Item from Severance by Dan Erickson
Kier Eagan's theory that the human soul contains four emotional forces — Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice — and that controlling them is the key to human perfection.
The Four Tempers are Kier Eagan's framework for understanding human emotion — Woe (sadness), Frolic (joy), Dread (fear), and Malice (anger). He believed these four forces comprised the human soul and that mastering them through discipline and introspection would make a person complete. On the severed floor, the Four Tempers are the basis for everything. MDR sorts data by classifying scary numbers into WO, FC, DR, and MA bins. The Waffle Party ceremony features four masked figures representing each temper. The Break Room forces employees to recite principles designed to balance their tempers. The Four Tempers are simultaneously pseudoscience, corporate philosophy, and religious doctrine. They are treated with the seriousness of empirical fact by people who have no other framework for understanding what they feel, because the severance procedure took away every other context for emotion.
Represented as four categories (WO, FC, DR, MA) on MDR's computer screens, as four masks in the Waffle Party ceremony, and as four philosophical pillars in Kier's writings. They are everywhere on the severed floor — the classification system for all work, all reward, all punishment.
Also known as: Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice, WO FC DR MA