of noise… shooting off guns and capturing people (yeah, handcuffs too!)…it’s easy to see why our scottian brothers and sisters like the work), there are very successful clarks and rogers in this line of work. It’s just that for a clark, while the excitement is attractive, they will see their role as being one to protect the innocent, to right wrongs. As too, our rogerian friends who would be cops, they would experience the job as a chance to maintain the Law (and what roger wouldn’t totally love that idea?).

So the everything Rule is there to remind us that when we seek to understand another person, the key is to see the world as they are experiencing it. So when your child come to you and says, “Mom!! Mom!! Tomorrow in school we have Career Day and we’re supposed to pick one thing that we think we should be good at and I signed up,   (for)Librarian!!!  (for) Firefighter!! (for) Ruiner-of-many-a-man’s-life!!! (for) brain surgeon!!”

So that’s ‘the everything Rule’.  (And this Rule applies to everything, not just jobs.  It applies to feelings and ambitions, goals and obsessions, passion and depression.  (yes, even something as subjective as ‘depression’ is amenable to better understanding through application of ‘the everything Rule’!  Simple:  understand the person’s worldview, put yourself in that worldview…what is ‘depression’ in that reality?  And it is different… that I guarantee. And it is difficult to achieve, this perspective…that I also guarantee. But the whole idea of the Wakefield Doctrine is to become able to see the world as the other person is experiencing it.)

(…. I knew you’d think that!)