The Defender protects self and family first. The Defender's the most emotionally mature archetype, but may still get caught up in sweeping narratives.
Your best arguments:
Emotions work like a jury of the three arguments, which combine in beats. Eristic beats are fast, like a heartbeat.
Eristics mostly looks at the form of the two strongest arguments involved in a beat. Any archetype can feel any emotion, but they tend to feel particular emotions.
Satisfaction is a complicated emotion.
It starts with the lowest energy argument in its internalizing form, love, and then jumps right to the highest energy argument in its externalizing form, pride. It's not a transition that's easy to make, even for the Defender, who has satisfaction as a characteristic emotion.
Satisfaction spans from love to pride, abbreviating every other base emotion.
Satisfaction is famously hard to achieve. What's less well-known is how it breaks down into the other emotions. In a sense, everyone is chasing satisfaction when they try to achieve all emotional arguments in their daily life.
The Defender can easily empathize with those close to them and come to their defense. Duress, attachment, envy— these are all just pieces of satisfaction to the Defender.
Defenders tend to be accepting of other emotional viewpoints in general, which makes them good deal-makers and negotiators.
The base emotions are like underlying survival needs.
Hatred fulfills disgust and anger, for example.
Duress fulfills fear, guilt and disgust, leaving love, anger and pride unfulfilled.
The broad emotional strokes of the Defender can make for a feeler who over-commits to the narrative demands of pride. The Defender's sense of self and sense of mission can become blurred. The Defender in leadership positions goes down with the ship.
Anxiety, hatred, duress and remorse may not 'click' with the Defender at all times.
The Defender may struggle to relate with the Wizard, the Lancer and the Observer.
Any emotion that doesn't neatly 'break down' from satisfaction will be tough for the Defender to empathize with. They may come off as cold, or lacking their characteristic empathy, when faced with people in these emotional situations.
When you feel satisfaction you can't feel envy, and vice versa. The Defender can 'turn off' satisfaction using envy to cope with the strong combination of love and pride.
Since satisfaction is hard to achieve, even for the Defender, this can be a really terrible cycle to fall into. Here are some common signs:
Lifestyle inflation: Envy may drive your standards higher and higher.
Status obsession: Your place in the group can become too important.
Nepotism: You may be prone to favoring those close to you while in groups.
Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hard-working.
Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.
Satisfaction culture, usually for smaller groups, focuses on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.
The Defender, like the Giver, falls into the self-society-world pattern. This pattern is powerful for connecting with others and for leading organizations.
The Defender has a hard time fitting into either the attachment/envy/zeal or devotion/contempt societal patterns.
The inherent problem with satisfaction is that it doesn't scale. Unlike the other two patterns, satisfaction can't support large groups. It can however support smaller, exclusive groups focused on achieving satisfaction. The Defender would be well-served to seek out such a group.
Some eristic combinations of emotion contain two instances of the same argument. For example, joy contains love and disgust, which are both forms of the argument of the self. Joy, combined with zeal, functions like satisfaction:
Joy/zeal is like satisfaction, but more viscerally touches on disgust and anger.
In order to fully reach satisfaction, the Defender needs to experience and master all of these fleeting emotions (marked by a dotted outline on eristic diagrams).
Frustration, revelation and satisfaction are the "big" eristic emotions, making the biggest leaps on the emotional spectrum:
The longer the bar, the harder the emotion is to achieve.
The Defender is great at working with the archetypes that embody these emotions, the Hero and the Architect. The key is mastering love and pride, the complementary emotions for the two:
Intense love and intense pride are natural masteries of the Defender. Avoiding the resulting wrath is harder.
The key to the Defender archetype is helping others and avoiding the self-gratification demands of satisfaction. The balancing act of the self and society arguments ultimately needs to lean towards society—towards pride—the harder argument to master.
Your archetype is most prone to first- and second-argument addictions:
Here are all six base emotion addictions:
Anyone can become addicted to any emotion. Emotional addictions are rare, even among the associated archetypes, and usually require outside help.
The Defender is naturally good at compassion and diligence which work like love and pride.
The Defender should aim to develop discretion and fairness, which work to moderate love and pride.
The hardest-to-develop virtue for the Defender is courage.
Virtues act like the opposite of their emotion. It's like coping but conscious and intentional, honed by practice. For the Defender, the need for courage goes along with a weak fear argument.
These archetypes have the same first argument, love:
These archetypes share your second argument, pride:
Archetypes with the same missing/third argument:
This archetype is the inversion of yours:
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