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, 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.
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
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 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 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, like heartbeats, all three arguments made each beat.
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 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 also tend to be accepting of other emotional viewpoints in general, which makes them good deal-makers and negotiators.
Emotions have energy costs:
In a beat, the lower energy emotion is felt first.
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.
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.
Groups, cultures and societies need to satisfy all six base emotions for their members.
They'll typically do this in one of three patterns:
Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hardworking.
Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.
Satisfaction works for smaller groups which focus on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.
All cultures are characterized by one of these three patterns.
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 passion and mania, 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.
Beats (combinations of love, fear, guilt, disgust, anger, pride) have opposites:
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 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.
Addiction to pride results in Machiavellianism.
Satisfaction essentially abbreviates or skips over wrath, the pseudo-emotion that spans from fear to anger:
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 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 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:
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.
Keeping secrets and revealing information only at the correct time. Using love to function as disgust.
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.
Read all the other archetype descriptions here:
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:
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