8 The Alchemy of Pathological Compatibility

Perhaps the most useful single component of the Framework is its ability to predict the course of interpersonal relationships. I refer to this as the alchemy of pathological compatibility. “Alchemy”, because the principles according to which relationships form and dissipate are so obscure, relative to the kinds of reasoning that we do in our day to day lives, that the Framework’s insight feels like magic— real magic, or merely sleight of hand, depending on how charitable you care to be. “Pathological”, because it’s important to remember that all of these rules regarding compatibility are ultimately grounded in crippling, life-ruining pathologies; as you’ll soon see, strong compatibility is alluring, and if you’re lucky enough to experience it, feels like a solution to all of your internal problems.

“Compatibility”, defined narrowly, refers to the tendency of any two people to grow closer together or farther apart over time. It’s not necessarily an index of how much they like each other— though generally it will be highly correlated with it— but an index of how much they will come to rely on one another. That the Framework can predict such a thing isn’t so remarkable. As you saw in the previous chapter, people’s deepest desires and fears are the material of pathology. Since people have different pathologies, and want different things, it’s no wonder that different dispositions get along better or worse.

What is more remarkable is the extent to which pathological compatibility can transform a person, and their worldview. The highest level of compatibility— “strong attraction”, in the graphs you’re about to see— feels like an encounter with your exact opposite. Such an encounter produces two transformations to a person’s worldview.

The first is that it sends you deeply into solve; generally, an encounter with their dispositional opposite is how someone first cracks. One of the key rationalizations which your lower mind employs to disguise the extent of your pathology is the notion that everyone else is just like you, wants and fears the same things you do. The closer you grow to someone of an opposite disposition, the more difficult it is to sustain this rationalization. To realize that the desires and limitations which torment you are not an unavoidable consequence of the human condition is the most important first step in beginning the solve process.

While the first of these realizations propels you further into the solve process, the second pulls you back from it. The “pathological” element of a pathology consists in the maladaptive behaviors your mindset forces you into— you avoid good opportunities because you view them as more dangerous than they are, or you seek out bad opportunities because you view them as safer than they are. These maladaptive conditions force other people into unhealthy behaviors in order to cope with your tendencies; however, when you encounter someone of the opposite disposition, the behaviors which you force them to adopt are exactly the behaviors which they need to engage in.

The principle is straightforward enough. To explain it most clearly, we’ll begin with an example. Let’s say we have a 2o and a 2c. Who they are specifically— whether they’re men or women, what kind of relationship they hold, how long they’ve known each other— doesn’t matter; that’s what makes this element of the Framework so powerful.

The 2o experiences a desire to be cared for. Operating under the typical mind fallacy— the golden rule— he takes charge of situations, taking care of other people in order to prompt them to take care of him. The 2c experiences a desire to be trusted. Again, per the golden rule, she obeys other people, hoping to prompt them to listen to her in turn.

When the two encounter each other, they intensify each other’s patterns. The 2o, naturally bossy, is forced to fill even more of the authority-space of their interaction, because the 2c shies away from taking charge. The 2c, naturally obedient, is forced to give up even more control over the situation, because the 2o refuses to listen to other people’s advice. This intensification gives rise to a great deal of resentment— experienced as subconscious pressure— but, remember, both parties view their pattern as a duty. The thing each asks of the other feels natural, because it’s the thing they provide to the world by default. The 2o takes command, and the 2c follows commands. The 2c demands instruction, and the 2o provides it.

Because it feels natural, each side feels bound to continue the interaction; because it’s an intensification, continuing the interaction feels unbearable. The result is resentment, a buildup of pressure from the lower mind. When this pressure builds up enough, one of them will be sent spiraling into their repressed mode. Their pathology will no longer be able to contain their repressed impulses, and their lower mind will seize control. If the 2o breaks first, he will submit to the 2c, placing the 2c in a position where she is forced to give him advice or otherwise take charge of his actions; if the 2c breaks first, she will take charge of the 2o, forcing him to listen to her advice or instruction. When this break occurs, a marvelous shell-game will be revealed. Each party will be forced to reveal to the other that the thing they really wanted— the desire they’ve repressed— is the thing that the other person desperately wants to provide.

Once the pair have come to grasp these facts, each will see the other as free game, a person around whom they can occupy their repressed mode as much as they want to, without incurring the horrible consequences which (they assume) would be the result of doing so around other people. Such a person is, naturally, an extremely valuable resource, and they will seek to monopolize that resource by becoming as significant a part of that person’s life as they are able to become. Of course, the pair in our example were a man and a woman, and so— assuming they’re both heterosexual— the result would be a romantic relationship. This is the ideal form for a pathologically compatible relationship to take, as it allows each to monopolize their partner’s time and attention more completely than any other form of interpersonal relationship. In cases where such a relationship isn’t possible— given insurmountable barriers of age or sexuality— the pair will adopt the most intimate relationship which is available to them, as roommates, or best friends, or as mentor and mentee.

So, given this example, hopefully now you’ve got a better idea of what “compatibility” is. It’s the tendency of two people to get more or less involved in each other’s lives, which is dictated wholly by the extent to which the other person allows them to access their repressed mode. This is what it means to live with a pathology— you make some good thing so scarce for yourself that anyone who provides it to you has a direct line to your intimacy, and anyone who gets in the way of it will be cast out of your life as quickly as you can manage.

With that out of the way, we can now get into the nitty-gritty of how compatibility actually works. Here’s a chart that lays it all out neatly:

As you can see, there are four levels of compatibility:

• Strong Attraction
  • Occurs between opposite dispositions on the same level
    • This is because they give each other the opportunity to access their repressed modes
• Weak Attraction
  • Occurs between like dispositions on different levels
    • This is because they can work together to make a situation more Thannatic or Erotic to suit their needs
• Strong Repulsion
  • Occurs between opposite dispositions on different levels
    • This is because their dominant modes get in the way of each other— the lower order dispositions place demands on the higher order ones that feel like an unreasonable intensification of their constraints; the higher order dispositions create social conditions that obstruct the ability of the lower order ones to seek the things they desire.
• Weak Repulsion
  • Occurs between identical dispositions
    • This is because they’re competing for the same scarce resource, and can’t provide it for each other.

Of course, everyone has two dispositions, not just one. Therefore, in order to use this chart, you need to add up the results of both dispositions for both parties. Keep in mind, there are no knock-on effects or chain reactions anywhere in the Framework; as a result, dispositions combine additively, not multiplicatively.

To start, we give each of these forms of attraction a number.

• Strong Attraction: +1
• Weak Attraction: +.5
• Strong Repulsion: -1
• Weak Repulsion: -.5

We then consult the chart to measure the ratings for each pair of dispositions the two individuals bear, and add them together. For example, in a relationship between two uncracked 2c3cs:

2c-2c: -0.5

2c-3c:+0.5

3c-2c: +0.5

3c-3c:-0.5

-0.5+0.5+0.5-0.5= 0

If the result is positive, the individuals in question should grow closer over time. If the result is negative, they will grow apart over time. If the result is 0, they will be indifferent to each other, and whether they grow closer or apart is a matter of circumstance.

What about Neutrals?

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, it’s time to add Neutrals into our chart.

As you can see, whether a Neutral disposition is attracted to a given disposition depends on whether the person bearing that disposition has cracked it. Keep in mind, a person bearing two pathologies can crack one of their dispositions without cracking another. So, for neutrals;

• Strong Attraction
  • Neutrals are strongly attracted to neutrals at the same level of sublimation
• Weak Attraction
  • Neutrals are weakly attracted to neutrals at other levels of sublimation, or cracked dispositions
• Strong Repulsion
  • Neutrals are strongly repelled by uncracked dispositions

These conditions add up for Neutrals the same way they do for pathologies, using the same numbers. For example, in the relationship of a 2n3n and 2c3o who is cracked on the first level only:

2n-2c’=+1

2n-3o=-0.5

3n-2c’=+0.5

3n-3o=-1

=0

In this notation, an apostrophe next to a disposition indicates that this disposition is cracked.

Loneliness is a common Neutral affliction, and with these principles it isn’t difficult to see why. The majority of the population of the developed world consists of uncracked 3cs, and after that are 2o3cs who are cracked only on the 2nd level, and after that are 3os. Without some means of “creating” Ns, it’s very difficult for a neutral individual to develop an extensive circle of acquaintances.

What determines the rate of decay?

Counterintuitively, the rate at which an interpersonal relationship decays is not determined by the extent to which the people involved are incompatible. Rather, the rate of decay is determined by the difference in the degree to which each party possesses trivial goods.

I’ll devote the next chapter to explaining what trivial goods are in-depth. In short, they’re the things which are both universally attractive, and easily perceived— physical attractiveness, trivial interestingness, and wealth.

These elements dictate the rate at which a relationship decays because incompatible relationships obey a consistent pattern. When a person recognizes that someone they have a relationship with is constitutionally distinct from themselves in a disagreeable manner, they attempt to alter that person’s personality. An uncracked person, unaware of the extent to which their own nature is pathological, will attempt to get the other person to think the way that they do— after all, in their view, it works great for them. A cracked person, on the other hand, won’t seek to replicate their own proclivities in the other person, but will instead focus on the pathological elements of the other person’s nature, and the extent to which they are self-defeating.

These conversion attempts won’t necessarily be the product of a conscious plan, and will instead manifest themselves throughout the myriad disagreements which characterize an unpleasant relationship. By setting boundaries and making demands, each side will attempt to compel the other to abandon the duties, desires, and fears which make up their pathology, to clear space for their own pathology to operate. Eg:

3c: “You know, when you say things like that, it makes people think that you’re weird, and they don’t want to be around you.”

2o: “If they’re so fragile that they can’t handle something out of the ordinary, I don’t want to be around them.”

Conversion attempts are doomed to failure, because pathologies are deeply rooted and can only be dislodged by an involved process of solve and unio; but this isn’t intuitive, and so each pathological individual will maintain the conflictual relationship for as long as they feel that there is some chance of things working out, and for as long as they calculate that the tertiary benefits of the relationship compensate for the unpleasantness of the conflict.

This is why the rate at which a relationship decays is determined by the differential in trivial goods between the two parties. The more attractive party (in terms of physical beauty, wealth, and trivial interestingness) is more confident in their ability to convert the other party to the extent that their attractiveness gives them leverage over the other. The less attractive party is more yielding and willing to withstand greater provocations, to the extent that they feel compensated by their association with the other. The result is that two people who are near to each other in absolute attractiveness want little to do with one another, whereas people who are far apart from each other associate more closely.

Which trivial good is most salient in making these determinations varies from one relationship to the next; I’ll visit the question of why these goods in particular carry so much weight in interpersonal relationships in the following chapter.

Putting together what we’ve got thus far, we’ve got a powerful tool for predicting the course of any relationship. First, add up the compatibility of the pair’s dispositions to see if the result is positive or negative. If the result is positive, the pair will grow closer together until they are as tightly wound as their circumstances allow. If the result is zero, the pair will be involved with each other only to the extent necessitated by their circumstances, e.g. as coworkers. If the result is negative, the pair will drift apart at a rate determined by the differential in their trivial attractiveness. Therefore, so long as you know the dispositions of the people involved and can estimate their trivial attractiveness, you can predict how and how quickly their relationship will devolve.

Miscellaneous Addenda

This aspect of the Framework often receives a great deal of pushback from the people I explain it to. I think that this can be attributed mostly to the repugnant conclusions it draws regarding the romantic prospects of the 3c majority. Like dispositions repel like dispositions— it’s therefore quite obvious that a society composed mostly of 2n3c individuals is bound to face an enormous amount of romantic dysfunction, a subject I explore in a later chapter.

In the face of this dysfunction— and doubting my central claim, that the Framework Process can help them avoid it— 3cs cling to a notion that romance is ineffable. That is to say, they strongly prefer to think of romance as something too complex and personal to be vulnerable to analysis. This refuge in ineffability is a standard 3c tactic when confronted with scrutiny, and represents a fundamental instantiation of the closed mindset— too great scrutiny at a critical point in their development leads them to instinctive rebellion against any schema that seeks to define them, whether or not they would agree with that schema in a more sober frame of mind.

It’s true that, if not for the Framework Process, the alchemy of pathological compatibility would be horrible news for the 3c majority. Society stopped inculcating women 3o by default 70  years ago or more, and as a result, there exists no reservoir of 3o individuals capable of getting along with them. Barring transcendental breakthroughs, the majority of their romantic relationships are bound to be very material things, riddled with compromises and doomed to collapse. This was one of the main reasons I avoided talking about or publishing the Framework until I had developed a means of altering one’s disposition.

If the notion that the success or failure of a romantic relationship is not ineffable, but is rather easily reducible to the interaction of a few fundamental factors, fills you with dread, disgust, or anger, then it is worth examining whether the appeal romantic mystique holds for you is in enabling you to hide from the possibility that you are statistically unlovable. If you find that this is the case for you, then I offer two ideas to help you move past these feelings.

The first is that, by virtue of the fact that N dispositions strongly attract N dispositions, completing the Framework process will allow you to fall as deeply in love with any other N disposition as you could with a complementary individual right now. Furthermore, because anyone can undergo the Framework process, even a relationship which is in the middle of collapsing due to pathological incompatibility can be salvaged with a few months’ effort and a willingness to change.

The second is that, even if you reject the viability of the Framework process and don’t believe that your disposition can be fundamentally changed, having a schema for understanding interpersonal relationships gives you the means to know what you’re looking for. Internalizing the principles of pathological compatibility can give you the tools to search for a compatible partner in an organized and sustainable way, rather than flailing around wildly and allowing yourself to be misled by pretty faces or stacked savings accounts and wasting precious time. Societal problems are personal problems writ large; but this causality only flows in one direction, and knowing what you’re really looking for gives you a huge advantage over those who refuse to understand themselves, and prefer to keep their romantic lives mysterious, ineffable, and, ultimately, impossible to plan around.

With that in mind, I’d like to take a further look at the experience of compatibility. Thus far, I’ve been fairly vague about it, and this has been intentional. This book is, first and foremost, a technical manual. Telling a compelling story has to come second to intense precision, because the ideas that I’m trying to communicate are tools of solve. They’re designed to destroy associations, not create them, to give you the tools to peel back the layers of complexity and sort out what is and isn’t happening. If I take things in a poetic direction, I won’t just be wasting your time, I’ll also be leaving gaps for you to fill with your own ideas, ideas which may or may not be aligned with my own.

However, the mechanics of compatibility can’t really be understood without a degree of poetic license. Compatible love and incompatible loathing are the most intense, sustained feelings most people ever experience, and that intensity is essential to understanding their operation.

My first experience of pathological compatibility was with a girl I dated in my Senior year of High School. She was actually in the middle of developing a 3c disposition at the time, so we were only compatible on the second level; I was 2o3n, as I wouldn’t complete my therapy for many years afterward. So, our compatibility rating was:

2o-2c: +1

2o-3c:-1

3n-2c’: +.5

3n-3c:-.5

1-1+.5-.5= 0

With a zero rating, one should expect that the two of us would split up. This was indeed what happened, quite violently. I’ll go more into the details of this relationship and what it tells us about pathological compatibility in my personal history of the Framework, later on.

For now, though, I’ll just explain it like this: when we were together, it felt as though my mind, which had been screaming my entire life, had suddenly gone quiet. Seeing her from an intimate distance allowed me to understand that so much of what I had taken for granted about other people— that they wanted the same things and obeyed the same rules I did— simply wasn’t true, and I began to conceptualize my distinct qualities for the first time as limitations I experienced, rather than eccentricities to be proud of. I had been given to conceive of my 2o nature as the product of my intelligence, but she was intelligent, and was more or less my direct opposite. This was the first crack in the facade of my pathology, a crack which would grow much larger when I moved on to college and interacted with a 3c institution for the first time.

But what felt more pressing to me was that just as I had discovered that I had a problem, I found a solution to it. That feeling, of being with someone around whom I could “be myself”, became what I sought most desperately in life. This is a  phenomenon I see all the time— least frequently in the 3c majority, who are less likely to encounter anyone of a disposition orthogonal to their own. Romantic relationships are far and away the most direct, sustainable means of accessing your repressed mode. Those who have experienced such a relationship invariably come to structure their life around it. If this first relationship was fully compatible, they will cling to it; if, as is more common, it was merely partially compatible, they will spend much of their time ruminating on it, seeking out more people like that first one and attempting to file off the rough edges (the contradictory dispositions) which spoil things.

What’s important to understand is that these relationships don’t present an illusion of health and value; they are, in reality, the healthiest type of relationship a pathological person can possess. Having a refuge where you are able to set down your pathology and achieve a simulacrum of healthy reasoning is an immensely valuable thing, and can transform a person’s dysfunctional life into a reasonable, sustainable one. All of our culture’s truisms about love, developed during a time when men and women were intentionally inculcated into complementary dispositions, reflect this reality.

However, this simulacrum of healthy reasoning is just that— a simulacrum. What a pathology ultimately consists of is a misalignment of the upper and lower mind, a fundamental, self-defeating irrationality embedded in the subconscious and disguised by the repressive mechanism. Being able to combine your powers of reasoning with another person, compensate for each other’s deficiencies, and make decisions together the way a single N disposition would is an immense improvement over living with a pathology alone; compared to possessing a neutral disposition yourself, it’s horribly insecure— after all, people die.

It’s something of a cliché of self-help manuals, that they tell you to destroy your perfectly functional relationships in search of something perfect. I certainly hope that you haven’t received the impression that I’m telling you to do likewise— far from ending functional relationships, I hope that the Framework Process is able to save an enormous number of dysfunctional ones. If you’re in a compatible romantic relationship, I certainly would not encourage you to attempt the Framework Process without first getting your other half on board, and making an explicit commitment that the first of you to succeed in casting off your disposition will remain beside the other for as long as it takes for them to complete the process themselves.

However, the majority of people aren’t in compatible relationships. They’re either people who have had a taste of compatibility on one level, but have seen it collapse on another; or, they’re people who’ve never felt compatibility at all, and see all relationships— romantic, and interpersonal— as a grim procession of compromises and disappointment. These are the people, then, that I’d like to address at the close of this chapter.

To anyone who has acknowledged their pathology, who spends their time waiting, counting on finding some perfectly compatible person who will deliver them from themselves:

1. The odds likely aren’t in your favor.
   1. If your disposition is 2n3o, you can likely find a member of the 3c majority to get along with fairly easily; for everyone else, the statistics mean that you face an uphill battle, and aren’t likely to win out in the end. You only have so many years to spend waiting— at some point in  your 30s, you’re going to be in a position where your only choices are to make compromises that won’t pan out long term, or never get married at all.
2. You won’t lose anything by giving up on pathological compatibility
   1. When you think of your pathology as “who you are” rather than “what you’ve been doing”, it’s easy to see a compatible romantic relationship as your only deliverance from yourself. But even within such a relationship, your irrationality doesn’t leave you. A pathology is a pathology because its limitations are self-inflicted. Some part of you can always see the actions you might take, if you were able to get out of your own way. In many ways, carving out your romantic life as an exception to these rules only serves to intensify them elsewhere— their weight may feel easier to bear, but your lower mind is running a ledger that has to be balanced in the long-run.
3. Converting to a neutral disposition means that you can be more selective, not less
   1. N’s are as strongly compatible to each other as opposite dispositions are. If you yourself have completed the Framework Process, dragging someone else through it, with all the leverage of a romantic relationship to bring to bear on the matter, is eminently doable. You therefore expand your dating pool from merely those who gratify your irrational, harmful impulses, to anyone and everyone, and gain that much more latitude in choosing a partner who suits your life, rather than merely your pathology.

On the other hand, to those who have never experienced compatibility before, I have only this to say: Interpersonal relationships are not meant to be difficult, disappointing, or full of compromises. You have allowed your pathology to force these conditions on you. Remember that it’s not the world that’s disappointing, but the expectations you’ve brought to the world. In reality, it’s not such a depressing place.

With that out of the way, we’ll continue on with a chapter on trivial goods— perhaps the second most useful element of the Framework. At the very least, it’s an important complement to this chapter, and an essential tool in understanding human behavior.