Durci Geometry, and Wisdom

• Posted by radar pangaean October 14, 2011 - 801 views

  I'm going to share an observation i made some time ago, but also share the path that i took deriving it. The final conclusion i will present was not born fully formed, but was instead the culmination of many previous observations and conclusions which were incomplete at the time they occurred. The purpose of this post is therefore two-fold. One is to share the specifics of the conclusion, but the other is to draw a distinction that i recognize as existing between intellect and wisdom.

   

  I acknowledge that knowledge and intellect are not drectly correlated with age. When i was in grade and high school, i made excellent grades in all subjects. I was recognized by my teachers and peers as of above average intellect, which sometimes led to some nicknames that weren't necessarily intended as a compliment. I'm not claiming i'm smarter than anybody, but certainly i am - as the Hanna -Barbera cartoon character says - "smarter than the average bear". However, while i think i've always been smart, i am well aware that i have NOT always been wise. 

   

  As far as i can tell, intellect is pretty much a constant over a person's life span, and is a function mostly of genetics. Expressing intellect requires the individual who possesses it to "feed her/his head', primarily by reading, studying, practicing, experimenting, and keeping an open mind. I've known some people who i believe have a very high raw intellect, but who for one reason or another appear dim because they have limited their input.

   

  We have some younger folks on the site - in their early to mid 20's - who appear to me have similar (or higher) intellectual prowess than what i demonstrated at their current age, and who appear to be fairly well read. I acknowledge that they already have things to share with me that i am unfamiliar with, and i enjoy my interactions with a few of them.

   

  However, IMO wisdom is a different animal that intelligence. Intellect is a pre-requisite for developing a high degree of wisdom, but so are experience and time. The fastest supercomputer on the planet can only process the data that is available to it. The same is true of the human mind, it can only analyze and evaluate subjects with the data available to it. The most intelligent person on the globe will draw invalid conclusions if operating with only invalid or significantly incomplete data. In the computer world, we refer to this as GIGO, i.e. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The same applies to the human mind. 

   

  Of course, nobody will ever have literally 'complete data'. It's not available to us, and even if it was our brains aren't equipped to contai or process that much knowledge. The best we can hope for is to have all the data necessary to understand an issue at the level that we need to deal with it, but that is NOT a trivial task either and doesn't happen by accident. I admire the people who honestly seek to attain that level of knowledge before declaring a firm conclusion. I have far less regard for the people who think that their limited personal experience can be extrapolated to serve as the final answer on every topic, and that's especially true in the cases where the person CHOOSES to limit their input. Intellect does not automatically produce wisdom, and in this type of situation IMO it produces only sophistry. 

   

  In my 20's i met a man named Dave Durci. We were both recently divorced, and we were discussing what we had concluded about male-female relationships. One observation we shared was that many of the women that we were attracted to were already in relationships where the man was not treating the lady as well as we believed that we would treat them. We sulked about the injustice in that with the fervor that can only be manifest at that age.

   

  We fell out of touch for a while, but the next time we got together, we discussed something that we had both noticed. Many of the same ladies who we had discussed as being mistreated by their boy friends at that time now appeared to have the upper hand in the relationship, and were in turn treating the guy poorly. We congratulated ourselves on not being those guys, as if we had had any choice in the matter (!), and went on to discuss other topics.

   

  More time passed. The next time we discussed this topic, we noted that some of these relationships had flip-flopped one or more times. In some, the man was now 'in charge' in others the woman, and some had flipped back and forth a few times. I drew the conclusion that for some people, the relationships they cultivated would always have one person caring more about it than the other, but that the roles could switch from time to time, and that was likely to go on indefinitely for those people. As i had derived this conclusion while talking to Dave, i named it "The Durci Theorem" in his honor. That theory matched the data i had available to me at that time, and i didn't even recognize at that time that i was drawing a conclusion based on incomplete information. I theorized that while a person had the upper hand, their need to control someone else, or their need to see that another person valued them enough to take the crap they were dishing out caused them to put more and more value in the relationship, so that when the other person finally got tired of the 2nd class status and wanted out, they bent over backwards at THAT point to KEEP the person from leaving, and thus the roles would reverse. That seemed to make sense, and it fit what i could see.

   

  Years passed. I watched assorted people i knew participate in Durci Cycle relationships, but i also noticed something else. Eventually, sometimes over as much as a decade, the people in Durci Cycle relationships eventually grew fed up with the back and forth, and one or the other of them finally terminated the relationship permanently. I also recognized that during the last few cycles, the participants in those relationships were generally just plain nasty to each other, to the point that their friends wondered why they continued it for as long as they so often did.

   

  I chalked that up to inertia, and to the same principle that leads a frog to stay in water while it is slowed raised to a temperature that will kill it. Gradual change is not always noticed by those who experience it, and few people are really self aware enough to see that they are NOT in a good relationship if it was EVER good before. But with the benefit of a longer term view, i recognized that what i had previously thought was a cycle was actually a spiral with a negative slope. At each pass through the alternating periods of dominance, resentments from when they were the 2nd class member remained even while on top, and so the overall commitment from both parties was less at each cycle. When the resentment passed one or the other's threshold, there was no keeping that person in no matter what the other person tried to do, because at least subconsciously the 'fed up' person knew that he/she had heard it all before. So, i kept the basic idea of the Durci Cycle, but renamed it to the 'Durci Spiral'. i saw that it was a better theorem than my previous model, and that it better explained the bigger picture of which i had not previously been aware.

   

  This amended view took decades to derive, and of course also meant that i watched a LOT of relationships fall apart … though presumably NOT just so i could study the phenomenon :-). I thought about the ramifications of this theorem for another decade, and during that time i found that it had remarkably good predictive power in guessing at the 'clock time remaining' on the relationships of people that i saw going around the spiral.

   

  But then, one day while thinking about it, i realized that what happened unintentionally for people on the negative sloped spirals could ALSO work in the opposite direction to create a positive spiral. When two people have hurt each other to the point that there's no longer any motivation for either of them to CARE, it IS sometimes still possible to repair the relationship, but only if at least ONE of them, and then later both of them, really want that to occur.

   

  To do so, one of them must be willing to put the entire past history of the relationship behind them, and be willing to give more love than the other person warrants. This is not to say that he/she must accept absolute disrespect from the other forever, simply that he/she must be willing to give more to the other than the other LEGITIMATELY deserves ***for a time*** to allow the other person to see that there's hope to make things better between them. If person A is willing to give up resentments, give up a tit-for-tat hurt each other game and REFUSE to repay unkindness with unkindness in return, that allows the OTHER person to allow a crack in the wall that he/she has built to protect her/himself from the inevitable hurt they have grown accustomed to receiving.

   

  I have NEVER believed that we owe anyone the right to abuse us, treat us as a convenience, etc., so i consider it REASONABLE and in fact CORRECT to NOT give fully of oneself to someone who gives little or nothing in return. But at the same time i think that if a person isn't committed to giving LOVE to their partner, they shouldn't be in the relationship at all. That is hard to implement when one has built a life with someone and the relationship was ONCE good but isn't any more, but it is still POSSIBLY  better than starting completely over with an UNKNOWN situation so IMO when we see that - for instance - a marriage or a sibling relationship has deteriorated significantly, the proper solution is to find a way to FIX the relationship instead of riding the spiral down to an inevitable end.

   

  If person A refuses to participate in the downward spiral, that doesn't automatically mean that person B will stop. Some relationships ARE beyond repair, and some people just flat can't participate in healthy relationships PERIOD. But if that's NOT the case, by not taking one's turn at being the ass, it frees the other from feeling that their only option is to reply by being an ass her/himself in return. As each overture of renewed commitment is seen by the other, trust can begin to rekindle. If both keep at it, eventually you reach a tipping point in the opposite direction, and the relationship can fully recover.

   

  This last observation, i.e. that the Durci Spiral can also have a positive slope and that consciously applying it is a way to REPAIR a fundamentally damaged relationship took even more time to derive and then see work in practice, but i have seen the theorem validated when i have seen it attempted. I don't think it would work everywhere, as again i thinks some people are just plain dysfunctional, but where there's a REAL commitment from both sides, this process can and does work.

   

  I suppose there's no deep insight here. The latter observation is almost intuitively obvious to the casual observer, but it took me decades to derive the whole theorem and to recognize that there was more similarity between the process of killing a relationship and reviving one than WAS immediately obvious, it was just a case of REVERSING the exact same process... and that doing so was something that COULD be done. It took over 25 years to put all this together, so expecting myself to have figured that out while still in my 20's was asking too much of myself, or anyone.

   

  So, there you have it. In this essay i have explained the derivation of my "Durci Spiral theorem", and also explained why i think that age is a NECESSARY, but not always SUFFICIENT, pre-requisite for wisdom.

   

  Thanks for reading, and have a great day.