MERRY KRAMPUS! & UNNECESSARY PANGS OF CONSCIENCE

The Christmas season in Germany was beautiful and enjoyable for children... if you ignored the part called The Naughty List. I'm not sure how other children around the world took Christmas, but we took it with what I could only call unnecessary pangs of conscience. On the one hand, Christmas represented family, gifts, and expectancy. Nice things. On the other hand, Christmas resembled the Day of Judgment. No matter how naughty you were from January to November, the first day of December found you recounting all the naughty words, all the naughty deeds, and all the naughty thoughts you indulged in like a reprobate ragamuffin. And the DAY OF RECKONING eventually rolled around with all the contrived regret and gratuitous repentance my little child's soul could conjure up. 

I remember once being put on The Naughty List close to Christmas (the tree was already up). As best my six or seven-year-old memory can recollect, it was for a homework infraction (or maybe several... and maybe for several other things, I honestly can't remember). I remember thinking There is no way for me to make this right before Santa comes. I mean, I needed to do enough good things to make Santa forget that I had even made The Naughty List. I had never heard of anyone who made the The Naughty List unmaking that list. I was screwed.

I remember more than one Christmas going to bed on Christmas Eve with the trepidation of an imminent Rapture. I was so frightened that I put my head under my covers and faced the wall, knowing full well that Santa would be in MY house that night. My head was full of the carol...

You better not shout

You better not cry

You better not pout

I'm telling you why

Santa Claus is coming to town...

I heard the song as more of a threat...

You BETTER not shout

You BETTER not cry

You BETTER not pout

Or else...

See, Santa knew if I was fake sleeping. Either I was really asleep or really awake. There was NO in between. And if I prayed to God, I prayed to Santa, too, to give me a genuine desire to sleep. But it didn't come in enough time before I heard someone moving about the living room, making his way into our hallway, and stopping right outside my door. It wasn't Santa Claus. It was Satan Claus.

Krampus.

Now, I am being completely honest when I say that in some places in Europe Christmas Day is like the day of reckoning. In America being on The Naughty List means fewer presents. In Germany, being on The Naughty List meant that you had your shoes filled with coal & switches. Which meant that you sucked.

Few children outside these European traditions understood that Santa had a helper... and he wasn't an elf. His descriptions varied, and none of us children really knew what he looked like, because he was typically levied as a threat to keep us in line. But we knew a few things. We knew that an enormous Santa entered normal houses through the chimney, but was never dirty upon arriving. Because he was good.

However, his more sinister side (who was covered in soot)... the one who took care of Santa's Naughty List) didn't care about his appearance. He would slide down chimneys and emerge with the switches (broom) he used to clean the chimney, dirty from head to toe, and trailing coal behind him. These fiery images were none other than the Devil. 

Now, what was so interesting was that ultimately we all enjoyed a Happy (Merry) Christmas. But it came with a cost: unnecessary pangs of conscience. After waking up to stockings on Christmas Day, opening up presents, staying in our pajamas, and stuffing ourselves with treats, the more sinister aspects of Christmas were forgotten. And within a few days we were back to our old antics.

Having run my own school for 13 years, I've dabbled in methods of motivating students to do the things they ought. When I first opened my school, I wanted to offer students opportunities (a concept not unique to me) to advance in their studies. But these opportunities were only opportunities if they didn't come with consequences for not taking them. And I was consistent with that. 

I've been a part of several designer communities (Look for my blog on LARPing... coming soon!) these last few years that sell themselves on benefits of "authentic living" and "belonging" and "organic community." Because most of us lack this kind of utopia in our lives, it's an effective lure to get us to take at least a peek inside. But once inside, almost each and every one of them have their own set of consequences, imposed upon the dabblers, the members or congregants if the opportunities they offered were ignored or spurned.

Subjecting oneself to communities like this, one's moral compass can get grossly misaligned and those special pangs reserved for true moral guilt are artificially engineered to be triggered more and more frequently. I knew someone who attended a private school who eventually left the community because he didn't agree with some asinine, medieval interpretation of some theological point that is moot in most of the world. On the one hand, he qualified to be in the community. But once in, he didn't really qualify because he refused the up-sells (They were true choices, weren't they?). 

There were consequences for not taking those opportunities, for not going above and beyond, for not willingly wearing more pieces of flair than required...

And do you know what those consequences are? Unnecessary pangs of conscience if you stay. And no Christmas presents if you go.

For me, screw the Christmas presents.

(Here is a real opportunity below!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYg3iB5VvmI

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I was labeled melancholy as a child (in addition to kleptomaniac, compulsive liar, and rebellious). Add middle child and Dr. Benjamin Spock hammered the last nail in the coffin that was my personality. In the 1980's Hippocrates' four humors was experiencing a resurgence in works like Why You Act the Way You Do. You had to be sanguine (loud), choleric (bossy), phlegmatic (lazy), or melancholy (emo).

Generation Xer's like myself cringed at these categories. First of all, THERE WERE ONLY FOUR. Second of all, they only captured our obvious trait (read fault) and that with stereotypical accuracy. The temperaments, though fundamentally accurate, weren't comprehensive enough to capture those unique stirrings within us that never rippled strong enough to register on the personality map but were there all the same, causing millions of us to wonder if we ever could really know ourselves or if others would ever really know us.

With the close of the 1980's came the upheaval of nations, the collapse of borders, and the advent of the global village. 

Cultural means of communication and expression, never before experienced, dramatically increased over the next twenty years. Breakthroughs in online communication, digital simulation and wireless accessibility introduced an entirely new dimension to the catalog of human behavior: the virtual dimension.

Virtual means of expression created new behavioral norms, contributed by phenomena like rapid technological innovation, variegation of the nuclear family, alternative realities, and the reduction of time and space. Simplistic Newtonian physics of linear cause-and-effect have rapidly given way to the quantum theory of repeat viewing, parallel narratives, probability theory, blank space, and the uncertainty principle. We are simply more culturally complex than pre-global culture.

TraitMarker is an online personality branding tool that treats the virtual dimension of personality as real as traditional views of personality. TraitMarker offers 27 simple scenarios that, should you answer honestly, render you a traitMark, a personality profile of your subconscious. So what makes traitMarker unique?

1) TraitMarker does not give you a personality profile of your final decisions: it renders a personality profile of your impulses. Most of us are, perhaps, more aware of what other people think we should be than we are aware of our deepest desires and scripting. You might be surprised at what your TraitMark says about you.

2) Recognizing the influence technology has over our lives is a unique part of the traitMarker assessment. TraitMarker uses the borderless character of technology to describe personality. For example, the Guardian has the organizational traits of a computer firewall. Several of the traitMarker category names are even inspired by technology like Framer, Merger, Server, Engineer, and Gamer.

3) TraitMarker takes into consideration the elasticity of personality. Instead of your personality having a rigid, given form, traitMarker views personality more like a ball of putty. Your personality comprises all of the possible contortions you can make without pulling the putty apart. That is some flexibility. You probably are unaware of the solutions that lie within you for your signature struggles.

4) This is the fun part: traitMarker identifies your personality description to be 1 of 165 different traitMarks! We can offer such diversity of personality descriptions because the matrix we use is based upon a quantum view of personality. TraitMarker is simply a new kind of personality assessment.

It's been 28 years since I first learned I was melancholy, and the Spock Method is now an historical fixture in the field of psychology. It has been almost three years since traitMarker liberated me from the stereotype I saw myself to be. 

TraitMarker launched on April 1, 2012 at  http://traitmarker.com/  and can be taken online for $19.99. Rest assured that your TraitMark is reliable enough to build your personal brand upon. After all, you are not one in a billion. You are the ONLY one in a billion!

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