the Wakefield Doctrine

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

Revelations 4:10-11 notwithstanding, today is (a) Monday.

What say we peek into the archives for a chance that there’s a post written on everyone’s favorite topic that we’d forgotten we’d already wrote. No, better yet! Let’s find something that, seeing it anywhere other than these Pages, we’d have a better than even chance of not recognizing our own writing.

Hey! No for nothin’ but, lets go with this here RePrint here. It’s old. It’s based on research. (Wikipedia, how do I love thee..) and it’s about rogers. (Never hurts to play to the predominant (by the numbers, at any rate) demographic of the world of Readers.)

New Readers: It bears repeating: the Wakefield Doctrine is gender, age, culture neutral. We’re talking about a lifeform’s relationship to the world around them and the people who make it up. It’s not about societal expectation. It don’t care about the physical condition, capacity or ability. Don’t got nothin’ to do with how old a being is. No Sir/Madam/Editorial Plural. The goal… No! forget the goal (of this thing), as we possess only a weak tertiary rogerian aspect, so we eschew ambition to appeal to the masses. (What? Yeah, we do know that we’re ‘writing online’, i.e. tying non-material words on virtual paper. Your point? Fine, we are massless. We’re the gluon of internetistic particles. Fine. But, the one ambition we do maintain is to find clarks. And to offer the insights and experiences we have gained by our totally serendipitous encounter with this thing, this small theory, that others might identify with it.

on with the Reprint!

“hey! Sunday Morning!!” (this is) Saturday Night calling, “put Sunday Evening on the line” the Wakefield Doctrine

March 3, 2013

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

 

Hey, somehow the day totally got away from me. Thought about doing a re-print Post, realized that this really would not be necessary, I believe that I am prepared to accept that the people who read this blog are not likely to forget us if we take one Sunday off.

Working on another Installment for Allegory Monday (which might fall on a Tuesday this week).

Had a good Drive last night. Mostly Doctrine shop talk, i.e. how to be more accessible and is the terribly amusing, albeit inflammatory language good or bad for the Doctrine. This is a debate that has been on-going since the first Post at this here blog here.
And as (this) debate flares up periodically, usually coinciding with an increase in new Readers.  The argument goes:

hey! the Doctrine is meant to be fun! So if we write something about how scotts are all, like, totalpredators, or say something subtle like, ‘how do you tell the difference between  six rogers at an engineering symposium  and a herd of Herefords?* there’s no need to worry that the Readers are going to get all mad and stop reading.
(vs)
Come on, grow up! You have many more Readers than before and most importantly, they are (increasingly)  real people and skilled blog writers and are showing a very real interest in the Wakefield Doctrine. You need to be more moderate in how the Doctrine is described, illustrating the characteristics of the three personality types is key, but if you use terms and words that piss people off, what are you gaining? Moderation, in the interest of attracting more Readers that’s what you’ve been after all these years. Ya know?

The debate continues.
Clearly the tone of ‘the conversation’ that fills Posts here has changed over the time we have been writing this blog. And that is as it should be, with each Post written, with every new Friend of the Doctrine added to the Blogroll (most recently Stephanie), one hopes that the sophistication of the discourse rises.

Having said that, some Posts are fun to write and some are (somehow) more fun to read! Seeing how, in most cases I am on both sides that fence, I am not really sure what that means, or if it is even possible.
Editors prerogative, with the 2013 Wakefield Doctrine Road Trip rapidly approaching, no matter what I said earlier, let’s do a reprint of a Post that was written after the very first of these trips.

‘Me and… Me and Mrs Smith, Mrs Smith, Mrs Smith (from March 2011)

 

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

Let me start by saying that the Wakefield Doctrine, (progenitors and DownSprings)  have nothing but respect for the Mormons and the LDS.  ( damn, such an excellent acronym;  counter-culture sixties and radical sixties all rolled into one! Seriously, how cool would a jacket with just LDS on the back, be?  )

Just got back from Salt Lake City and thought that it would be helpful to our Readers to see how the Doctrine and the LDS might relate to each other.  Everyone knows something about the Mormon religion and perhaps a little less about the Wakefield Doctrine.  Nevertheless, it would be instructive to look at any commonalities between the two. And what jumps right out, what both clearly have in common can be summed up in two words: rogers.  If you are reading this, then we expect you to have at minimum a cursory understanding of the rogerian personality type. Beret-wearing engineers? Chapter-verse citing grandmother on the other side of the counter at your local Tax Assessor’s Office, Civil War re-enacting, Ken Burns fan? Yes, those rogers. Of the three personality types, rogers are the social/herd-centric people who live for tradition and history and culture and can tell you how to cook a dinner that your ancestors ate before being wiped out by the Bubonic Plague. It is this need for order, desire for rules that will form the bridge between the Wakefield Doctrine and the LDS.
For our Post today, it is the nature of rogers that we are going to present in relation to the story of Joseph Smith and his founding of the Mormon religion. It is not within the scope of this Post, to try and relate the actual history or dogma or teachings of this widely respected religion, rather we will simply talk about rogers and how they see the world.

As we do know, that it is integral to the rogerian worldview  there be organised religion. This is true simply because rogers have the need not only to establish rules and order for everyone, but to have these rules possess a degree of moral imperative that can only derive from a deity or deities. Most rogerian religious leaders ( not to be too redundant ) know fully well that their followers will wander off if they (their leader) dies or gets a good paying job, unless that is, god is backing the roger’s play.  Suffice to say that, for our rogerian brethren, it is not enough to impose rules of conduct and  the right way to live life;  the ‘choosen people’ that follow the leader must know that it is right to do so because god says so. And it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know that you don’t be messin with god, at least not if you expect to wake up the next day.
To bring in Joseph Smith and his creation of what would become a major religion; while Mr. Smith appears to be rogerian enough to want to make up a set of Rules for Life,  the Catholics and them already staked their claim on the best known deity.  (You know, the one with the beard, who took on the Greek, Roman, Norse gods and totally kicked they asses),  Mr Smith needed a new source of authority. Now we are out of our league, factually speaking, so lets bring in our friends from Wikipedia:

Joseph Smith, Jr. (December 23, 1805 – June 27, 1844) was an American religious leader and the founder of what later became known as the Latter Day Saint movement. He was also an author, city planner, military leader, politician, and U.S. presidential candidate.

Raised in western New York, a hotbed of religious enthusiasm, Smith was wary of Protestant sectarianism as a youth. His worldview was influenced by folk magic, and he became known locally as one who could divine the location of buried treasure. In the late 1820s, Smith said that an angel directed him to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a religious history of ancient American peoples. After publishing what he said was an English translation of the plates as the Book of Mormon, he organized branches of the “Church of Christ“. Adherents of this new religion would later be called Latter Day Saints.

In 1831, Smith moved west to Kirtland, Ohio with the intention of eventually establishing the communal holy city of Zion in western Missouri. These plans were obstructed, however, when Missouri settlers expelled the Saints from Zion in 1833. After leading an unsuccessful paramilitary expedition to recover the land, Smith focused on building a temple in Kirtland. In 1837, the church in Kirtland collapsed after a financial crisis, and the following year Smith fled the city to join Saints in northern Missouri. A war ensued with Missourians who believed Smith was inciting insurrection. When the Saints lost the war, the Missouri governor expelled them, and imprisoned Smith on capital charges.

After being allowed to escape state custody in 1839, Smith led the Saints to build Nauvoo, Illinois on Mississippi River swampland, where he became mayor and commanded the large militia. In early 1844, he announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That summer, after the Nauvoo Expositor criticized Smith’s teachings, the Nauvoo city council, headed by Smith, ordered the paper’s destruction. In an attempt to check public outrage, Smith first declared martial law, then surrendered to the governor of Illinois. He was killed by a mob while awaiting trial in Carthage, Illinois.

Smith’s followers revere him as a prophet, and regard many of his writings as scripture. His teachings include unique views about the nature of godhood, cosmology, family structures, political organization, and religious collectivism. His legacy includes a number of religious denominations, which collectively claim a growing membership of nearly 14 million worldwide

 

So what is clearest about the Lesson of the LDS and rogers?

Both rogers and by inference, those followers of organised religion provide the world with:

• rules of civil conduct, at least among the adherents of a given religion
• holidays and their attendant days off from work
• conceptualization of the innate human need to imagine life after death
• persecution and death at the hands of the dominant culture, at least until a minority is found to ‘pass-it-on’ with
• preservation of culture and art and a common heritage
• a counter-acting force to the  ‘live for the moment’, instinct-driven rampages of scotts
• interesting and sometimes amusing religion-required clothing ( I’m lookin at you, catholic priests and bishops)
• clean and orderly and safe cities ( Salt Lake City…very nice place)
• opportunity for advancement for minorities and women and such…provided they earn it
• one more way that clarks can feel left out
• an organisational structure that presents a total frickin buffet for the scottian element in every society

So there you have it! The reason you have things like religions popping up almost anywhere, at any time in history, this despite the fact that with an issue that deals with mortality and life beyond this life, one religion should be enough…there is a new one every time you turn around, anthropologically-speaking.  But then again, there are so many rogers out there!

Ok then

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