Re:virus: Wooden Leg

From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue Sep 24 2002 - 13:37:34 MDT


[Mermaid]The following is from Eric Berne's terribly outdated (but entertaining) book, Games People Play. I hope some of you will find it entertaining and/or interesting and/or useful.

<begin excerpt>
Games People Play, Eric Berne(c)1964.
page 159-162

Wooden Leg

<snip>

The thesis of "Wooden Leg" is, "What do you expect of a man with a wooden leg?" Put that way, of course, no one would expect anything of a man with a wooden leg except that he should steer his own wheel chair.

<snip>

The obverse of "Wooden Leg" is "Rickshaw," with the thesis, "If they only had (rickshaws) (duckbill platypuses) (girls who spoke ancient Egyptian) around this town, I never would have got into this mess.

<snip>

[rhinoceros]
This post had me thinking for a couple of days. Probably a mistake. Now I see wooden legs and rickshaws on everyone.

I won't talk about my self-diagnosis; I'll just say that there are a number of wooden legs, such as modesty and fake incompetence, if you prefer a lazy approach where people have low expectations from you which you can easily surpass and feel good about it.

I wonder whether raising the expectations that people have from you, that is, posing as someone better than you are to intimidate the others so that they won't challenge you could be useful too. We could call it "wooden balls". But not for me. To much work needed.

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This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS.
<http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=26698>


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