#socionomics

[thekallipolis]

The Kallipolis Kounsel presents Socionomics Step 1: Establish Familiarity

How do you transition from being a stranger to an acquaintance to a friend? These early stages of relational familiarity are as essential as the later nurturing of relationships. There are many analogies that can be used for the development of any type of relationships: baking a cake, growing a plant, or constructing a building; Either way, the point is that progress is a process. In Step 1, Establishing Familiarity, our goal is to transition the target's view of us from stranger to friend. Sometimes, initial contact is too easy because of the environment in which the target presents itself. For example, at a conference or other professional or academic setting in which networking is encouraged through meet and greets, cocktail lounges, and banquets; this is an extremely easy opportunity considering that the majority of the attendees have similar backgrounds. Take the annual National Society of Black Engineers Nationals conference, at a place like this, making connections is almost effortless because of the multitude of common denominators and common interests. A conversation in this setting might go like this:

Me: Hi, how are you, I'm Devin T. Galt!

Target: Nice to meet you, Devin. I'm _____.

Me: I love your dress! You look amazing, I saw you from across the room and I knew I'd beat myself up if I didn't come talk to you. So, where do you go to school? What's your major?

Target: Thanks! I really like it too. I go to Spelman and I am an Electrical Engineering major. What about you?

Me: I go to West Point and I am an Economics and American Politics double major with a minor in Mechanical Engineering. Where are you from?

Target: O wow, that's a lot, I'm from Nashville, TN. You?

Me: I'm from Birmingham, AL. So, not too far from you. You didn't want to go to Vanderbilt or TSU?

Now. We've made the introductions, infused a bit of flattery, exchanged information about our academic background as well as our geographical backgrounds. Since we were already in an environment where I could make reasonable assumptions about the target, I was able to open with the School and Major question. Judging by the prestige or quality of their school and intensity of their major, I can reasonably start to formulate a profile on the target. Coupled with the knowledge of their city and state of origin, you can not only assume reasonable things about their ideals, principles, and sensibilities based on the assumption of the societal norms of that area. It also allows you an opportunity to comment on something about them, illustrating that you know something about their life. The not too far line and mentions of other colleges in Nashville will show the target that I am familiar with their surroundings, that we have shared experiences and knowledge. For the purposes of this particular step, we will stop there for the familiar settings, leaving room for Step 2: Convey Interest.

In unfamiliar settings, your work is cut out for you a bit more but this is where following the steps that we are laying out here will guide you to success. The issue with unfamiliar settings such as a bar, subway, bus, airplane, or any other number of public places is that you have to create an environment or reason to approach the target. A good personal example is this: I am from Birmingham, AL and as such am an avid Alabama Crimson Tide Football fan. Whenever I see someone in Bama paraphernalia, I always speak to them with the greeting, “Roll Tide!”. This allows me to establish familiarity between the target and I by pinpointing a specific thing that we have in common with one another.

Me: ROLL TIDE!

Target: Damn right, Roll Tide!

::High Five::

Me: I’m from Birmingham, Are you from AL?

Target: Yea, I’m from Birmingham too, where’d you go to high school?

Me: I went to Thompson, graduated in ’07, you?

Target: I went to Homewood, graduated in ’06, did you know ____

I have had many realistic exchanges such as this and you’d be surprised at how well people receive talking about their clothes or shoes in a familiar manner. I do the same thing with people’s shoes, as a shoe aficionado myself, when I see a girl with a fly set of sneakers on, I let her know that I love her shoes and subsequently begin conversation.

So, I say all this to say that the first step is to open the conversation with something that will put you and the target on common ground. If you are in a place where there are already obvious common grounds, tread on that common ground before proceeding into the weeds. If you are in a place where there are not obvious common grounds, then you must chop down the weeds with a machete while you look for common grounds.

Step 2. To follow!

-Devin T. Galt

[thekallipolis]

The Kallipolis Kounsel presents Socionomics Part 1: Establishing Relationships

"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called "The Pledge"; The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn"; The magician makes his ordinary some thing do something extraordinary. Now if you're looking for the secret... you won't find it, that's why there's a third act called, "The Prestige"; this is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before."

-From Christopher Nolan's Film The Prestige

Man is naturally and innately social. Civilization, government, and culture arises from an impulsive need for people to be around each other. Therefore, relationships are a good to be valued and therefore managed with an investment in time and money. Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Socionomics is economics applied to interpersonal relationships on a macro and micro scale. Utility must be maximized, profit must be maximized and cost must be minimized. Establishing relationships will be the first topic covered by The Kallipolis in socionomics. Relationships are the basis of all human interaction and must be managed correctly to receive the most profit. By profit, I refer to desired goods and services that can be obtained through the connection with another person. The formation of a relationship can be broken into six parts: Establish Familiarity, Convey Interest, Validate the Target, Validate Self, Validate Us, and The Bold Move. This post will be a brief discussion and definition of each part. Further in depth analysis will follow in future posts.

            Step 2: Convey Interest. Once familiarity has been established, interest in the agent must be conveyed.  If done too obviously, the performance will be seen for what it is and the target will grow defensive. This is best done through the art of inception. The soil is carefully prepared. The seeds are planted months in advance. Once the seeds are in the ground, no one will ever know who planted them. The seed is apart of the earth. Disguise your interest by planting a seed that takes root on its own. Inception is the art of planting ideas in people’s minds by dropping elusive hints that take root later, appearing as their own idea. Therefore the idea that must be incepted at this stage is that the agent wants your attention. Even more so, it was the agent’s idea to get to know you, not the other way around. Everything must be suggestive; bold statements followed by withdrawal, ambiguous comments, banal talk accompanied by divergent body language; all tools to enter the subconscious to convey your real meaning.

            Step 3: Validate the Target. Once interest has been conveyed you must make the target feel special. Validate their achievements, goals, and traits. The lark is difficult to catch for a bird hunter. Its is fast, elusive, and intelligent. The hunter places a mirror in a field. The lark lands in front of the looking glass and becomes enraptured by its own image and by the mating dance unconsciously done on itself. Hypnotized, the bird loses its situational awareness, until the hunter traps it against the mirror. People are naturally selfish, stubborn and prideful. All of us are narcissists. The best way to lure people out of their intractability and self-obsession is to enter their spirit and feed their ego. Glorify their life and place them on a pedestal and they will gradually accept your adoration and open up. By providing a mirror image of themselves you nurture self-esteem and validate their opinion of themselves.

            Step 4: Validate Self. Now it is your turn to validate yourself in their eyes. Create a halo around your life and accomplishments but be careful not to outshine or you will place yourself beyond reach. Slowly, the target should begin to imagine a faint glow around your head, formed by all of your successes, the possible pleasures you might offer, the radiance of your presence, your noble qualities. The halo separates you from other people and propels you from the familiar and ordinary to the extraordinary and fantastic. As stated before, people are narcissistic and therefore want the best for their lives. As Angela Carter stated, “We would rather align ourselves with angels that with the higher primates from which we are actually descended.” The choices we make in regard to who we associate ourselves with reveal something important and intimate about us; our own self-worth. If you associate yourself with ordinary people then you must be ordinary. It doesn’t match our opinion of ourselves if we were perceived as average. Therefore as humans we have a natural affinity towards associating ourselves with the extraordinary, complex, and sophisticated to fit our self-schema. It is important at this step to sell yourself as worthy of the target’s valuable attention.

            Step 5: Validate Us. Once yourself and the target’s validity has been established you must pair the two of you in an inseparable bond. Everyone has a vision in their mind of a perfect place where people are kind and noble, where their dreams can be realized and their wishes granted, where life is fantastic and interesting. Lead the target there and illustrate that through your combined powers you can reach Shangri-La so to speak. The notion of otherness is one of the most powerful social forces. As people tend to form groups they seek to distinguish themselves from the “others”. Be it a clan, village, or nation the concept of “us” is glorified and distinguished from “them”. In regards to the target, for the bond to be completed this concept must be harnessed. We are the product of our own ambition and goals. Civilization is rife with stories of marvelous occurrence, happy romances, and fulfilled lives. By embodying that fantasy, you exploit that secret desire to achieve the fairytale. You hold the future and through both of you it can be attained.

            Step 6: The Bold Move. The last step is the bold move, the final offensive that carries the intent to success. If the previous steps have been executed properly than this step simply takes courage and confidence.  No one is born timid; timidity is a defense we develop. You fail 100% of the times you do not attempt an action. At this point the intent must be made clear to the target. Boldness is necessary to bring any relationship to its full flowering, eliminating awkwardness and doubts. It breeds commitment to the cause. The Bold Move is your socionomic equivalent to The Prestige. Not only does it require boldness, it also requires a large amount of patience and analysis. If the intended outcome of this socionomics exercise is to receive contact information from the target then all it should require at this stage is to ask. Having followed the other steps, the target will not hesitate to continue what has been shown to be a beneficial transaction. If not, then you must assess the objections that exist in the target’s mind and act to overcome them without pushing too hard or not trying hard enough.

 Following these steps breeds a successful relationship that can be used to any purpose, be it romantic, professional, or platonic. As networks of relationships are established control and direction of life can be easily obtained. Maximized profit comes in the form of achieved wishes and desires. Above all guaranteed return on investment is control over your environment whose landscape is the human race.

~Robert A. Roark

[thekallipolis]

Kallipolis Kounsel: Socionomics Overview

So, as previously stated, economics can be looked at as the battle over the allocation of scarce resources. Usually, this refers to the market of goods and service around the world. Following these premises, we look at socionomics through the lens that relationships (both personal and professional) can be considered goods and services and thus a scarce resource. In socionomics, time is quite literally money and the amount of time spent building a relationship is a literal investment. Utility is the economic principle that every thing that you consume will provide you with some level of satisfaction. With a diminishing return, each new unit of product brings more utility but less than the last unit of product. Socionomically, it is important to maximize utility to make each relational transaction a good investment for both parties. Relationships can be looked at as mutually beneficial transactions wherein both parties take the roles of both consumers and firms. This is what causes problems in the long term for the firm side of relationships. The firm's problem is to maximize profit through minimizing cost. Profit can be equated by the equation, Total Revenue-Total Costs (TR-TC). Firms should focus on minimizing cost since it is the only part of the transaction that is directly controlled by the firm. So long term, a person will naturally deviate from putting out as much time as in initial periods of maximum utility if some satisfactory level of utility remains. All this to say that by looking at relationships from a business mindset, we will walk through the steps for you to maximize utility for both you and your potential consumers. One last thing, please resist the feeling to discount this socionomics theory on the naive premise that relationships should not be viewed as transactions because it dehumanizes them by stripping them of emotion. In fairness to us, actual business transactions require enormous levels of emotion and provide many of the same psychological and physical benefits as will be laid out in our theory. -Devin T. Galt

[thekallipolis]

Kallipolis Kounsel: Welcome to Socionomics

Here in the Kallipolis, we welcome all things uplifting, insightful, logically sound, beautiful and of course great. As such, we have set out to collect and organize our thoughts in order to help those who visit this beautiful city a better informed and inspired intellectual when they depart.

So we have decided to begin what shall be referred to as "Kallipolis Kounsel" pieces. This Kallipolis Kounsel series will begin with the concept and execution of "Socionomics". By definition, economics is the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. As my cow (junior at West Point) year began, I took microeconomics. In this class, we were told the key to economics was to think of it as a battle over the allocation of scarce resources.

These days with social media and increased digital stimulation, many people worry that good old fashioned face to face contact is diminishing into the background. In the Kallipolis, we disagree. We feel that as this contact becomes more scarce it is even more important to hone your interpersonal skills and take advantage of the opportunities presented to become socionomically rich.

Socionomics is not an exact science however having insight in the realm can change the way you think and approach real time relationships. So, sit back, relax and stay tuned for the Kallipolis Kounsel on Socionomics!

-Devin T. Galt

[michaelquirke]

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