The Eristics Test
Artist ·  Giver ·  Hero ·  Defender ·  Observer ·  Lancer · Architect ·  Fixer ·  Wizard
  ●●●

satisfaction

love » pride

The Defender protects self and family first.

A fierce friend, the Defender makes a great ally to have if attacked. Conflict is a last resort, however: The Defender is an inherent cooperator.

While the Defender is characterized by the hardest-to-achieve emotion, satisfaction, they have the easiest time of all the archetypes in achieving it.

Emotions are arguments

Emotions are arguments, each arguing for survival in one of three arenas:

SELF

The self argument argues for the extended self: You, your family, close friends and valued possessions.

WORLD

The world argument argues for survival in the physical environment, making the feeler confront danger.

SOCIETY

The society argument navigates the complexities of human society, arguing for survival in the tribe.

Your eristic order

Eristic order describes the usual order of an archetype's emotional arguments. There's always a self, world and society argument, but the order and expression differs between archetypes.

Your eristic order goes like this:

SELF

SOCIETY

The self-society order puts the two human arguments first, allowing the feeler to bridge self and society.

Benefits: A strong sense of self

Drawbacks: A weak sense of space

Each argument has two forms

Emotions are dualities, having one of two forms that can be felt at a time:

SELF
LOVE/DISGUST

Love argues to add to or nurture the extended self, while disgust argues to remove from the self.

WORLD
FEAR/ANGER

Fear argues to model and understand the world, while anger argues to modify or destroy the world.

SOCIETY
GUILT/PRIDE

Guilt argues to do work for society, while pride argues to be a high-quality member of society.

Your first argument: love

Your first argument is the argument of the self, expressing in the love form.

Love is the most common first argument, serving in the role for four archetypes.

First-slot love archetypes are inherent cooperators who make for good allies, co-workers and community members.

Benefits: Passionate, warm, caring

Drawbacks: Possessive, self-absorbed

Your second argument: pride

Your second argument is the argument of society, expressing as pride.

Pride, the higher-energy form of the society argument, makes for a demanding second argument. As an inner voice, pride combines the "being" demands of disgust and the "doing" demands of anger.

Since there are no first-slot pride archetypes, the second-slot pride archetypes tend to be the most prideful feelers.

Benefits: Goals-oriented, organized

Drawbacks: Goals-obsessed, Machiavellian

Emotions are felt in beats

Emotions are felt in beats, like heartbeats, all three arguments made each beat.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender
  Revelation
Architect
Frustration
Hero
   Exhilaration   Wrath   Joy        Contempt    Remorse   Duress Zeal Devotion Hatred Mania    Envy Rage   Anxiety Grief Attachment Shame   Despair Passion

Beats span from one base emotion to another along the LFGDAP scale.

Generally: Farther up and farther to the right are more energy-intensive.

Each beat has a point-of-view shaped by its base emotions.

Satisfaction

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.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender

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 also tend to be accepting of other emotional viewpoints in general, which makes them good deal-makers and negotiators.

Emotions have an energy order

Emotions have energy costs:

Lower energy
→ → →
↓↓↓
Higher energy
Love
Fear
Guilt
Disgust
Anger
Pride

In a beat, the lower energy emotion is felt first.

Self and narrative

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 tends to go down with the ship.

Obtuse to certain emotions

Anxiety, hatred, duress and remorse may not 'click' with the Defender at all times.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Remorse   Duress   Anxiety Hatred

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.

Emotions are needs served by culture

Groups, cultures and societies need to satisfy all six base emotions for their members.

They'll typically do this in one of three patterns:

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attachment Envy Zeal

Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hardworking.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Devotion Contempt

Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender

Satisfaction works for smaller groups which focus on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.

All cultures are characterized by one of these three patterns.

Emotional strategies

The Defender, like the Giver, falls into the self-society-world pattern. This pattern is powerful for connecting with others and for leading organizations.

Exclusive society

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.

Mastering fleeting emotions

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:

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joy Zeal

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).

The complicated archetypes

Frustration, revelation and satisfaction are the "big" eristic emotions, making the biggest leaps on the emotional spectrum:

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frustration
Hero
  Revelation
Architect
Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender

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 passion and mania, the complementary emotions for the two:

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passion Wrath Mania

Intense love and intense pride are natural masteries of the Defender. Avoiding the resulting wrath is harder.

Helping others

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.

Beats are dualities

Beats (combinations of love, fear, guilt, disgust, anger, pride) have opposites:

●  ●●Attachment ●  ●●Hatred ●●  ●Duress ●  ●●Frustration ●  ●●●Devotion ●  ●●●Contempt ●●●  ●Envy ●  ●●●Satisfaction ●●  ●●●Anxiety ●●  ●●●Zeal ●●●  ●●Remorse ●●  ●●●Revelation

Coping using envy

Since the coping emotion has the same arguments (self/world/society), but in opposite form, it effectively "turns off" the characteristic emotion, giving you a way out of overwhelming feelings.

The coping emotion serves as a sort of shadow archetype, characterizing you in times of extreme emotion.

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 particularly hard to achieve, even for the Defender, this can be a really terrible cycle to fall into. Here are some common signs:

Lifestyle inflation: An escalating set of standards can drive the Defender towards lifestyle inflation, where envy drives them towards higher and higher standards of living.

Status obsession: The Defender may come to self-define entirely through his or her place in the status hierarchy.

Nepotism: The Defender may be prone to giving friends and family high-status positions.

Emotions are addictive

Emotions can become addictive, like a drug that's made in your head. The addictions usually involve the emotions that make up your archetype's characteristic emotion:

Addiction to love, or the emotions here, looks like codependency.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender
Frustration
Hero
Devotion Attachment

Addiction to pride results in Machiavellianism.

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender
  Revelation
Architect
    Contempt      Zeal

Weakness: Wrath

Satisfaction essentially abbreviates or skips over wrath, the pseudo-emotion that spans from fear to anger:

Love Fear Guilt Disgust Anger Pride

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satisfaction (Belonging)
Defender
  Wrath    Envy

Satisfaction abbreviates wrath, which itself abbreviates envy.

The emotion of wrath, a fleeting and oxymoronic combination of fear and anger (which are the same argument, the world argument) can be overwhelming to the Defender.

The Defender is best off simply avoiding wrath, by recognizing that it's never actually felt in the service of love or pride.

Emotions model and modify

Emotions model and modify their spheres of influence—the extended self, the physical world or the feeler's tribe/society.

  Self World Society
Model Love Fear Guilt
Modify Disgust Anger Pride

It can be useful to think of the three dualities as pairs of opposite emotions.

They're also called the internalizing and externalizing forms of an emotion.

Love & Disgust
model/modify
Your extended self

Fear & Anger
model/modify
Your physical world

Guilt & Pride
model/modify
Your tribe/society

Virtues

Virtues help you avoid the negative effects of an emotion by consciously producing the results of its opposite emotion. It's like coping but conscious and intentional. Here are your archetype's virtues:

compassion

Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. When you act out of love when feeling disgust.

compassion is your operating virtue or highest virtue. It's the virtue you need to get by.

discretion

Keeping secrets and revealing information only at the correct time. Using love to function as disgust.

fairness

Acting out of guilt when pride is felt-- sticking to the governing of love and fear, the emotions of understanding, instead of the narrative emotion governing disgust and anger.

There are nine archetypes

Read all the other archetype descriptions here:

Your similar archetypes

The people most similar to you will be your own archetype:

These archetypes share your eristic order:

 

These archetypes have the same first argument:

These archetypes share your second argument:

 

Archetypes with the same missing/third argument:

 

This archetype is the inversion of yours: