You have to feed them a steady stream of correctly calibrated “luck” and “merit-based wins” to stabilize. Since they NEVER turn inward to explain anything, only external stimuli work. I suspect cognitive-behavioral therapy fails on such people. They need pure behaviorism.
Conversation
Or to put it another way, cognitive reframing etc are weak behavior change levers if there are very few frames to begin with, and they’re all mostly unconscious firmware. Their conscious frames are about modeling external factors. Mostly external “people” factors. Blame frames.
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Don’t get me wrong. ELoCs are an important part of healthy societal problem solving. They bring all the energy and the focus on external factors needed if indeed that’s the locus of the problem. They are the ‘unreasonable’ people all change depends on.
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But when they “break bad”, especially on wicked problems with big internal AND external contributing factors, ELoCs, who are probably the majority, can turn cancerous. They bring change energy to the party with no good ideas. Result: things go BOOM!
Societal meltdowns.
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Introverted ELoCs are particularly dangerous since they can seethe in resentment for years, accumulating energy, until they finally blow up. Often described as a “silent majority.” Probably better described as “ticking time bombs.”
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If you are ILoC and have ELoCs in your life you will learn to manage them with merit-win+luck game-making, and they’ll swing between hating/thanking you for it. That’s your cross to bear. They’ll return favor by pumping you up when you’re low-energy. That’s their cross to bear.
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But at macro scale things are much harder. ILoCs never cause collective level problems because they retreat, self-isolate. But ELoCs can connect, feed off each other and turn into explosive metastasized societal problems. True believer mobs etc. ILoCs can’t easily “manage” this.
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An ILoC at the end of his rope is likely to commit suicide. If the cause is external, ultimate failure mode of looking internal is to run out of life energy in isolation.
ELoCs too, commit suicide at the end of their rope, but like to take as many people with them as possible.
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This is the fundamental asymmetry of LoC sociology. During general bad times, full of both internal and external factors driving multiple wicked problems, you get both a suicide epidemic AND an epidemic of suicide-bombing type events. The latter is the bigger problem.
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In fact a great deal of societal/institutional design is devoted to ELoC management: making sure ELoC introverts have safe outlets so they don’t accumulate “Cold Revenge” energy, and ELoC extroverts have zones to act where chaosmaking is an asset, like entrepreneurship.
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Replying to
I don’t have answers here yet, but I think this is the question next-gen institutional design (my current big interest) has to answer: How do we control and manage ELoC energy so it powers society steadily instead of blowing it up every decade.
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Baumol paper I mentioned: “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive”
jstor.org/stable/2937617
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