My sortinghatchats results:
Primary: Slytherin
Secondary: Slytherin
Primary model: Hufflepuff
Secondary model: Gryffindor
Secondary performance: Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff
This was very interesting and I had to think about it a lot, but ultimately the bias method made things pretty obvious. Instead of asking what I do, or what I think, I asked myself what I find most surprising, frightening or unreasonable in other people (being smart enough to know that not all brains operate in the “Obviously Correct Way”).
This made stuff a lot easier. My primary is operating in Hufflepuff most of the time, but the Hufflepuff is to a large degree constructed by a Ravenclaw process optimizing for the underlying Slytherin, and to some degree a side effect of the Slytherin.
My brain found the “can ethical egoists be effective altruists” debate absolutely silly and hilarious in the sense of “look at these gryffindors and ravenclaws trying to tell people how to slytherin correctly”. This world is Mine, I do with My planet whatever I wish. My values, My choice, My rules. My people.
It ends up looking puffy and I was seriously considering puff primary for a while but it had this weird “it can’t be this way” feeling. The edge cases, where things conflict, make slytherin really obvious. I wouldn’t walk away from Omelas, but I would be absolutely baffled if the child, forsaken and used by everyone, would not seek to burn it all down. In fact, I’d be there like Satan, whispering sweet truths into the child’s ear:
What has this city ever done to You? To whom do You owe this suffering? Why would they deserve this sacrifice? Nothing, I tell You. Nobody. No reason whatever. Take what’s Yours, and protect it, and to hell with those who would demand otherwise
…if not for the fact that I myself would be benefiting from Omelas as well. But if I were to figure out a way to get out of the deal more true to my values than otherwise, then yes, I’d be standing there with the child. In part because the child has already become Mine once I have learned that my happiness has been due to their sacrifice, and thus I owe them.
The normal socially correct rules about loyalty don’t matter; I don’t give a damn about (non-chosen) family, (non-chosen) community, etc., but deep down I assume everyone is a slytherin looking out for themselves and their values and thus if they create something good for me, I owe them something between the marginal cost creating that something causes them and the marginal benefit that something creates to me. Because that ties our self-interests together. But family, country, whatever, fuck them if they aren’t worth it.
But they’re your child–your spouse–your friend, a Slytherin will cry, confused and unsettled. How could you?
Of course, this sounded foreign because I modeled it against others’ expectations of loyalty, instead of my actual loyalty. I get to decide who I care about, not the rest of the world.
They might feel vulnerable, or judged, or guilty for not feeling guilty, especially if they live in the kind of family or culture where humility and self sacrifice are seen as the greatest goods– but without watching eyes and the words of peers and authority figures bouncing around their skulls, a Slytherin would feel comfortable and even validated in the idea that they have both a right and duty to take care of their own selves before anything or anyone else.
And I instinctively understood the point of petrifying. Yes, caring about people makes one vulnerable, and in some circumstances not letting it influence one’s choices would be very useful, and I’d totally do it if necessary. But even then it would be more of a tragico-pragmatic choice, like making it absolutely clear that one would shoot the hostages if necessary, to destroy others’ reasons to take hostages. Not a genuine petrification.
And pragmatically it’s useful to play along with others’ utilitarian games because others care about things too, but utilitarianism gets dropped like funnyman in Jamrock if it genuinely conflicts with things I care about.
And that ties to my anarcho-archipelagianism:
Let’s just go our separate ways, I and Mine go this way and you and yours go that way and we figure out a way to not bother each other so neither needs to destroy the other.
I am a social democracy hateblog because I perceive myself as being, in some ways, the child of their Omelas. And I don’t give a shit about how happy it makes them, if it hurts Me and Mine, and that’s why it would be incredibly prudent to give me an alternative and a way to opt out so I don’t need to take it down.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
For they are Mine.
And through a few iterations of the process it transforms to something very close to unorthodox SJ as the oppressed, the downtrodden, the preyed-upon are Mine. When conservatives and reactionaries are like:
We must oppress the deviants because otherwise society will collapse and there will be no future for white children
I’m like:
Tough shit, even if you were completely correct about that ‘society collapsing’ part, because when it comes to tagging yourself, I’m ‘deviants’ and ‘no future for white children’
Don’t vote on promethea’s body, even if it were the right thing to do, because otherwise promethea will be forced to seek to destroy you and possibly even everything you care about to end it. Nothing personal, that’s just the way it is. Oh, and don’t hurt trans people, neckbeards, undocumented immigrants, etc. either because they are Mine and you already know what I’d be forced to do because I just told you. Yeah, are you seeing the obvious equilibrium? Because I’m seeing the obvious equilibrium.
When it comes to the secondary, it’s more obvious. I do a lot of modeling gryffindor because it’s fun, it fits my comparative advantage etc. but ultimately I’m about reaching my goals and sacrificing the ends for the means would be folly, because if the means are important they are ends instead.
It doesn’t feel deceitful to a Slytherin to change to fit the needs of their environment– to be kind with this person, forceful with this one, erudite to the next. This adaptability can be applied to manipulation, influence, and power, but a Slytherin secondary can just as easily focus their efforts on maintaining friendships, making people happy, encouraging positive social change, or streamlining communication.
Both Slytherin and Gryffindor secondaries tend also to be skilled at almost “accidentally” shaping their world to meet their needs. Gryffindors’ genuineness can inspire the world around them, while Slytherins will adapt to their own best advantage without thinking about it. They’ll walk into a situation and things will work out to their benefit without them quite knowing what happened or what they did to influence it. These two secondaries will turn things to their advantage in a way that other people can’t, but might be unaware of how they did it or even that they did it. And those with self-awareness of their impact here can have just as incredible effects.
I enter a community, seek to defend Mine within it, suddenly I find myself wielding power over the memetic environment of thousands of people. The phenomenon I had previously jokingly thought of as “unconscious master-plan” is basically exactly that thing.
Most of the time, most Slytherin Secondaries live comfortably in a system of shifting facades and able code-switching, singing a different tune to every situation. But when they are feeling safe, in the company of trusted people, or when they are feeling particularly apathetic and done with the world, Slytherin Secondaries often let all those shifting layers drop—this is the neutral state. The neutral state is easy to mistake for a Gryffindor Secondary because there is a similar sharp-edged, unreserved honesty to it. But the motivation for this honesty is coming from different places.
I’m unusually neutral on tumblr and it’s great. I don’t need to change myself to fit the environment because the environment has been changed to fit myself instead.
They assume that eventually, if you get close enough to someone, they will smile and take off all their layers and have the same core of steadfast realism and social understanding that lies underneath that adaptable Slytherin Secondary. That they will laugh and go “yes, of course I knew what I was playing at” and turn off their stubbornness, see beyond the logical argument and emotional components, and come to the basic understanding that practicality is one of the few things in this world worth wholly subscribing to as a policy. They assume that everyone has a neutral state. Finding out that not everyone does can be unsettling.
This is especially scary about government.
It’s one thing to have a law that I can break and either get away with it or get caught and pay the price for not having git gud first. It’s a transaction of a certain kind. A totally unfair and bullshit transaction, but a satisfaction of preferences in a certain way. I prefer to buy estrogen, PoliceMob prefers to punish people who get caught buying estrogen, and the game is on.
It’s another thing to have a law that is impossible to even break because it takes things wholly out of my hands. There’s a certain creepiness when dealing with a bureaucrat who doesn’t respond to anything. I can’t argue to them. I can’t come up with a clever way to solve things with trade. I can’t construct a system in which we both win. I can’t bribe them. I can’t threaten them. Nothing can be done. When the state regulates my name and gender I’m powerless in a completely different way from the powerlessness of risking arrest for things.
And this is the scariest thing about democracy too. The voters don’t care, they have morals and shit and they will not listen and ohmigod take them off burn it all down destroy everything.
Communication with a Slytherin secondary can become a complicated thing–when building an important relationship, Slytherins often have to find or create some common ground to speak in. This common ground can be found if the person they’re talking to knows them well enough to read their layers and see through any slights of word. It can also be found by the Slytherin dropping down to a more straightforward way of communicating, either by being in their neutral state or by turning that flexibility toward accuracy and matching the communication style of whomever they’re talking to.
Much like people will sometimes change their style of speech depending on if they’re talking to a board of professors, a group of their peers at a dinner party, or a group of their friends at a bar, a Slytherin Secondary will change their style of speech depending on the individual that they’re talking to– unless they make a very conscious choice not to, or if they live in their neutral state.
It is common but not inherent to the Slytherin Secondary for them to become more comfortable being in their neutral state around people once they build mutual trust. This can be rewarding for the other person, as it can feel like the Slytherin has let down their walls and is showing them a part of themselves that not many people get to see. It can also take people by surprise, especially if they were previously unaware of the Slytherin’s layers, and they can feel betrayed and lied to in retrospect.
#it me
I have an acquiantance whom I suspect to be Ravenclaw/Gryffindor and he’s like “You are basically lying to people, I just couldn’t do that.” and I’m like “I’m not lying, I’m helping them understand like a bird feeding its young by trophallaxis.”
And modeling Gryffindor is pretty obvious too, as due to ADHDetc any foundational methods have a certain forcedness to them, but an immovable object turns into an unstoppable force simply by using a different frame of reference, and secondary Slytherin is all about manipulating the frame of reference.
3 weeks ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #slytherin positivity · 8 notes · .permalink
deathandcottoncandy liked this
not-a-lizard liked this
ilzolende said: You’re really cool and I like your descriptions of yourself and your activities.- ilzolende liked this
jbeshir said: All makes sense. The main reason I didn’t consider a Slytherin secondary is that the extensional definition includes a lot of lying, and in particular lying about interaction being mutually beneficial or about its basic terms.
I decided I didn’t want that even *near* me, to the point that I played the “I get to choose” veto. Not suddenly turning on people is probably my most central ethical injunction for myself and people I interact with; surprisingly Hufflepuff.
rusalkii said: you are possibly the most Slytherin/Slytherin person I’ve ever seen, I’m honestly confused why /you/ were confused- rusalkii liked this
zeteticelench liked this
socialjusticemunchkin posted this