the Wakefield Doctrine

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

This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop. Hosted by Denise, it’s a fun way to see if you can find any doors inside your head that you may have forgotten were there. The rules are simplest: write a story using the prompt word and keep it to six sentences.

Funny about these ‘hops. They allow us to sometimes catch a glimpse of the process of making stories up. Don’t mean to get technical and all Oxford Literary Review on you, but that’s pretty much as fun and interesting as writing the stories. This week is no exception.

At the start of the week I was thinking how maybe I’d do another ‘Missing Starr’ Six Sentence story. I’ve enjoyed the previous installments. (In fact, here is the link to the last ‘Missing Starr’ story and it actually is a ‘set up’ for this week’s Six).

Fine, I’ve got an idea, at least of the characters and setting, but nothing to get me running for the keyboard, ya know? And then, for god knows what reason, I flashed on a scene from the movie, ‘True Romance’, and what got caught in my head wasn’t the scene, it was the background music. I went and found the song on youtube and from the first note, somehow, it was the Six Sentence Story. Weird.

The word this week:

INVESTIGATE

The neon hand flashed red and Hazel Grover felt the crowd of lunchtime pedestrians surge and jostle at the edge of the sidewalk at the intersection of Empire and Washington Streets, across from the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge; her curiosity and an impulse to investigate drove her from the offices of Desiderata Investigation and Conflict Resolution, LLC ten minutes after turning down her employer’s invitation to join him for lunch.

She caught a sudden motion in the red velvet curtains covering the plate-glass windows, a flesh-colored arm retreating like an mis-applied apostrophe and, feeling her resolve flutter and pulsate in rhythm with the neon message shouting mutely at the passersby, ‘GIRLS!’ and ‘ALL NUDE!!’, the partial redundancy ignited a mischievous smile and she followed it into the lounge.

A sudden blast of air conditioning brushed her dark hair from her eyes as she surveyed the interior; to the right a row of booths, on the left a circular stage and, dividing the interior down the middle, a bar, it’s stacked rows of amber and gold liquor bottles serving both as a wall and a prism for the light that ricocheted from mirrored walls.

On the stage a young woman playing hide and go seek with a glowing circle of light decided a brass pole was a perfect hiding place, her decision roundly applauded by the concentric rings of men; to the right she caught sight of Ian sitting in a booth talking to a short man holding a large cigar and, leaning into a step towards him, heard a woman’s voice say, “Are you alone?’

As the blonde woman stepped confidently towards her, Hazel’s eidetic memory provided a name out of a throw-away conversation from a year before, Diane Tierney, hostess and manager of the dancers at the Bottom of the Sea. The other woman’s eyes flickered in the direction of Hazel’s glance and, with a new, more personal smile said, “You must be Hazel Grover, Ian has told me so much about you.”

https://youtu.be/Vf42IP__ipw?t=1m17s

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

It is characteristic to the point of being axiomatic that clarks have a drive to self-improve themselves. While one might argue (not without a reasonable chance of being successful) that this ambition is a conceit grounded in a mistaken premise, it is one of the defining characteristics of the Outsider.

That being said, the Wakefield Doctrine is, in no small part, an expression of this need to improve. To be more precise, the Doctrine is an effort to make sense of the world, in service of discovering the deficiency that (presumably) lead to our Outsider status.

We have three worldviews: the Outsider (clarks), the Predator (scotts) and the Herd Member (rogers). The beauty part of the Doctrine is that these worldviews and their respective qualities, abilities, capacities, strengths and vulnerabilities are not limited to one per person. Rather, we are all born with the potential to experience the world as do each of the three. For reasons uncertain, we all, all of us, at a very early age find ourselves in one of these three worldviews. We grow, learn and strategies and styles to contend with the world and the people around us, appropriate to the character of our reality.

This post is about rogers. Or rather, it concerns rogers. We are reaching out to rogers for help in understanding their world. (The Wakefield Doctrine is amazing, in part, because with it’s principles and perspectives we are able to gain an appreciation of how the other two ‘personality types’ are perceiving the world. However, there are limits to ‘how far into the other two worldviews we are able to see’. So when we come across something that doesn’t make any sense in our world but appears to be significant to a person of a different worldview, we’re all, ‘Hold on! That might be something useful to understand.’

…anyway. Trying to keep this under 500 words.

scotts are aggressive. They love to wrestle and they need to establish their ranking among anyone/everyone around them. It’s nothing personal, it’s what a pack member does.

clarks are reflective. They try to figure out what’s going among anyone/everyone around them. It’s nothing personal, it’s what an outsider does.

rogers…. they are emotional, their very reality is grounded in feelings and emotion. They must establish their relationship with everyone around them. It’s totally personal because they are members of the Herd.

So the question for rogers:

scotts wrestle and clarks think and, rogers ‘wheedle and cajole’

A very distinct style of interaction, neither negative nor aggressive, necessarily. However, (here is where the practical value is to be found…hopefully), to wheedle and cajole is the dominant style of interaction among rogers. Seeing how they account for the majority of the population, it ends up being the preeminent style of interaction in business. I’m in business.

I’d like to learn how to ‘wheedle and cajole’

PART 2

As often happens, a comment (by Val) frames the discussion in a way that is conducive not simply for an elaboration of the original thesis, but a branching point.

“You can be intellectually trained to wheedle and cajole. It’s a skill that doesn’t come naturally but “Hey, that’s a nice tie or what is your opinion on.. . . .?”

Says Valerie, in part, in her comment.

Of course, students of the Doctrine are all, “intellectually trained!!’…. but we thought this was about rogers!” (lol). And they would be correct, (in the implication of that distinction) as Val is in her assertion that ‘Wheedling and cajolery’ are behaviors/social strategies that can be learned and taught.

With the Everything Rule* at hand, allow me to digress on the matter of learning the nature of the three predominant worldviews. The Doctrine is fun and useful because you can read the basic description of each of the three personality types and proceed to observe them in the people around you, first time out. In part this is because the description of each of our ‘personality types’ is, in fact, a description of a person’s relationship to the world around them. Fine. There are, however, depths to each of the three personal realities not readily, if at all, available to the person not native to it.

A few years ago I wrote a series of scenaria intended to portray the differences between the three worldviews. (In one of them), I had a young woman by the name of Emily apply for a job as a waitress. She arrived in the middle of the noon rush. Everyone, the owner and the staff were flat-out busy. Emily sat and watched the employees try to keep up. I proposed three things that Emily could do while sitting and waiting. One of them was: get up and clear tables and otherwise help wherever she could.

The rogers among the Readers went berserk. ‘You can’t do that!’ She can’t do that!’ That’s just wrong.’ I noticed two things about the reaction: 1) it was only the rogers who felt that way and B) they were really serious and upset. Naturally, bells were going off in my head. ‘Whats up with that?’ I thought. To make a long illustration short, by talking to rogers I realized that there was ‘an artifact’ in their reality that did not have a counterpart in the world of clarks or scotts, called ‘referential authority’. And, further validating the fun of this here Doctrine here, as soon as it was identified in terms that I could comprehend, the rogers were all, “Well, duh! Of course thats what it is.”

Authority (and power), when invoked by a roger, is always a third party. Be it a clergyman informing the congregation about what God told him to tell them, to a politician invoking the power of the ballot box, to the HR person who finishes the new employee orientation by saying, ‘This book of SOPs? We call it the Bible’. That is referential authority as manifested in the reality of the Herd Members.

So naturally, when I saw something that implied that rogers were accomplishing something that a clark or a scott could not, despite all conditions being the same, I thought, ‘Well, there’s something going on deeper in the world of the rogers than I can see. Lets call it ‘wheedle and cajole’ and see if we can’t infer a deeper understanding.

Hey Val thanks for the Comment… I may have veered off to the left. Will return to the topic soon.

*  We will recall that the Everything Rule states, ‘everyone does everything, at one time or another‘ The three worldviews are not mutually-exclusive personal realities. Originally intended to remind us that there is no such thing as ‘a clark thing’ or ‘thats something that only scotts do’ or even, ‘those rogers are different like that’; rather we say that a thing (or an intention, a thought or an urge, an occupation and a mere dalliance) that exists in one reality will manifest in the other two realities. Differently. As appropriate to the characteristics of the worldview. Example: scotts provide the archetypical cop. They (scotts) have a natural affinity for action (before reflection), a love of speed and loud noises and an almost irresistible urge to chase prey. Plus they are aggressive and confident and ….certain. Not surprisingly they make ‘good’ cops. However, the Everything Rule admonishes us to consider how ‘cop’ manifests in the reality of clarks and rogers. Because there are most certainly rogerian and clarklike policemen and women.

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

Hey Friends! OMG it’s Thursday??? We’re on tonight, at 10pm eastern with “10 things I’ve learned about blogging from other FTSF bloggers.” Should be fun yes? Kenya G. Johnson‘s and my special co-host tonight (and sentence thinker-upper) is Mardra Sikora of Grown Ups and Downs.

Link up with any of us here at Grown Ups and Downs:
https://mardrasikora.com/

Here at Sporadically Yours:
https://www.kenyagjohnson.com/Or here at my place (Finding Ninee):
http://www.findingninee.com/The linkup is open through late Sunday evening! Hope to see you there

OK, if you guys say so… Sure! That’d be fun.

The Sentence “10 things I’ve learned about blogging from other FTSF bloggers…”

“… is there is no place like known.”

OK, enough of the cutesy movie/cultural reference. I’m also resolving to go easy on the social metaphor of high school and other common ‘real’ world experiences. The simple fact is that, as the first bloghop I participated in, FTSF is where I met the people who remain friends to this day, here in the inter-world. So that really should be the leadoff item

1. “…is that that is where my friends have been all along.” (After all, how many ‘co-workers/neighbors/classmates/PTA members/co-standing-in-line-in-the-supermarket/’hey,-there’s-someone-I-think-you’d-really-enjoy-meeting’/’Excuse-me-haven’t-we-met’ people are there in the world of flesh-and-blood for the average person of the average demographic?)
2. There is no such thing as ‘writer’s block’. There is only Self-Importance (and his attractive, but somewhat slutty, sister, Self-Consciousness); when we either: a) throw fear to the wind or 2) love our story enough to put our sensitivity in second place we are able to see there is no end to ‘story ideas’ or ‘things to write about’. All we need do is tell everyone else what we know about them.
3. A trick I learned a lot later in the game than I should be comfortable admitting to, (the) ‘multiplying bloghop effect’. This is to not only cite other ‘hops we are participating in, but to count them as Items (or even multiple Items) in a given List.
4. The best way to hide a bad blog post is to write another. The collective memory of (anyone’s) readership is usually measured in femtoseconds.¹
5. 1 Learn a couple of html shortcodes and dazzle your Readers right over the mid-point of a List.
6. Acceptance (There is a lesser-publicized aspect of being accepted, especially in the social goulash of this here blogosphere here and that is, ‘the fastest way to be accepted is to practice acceptance’.)
7. (Crowd Sourced Item here) (No, seriously! If anyone is reading this post and does not have the time and/or the content to submit a list, send it in to me in the Comments section below. I will totally paste it here, with complete attribution and such.
8. “… that, as found over at the Ten Things of Thankful, there is, in fact, a Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) and it is a tool without compare, as long as one remembers that everyone has their own copy.
9. If a blog post gets a single hit, the premise upon which it is based is valid and unassailable.
10. Secret Rule 1.3 (‘[T]he approaching and, if perceived within two or less items of the [a]fore-mentioned list, (and) therefore assuring completion of a said list of Ten Items, may be counted as an Item and cited as the final Item…’ [op.cit., ibid SBoR/BoSR 2014])

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

‘No! Wait! This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story. You’re in the right…. well, at the correct address.’

It’s just that, as if we didn’t have an issue with the chrono-demographics already, the photo this week is a way-out-of-time cultural reference. I won’t describe or otherwise identify those in the photo, simply because if you don’t recognize the characters, you won’t care. No matter if I wrote an entire post on who and when and why. (Most of the time, the young demonstrate their fealty to the preceding generation with gestures of curiosity about the past. Their interest is, for the most part, confined to the person telling the tale of their youth, not the actual period in history. When you get right down to it, any era or period in history that we have not actually lived in, is just that, a ‘period in history’, no different from the Pleistocene Era, the Age of Enlightenment, the Roaring 20s or the Summer of Love.)

In any event, Denise is the host of the Six Sentence Story and each (and every) week she posts a prompt word and invites one and all to write a story that is Six (and only six) Sentences in length.

This week the word is:

SHED

“Plot and narrative be damned! Nouns and verbs and objects are all that are necessary,” his reflection in the computer screen smiled like an invitation embossed on the finest vellum cardstock; the part of his brain he referred to as the ‘medulla metaphora’ begin to stir as if willing itself into dominance, very much like…. .

Staring at the ellipsis, he faltered, sat back in his chair and watched it writhe on the end of his last sentence, like an exotic dancer in a strip club at ten o’clock on a weekday morning, a tantalizing trail to nowhere. Glancing at the crumpled telegram that sat like a paper boulder next to his coffee, he saw only the words, ‘shorten’ ‘UP’ and the laconic initials, alone at the bottom of the page, like children standing precariously in their parents shoes, PB.

Sensing the approaching deadline, the would-be writer felt the pressure grow, as dependent clauses and compound sentences grew like barnacles on his mind, a siren call of filigree and nonessential adornment.

‘Get thee behind me,’ having shed the excess verbiage with the fervor of a man in a life raft full of bowling balls, he realized he’d reached number Six.

(staying with and clearly ignoring my own advice, …remember this song?!*)