I posted this elsewhere in comments, but I think there are two types of frame controllers: the assertive and the receptive types. Think of this comment as inspired by Aella’s, and a processing of some of my own experiences. I don’t know her at all, and won’t pretend to understand her experiences very deeply.
I interpret Aella as mainly referring to receptive frame controllers, while Elizabeth is referring to assertive frame controllers.
A key function of useful hierarchy is to make genuine capability legible and to improve our ability to coordinate around it. But not all hierarchies are formal, and even the formal ones need informal maintenance. Hence, you get genuine experts, who will make moves to establish their superiority and reinforce a subordinate’s place in the hierarchy. This isn’t always good, of course. Experts will fight for turf they haven’t really earned. Sometimes, this is just bad. Other times, it’s because what they’re doing isn’t so much trying to grab more territory, as to prevent someone who hasn’t earned it from doing so.
As an example from my life, think of the psychiatrist who makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements about the COVID-19 pandemic at the family dinner, even though he’s not 100% clear on the difference between the CDC and the FDA, because a master’s student in biomedical engineering has been voicing his own opinion on a narrow topic based on some careful research. The psychiatrist doesn’t want the MS student, who doesn’t even have a graduate degree in the field, to be mistaken for an expert on par with him, an experienced MD. Yet the psychiatrist doesn’t necessarily believe himself to be an expert on COVID-19. He just doesn’t want the MS student to overstep.
By contrast, the “receptive” frame controller doesn’t tend to have any significant concrete expertise, conventional formal status, or money. He might set himself up as a coach, guru, or religious figure. Fatherhood is also in this zone. Rather than being recognized for his tangible accomplishments or contributions, and engaging in assertive actions to make this recognition legible to others, he has to impress people who don’t know any better with some sort of intangible aura of mystery, wisdom, or social access.
The receptive frame controller has to make up for a lack of any tangible utility to attract people to him. He instead uses his own availability. He invites people over. He lets them stay. He makes himself enormously available to those who are willing to give him an even more enormous amount of their time. Most people have better things to do, but a few don’t, and they’ll get involved. Once the receptive frame controller has developed some sort of following, it becomes part of his aura. Everybody tries to figure out what everybody else is following him for, and trying to justify the time they’re all spending, searching for any sliver of value or meaning in the situation.
It would be unusual for people to stay long-term in situations that needed constant, ongoing justifications. If you were a monk in a monastery and had a deep, gut-level clarity about what you were doing there, the master wouldn’t need to convince you.
If that isn’t operating, then sometimes, there is at least a time-limited commitment. “Try it out for a year, and then you can quit if you don’t like it,” the parent might say to their child about an imposition of piano lessons.
What Aella describes is a frame controller who has to constantly exert his energy to justify the enormous amount of time and pain that his followers are throwing away on him. And there is no time-limited commitment. In theory, it goes on forever, and the commitment grows with time.
This, for me, is the key criteria that distinguishes a receptive frame controller from the normal give-and-take of social relationships. It’s the invitation to waste an unlimited amount of time, with no cutoff and no promise of a tangible outcome at a given time, with the experience being painful and consuming. The people who stay have no clear sense that they have alternatives.
This also helps me explain why I still find myself dealing with “frame control” on a daily basis, and yet feel as though I have become entirely immune to the dynamic Aella is describing in the OP. Having excluded receptive frame controllers from my life, or learned how to resist their tactics nearly effortlessly, I spend much more time in spaces where tangible competence is the main focus. This brings me into contact with lots of assertive frame controllers. That’s a form of hierarchy I don’t expect to ever be free of, but I also don’t resent it too much, because I understand that its basic purpose aligns well-enough with my own goals to be useful to me.
I posted this elsewhere in comments, but I think there are two types of frame controllers: the assertive and the receptive types. Think of this comment as inspired by Aella’s, and a processing of some of my own experiences. I don’t know her at all, and won’t pretend to understand her experiences very deeply.
I interpret Aella as mainly referring to receptive frame controllers, while Elizabeth is referring to assertive frame controllers.
A key function of useful hierarchy is to make genuine capability legible and to improve our ability to coordinate around it. But not all hierarchies are formal, and even the formal ones need informal maintenance. Hence, you get genuine experts, who will make moves to establish their superiority and reinforce a subordinate’s place in the hierarchy. This isn’t always good, of course. Experts will fight for turf they haven’t really earned. Sometimes, this is just bad. Other times, it’s because what they’re doing isn’t so much trying to grab more territory, as to prevent someone who hasn’t earned it from doing so.
As an example from my life, think of the psychiatrist who makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements about the COVID-19 pandemic at the family dinner, even though he’s not 100% clear on the difference between the CDC and the FDA, because a master’s student in biomedical engineering has been voicing his own opinion on a narrow topic based on some careful research. The psychiatrist doesn’t want the MS student, who doesn’t even have a graduate degree in the field, to be mistaken for an expert on par with him, an experienced MD. Yet the psychiatrist doesn’t necessarily believe himself to be an expert on COVID-19. He just doesn’t want the MS student to overstep.
By contrast, the “receptive” frame controller doesn’t tend to have any significant concrete expertise, conventional formal status, or money. He might set himself up as a coach, guru, or religious figure. Fatherhood is also in this zone. Rather than being recognized for his tangible accomplishments or contributions, and engaging in assertive actions to make this recognition legible to others, he has to impress people who don’t know any better with some sort of intangible aura of mystery, wisdom, or social access.
The receptive frame controller has to make up for a lack of any tangible utility to attract people to him. He instead uses his own availability. He invites people over. He lets them stay. He makes himself enormously available to those who are willing to give him an even more enormous amount of their time. Most people have better things to do, but a few don’t, and they’ll get involved. Once the receptive frame controller has developed some sort of following, it becomes part of his aura. Everybody tries to figure out what everybody else is following him for, and trying to justify the time they’re all spending, searching for any sliver of value or meaning in the situation.
It would be unusual for people to stay long-term in situations that needed constant, ongoing justifications. If you were a monk in a monastery and had a deep, gut-level clarity about what you were doing there, the master wouldn’t need to convince you.
If that isn’t operating, then sometimes, there is at least a time-limited commitment. “Try it out for a year, and then you can quit if you don’t like it,” the parent might say to their child about an imposition of piano lessons.
What Aella describes is a frame controller who has to constantly exert his energy to justify the enormous amount of time and pain that his followers are throwing away on him. And there is no time-limited commitment. In theory, it goes on forever, and the commitment grows with time.
This, for me, is the key criteria that distinguishes a receptive frame controller from the normal give-and-take of social relationships. It’s the invitation to waste an unlimited amount of time, with no cutoff and no promise of a tangible outcome at a given time, with the experience being painful and consuming. The people who stay have no clear sense that they have alternatives.
This also helps me explain why I still find myself dealing with “frame control” on a daily basis, and yet feel as though I have become entirely immune to the dynamic Aella is describing in the OP. Having excluded receptive frame controllers from my life, or learned how to resist their tactics nearly effortlessly, I spend much more time in spaces where tangible competence is the main focus. This brings me into contact with lots of assertive frame controllers. That’s a form of hierarchy I don’t expect to ever be free of, but I also don’t resent it too much, because I understand that its basic purpose aligns well-enough with my own goals to be useful to me.