| Newsletter #8 |
page: 1
Part 11 of an interview with ank, creator of the Theory of Eight, in July 2003
Q: We were talking about the Landscape. So how does the Landscape affect us in reality?
A: The important thing about the Landscape is the continuity. It is a field of connected activities. People on the Landscape don't like jumps and discontinuities. They like to see a visible connection between the adventure and the settled, between the question and the result. They like to see the workings out step-by-step of the problem advancing towards its solution. Think of the analogy of surveying a terrain. The method is to connect each point and region with its neighbour, gradually moving from one known point to the next. I can illustrate this with something that occurred in the New World. When settlers gradually began to push their way inland, carving out their farms, not every square meter of the terrain was cleared. Much of it between cleared sections remained hidden under dense woods, and the shape of the land beneath the woods remained an unknown. As the surveyed boundaries of occupied farms spread out from the coast, sometimes the boundaries of farms didn't quite meet up because of the unknown stretches of terrain between them. These sections of land were essentially free, and were squatted in. They were known as 'found farms'. I know a writer who used to live in one in Connecticut.
Anyway, the point is that Landscape folk don't like found farms. They don't like discontinuity. They don't like their ideas coming from out of left field without any provenance. Every idea needs to be referenced, needs to have its bibliography and its champions who have a recognised place in the connected scheme of ideas. The thought of an idea lurking out there all on its own because of a mistake fills them with dread. Landscape folk form cliques or paradigms to make sure that doesn't happen. This process is an active and prominent feature of Science, but we also find it everywhere on the Landscape, especially in media and publishing where continuity is required. An unknown will not be published until he or she has first been legitimised in some way first.
The Landscape is not static or rigid; things are changing, impelled by the restlessness of 1. It is responsive to changing conditions but is always looking for the practical solution and to use what is known already. To solve a problem, the Landscape person first considers what already has already worked in the past or anticipated, then gradually proceeds through the less stable solutions until something is found to work, and there stops. This is how hierarchies are made: for Landscape folk, the continuum is from long lasting = best choice to temporary = least favourite choice.
Q: Isn't that everybody's choice?
A: Off Landscape folk wouldn't see solutions to anything in quite these terms of long lasting or temporary, and certainly off-Landscape folk don't see tradition or precedent as defining the range of possible solutions to consider. For off-landscape folk, the very fact that a notion is like a 'found farm' is enticing. They can squat on it and make it their own. Of course, it's not all plain sailing for off-Landscape signs. The Landscape does act as an Antagony to 2 and to 6. For Minor Sixes this means that they have trouble overcoming that final hurdle and bringing things to their logical conclusion, whereas Minor Twos have trouble starting anything with the appropriate preparation, preferring to enter at a point other than the logical staring point.
Q: This is very different from the dimensions of personality we are used to - like rational vs. emotional; extrovert vs. introvert etc. So what have you discovered about personality that's different to the accepted view?
A: The TO8 Landscape is a concept that has not really been considered before as far as I know. But the main thing I've done is to make sense of a lot of disparate themes in the study of human behaviour. I've also given an alternate view of our sexual bond and our sexuality in general. Current researchers all seem to think that, and I'll repeat a quote from Dr. Helen Fisher of Rutgers University that I read in a news article about research on romance, 'The sex drive evolved to motivate individuals to seek sex with any appropriate partner.' Well, that simply cannot be generally true for humans. Obviously, we want to have sex with the partners we are attracted to, but we certainly don't want to have sex with everyone we like or with just anyone who is available. Given the freedom, we seem to choose our partners more carefully than either attraction or sex drive circuitry suggests. If we just wanted sex with any available partner, we'd be an orgiastic society, which we clearly are not, and I don't believe there are any naturally formed societies that have orgiastic sex as a basis for pair bonding and reproduction. Orgies do figure in human social behaviour but their purpose is not for reproduction or bonding, so any study of fundamental sexuality has to somehow explain the difference.
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