After so many near-worthless entries, at last a really really exciting one!  A very lame school marm type at HLAS, one of my Shakespeare Authorship “Question” sites, got me thinking about rigidniplexes.  They are fixational systems rigidniks form that are the basis of the authorship theories of the most dedicated and rigidly doctrinaire anti-Stratfordians.  One of their main functions is defending the rigidnik against non-conformity.   I had always thought of them as necessarily irrational.

But it seemed to me  the school marm, Mark Houlsby (which may be a pseudonym), has one,   because of  the way he constantly gets after people for rude remarks, going off-topic, and disregard of what he thinks is grammatical correctness, as well as any view he disagrees with, which are mostly non-conformist views.   Yet Houlsby is not an anti-Stratfordian nor does he  seem any more irrational than every normal person is, just set in his narrow ways.  So, I decided there are two basic kinds of rigidniplexes, “hyperrigidniplexes” and “hyporigidniplexes,” the first being highly irrational, the second not particularly irrational.

Actually, I’ve always believed in more than one kind of rigidniplex, but I hadn’t come up with names for them I liked, and my definitions of them were vague.    Now I think I’ll call the most rigidnikal of rigidniplexes, the ones suffered by genuine psychotics, “ultrarigidniplexes.”  Such rigidniplexes are either not “sensibly” irrational, the way hyperrigidniplexes are, or are based on unreality rather than the irrational, although they are no doubt irrational as well.  For instance, an ultrarigidnik may believe unreal aliens from another dimension are after him whereas a mere hyperrigidnik will only believe, say, that no one whose parents are illiterate can become a great writer, which is idiotic but but is merely a misinterpretation of reality, wholly irrational, but not drawing on pure fantasy.

There are probably two levels of hyporigidniks–no, make that three.  Managerial hyporigidniks are the most successful rigidniks, common in the officer corps of the military, and on corporation boards, and, of course, running federal bureaucracies, or universities.  Rigidnikal enough to dominate third-raters, and hold unimaginatively to a course that has proved effective in the past, and rally others at their level, along with the masses, against non-conformity, which will include a country’s culturateurs.  Such hyporigidniks are the great defenders of mediocrity.  And here’s where this entry becomes on-topic for a blog called “Poeticks,” for among the great defenders of mediocrity are the people selecting prize- and grants-winners in poetry, and which contemporaries’ poetry should be taught, published and made the subject of widely-circulated critical essays or books.

A level below the managerial hyporigidniks are the marmly hyporiginiks.  Only slightly above-average in charactration, or basal mental energy, below average in accommodance, the engine of flexibility, imagination, creativity, but with possiblely slightly above average accelerance, or the ability to raise their mental energy when appropriate.  So, not in managerial hyporigidniks’ league, but able to construct rigidniplexeses about trivialities like table manners, spelling, etc., and lord it over milyoops.  And, in poetry, repeat the opinions of the Establishment.

Managerial hyporigidniks, I should have said, are higher in charactration than lesser hyporigidniks.  Indeed, each level of rigidniks has more charactration, and less accommodance–and smaller but more life-consuming rigidniplexes.  The lowest-level hyporigidniks have average charactration and accommodance, and variable but never inordinately high accelerance.   Peasant hyporigidniks, I call them: they form rigidniplexes that are little more than habits sensible for their position in life, and aren’t so much locked into them as too unimaginative to try anything else.

In the past, I’ve often hypothesized a kind of “pararigidniplex”–a rigidniplex formed by freewenders, who are the sanest, most intelligent people.   I now have a new name for it: “wendrijniplex.”  It’s like any other rigidniplex except for its origin, which is not caused by a person’s chronically having too much charactration and too little accommodance, but by a freewender’s having in a single instance, too much charactration and too little accommodance, his enthusiasm for a discovery of his over-riding his critical sense, and his continued pleasure in the rigidniplex it brings into being, being too great for him to break ties with it.  So it blights his intellectual existence every bit as unfortunately as a rigidnik’s rigidniplex blights his.

To be thorough, I will remind my readers (including myself) that everyone forms knowleplexes, which are mental constructs each of which provides an inter-related understanding of some fairly large subject like biology, for a layman, or the biology of mammals, or of one species of mammals, for a biologist.  A rational (although not necessarily valid) knowleplex is a “verosoplex.”  Offhand, I would say there are two kinds of irrational knowleplexes: rigidniplexes and–another new term coming up–”ignosoplex,” or a knowleplex which is basically too inchoerent to be classified as either rational or irrational.  It’s the result of ignorance.  We all have many of them, each concerning a field we are “ignosophers” about–not completely ignorant of, but not sufficiently knowledgeable about to be able to form a verosoplex–or any kind of working rigidniplex.

I’m well aware that most readers will find the above the product of an ignosopher.  It isn’t.  It’s just a pop-psychology–level very rough draft of one small knowleplex the among many making up my knowleplex of temperament, which in turn is a small knowleplex among the many making up my theory of intelligence, which is just a small portion of my theory of epistemology, which is a not-small portion of my theory of the human psychology.  Or so I keep telling myself.