It’s a Negotiation Btches!
Read below or watch/listen to Broadcast #4 where I read the essay from the bridge of the Sanity Retreat:
The swarming social insects divide up work between castes:
Worker
Warrior
BreederLike ants and bees, humans are social creatures. We are a little more flexible than termites. We are individually smart [caveat 1: at least relative to an ant; caveat 2: in most cases] so our nests, and our roles within them, are less well defined. Depending on our mood, and on the availability of resources, the ‘hive’ we pledge our loyalty to might be family, kin, tribe, or species; but, just like a worker bee, or a warrior ant, we are all allocated our predetermined roles. We call these archetypes:
The Hero
The Outlaw
The Explorer
The Sage
The Innocent
The Mother
The patterns of behaviour are persistent. They crop up again and again in our fiction and mystical writing. This is because they are behaviour pre-sets that prepare an individual for a specific role in our hive/society. These archetypes are our human ‘casts’. They were created by evolution to help our species cope with the various trials of life by assigning challenges to ‘specialists’ equipped to deal with them.
Societies can change their attitude by varying their mix of ‘casts’:
Sparta, focused on The Hero, while Athens, preferred The Sage.
The same concept is common in the corporate world. We are told that effective teams are made a mix of personality traits:
The Strategist
The Builder
The Innovator
The Coach
These names are less mystical than the Tarot archetypes, but the concept is the same. People tend to fall into different buckets, and, by mixing and matching these personality traits, a skilled manager can improve the productivity of her team.
It should be noted that because we are dealing with squishy human psyches here, the divisions between archetypes, aka personality-categories or casts, will be blurry and somewhat arbitrary. They will also be fractal. If we zoom in on the tip of a branching category we will always be able to divide further, right down to the individual. Perhaps it is easier to go the other way then, and zoom out until we are all split into just two groups:
The Leaders
The Followers
Which are you?
I suspect a disproportionate number of you will say ‘The Leader’. It is more romantic to be a leader. Follower has negative connotations, but evolution is not sentimental, in a social species, we can’t all be leaders; imagine a room full of cats to get a glimpse of that society! For a smooth functioning hive, most of us need to be followers. Each hive only really needs one leader — one per tribe, for humans something like one in a hundred, one per cent. But evolution will ensure a couple of spares, and, if we add in the next generation waiting in the wings for when the king gets too grey and weak to lead, we might end up with something like an eighty-twenty split between the follower-cast and the leader-cast.
The necessary excess of leaders will consign the majority of individuals displaying leader-archetype characteristics to follow; this will not sit well and will be a source of much conflict within the hive, but this overhead is preferable to ending up with no leaders at all. At the same time, some follower-archetypes will be thrust into leadership positions—in many cases by those above, emplaced because they pose less of a threat to those who put them there.
In short, archetypes are behaviour-presets installed by evolution to ensure optimal performance at the level of the hive [clan/tribe/church/corporation etc]. Most of us — the eighty per cent — are built to follow. We are susceptible to messages from our leaders, from the authority figures of the tribe. We instinctively perform loyalty displays; even if we are not aware that this is what we are doing when we put on our suits and ties and climb into our BMWs to drive to the monthly sales meeting.
