Introduction

Author’s Note- Disclaimers

This book, the Framework BlogBook, presents a Framework for understanding human behavior through the lens of 9 dispositions, or fundamental personality types.

8 of these personality types are pathological, and, as such, this BlogBook also describes the Framework Process, a self-applied transcendental psychological process designed to alter your personality type from one of the 8 pathological ones into the 1 healthy one.

I’d like to disclaim here at the start that I am not a psychologist or therapist, and bear no professional qualifications of any kind with regard to psychology. The Framework describes a system of analysis which I have developed over the past 8 years in order to understand other people, across all scales— from the cyclical motion of entire societies, to the qualms and foibles that arise at the dinner table. The Framework Process which has emerged alongside it it is something which I myself have used to alter my personality, to heal the deepest wounds I bore upon the fabric of my psyche. It is the product not of any accredited expertise, but of my deep, obsessive engagement with the understanding of the human condition.

To you, the reader, I offer my Framework as a tool handed from one student of life to another. I make you no guarantees beyond my own intellectual conviction and my willingness to serve and to aid you as best I can; I claim no authority over your actions. The Framework Process is necessarily self-applied. This book lays out its method, but only you can perform the introspection and achieve the self-forgiveness necessary to complete it.

I ask, first and foremost, that you take the Framework in its intended context, as a framework. Such a framework is a means of taking the broad, undifferentiated mass of human activity and splitting it into smaller, more cognizable pieces. I do not supply evidence to support my claims, whether scientific or otherwise; you are already in possession of more convincing evidence regarding human behavior than I could ever hope to supply, and the Framework’s role is simply to help you make sense of it.

With these disclaimers out of the way— on to the real introduction.

Introduction— Cracked and Uncracked People

There are two types of people to which this introduction must be addressed. This fact presents me with a serious difficulty.

The backbone of the Framework outlined in this book is the division of people not into two types, but into nine; the eight pathological dispositions to which almost everyone  belongs, and the one healthy one. Through a self-administered transcendental process, the Framework gives you the tools to move from the former to the latter.

These nine dispositions present no obstacle in writing this book, because collapsing these divisions into a unity is its entire purpose. However, there is one division which I have been thus far unable to bridge. It is, therefore, the division with which we have to begin: the division between those who recognize that they are irrational, and those who do not. The Framework has terms to differentiate these people; they are “cracked” and "uncracked".

A “cracked” person, defined narrowly, is someone who recognizes that the most serious problems in their life are caused by their own irrationality. They have “cracked” the facade of excuses which their subconscious mind has erected to separate them from their repressed contents. By whatever means, they have detected the internal inconsistencies which prevent them doing the things which they know they should be doing— the things they know they should want  to do— and are willing to assume responsibility for their problems.

You are the people for whom this book is designed, you self-aware people who have broken past the repressive mechanism which held you in thrall and have taken the first steps along the path of solve. (Solve is a Latin alchemical term which means “dissolution” or “disintegration”.  The Framework uses the term very precisely in its latter case. It is pronounced “soul-vay” or “soul-way”.)

By questioning the story your subconscious mind has fed you regarding why you feel incapable of doing the things you know to be necessary— and conversely, why you feel bound to do things you know to be unnecessary— you have already taken the first steps in the Framework Process.

The purpose of the first half of this book, Solve, is to meet you where you are in the solve process, and to provide you with tools you can use to understand yourself, and the world around you. We live in a very subjective world, a world with an uncertain epistemic basis. Any question can be met with another question, and the chain of “why’s”, traveling downward, will never hit solid ground. This is the danger that solve incurs, a cost that you, being cracked, are already bearing. Once you’ve begun questioning your own subconscious mind, it can be incredibly difficult to know where the questioning should stop.

Luckily, the questions you are asking in solve are questions about human behavior— your own behavior— and while no ultimate basis of indisputable facts regarding such questions can be found, there are trillions of examples of human behavior against which to measure yourself. The solve portion of this book, therefore, is dedicated to outlining a framework of human behavior, centered on 8 pathological dispositions, or “personality types”, which can be used to explain almost everything people do. First, the underlying premises from which I arrived at these personality types— which I believe actually exist— will be explained. Then, the 8 pathological types, and their origins in childhood, will be laid out, so that you can place yourself within them. Next will come a selection of powerful tools you can use to examine your own life, and the lives of people around you, through the lens of these eight dispositions. Finally, we will embark on extended discussions of the big-picture questions facing society, and how looking at these questions through the Framework can help us find our place in history and in the modern world. This is where part one of the book will end.

It has been a hard-won piece of knowledge for me, that solve alone is not sufficient to heal a pathological disposition. Solve— proper, alchemical-psychological solve— is a process with a definite beginning, and a definite end. You are digging to the bedrock of a problem, and eventually, that bedrock will be reached.

Before I reached that bottom, I assumed that healing was something one would dig up along the way. This is not true. Healing must be pursued, intentionally, and subsequently to completing solve. The upper mind and the lower mind must be reconciled. Your subconscious mind has not been tormenting you with these irrational constraints for no reason; it is operating on instructions you imprinted it with during your childhood, and its hostility and anger have been generated in response to your own.

The Framework refers to this process of reconciliation as unio. (Like solve, a Latin alchemical term; pidgin Latin, in this case, because I don’t like the way it conjugates. It’s pronounced “oo-nee-oh” and means “unification”. More properly, it’s referred to as “coniunctio”, which is a mouthful, or “coagula”, which sounds gross.)

The second half of the book, Unio, lays out the process by which unio can be achieved. Where solve employs the more cerebral Framework which is mostly of my own derivation, unio is an emotional and internal process.

In first conducting unio on myself, I employed two other self-help books and a blog post. The tools contained in these sources are wholly sufficient for conducting unio; however, they are packaged along with some assumptions concerning solve and the state of the world with which I stridently disagree. As such, the unio section of the book will distill out the mechanisms contained within these sources for easier access, and discuss how they may specifically be applied in light of what we learned during solve. It will also contain assorted material concerning topics related to carrying out unio and solve on a logistical level, and a narrative of my own experience of the Framework Process.

And so, this is the book’s itinerary for the first group of people— the self-aware people, the cracked people. I hope that you are looking forward to it as much as I do; you have already taken the first steps in solve on your own, and because knowledge cannot be unlearned, the process cannot be reversed. The only way out is through, and I hope that you will allow me to conduct you on your journey.

The uncracked people, however— perhaps the majority of people— remain unaddressed. As they, thinking themselves healthy, will have little reason to read further, I will address them here.

Where cracked people have seen through the veil of their repressive mechanism and take responsibility for their own actions, uncracked people choose to believe the excuses that their subconscious feeds them, and believe that they are self-consistently rational. This would not be a problem, if they were rational, but they are not; that’s what makes them “uncracked”, rather than “healthy”.

A pathological disposition, or, a pathology, is the thing people both cracked and uncracked alike suffer from. Narrowly defined, it is a subconscious irrationality which prevents you from taking the actions you know would be optimal in fulfilling your needs. “Know” is a tricky word here, where the uncracked are concerned; cracked people know about their pathology in the same way that they know that the sky is blue— they are aware of it. Uncracked people, however, only know about their pathology “deep down”. Their subconscious minds are aware that they are behaving counter-productively to their conscious goals, but their conscious minds are not..

This is really the sense in which “cracking” is the first step of solve, the step that I can’t teach you how to take. As I said earlier, solve is “disintegration”— “dis” “integration”, it is the separation of one integrated thing into multiple things. The realization that your subconscious mind is deceiving you divides your mind into multiple parts, which don’t want to work together (this is why unio must follow solve to achieve real healing— what has been taken apart must be put back together again).

This is what makes the difficulty of addressing uncracked people with this introduction so insurmountable. To be irrational and unaware of it feels more or less like being rational and aware of it. However, there is one exception: when you consider the possibility that you might be irrational, you will feel an overwhelming sense of shame.

Shame is the primary tool— perhaps the only tool— of the repressive mechanism. It is a torturous sensation that communicates to the upper mind that it is not allowed to think about something. The instinct of the conscious mind when confronted with shame is to spasm, and to beat the thought away with whatever tool is closest to hand. Generally, this tool will be anger, backed up with a faulty rationale from the subconscious which makes this anger seem justified so long as it isn’t inspected closely.

A cracked person looks out across a landscape of irrational people coping as best they can with their self-imposed limitations, and sees themselves as a part of it; an uncracked person looks out at this landscape and sees themselves apart from it. They believe that they are self-consistently rational, and that the limitations on their behavior  are not self-imposed, but necessary. As such, when they are confronted with someone doing something which they feel should be impossible— someone that behaves as though they operate under different constraints than they themselves do— they feel shame, as they begin thinking  about possibilities which their subconscious mind has declared off limits. They then wonder— naturally— why these possibilities are off-limits to them, but not to the brave person they’ve been watching trampling all over the rules they live by. The subconscious mind, panicking that the shame alone has not sufficed to satisfy the upper mind, produces an excuse: that seemingly brave person is either lying, crazy, or suffering under extenuating circumstances.

These excuses are seductive. If you believe yourself to be mentally sound, but find yourself subject to limitations that get in between yourself and what you want, then you have to assume that everyone else should, by rights, be subject to these limitations as well. To be confronted with evidence to the contrary, to be forced to feel that awful shame as you dwell on feelings you aren’t allowed to feel, is extremely unpleasant. This is true whether the source of the feeling is seeing someone doing something you’ve forbidden yourself, or someone (like me) telling you that you’re irrational for forbidding it. It’s natural, and easy, to accept the excuses your subconscious mind gives you about the other person, to write them in as an exception to your rules, and to infer that it will work out poorly for them in the end. Really, it’s only as these excuses begin to wear thin that the hostility emerges; the more plausible the possibilities you’ve been exposed to feel, the more intently you consider them, the more shame you feel, and the angrier you get that you’ve been made to feel it.

The only way past this cycle of shame, anger, and rationalization comes in at that last stage, rationalization. If you have a pathological disposition, the excuses your lower mind provides you with won’t be self-consistent. That’s what a pathology is, an irrationality; the information you have and the model you’ve created with it do not align.

Let’s say you see a man drinking directly from the soup ladle at a buffet; some part of you considers doing the same thing, since you can’t tell how much you’ll like the soup before you try it. Picturing it more intently, you feel a mild jolt of shame, and your subconscious mind gives you numerous excuses as to why it’s a bad idea. “It’s unsanitary”, “You wouldn’t like it if other people did that to the soup you were eating”, “You  might get in trouble”.

Are these bad reasons not to try it out? Not at all, they’re great reasons. You can square them against pretty much any useful metric, and they’ll hold up fine. Congratulations; in this example, you don’t have a pathology within the domain of life that covers drinking directly from soup ladles.

On the other hand, imagine you’re thinking about asking your roommate to turn down his TV a bit so you can get some sleep. You feel an intense bolt of shame at the thought, and your subconscious mind begins pouring out excuses:

“He’ll get angry” Will he? Is he the type of guy to get angry over something like that? Have I seen evidence of that in the past?

“I can just wear earplugs” Are people supposed to need to wear ear plugs to sleep? Don’t most people have a quiet home at night?

“I’m loud all the time too” Are you loud at night, or during the day, when people are supposed to  be awake?

If, when confronted with a situation like this, you feel a strong sense of shame, and the excuses you come up with to justify your behavior don’t square with reality, then you probably  have a pathological disposition.

This is the process of solve, and, until you’ve taken that first step— questioning the rationales your mind has presented you with, really digging down until you found the truth— the Framework Process itself won’t be of much use to you. Of course, it’s very difficult to tell if you’re one of these people, because until you’ve begun questioning yourself intently, you’ll feel you’re healthy, that your mind provides you with good excuses, and that the people that do the things of which you feel incapable are just crazy.

However, even if you are one of these people— really, whether you are healthy or just think that you’re healthy— I encourage you to continue reading this book. If, in the course of reading this book, anything I say makes you angry, makes you feel that I must be crazy, or stupid, or both: please, think about that anger. Poke at it. Why do you feel so angry? Do you feel ashamed about something? How strong is that feeling? Am I really that crazy, are the holes in my arguments really so large as to merit this reaction? You might find that, deep down, you’re less sure about things than you think.

Shortly, I’ll begin laying out the underpinnings of solve analysis. But, before that, the next chapter is a word of warning concerning solve and executive dysfunction, and the two modes in which you can read this (or any) book.