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

Let’s get right to the reprint, shall we?

“…where the sun is silent” (l sol race) the Wakefield Doctrine (yeah, Dante in the morning….what’s not to like?)

November 3, 2013

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

(A Monday Post in 2 Parts)

Part 1

Struggling with the book. Getting tangled up in the effort to present simple factual information without (it) strangling on footnotes, ibids and op.cits. Everything seems to come across fairly straight-forwardly in a blog Post, but when I try to write ‘the Chapter: rogers’, I stare at the screen for hours!  I suspect that I’m over-thinking it (yeah, I know… no way I’d do that!).
Anyway, I got up early this morning and, at some point, the though came to me, ‘hey! weren’t there 2 new Readers who recently left Comments? They seemed to like the idea of the Doctrine but (also) seemed to not quite get what we do here… why dontcha explain the Wakefield Doctrine to them in a single Post!‘

Michelle ( Rubber Shoes in Hell ) wrote: ‘This is fascinating…‘   (and)  Kathy ( SMARTLiving365.com ) wrote: ‘ you should be awarded the Noble Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 VMA for this blog*  …I’m still just tying to figure out what in the heck you mean by “the doctrine.”

so… new Readers? try this:

The Wakefield Doctrine is a way of (re) framing the question we so often finding ourselves asking, ‘now why on earth would they go and say a thing like that? I really thought I knew them better!‘

The Wakefield Doctrine is, at it’s heart, a question, not an answer. The question that the Wakefield Doctrine would have us ask is: ‘how is that person relating themselves to the world around them?’ Note the wording of our question. We do not ask ‘how is that person relating to the world‘, we are focused on how they relate themselves to the world. This is, in part, because the Wakefield Doctrine maintains that there are three ways to relate oneself to the world, as the Outsider(clarks), the Predator(scotts) or as the Herd Member(rogers). Actually, the Wakefield Doctrine goes way beyond this simple three perspectives approach. The Doctrine is predicated on the idea that that we experience life on a personal level, what we refer to as worldviews and it is the worldview that we grow up and develop in that accounts for our ‘personality type’. For the Wakefield Doctrine, a person does not get born with (or be given by parents, family and caregivers) a personality type. Rather we say, ‘we are all born with the capability to deal with any of the three worldviews and at a very early age we settle into one of them. What others may call a ‘personality type’, we recognize as the coping skills, social strategies and style of interacting with others, that is appropriate to the reality we are living in… we become a clark or scott or roger.’ By the way, while we never lose the capacity of ‘the other two worldviews’, our reality is always just one of the three (predominant worldviews).

The rest (of the Wakefield Doctrine) is just plain fun. Learning the characteristics of the three worldviews helps us correctly infer ‘how the person is relating themselves to the world around them’.

(Clearly this ‘lets explain the Doctrine in half a Post’ is not gonna work… but, it’s helpful to me to try and organize the information necessary to (the) understanding of our little personality theory. … yeah!  bullet points! who the hell doesn’t love bullet points? (bullet points motto: ‘because we don’t have grammar, we seem so much more understandable!’):

• the reason we learn the characteristics of the 3 worldviews is to help us recognize a person’s worldview… we do not, I repeat, do not assign categories, types or any other designation that implies ‘you are now this personality type’, on the basis of observed behavior… (quick tip: observe the person, eliminate the dominant worldview that there’s no frickin way they could be a (clark or scott or roger)…continue to observe …make the call
• you can’t get it wrong and you can’t break it…. a person relates themselves to the world around them (in a certain characteristic way), you are not deciding anything other than which (of the three worldviews) appears to be most consistent with their behavior
• the Wakefield Doctrine is for you, not them
• ‘everyone does everything, at one time or another’
• the goal of the Wakefield Doctrine is to help us  to see the world as the other person is experiencing it

 

Part 2

‘rogers are mean, scotts are cruel and clarks are heartless’

This is a perfect illustration of the ‘everyone does everything at one time or another Rule’
We start with the premise:  one chooses to be unkind to another, how does this manifest in the three worldviews?  (I could simply say, ‘why are clarks heartless and scotts cruel and rogers mean, rather than say, clarks are cruel and rogers are heartless?)

‘rogers are mean’ because when they want to negatively affect someone, they do it within the context of the Herd. They will gossip and talk among each other about the target (of this negativity). They will never go up to the target (person) and say ‘you are such a slut’. Instead, they will say to each other, ’isn’t she such a slut’? It will be the group opinion that will constitute the negative effect. In other words, if an outsider comes on the scene and needs information regarding this person, the herd will make a point of offering an opinion.
(Now class, why is that so rogerian?)
(God, I so love to lecture)

The answer is, of course, because the effort to affect a non-herd member is always manifested among and within the Herd. No single member (of the Herd) could, or would approach the ’target person’ directly and certainlywould not say anything to their face. (Much more likely would be the situation where one (of the rogers) would get the person in private and explain that, being their friend, they wanted to let them know that ‘everyone thinks you’re a slut’, (with the implication that, perhaps they did not agree with everyone).

All right, then how about scotts? Why cruel instead of heartless or mean?
Because it is the nature of predators, to act alone. Granted scotts will gather in packs when the occasion rises, but for the most part, they act/hunt alone. And when a scott is being ‘negative’ it is expressed in a manner that can only be called cruelty. Part of this is the result of the fact that scotts will act directly, but impersonally. They enjoy the efforts of the prey to resist, (hey that squirming and trying to get away is totally a part of the whole hunting experience. But! its nothing personal, the scott is hungry and the prey is food. So in the case of scotts, while this may appear to be cruelty, it’s simply the ‘way of nature’.

Clarks? Heartless? No! Say it ain’t so!! If any Reader needs it explained, then you need to read the content in these Pages a bit more.

 

* the first half of the quote is a re-enactment, dramatization and slight paraphrasing of what a Kathy-like blogger may have been feeling as she began to type her Comment, everything after ‘VMA for this blog’ is what Kathy of SMARTLiving  actually wrote in her Comment.

*