duress
fear » disgust
The Lancer relies on the development of personal skills (or knowledge of the world) and self-perfection to overcome big problems.
The Lancer's best traits: Imagination and independence. The Lancer's worst traits: Imagination and independence.
Analytical and discerning— but analytical first— the Lancer is driven by fear, but balances it with disgust.
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:
WORLD
SELF
The energy-order-breaking world-self argument, unique to the Lancer, allows a feeler to view the world from a unique perspective, but at a high energy cost.
Benefits: A strong sense of the world
Drawbacks: A weak sense of time
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 world argument, expressing in the fear form.
The second most common first argument behind love, fear connects you to the real world. First-slot fear archetypes are rational and cognitive.
Benefits: Intelligent, creative, observant
Drawbacks: Anxious, fawning, avoidant
Your second argument is the self argument, expressing as disgust.
As the second argument, disgust is discerning, critical and often overrules the first argument, abbreviating the emotional loop completely. Disgust in this position can work like a reset button on the eristic beat. This results in a quick-thinking, witty feeler.
Benefits: Well-groomed, constructively critical
Drawbacks: Perfectionistic, irritable, abrasive
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.
Duress is the eristic one-two of fear and disgust. It's a quick, smart, incisive emotion.
Duress goes from fear to disgust, abbreviating guilt.
Duress's world-self order is rare. Attachment for example is a self-world emotion. That's the normal order. Duress hacks this with the self argument of disgust. The Lancer thinks and feels in this disgust-powered world-self order by default.
Duress in its strongest forms feels like being tortured or being trapped. Lancers are resilient, tough-minded people, except when it comes to social situations. There, they may have to depend on their weak third argument, the argument of society.
Emotions have energy costs:
In a beat, the lower energy emotion is felt first.
The Lancer is named for his/her tendency to daydream, or to slay dragons. Their imaginative capabilities and lack of societal rewards mean that daydreaming is pretty close to the real thing, at least in terms of emotional feedback.
The Lancer's daydreams are usually focused on satisfying anger and pride.
Their best and worst ability is being able to access anger rewards with their rich imaginations. In other words, a typical feeler will punch another person when angered, but a Lancer can simply imagine doing it and get the same reward.
Because of this, the archetype may seek bigger and bigger targets in the real world to satiate their anger— targets that may sometimes even still be objects of fantasy, worldbuilding or storytelling.
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 Lancer is the most individualistic archetype. The key for this type of feeler is either embracing that or trying to overcome it.
The Lancer is great at tackling big, deep-dive problems that require focused thought. Unfortunately, big problems are best tackled by groups. The Lancer often can't get into a position of power to lead such a group, and even if he or she could, it probably wouldn't work out well.
The most important tool in embracing individualism for the Lancer is self-compassion, or moderating any disgust that's pointed inward by instead acting out of love.
Honor is vital to the Lancer to govern anger. A Lancer's sense of honor will usually see them behaving well in society. When the sense of honor clashes with society's rules, however, the Lancer can run into trouble. You should note the difference in your internal rules and society's external rules.
Humans are inherently social creatures, so the Lancer's individualism comes at a big cost.
The Lancer's most common issue in this regard is working on projects that don't benefit others. The archetype's weak guilt argument can make it difficult to identify society's needs. Unlike the Observer, the Lancer isn't naturally adept at zeal, mostly because of this misplaced society argument.
The Lancer only has any hope of fitting one societal pattern, attachment/envy/zeal:
The Lancer almost fits well into the attachment/envy/zeal cultural pattern.
The biggest gap in the Lancer's emotional toolbox is in feeling envy, the combination of guilt and disgust. The Lancer will tend to substitute duress for this emotion, missing the subtle nuance of the differences in the world and society arguments. Survival is the ultimate emotional truth, but world survival and society survival are very different things. The farther a society is from real-world survival needs, the worse the Lancer will do in it.
The Lancer has almost no hope of fitting into a devotion/contempt culture:
The Lancer will step on lots of toes in a devotion/contempt society.
In short, the satisfaction of disgust through duress makes contempt seem pointless to the Lancer, who would rather practice zeal (anger and pride). Contempt is ultimately an abbreviation of anger, which the Lancer needs to satisfy the full emotional spectrum.
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.
The Lancer copes using frustration, the combination of love and anger.
Frustration can be impulsive and uncontrolled, especially in the Lancer, who won't tend to be great at either base emotion of love or anger.
Coping using frustration may look like:
Rumination: The Lancer can escape duress by feepng anger towards loved ones.
Too-big challenges: Tackling difficult problems can elicit frustration for the Lancer, who can sometimes use it as an escape from duress.
Burnout: The combination of passion and rage as tools to cope can lead the Lancer to burnout.
The Lancer's coping emotion is the Hero's characteristic emotion, making them complementary archetypes.
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 fear looks like depression and anxiety, with duress as depression.
Addiction to disgust results in narcissism.
The Lancer will weakly feel the emotions starting or landing on guilt: Shame, anxiety, envy, devotion, remorse and exhilaration. This is because duress abbreviates guilt, the Lancer's weakest argument.
Weakly feeling an emotion means not feeling it strongly. But it also means not handling it well when it is felt strongly. Since the Lancer likes challenges, this may present as a paradoxical focus on overcoming the discomfort associated with these emotions. The base weaknesses look like this:
In general, a weak sense of guilt makes for a weak connection to society. The Lancer feels as strongly as anyone else, but may not make an effort to show it to others. As a result, they may be seen as having a blunted affect. They may be seen as being hard to work with.
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:
Subverting anger with fear, or thinking when struck with the impulse to act.
honor is your operating virtue or highest virtue. It's the virtue you need to get by.
Withstanding or overcoming fear. Acting as anger (the 'do something' emotion) would when feeling fear.
Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. When you act out of love when feeling disgust.
Read all the other archetype descriptions here:
The people most similar to you will be your own archetype:
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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