Danger Flags #3: Internal Strife

TYPE 3: "THE GREEDY, DEMANDING CHARACTER"

“ This kind of person affixes himself to others like a leech and clings obsessively. Although extremely dependent and passive, he constantly demands that others take care of him and gratify his wishes.  If he considers himself wronged, he does not seek redress through his own efforts but tries to persuade another to take up the cudgels in his behalf -- "let's you and him fight."  His loyalties are likely to shift whenever he feels that the sponsor whom he has chosen has let him down.  Defectors of this type feel aggrieved because their desires were not satisfied in their countries of origin, but they soon feel equally deprived in a second land and turn against its government or representatives in the same way. The greedy and demanding character is subject to rather frequent depressions. He may direct a desire for revenge inward, upon himself; in extreme cases suicide may result.
 
“The greedy, demanding character often suffered from very early deprivation of affection or security. As an adult he continues to seek substitute parents who will care for him as his own, he feels, did not.
 
“The interrogator dealing with a greedy, demanding character must be careful not to rebuff him; otherwise rapport will be destroyed. On the other hand, the interrogator must not accede to demands which cannot or should not be met. Adopting the tone of an understanding father or big brother is likely to make the subject responsive.  If he makes exorbitant requests, an unimportant favor may provide a satisfactory substitute because the demand arises not from a specific need but as an expression of the subject's need for security.  He is likely to find reassuring any manifestation of concern for his well-being.
 
“ In dealing with this type -- and to a considerable extent in dealing with any of the types herein listed -- the interrogator must be aware of the limits and pitfalls of rational persuasion. If he seeks to induce cooperation by an appeal to logic, he should first determine whether the source's resistance is based on logic.  The appeal will glance off ineffectually if the resistance is totally or chiefly emotional rather than rational.  Emotional resistance can be dissipated only by emotional manipulation. ”
 
-- from the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s “Counterintelligence Interrogation”, July 1963; declassified and approved for release into public domain January 1997; emphasis added
 
***
 
REGARDING INTERNAL DOCUMENTS AND OPERATIONS MANUALS
 
It’s a poorly-known fact, and somewhat of a minor tragedy that it’s so poorly known – every document created by the U.S. government automatically enters into the public domain, without copyright, if it’s not classified.
 
These operations documents are incredibly useful to learn from – indeed, almost any ops documents or training materials that began as internal-only  in an effective organization is worth learning from.
 
You can learn immensely more, and far more quickly, by studying how Toyota builds cars than by reading the latest pop bestseller on business or leadership; you can learn far more about physical fitness from the U.S. Army guidelines on running and strength training and nutrition and recovery than you can from the latest fad diet; when internal materials are available on how high-stakes negotiations are conducted, these are almost always more direct, practical, and useful than reading general theories of negotiation that might be tested or untested – and even then, hopeful and “easy-seeming” materials tend to spread more easily and become more popular than uglier, harder, but often critically-necessary truths.
 
One of the more famous operations documents of our era, which is read and re-read by almost everyone effective I know, is Ray Dalio’s “Principles” – which began as internal-only at Bridgewater, the largest and most successful hedge fund of all time. You’ll see often references in Dalio in my writing.
 
Again, internal-only  is a good criteria for whether something is likely worth reading. Dalio’s Principles  started internal-only before being leaked (and only afterwards released publicly), thus it has that terse, direct, “you’ve already bought in if you’re reading this” feel to it. It doesn’t spend half the time selling you on the trueness of what it’s doing and all its core assumptions, and it doesn’t have that “sanitized quality” that writing for the general public typically carries with it.
 
Of course, the reason most public writing is sanitized is because almost all people don't want to say something that will cause a bad reaction in the general public for no gain to themselves. No one does; everything written for general publication is sanitized, and often it’s the most harsh, critical, and counterintuitive elements that are left on the cutting-room floor.
 
U.S. government documents are interesting in that there’s surprisingly little interest in them, and the majority were written before the Internet came of age. While technically you could get your hands on just about anything through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, this only typically happened when academic researchers wanted to delve deeply into materials, or when a major scandal happened.
 
But nowadays, you can find immense amount of these materials online. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has some incredibly interesting documents on assessing ecology and measuring environmental health over time. It takes a while to parse them – the guidance in them is typically used by specialists who already know the field, and they typically don’t explain basic well-known terminology – but a lot can be learned from them.
 
Similarly, in 2016, the U.S. Army had over 475,000 active soldiers and 540,000 reserves. Any guidelines for soldiers’ health needed to take into account making the material simple, easy, straightforward, and effective for over one million people  of different ages, different levels of motivation, different baselines of physical fitness and different jobs to be done.
 
Their materials on running, weight-lifting, nutrition, recovery, and injury-prevention are worthwhile. They have to be, or people die.  Likewise, the Navy has over 300,000 sailors and 100,000 reserves; you’d imagine their guidelines on swimming to be a pretty good place to start learning, wouldn’t you?
 
Finding these materials can be as simple as a Google search when you’re going into a new field. You can read about how the Treasury goes about assessing the money supply, how the FBI practices firearms safety… even how various bureaus and agencies go about record-keeping, accounting, and logistics.
 
It’s all incredibly useful and practical stuff, needing to be both foundationally correct for the most motivated members of those services, as well as a variety of everyday people going about regular and routine jobs. If any of these training materials or operations documents are fundamentally flawed, very bad things happen.
 
And while it’s fashionable to make jokes and denigrate the American civil service, after having studied a lot of history as well as surveyed the civil services of some other modern governments, I’m comfortable stating that there’s never been a country anywhere near as large and diverse as the United States that was even  close to as well-governed and effective.  Really, the only other major candidate in modern times would be the British Empire.
 
So – learning from what civil servants, soldiers, and people in high-stakes situations in government are actually doing  for their operations, their lessons, and their trainings is incredibly valuable, as well as looking for excellent documents released from the private sector. I mean, where are you getting your information on how to effectively do things? Storytellers like Malcolm Gladwell?
 
***
 
PARTICULARLY HIGH STAKES: THE COLD WAR BEGINS
 
The United States was ill-prepared for the Cold War.
 
American isolationism before World War I and World War II are well-known, but American “gentlemanly idealism” is often not well-known enough.
 
The first major American code-breaking and cryptography organization, the Cipher Bureau, was founded in the aftermath of World War I in 1919 and jointly funded by the State Department and the Army.
 
But this ran against the currents of American idealism and hope. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson ordered closing down the project, saying: “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.”
 
On 7 December 1941, that date which will live in infamy, the Japanese led the sneak attack assault on Pearl Harbor, killing over 2400, wounding over 1100, sinking six ships, destroying 188 aircraft, and wreaking a lot of other havoc and carnage – while American forces were caught unaware.
 
Even following the entry of America into World War II, the Axis Powers were seen as sort of an aberration. Max-hostility would be needed to put down their attempts at global conquest, but it was thought that the aftermath of the war would usher in genuine peace and prosperity. Perhaps still feeling foolish and bashful at the World War I slogan of “the war to end all war,” such pronouncements were not explicitly made in pithy catchphrases, but the feeling was that something altogether more sane, stable, and peaceful would emerge from the aftermath and endure.
 
Of course, Joseph Stalin did everything he could to convince American leadership of his goodwill and good intentions, and American leadership genuinely wanted  to believe that a peaceful world would emerge after the carnage. It’s the American way; we Americans so want  to believe.
 
Seeming on the verge of universal peace, Stalin’s 1946 Bolshoi Theater Victory Speech shocked, horrified, and confused those would had been his allies merely a year before. Stalin –
 
“Comrades! […] It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally, or as a result of blunders committed by certain statesmen, although blunders were certainly committed.  As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.  […] As far as our country is concerned, for her this war was the fiercest and most arduous ever fought in the history of our Motherland. But the war was not only a curse. It was also a great school which examined and tested all the forces of the people. The war laid bare all facts and events in the rear and at the front, it ruthlessly tore down all the veils and coverings that concealed the actual features of states, governments and parties, and brought them onto the stage without masks and without make-up, with all their defects and merits. The war was something in the nature of an examination of our Soviet system, of our State, of our Government and of our Communist Party, and it summed up their work and said, as it were: Here they are, your people and organizations, their life and work scrutinize them carefully and treat them according to their deserts. This is one of the positive sides of the war.”
 
Well, this not what the Americans and the English and the French and Nationalist Chinese wanted to hear.
 
Stalin goes on to violate his agreements of free and open elections in occupied Soviet territory, and Churchill fires back on 5 March 1946 in his “Sinews of Peace” speech –
 
“ From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.  Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy. ”
 
In July 1946, the Chinese Civil War reignites; it had been on hold as the Nationalists and Communists set aside their differences to fight Imperial Japan.
 
In October 1949, the Nationalists withdrew to Formosa Island – Taiwan – and the Communists had occupied mainland China successfully.
 
On 25 June 1950, Kim il-Sung led North Korean forces equipped by Stalin and Mao in the invasion of South Korea.
 
***
 
COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IN 1963: FROM EUROPE TO KOREA TO EVERYWHERE
 
Many – perhaps most – of the events of the Cold War caught the Americans unaware at first. Soviet leadership, now firmly under Stalin, had grown up in an environment of conspiracy and crime.
 
Stalin for his part had personally led bank robberies, extortions, riots, and the like. He dealt with the Nazis, signing their famous non-aggression pact and jointly carving up Poland, and – while caught slightly flat-footed by Hitler’s opening a second front through attacking the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa – nonetheless adapted.
 
Both Soviet ideology and Soviet experience were far more suited to a murky world of conspiracy and espionage than the American experience. After all, Soviet leadership had already navigated the covert insurrection followed by revolution in the Russian Empire, and then had developed a vast apparatus of secret police and infiltrators to destroy internal enemies first, and to begin to subvert foreign organizations shortly after consolidating.
 
Little-remembered now, but Stalin had multiple agents on site  at the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos; four years and three weeks after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Soviets conducted their first successful nuclear detonation on 29 August 1949, largely driven by his spies stealing atomic plans and science.
 
Stalin had rebuffed Korean communism while the Chinese Civil War was still raging, but after the Communist takeover of mainland China, he and Mao greenlit an invasion of South Korea.

When dawn broke on 25 June 1945 in America, Kim il-Sung had invaded South Korea. American diplomats moved unusually quickly in getting the United Nations Security Council to condemn the action that same day.
 
A rare blunder from Stalin in the field of belligerent diplomacy occurred – he’d instructed his Ambassador to the United Nations to protest all proceedings, and thus, with the Soviet Union absent, North Korea was identified as the aggressor on 25 June in the UN Security Council, on 27 June a resolution was passed recommended UN members furnish assistance to South Korea to repel the invasion, and on 7 July established the United Nations Korean Command to send soldiers under American leadership to repel the invasion.
 
The Korean War had begun.
 
Fighting went back and forth numerous times, and the entirety of the Korean War is beyond the scope of this chapter, but one item particularly puzzled American leaders – North Korean forces were particularly good at coercing confessions from captured prisoners-of-war.
 
This led to a deep study of the topic. Certainly, American and English forces had at times been captured by the Nazis or Imperial Japanese, but they didn’t make the sort of confessions and denouncements that came out of the Korean War.
 
In 1950, the first usage of “brainwashing” came into effect in English while attempting to explain this phenomenon.
 
The Korean War came to an armistice that divided the country in 1954, but even as it happened, Soviet funding of insurrection started growing everywhere : Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
 
The whole world turned into a slowly simmering battlefield, that would turn into flashpoints when Communist forces perceived themselves as having enough gravity to go into open war. By 1963, Fidel Castro had taken hold in Cuba and the Vietnam War was heating up.
 
All the successful Soviet espionage, the successful Communist interrogation and coercion techniques from 1946 to 1953, and the covert insurrections that boiled over rapidly once reaching critical mass had caught American leadership very much off-guard.
 
The Central Intelligence Agency had been formed in 1947, but its mission had been somewhat vague and murky, and there were debates on what it should do. As the success of Soviet espionage and Korean War coercion and interrogation came to light, and as similar Communist plans started being enacted around the globe, the CIA quietly became one of the paramount American organizations for the research of psychology and how people react under stress and pressure.
 
***
 
DANGER FLAGS #3: INTERNAL STRIFE
 
We continue exploring Danger Flags , a simple concept that’s often profoundly neglected: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it.
 
We are looking to be able to build our mental models of common danger flags so we can spot them out in the world, so we can take adequate measures in danger-flagged situations, and so that we can identify problems in our own behavior and ways of thinking and gradually train to become more solid, more effective, better people.
 
In this chapter, we’re concerned with recognizing a variety of Internal Strife  that can plague and torment people. Indeed, people with high degrees of internal strife – and there a number of variants of it – are prone to rapidly reverse course and do incredibly destructive things.
 
We’re using a backdrop of counterintelligence material developed in the 1960’s in a highly leveraged and incredibly dangerous and fast-moving environment, which was only declassified three decades after originally being written.
 
Of course, this can be heavy stuff. In an ideal world, perhaps, I would find a way to lighten the tone. This stuff can be so dark , no? And yet, it is  the world as-it-is. Similar to an engineer ensuring that a building doesn’t fall down during an earthquake, we have to consider a variety of dangerous and unpleasant scenarios, so that we can build things that are beautiful and functional. If the topic starts to become too gray or too dark, of course, there is plenty of Malcolm Gladwell out in the world as a change-of-pace; but for our part, we dive into the hard and practical stuff that is so poorly covered elsewhere.
 
***
 
THE NINE MAJOR PSYCHOLOGICAL-EMOTIONAL CATEGORIZATIONS
 
The declassified 1963 “Counterintelligence Interrogation” document ranges from the boring and practical, to the horrific and macabre, to the highly insightful. In the preface, it begins:

“There is nothing mysterious about interrogation. It consists of no more than obtaining needed information through responses to questions. As is true of all craftsmen, some interrogators are more able than others; and some of their superiority may be innate. But sound interrogation nevertheless rests upon a knowledge of the subject matter and on certain broad principles, chiefly psychological, which are not hard to understand. The success of good interrogators depends in large measure upon their use, conscious or not, of these principles and of processes and techniques deriving from them. Knowledge of subject matter and of the basic principles will not of itself create a successful interrogation, but it will make possible the avoidance of mistakes that are characteristic of poor interrogation. The purpose, then, is not to teach the reader how to be a good interrogator but rather to tell him what he must learn in order to become a good interrogator. ”
 
Obviously, it’s extremely unlikely – statistically speaking – that you’ll ever interrogate anyone. But that’s not the point.
 
As with any operations document, you’re looking for general principles. The vast majority of us will never do industrial engineering either, but the general mental models of eliminating waste, batch-processing, eliminating bottlenecks, and economy of motion are very easily applied to any domain. Studying how Toyota built the most economical, effective, and profitable automobile company in the world is worthwhile.
 
Similarly, people are people – learning how professionals in an extremely high-leveraged and high-risk situation assess people is incredibly worthwhile. The people learning interrogation in the 1960’s were doing such things as debriefing potential defectors from the Soviet Union to see if they were genuine and were bringing real information. This is obviously a very high-stakes game; a double-agent with incorrect information could be devastating.
 
Most of the document has some historical value, but not much practical value for those of us simply trying to build mental models to further our performance and understand people better. The extreme situations presented do not apply to us.
 
However, “Types of Sources: Personality Categories” offers a wealth of interesting details. In it, the manual outlines nine basic types of personalities, what types of traits and behaviors tend to come in packages together, what motivates each type of person, and how they’re likely to respond and act going forwards.
 
It’s imperfect, but an incredibly interesting jumping-off point for learning what makes people tick and predicting future behavior.
 
Here’s the full description of their first type, “the orderly-obstinate character” –
 
“The orderly-obstinate character. People in this category are characteristically frugal, orderly, and cold; frequently they are quite intellectual. They are not impulsive in behavior. They tend to think things through logically and to act deliberately. They often reach decisions very slowly. They are far less likely to make real personal sacrifices for a cause than to use them as a temporary means of obtaining a permanent personal gain. They are secretive and disinclined to confide in anyone else their plans and plots, which frequently concern the overthrow of some form of authority. They are also stubborn, although they may pretend cooperation or even believe that they are cooperating. They nurse grudges. 
 
“The orderly-obstinate character considers himself superior to other people. Sometimes his sense of superiority is interwoven with a kind of magical thinking that includes all sorts of superstitions and fantasies about controlling his environment. He may even have a system of morality that is all his own. He sometimes gratifies his feeling of secret superiority by provoking unjust treatment. He also tries, characteristically, to keep open a line of escape by avoiding any real commitment to anything. He is -- and always has been -- intensely concerned about his personal possessions. He is usually a tightwad who saves everything, has a strong sense of propriety, and is punctual and tidy. His money and other possessions have for him a personalized quality; they are parts of himself. He often carries around shiny coins, keepsakes, a bunch of keys, and other objects having for himself  an actual or symbolic value.” 
 
Is that not incredibly fascinating?  Indeed, a quick skim of my memory does see a correlation between non-impulsiveness, frugality, less self-sacrifice, desire to control the environment, making only tentative commitments, more care and attention to detail of personal property, and so on.
 
Of course, these things are imperfect. Indeed, the introduction to that section warns, emphasis added on the most important line –
 
“The number of systems devised for categorizing human beings is large, and most of them are of dubious validity. […] The ideal solution would be to avoid all categorizing. Basically, all schemes for labeling people are wrong per se; applied arbitrarily, they always produce distortions. Every interrogator knows that a real understanding of the individual is worth far more than a thorough knowledge of this or that pigeon-hole to which he has been consigned. And for interrogation purposes the ways in which he differs from the abstract type may be more significant than the ways in which he conforms. […]  With all of these reservations, then, and with the further observation that those who find these psychological-emotional categories pragmatically valuable should use them and those who do not should let them alone , the following nine types are described. The categories are based upon the fact that a person's past is always reflected, however dimly, in his present ethics and behavior. Old dogs can learn new tricks but not new ways of learning them. People do change, but what appears to be new behavior or a new psychological pattern is usually just a variant on the old theme. “
 
Those caveats in place, their nine categories are –
 
1. Orderly-obstinate
2. Optimistic
3. Greedy and demanding
4. Anxious and self-centered
5. Guilt-ridden
6. Wrecked by success
7. Schizoid
8. The Exception
9. Average or Normal
 
In this chapter, we are less interested in their categories #1-4, #7, and #9. They can be interesting, particularly the “magical-thinking” schizoid-type who is totally ungrounded in reality, but we are most interested in those people that are fighting internal strife.
 
***
 
DANGER FLAG: WRECKED BY SUCCESS
 
“Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.”  – Thomas Carlyle
 
From the counterintelligence document –
 
“The character wrecked by success is closely related to the guilt-ridden character. This sort of person cannot tolerate success and goes through life failing at critical points. He is often accident-prone. Typically he has a long history of being promising and of almost completing a significant assignment or achievement but not bringing it off.  The character who cannot stand success enjoys his ambitions as long as they remain fantasies but somehow ensures that they will not be fulfilled in reality . Acquaintances often feel that his success is just around the corner, but something always intervenes. In actuality this something is a sense of guilt, of the kind described above.  The person who avoids success has a conscience which forbids the pleasures of accomplishment and recognition.  He frequently projects his guilt feelings and feels that all of his failures were someone else's fault. He may have a strong need to suffer and may seek danger or injury. ”
 
Now, isn’t that  something?
 
Clearly, with the briefest moments of reflection, we all know someone like this.
 
And we can see right away why this is a danger flag. Echoing Carlyle, they can soldier on through adversity… but when at the gates of prosperity, they begin to break down.
 
And note, this is not some New Age thinking about the power of belief. Whoever the lost-to-history writer of the CIA’s counterintelligence interrogation manual was, this was a rather clinical and blunt person, interested in very practical outcomes.
 
We will deal with addressing this in ourselves and others momentarily.
 
***
 
DANGER FLAG: GUILT-RIDDEN
 
“The guilt-ridden character. This kind of person has a strong cruel, unrealistic conscience. His whole life seems devoted to reliving his feelings of guilt. Sometimes he seems determined to atone; at other times he insists that whatever went wrong is the fault of somebody else. In either event he seeks constantly some proof or external indication that the guilt of others is greater than his own. He is often caught up completely in efforts to prove that he has been treated unjustly. In fact, he may provoke unjust treatment in order to assuage his conscience through punishment. Compulsive gamblers who find no real pleasure in winning but do find relief in losing belong to this class. So do persons who falsely confess to crimes. Sometimes such people actually commit crimes in order to confess and be punished. Masochists also belong in this category. ”
 
It’s difficult for me to toe the line here on not venturing into current events; anything I might say to expound on this could be interpreted politically.
 
But to take a mild example, I suppose we all know people who are intentionally rude or combative towards authority figures like border guards, customs officials, or police who pull them over on a routine traffic stop.
 
It’s well-known and widely agreed – most law enforcement officers will admit it in private, and some have even written and declared it publicly – that if you’re friendly, polite, cooperative, calm, and address an officer as “Sir” or “Maam”, they will treat you more cordially and be less potentially hard on you than if you’re standoffish.
 
This doesn’t get into how  things ought to be;  that’s not the point. The point is, there is a certain pattern of behavior and type of personality that, as the expert put it, “may provoke unjust treatment in order to assuage his conscience through punishment.”
 
Odd, is it not? And yet, does it not explain a lot?
 
Again, we will come back to this to address practical implications in a moment.
 
***
 
DANGER FLAG: GENERALIZED VENGEFULNESS

We began this chapter quoting type 3, “the greedy, demanding character.”
 
The key quote is thus –
 
“Defectors of this type feel aggrieved because their desires were not satisfied in their countries of origin, but they soon feel equally deprived in a second land and turn against its government or representatives in the same way. The greedy and demanding character is subject to rather frequent depressions. He may direct a desire for revenge inward, upon himself; in extreme cases suicide may result. ”
 
Now, I should clarify that I’m not advocating “turn the other cheek” against legitimate and persistent hostility; this is a modern ethos that I do not agree with. Self-defense and counterpunching are both appropriate in a wide variety of situations, and perhaps the next time we do a series contrasting ancient views with modern ones – something similar to what “Uncommon Virtues” was – we’ll likely cover this topic.
 
With that said, true enemies are a rarity. Constantly nurturing grudges is a dirty-burning fuel at best; most of the time, it merely saps one’s energy. The most effective people I know almost universally do not bother trying to avenge themselves when petty trivial things happen to them unfairly, but instead look to get out of that situation and get back to work as soon as possible.
 
The interesting insight from the author of that document, which certainly explains why a defector would often cross back to their original home country’s service so often, is that excess grievances and hatred for no particular reason are typically a sign of the person who is carrying those grievances and hatreds, rather than the circumstances they came from.
 
Obviously, then, if the hatred and aggrieved feelings are internal  but mistakenly expressed as external  whenever it is convenient, this becomes a person you can easily fall out with or have bad experiences with, and is very dangerous.
 
Again, we will deal with practical implications in a moment.
 
***
 
DANGER FLAG: REBELLIOUSNESS AT NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
 
And finally, Category #8: “The Exception” –
 
“The exception believes that the world owes him a great deal. He feels that he suffered a gross injustice, usually early in life, and should be repaid. Sometimes the injustice was meted out impersonally, by fate, as a physical deformity, an extremely painful illness or operation in childhood, or the early loss of one parent or both. Feeling that these misfortunes were undeserved, the exceptions regard them as injustices that someone or something must rectify. Therefore they claim as their right privileges not permitted others. When the claim is ignored or denied, the exceptions become rebellious, as adolescents often do. They are convinced that the justice of the claim is plain for all to see and that any refusal to grant it is willfully malignant. ”

This use of the word “exception” is a little differently than we used last chapter, “Overlooking,” to denote someone who ignores base rates of statistics and thus overlooks impending potential problems to their own detriment. It’s also a little different from current modern-day usage of the word.
 
It’s perhaps worth focusing less on the “feeling of suffering a gross injustice” and more on the obviously and easily noticed trait of general rebelliousness over really petty and trivial things.
 
It’s easy to notice someone who regularly gets worked up over nothing; indeed, it’s common for young people to do so, since they don’t have enough experience to know when it’s practical to assert themselves or to shrug things off and go along with them; likewise, being able to be assertive without being aggressive is a learned skill that many young people do not possess.
 
I wouldn’t read into this too much if someone is rebellious to some extent over slightly trivial things under the age of, say, 35 in a Western country or slightly earlier in a country where people grow up faster. But once a person has some experience, generalized rebelliousness at nothing in particular  is certainly a danger flag.
 
Now, let’s address what these cases have in common.
 
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INTERNAL STRIFE AS A CATCHALL FOR MANY DANGER FLAGS
 
To echo a quote from Carlyle we’ve used in the past, albeit in a different context –
 
“The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual…”
 
Well, we’ve largely thrown “the spiritual” over the side of the boat in the modern world, to be replaced by psychology and culture. Nevertheless, indeed, people have feelings and impulses deeply embedded in them, things they’re typically unaware of – and things that others with an untrained eye might not see.
 
I believe the vast majority of unreflected-upon internal strife is a major danger flag.
 
Certainly, the majority of us have our insecurities and failings and situations where we become unduly anxious or impatient or whatever. Indeed, many great inventors and athletes and leaders wrestle with their internal demons.
 
But someone who is unaware  of internal strife in themselves and periodically expresses itself through destructive action, that person is incredibly dangerous to be around.
 
Most of us already recognize this at least somewhat intuitively. Sooner or later, we realize that a person who is always “down on their luck” might never break through. We realize that people who feel immense amounts of hostility towards organizations they’ve been a part of in the past are incredibly more likely to eventually feel hostile to any organization they’re part of now or might join in the future.
 
But over and above that, the key for spotting these types of danger flags are recognizing behaviors that are  not the result of external circumstances, but rather an expression of internal strife directed outwards. 
 
***
 
RECOGNIZING AND FIXING THESE DANGER FLAGS IN YOURSELF
 
Perhaps you resonated to some extent with one of the types of personality and character written above – that should not be so surprising. Most people who are very normal and have no internal pressures on them are less inclined to go seeking and searching for better ways of doing things. If you read memoirs of great inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders, very many of them are haunted by some sense of insecurity or wounded pride or anxiety or similar.
 
The first key would be recognizing those aspects in yourself.  This is of course not any fun at all; it’s staring at the Sun. Your eyes burn and you want to look away. This is natural. The people who look quickly away, though, remain at risk.
 
The second key would be to recognize where those internal pressures express themselves poorly as actions and behavior, and then train alternative actions and behavior into place.  For instance, I would wager that a fair handful of our readers here have addictive personalities – certainly a higher percentage than the general population. That is perfectly fine – so long as you recognize the situations where it can lead you down to perdition, and take countermeasures against them. This might be never having a single drink, avoiding known substances of abuse, or setting explicit limits and self-monitoring around different types of leisure or games or entertainment. The exact force that can propel substance addiction can also lead to a person falling in love with a domain and driving relentlessly towards mastery in it. There are people addicted to physical exercise who become elite athletes, and there are people addicted to alcohol who ruin their lives on drink. Being the former is preferable to being the latter, which leads to our final point.
 
The final key for oneself is to recognize and channel potentially destructive aspects of personality into healthy, worthwhile, and effective behaviors and patterns of action.  I have something of a love of truth and a hatred of a stupidity and lies. While that might sound like humble and subtle bragging, I assure you it’s not – I formerly got into a lot of stupid arguments on the internet, sometimes got into stupid and unproductive arguments in real life, and at times was intemperate in the subject matter I wrote about to my own detriment. All of those I gradually set about to remedying – I think Danger Flags , for instance, cuts about as close to how radically honest I can be without getting myself into trouble. I removed myself from arguing on the internet entirely – a waste of energy – and will avoid a variety of forums of discussion that lack open-minded genuine searching-for-truth. Finally, I set some explicit rules and criteria around whom I’d get into arguments and discussion with, and spent years – perhaps 3-5 years – looking for the type of people like Kai Zau, Justin Mares, Taylor Pearson, and so on, that also drive endlessly towards truth and for whom taking opposite positions and fleshing them out is always uplifting, pro-social, and productive. I set guidelines about arguing – if I give someone advice and they start to argue without reflecting, I immediately shrug and treat them kindly and move on, but don't engage. It’s saved a lot of grief, since these days I almost exclusively debate and discuss with only open-minded people.
 
That’s of course a personal example, and it’s hard to say exactly what internal drive makes me dislike things that are untrue or sloppy. This can manifest itself in a regard for driving science and discovering the truths of the universe, or it can manifest itself in getting into useless arguments.
 
Likewise, something like a hyperactive conscience could lead one to try to codify a set of principles, live by them thoroughly every single day, and journal one’s errors while working towards self-improvement, or it could result in self-sabotage whenever success seems to be coming to one. With some awareness of one’s internal drives and personality, you can gradually train to change default bad behaviors and express those drives in healthy and effective ways.
 
***
 
AS FOR DEALING WITH PEOPLE WITH INTERNAL STRIFE…
 
I was going to try to give you guidelines on how to work with them, but if you spot any strong hatreds, immense guilt, self-sabotage, discontentment, or masochism – you’re probably just better off avoiding those people entirely. This is something to be worked on on one’s own; almost by definition, these attributes make people into potentially very dangerous colleagues, associates, or friends.
 
But with that said, I’ll note that there’s some people that seem to handle “just business” and transactional interactions just fine, but get let-down and disappointed by people who “really should know them” or some such. If you spot a person who is diligent and effective with people they don’t know, but who are erratic and do erratic things with the people they’re closest with, you’re better off keeping them at arm’s length.
 
Often you can actually work with those people, but if you generally like to run on “social norms” (as opposed to “transactional norms”) and generally like camaraderie, goodwill, and friendship – these are all things I like and prefer as defaults – you’ll have to check your inclinations around someone who gets most aggrieved towards the people they’re intimate with, but who are decent enough to people they’re not intimate with. As a morbid and unfortunate example, but probably illustrative, you can think of someone who is a decent employee at work, but who goes home and takes out their resentment on their family. This person is best avoided entirely, of course, but it’s probably not the end of the world if you work with them in an impersonal and detached, very professional way. Though you should, of course, avoid becoming family members or close friends with such a person like the plague.
 
***
 
IS THIS ALL JUST SOME NEW AGE THEORY?
 
I don’t think so. And indeed, the core we took these lessons from were people dealing with life-or-death decisions that effected thousands if not millions of lives at times.
 
This chapter, indeed this whole series is somewhat heavy, but I tried to keep this chapter from any heavier than needed to be. But this is the type of thing they were dealing with –
 
“ The true defector (as distinguished from the hostile agent in defector's guise) is likely to have a history of opposition to authority. The sad fact is that defectors who left their homelands because they could not get along with their immediate or ultimate superiors are also likely to rebel against authorities in the new environment  (a fact which usually plays an important part in redefection). Therefore defectors are likely to be found in the ranks of the orderly-obstinate, the greedy and deriding, the schizoids, and the exceptions.
 
“Experiments and statistical analyses performed at the University of Minnesota concerned the relationships among anxiety and affiliative tendencies (desire to be with other people), on the one hand, and the ordinal position (rank in birth sequence) on the other.  […] investigators [tentatively] concluded that isolation typically creates anxiety, that anxiety intensifies the desire to be with others who share the same fear , and that only and first-born children are more anxious and less willing or able to withstand pain than later-born children.”
 
Isn’t that just mind-blowing to read? The logic is on clear display, in a situation of the highest stakes. It makes immediate sense.

There, just dropped casually into there, is noting that birth order effects levels of anxiety and affiliative tendencies, and “anxiety intensifies the desire to be with others who share the same fear” – isn’t that just mind-blowing ?
 
And yet, it seems true.  The rabbit-hole goes deep, does it not? There is so much wisdom and experience out in the world to synthesize and learn from, to glean insights from all sorts of professions and industries and fields, widely dispersed, across the ages.

If you're willing to stare at the Sun.

That is, I suppose, what we’re doing here.
 
The more I realize how much sophistication  is possible in one’s ability to read a situation correctly and make accurate predictions about the future as result, the more genuinely humbled I feel.
 
It's always joyful to focus on the upsides of success and production, but avoiding dangers and treacherous terrain are just as important. If you can do both successfully, certainly you can do some marvelous in life.

And yes, the rabbit hole… the rabbit hole goes deep.