I have previously defined ditonality as follows:
Ditonals are compelled by ingenopathic geas to speak honestly of themselves during communication, so the speaker may evaluate their intentions and credibility. Unitonals aren’t.
Note how deepsocket comedians Jim Carrey, Will Ferrill and Steve Carell portray characters who are lost in their own worlds, clueless to feedback and convention, excessively self-revelatory and honest. They are portraying ditonal foolishness.
I named this phenomenon “ditonality” because of the phenomenon of two separate tones transmitted on the same channel, in the same message.
For example, take my posts on the Federal Reserve, Depression 2.0, and nuclear apocalypse. Such an outcome is by no means certain, if for no other reason than that human predictive capacity is limited and flawed. Yet I repeatedly described it as “inevitable”.
Why make inaccurate statements? To convey the second tone of the message, the deeper tone. I wished to strike at general complacency, to communicate my own shocked and horrorified surprise at the viability of this argument, to instill alarm, and to stir to “extreme” action. I saw a need for someone to argue the darker case, lest disaster befall the too-comfortable.
I was also honestly reflecting my atypically savage and cynical internal nature to the audience.
This probably rendered my arguments less effective, since ditonality does not scale. But due to ingenopathic geas, I felt compelled to present the argument in the way that felt “right” – fully honest. The argument dictated its own form.
So this is one example of ditonality, from an outlier MT. Let’s take a look at some examples from a very different outlier, TT Hugh Howey:
1. His (deleted) account of an interaction with a rude bitch at WorldCon. Just read the screencaps from his blog.
2. His personal philosophy of extreme nonviolence, turn the other cheek pacifism.
In both of these cases, ditonality is present. The speaker is compelled to bare his breast, to make his intentions and inner nature fully apparent.
In the first example, observe once again that this backfires. He confesses to uncharitable thoughts towards the bitch as penance and self-criticism, yet those thoughts are misinterpreted by hostile dishonest unitonals as simply a rhetorical attack.
As a result, (according to hearsay) he cries, discusses it with his wife, deletes the post and writes an apology, and then deletes the apology and replaces it with another apology.
So clearly he’s a gentle critter. The only commonality between myself and Howey in these examples is that we’re both ditonal.
I think a better word than ditonal would be “altonal”. This captures its essence: an ingenopathic communication protocol optimized for small-tribe altruism, reliant on high-context communication, that handicaps its user for the benefit of the group.
The upcoming sections will justify this terminological shift by contrasting with other communication modes.
** Hostonality, or Melon-speak
The concept behind hostonality is simple. Rather than being optimized for speaking to lifelong small tribemates, the protocol is designed for social interactions with a wide variety of participants, from strangers to shallow acquaintances to close friends and family.
It is thus able to access concepts and behaviors that are off-limits to altonals.
Hostonality is capable of unmooring itself from the obsessive strictures of deep sincerity, in order to more flexibly play with surface social dynamics. It is much more aware of such minor fluctuations, since they take on far greater importance when no deep, long-lasting relationship exists. It is able to warmly invite strangers in for brief, light interactions.
Obviously, this is a far more effective strategy in our massively scaled and atomized modern society. Moreover, girls eat it up. Let’s take a look:
The interesting thing about Craig Ferguson is that he’s charming despite socket depth. His extraordinary robusticity, large dimensions, projecting chin and good testosterone help explain this. Still, deepsockets can develop extraordinary social skills with proper application, e.g. Mark Manson and Nick Krauser. This requires strenuous contact with reality, as the sad case of Tom Cruise demonstrates.
In a world of shallow social interactions, being a “good guy” means making semi-strangers feel warm and fuzzy in casual interactions. It has nothing to do with character, which can’t even be observed within such brief contacts.
I initially called hostonality “unitonality” because there was never a huge divergence of tones that required lots of context to follow. Sure, there are plenty of jokes and sophisticated tonal effects – this isn’t autism. But the tone stays sufficiently unified to be comprehensible to a casual observer, whereas an altonal’s may diverge wildly.
However, I think “hostonality” captures it better. The example of a talk-show host doing lots of public interviews with strangers who may or may not make repeat visits, but whom are all nevertheless loosely connected via the greater world of show-biz, accurately captures the ideal functioning of the shallow social attachment communication style.
To see this style in a more combative setting, watch as Russell Brand defends himself from American asshole anchors with a combination of shallow social skills enwrapping some modicum of intellectual depth:
His core beliefs are deployed in subordination to the dynamics of shallow exchange, serving to buttress his frame of lighthearted mastery. An altonal would do the reverse. Yet this doesn’t alter the fact that Brand is sincere in his beliefs – it merely changes how he communicates them.
Thals are altonal. They don’t innately grasp the occasion of hostonality. It simply doesn’t register. They are either altonal or nothing. To them, hostonality feels disingenuous, shallow, wrong. And in a small tribe, it would be! Talk that kind of bullshit, and everyone would look at you like you were some kind of idiot. Altonality, being much higher density, can convey vastly more humor, insight, information, etc, and in briefer form.
This aversion to hostonality can be overcome, of course – I speak of the default sociobiological setting. Still, it is useful to disambiguate the two protocols so that Thals do not endure internal trauma when making the switch. One should not cut too deeply – it is JUST the communication protocol that needs adjustment.
** Mytonality and Metonality
This last pair refers to the rhetoric of proles. In Gervais Principle terms, hostonality is Powertalk for Sociopaths, altonality is Posturetalk for the Clueless, and Mytonality/Metonality is the simpler Gametalk for the Losers.
As Rao writes, Gametalk is already described here:
you can learn all about it in the pop classics on Transactional Analysis (TA, a Neo-Freudian school) from 30 years ago (now available in updated editions): Eric Berne’s Games People Play and What Do You Say after You Say Hello and Thomas Harris’ I’m OK–You’re OK.
It is a simple, artless language that nonetheless mystifies altonals, who interpret everything through the rose lens of ingenopathic geas.
I split the language into Mytonality and Metonality to signify the masculine/feminine shift from object/dominance to subject/solipsism.
** Conclusion
What altonals need to realize is that society is sick with scale. It is a rotting whale carcass that periodically blows up.
There are no rules in a rotting whale carcass. In order to maintain your internal integrity, you must defend yourself externally. If you find this distasteful, find ways to exit the carcass.