The Rest of the Introduction - Personal Appeal of the SSH
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Dream of Ossian, 1813, oil on canvas, Musée Ingres Bourdelle, Montauban, France. Photo by Didier Descouens, CC 4.0
The last post started an introduction to this sub by explaining how the applicability of the SSH makes it interesting. This one will wrap it up with the personal part of the attraction. As a rule of thumb, I dislike and avoid writing about myself, beyond the unconscious projection any writer does. But it’s also affected to refuse when it’s directly relevant to the topic. And the visceral nature of SSH’s appeal is based in personal experience. Luckily, that can be described with no more biography than was necessary to set up the CTMU project, so it seems worth the indulgence. YMMV.
René Magritte, La Reproduction interdite (Not to Be Reproduced). Brussels, 1937, oil on canvas, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
The synopsis is that synergistic neuroatypicalities complicated youth socialization. This wasn’t an issue as a small child, when interpersonal contact was limited to adults and some bright kids in parental circles. Public school was a shock though - “alien creature” and “source of unintentional comedy” not being desired outcomes. This is a kind of misalignment that frequently gets distorted in Gamma auto-mythology. They perceive the experience of [natural reactions to uncool poseurs] as willful refusal to acknowledge imaginary superiority. And since they never stop being uncool poseurs, this affront never goes away. Hence that “seething with suppressed rage” sociopathy they falsely assume outliers feel.
Thomas Rowlandson, The Pedant, early 1800s, pencil, ink and watercolor, private owner
Actual outliers face a choice early on. Many simply isolate. Solitude is pleasant because no one to have to accommodate frees the unfiltered self. But the operative word is pleasant. There’s no simmering hated for the uncomprehending masses. The whole appeal is not being compelled to think of the masses at all. Beyond the brief moment of relief at taking all the facades off. Pedowood stereotypes always whiff in important ways, but the Doc Brown figure gets the point across. The second option comes in when isolation isn’t preferable. Taking part in activities and have friends to hang out with after school seemed appealing. We wanted some social life.
Door #2 is figure it out.
Qian Xuan, Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, around 1295, Yuan Dynasty handscroll; ink, color, and gold on paper
It should be self-evident. If social moves aren’t intuitive, be sociological. Or anthropological. Watch and learn. Use self-awareness to mesh with the observable patterns. There are embarrassing missteps along the way, but those are instructive. Over time it gets instinctive, including knowing when that solitude is necessary. The same process works individually too. When meeting someone, listen and compile. Determine what they’re like, how they think, key traits and it gets easy to interact productively. I was blessed with certain gifts that made sports and other activities accessible. If I wanted to participate, productively figuring out new and changing groups of people was constantly necessary. And just when it seemed like it all made sense, puberty brought a galaxy of fresh counter-intuitive appeals and new turbo-motivation to learn.
Pierre Auguste Cot, Springtime, 1873, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The point being that approaching social situations analytically – for productive real-world outcomes - is second nature. Note that the “productive real-world outcomes” part is obligatory. This isn’t Gamma critic in his own head. The whole purpose of social analysis to achieve real world social goals when normative behavior isn’t intuitive. Picking up on recurring patterns is inductive shorthand that develops over time. But it had always been a reactive, ad hoc process. It never occurred to think of my interaction process as universal like the SSH. So reading about the SSH was one of those nova-tier flashbulb moments when something you’ve always been attentive to flares into new clarity. The profiles blatantly mapped onto a lifetime of accumulated mini-analyses. No gaps came to mind that weren’t just personality variance within the larger category. Full breadth of applicability took some time, but it was instantly convincing. And the utility was obvious.
Francis Augustus Silva, Sunrise at Barnegat Beach, New Jersey, 1875, oil on canvas
Since then it’s actually become the foundation of my own social read-and react process. I’d mastered Game for similar reasons – basic social insights to internalize and personalize experientially. But the SSH is more systematic and direct. Of course, none of them are strict rules to follow. The lesson of the observant outlier is that there is too much variance in personality for pre-scripting. Rehearsed lines have an off-putting uncanny valley quality to them anyhow. What patterns do is define the field. They lay down an element of predictability that makes the personality details quicker to fill in. Like burying ego and praising the Gamma tech support guy’s life-saving skills meaning skipping the service queue going forward. Or rolling “approvingly” with the Alpha project head’s pedestrian idea because it will work, he’s more inclined to cooperate, and it’s irrelevant in the overall scheme of things.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842, oil on canvas, Tate London
Beyond the immediately social, the SSH has contributed to a personal intellectual project. The Blog is working through basic metaphysical necessities of reality - the kind of question that appeals to the speculative nature of my own thought. But reality includes material reality as well, and those patterns aren’t as clear. The SSH is an example of logos in the social world that helps concretize the more abstract speculations. That approach is why we moved to applicability in the last post here. A recent Blog post noted synergies between it and r/K selection theory that spun up some interesting insights.
That’s where the other half of the appeal comes from. It crystalized something integral to my own social existence and streamlined my process. Personal and intellectual. And the underlying truth of it only gets more obvious with time.
Anonymous Dutch artist, Truth Presenting a Mirror to the Vanities of the World, 1620 - 1630, oil on canvas, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford