the Wakefield Doctrine

     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 built 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 a clark 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?”