the Wakefield Doctrine

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

You want some simple, un-impeachable evidence to support the assertion that I have a secondary scottian aspect? Allow me to say,

“You are living in a perfect world.”

“Everyone works as hard to get things in life as everyone else.”

It’s true! Unfortunately, the scope of the discussion required to support my provocative assertions is just a wee bit beyond a Tuesday morning post.*

The Wakefield Doctrine is a perspective. An additional perspective. And, as such, can only add to our capacity to understand the world around us and the people that make it up. (And, no, you don’t want to put the emphasis on ‘make it up’. Were you to do so, we would be all, “well, since you brought it up.” lol)

The second-greatest obstacle to employing the Wakefield Doctrine is accepting the idea that when we speak of ‘the reality of the Outsider’ or ‘the world of the Predator’ or the even, ‘the life of the Herd Member’, we are not merely referring to a category of observed behavior. I grew up in the reality of the Outsider. The ‘conditions and character’ of the reality I found myself in was that of an Outsider. I did not choose or decide or otherwise pick a world in which I was apart from; for reasons not understood, I found myself there and, as most organisms do, I adapted and learned and developed strategies for interacting with the world (and especially) the people in it. As best I could.

Didn’t think I’d find the hook to bring in the subtitle, but there it is! Three personal realities. Three styles of interacting and living in the world we find ourselves.

The hardest thing in the world:

• for a clark (Outsider) is to live in the emotional matrix of a roger (Herd Member)
• for a scott (Predator) is to remain sane in the reality of a clark (Outsider) where everything is variable and changeable from one day (or minute) to the next
• for a roger (Herd Member) is to be happy in the life of the scott (Predator), roaming the world, hunting to live and living to hunt, associated with others in a pack on a basis of mutual convenience, not mutual validation.

* Hint: it’s grounded in one of the fundamental concepts under-pinning our theory of personalty, i.e. the notion that all reality is personal. On a personal level, of course. But before you laugh, consider: what is more personal than the world as you experience it? Right?

I’m standing with a friend, looking across Bleecker Street (in Manhattan) (see photo above), at the glass front of the Cafe Angelique. You call me up and say, “Put your friend on the phone.” I remain standing next to my friend and try to ignore the masses of people flowing past us in either direction. On occasion, like a rogue wave careening down a mountain stream, a group of people slow almost to a stop, then breaks apart, some passing to my front, others to the back.

“He wants to talk to you,” my companion says, by way of explaining the cell phone, suddenly two inches from my nose. Across the street, like a vertical Syclla and Charybdis, the crosswalk light shouts, Stay! Walk! Stay!

“From what your friend says, you’re about to have a really great lunch. Tell me what you see.” The voice from the phone is calming to my ear and reassuring to my head.

I describe the plate glass window, barely containing the diners within, like the famous small-car/multiple-circus clown stunt, only in a convertible. I mention the maroon awning with the establishment’s name in white lettering and end with the vacant white bench.

“Is there any one sitting there?”

I reply, “In the restaurant?” My phone turns into inanimate plastic and metal, it’s smooth surface mocks me.

“Of course not! Cafe Angelique is one of the Top Ten places for lunch, according to the Times. The bench. Are there people sitting on the bench?” There was an up-lilt to the voice on the phone reminiscent of a child asking about Santa Claus as the family heads to the mall for Christmas shopping.

“No. Its em… wait a minute, a couple is standing in front of it. Looking in through the window. They’re waving at someone inside. Ok, there is someone sitting on the bench.”

“Thats where you’ll be having lunch today. It sounds as good as everyone says. Bon Apetit.”

I can’t wait to leave. My lunch companion has to be dragged out of the place, totally at home the minute we stepped through the doors, (somehow, after a brief conversation with the maître d′, we were waved into the cafe. The attractive couple remained on the bench. Smiling).

That, for the Wakefield Doctrine, is what personal reality is about. Nothing magic or mystifying, simply that the world, reality, our jobs and the people we interact with in our daily lives are…. subject to interpretation.

So, the perfect world? Well, that kinda involves a little more imagination. Suffice to say, our experience (of the world) are influenced by our history, our selfs and so, tend to reflect our hopes, expectations, fears, ambitions and secret dreams buried under childhood years. Now, we didn’t say ‘An enjoyable world’ or, even, ‘A good world’. We said ‘A perfect world’.

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

And now, last but not least*

(New Readers: this rounds out our survey of the three personality types of the Wakefield Doctrine. Don’t forget! A person has only one personality type because they grew up, developed and now live in a predominant worldview that has the characteristics of: the reality of the Outsider(clarks), the world of the Predatory(scotts) and the life of the Herd Member(rogers). However! We never entirely lose the potential to experience the world as ‘the other two’. We can have a certain ‘streak’ of aggressiveness (scottian) or creativity (clarklike) or emotionality (rogers) flashing through from time to time, most often at times of duress. This does not mean you ‘are both or all three’ and it does not mean that you ‘are a hybrid combination of the three, sorry to say, your system is flawed‘. lol. For example: I’m clearly and obviously a clark (jeez, did you even look at the thumbnail on this post?!!), however, I possess a significant secondary scottian aspect. This means, given the right circumstance, the proper motivation, sufficient motivation, I can be aggressive and impulsively outgoing. At times. In the aforementioned ‘right circumstance’. (lol. and that, like a certain 1940s superhero putting a pair of horn rim glasses and tie back on, ends my scottian demonstration.)

rogers grow up in a life in which things are to make sense, are quantifiable and there is a wrong way to do things and a Right Way of living. Without our rogerian counterparts, cultures and civilizations would last as long as it takes for the next scott to take over. rogers are the: accountants. chemists, engineers, judges, firefighters, politicians, clergy, Boy Scout troop leaders, oncologists, Rockette and/or Esther Williams swimmer/’dancers’; rogers compose the thrilling symphonies that make a tear come to the eye, write the best sellers that seem to be in front of everyone, all of a sudden, they are ShaNaNa and they are Ed Sullivan; rogers are the core of every military, most government organization and the entirety of ‘Middle Management’. Without rogers, the planes would fly until they didn’t (gravity is rogerian, spontaneous combustion is scottian and worn-down critical parts no-one pays attention to are clarks), there would be no baseball, no cross-country skiing; rogers are the chefs (scotts are the short-order cooks and clarks are the busboys(who-somehow-cover-for-both); rogers are both the judges and the DAs and, in a business setting, they will always tell people who the reason a thing is done a certain way is because it’s here, in what we call ‘the Bible’.

Two things about rogers that don’t have a parallel in clarks or scotts:

1. referential authority whether a member of the clergy or a politician or a world-renowned chef or a high school civics teacher or the creator of the Dewey Decimal system, the reason and basis for them (the roger) telling you what to do is because, “that’s how it’s down/ they always suggest that approach/God tells us to.” It is never because anyone directly involved in the discussion, management meeting or symphony performance requires it, it is because ‘that’s the Right Way to do things.’
2. rogerian expression. This is a unique-to-rogers thing with language. You will recognize a rogerian expression by the sudden outburst of startled-yet-quite-genuine laughter upon hearing: ‘oh man! Look at how much they deducted for aggravated security’ or ‘no, I am going to wait until they release the un-abashed edition’ perhaps ‘I know I have to give them the bad news with the good news, I just won’t baby-coat it’ or, if you’re lucky: ‘ I have to say that as a professional class, most real estate agents are much too self-absorbent…”

* so not least. Most, credible estimates of the percentage of the population spending their days looking out over an ever-changing sea of: metal-tagged ears, yellow-plastic electric-fence insulators divining vast oceans of grazing to be on the order of 66% You read that correctly! You and your tight knit group of bffs? At least one of them has the dirt (real or imaginary) on the others and will be happy to share it in exchange for you stepping aside (just a little) so they might better be able to reach out** to everyone else. aka as a roger.

** ‘reach out’, ‘action item’, ‘what’s measured, improves’, ‘drill down’, ‘informativity’, ‘pain point’ and… (this one I wasn’t aware of, but I do want to thank the roger who wrote it so I could end this list strong: ‘Emotional leakage: Anger or disappointment that transfers from one person to another.’