Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1)

by Venkatesh Rao

  If you are unreasonable, even if you actually manage to find a calling and do something that you will be remembered for, chances are high you’ll die destitute and unrecognized, after a lifetime of maneuvering, fighting and making implacable enemies and loyal-to-the-death friends at every turn. Instead of medals that nobody cares about, you’ll collect the detritus of failed and successful battles.

  And interestingly, people will scramble anxiously to preserve and pore over your unfinished junk.

  Boyd died in near-poverty, depressed and anxious about his legacy. He spent his last years battling cancer and worrying about all his papers.

  He died a nobody by some reckonings. But he died having done something.

  When he died in 1997, his acolytes scrambled to make sure his work was preserved. Boyd’s papers are now preserved at the Marine Corps Research Center at Quantico. He never rose above Colonel, but he will be remembered, and his briefings pored over, long after the medals of the generals of his time are auctioned off by their descendants on the Antiques Roadshow.

  Double-Talk and Chaos-Making

  Here’s a philosophical challenge for you: you’ve got a 2x2 matrix, with evil-to-good on the x axis and pessimism-to-optimism on the y axis. Try and think of people to pigeonhole in each of the four quadrants. Now what about each group leaps out at you? Are any of the quadrants empty? If you had to label each with an archetype, what would you call it? Try and think of the most famous person you can for your labels, because our mental models of famous people are caricatures that work well for this sort of thing. Alternately, you can try labels based on motifs or metaphors of some sort.

  With every 2x2 view of the world, the challenge is of course to see if you can break the dichotomies involved, at least locally for your own situation, even if you cannot invent a philosophy that entirely transcends the 2x2 perspective. This is much harder than it might seem. I am always amused by clumsy thinkers who latch on to a subtle idea like “dichotomy breaking” and assume that breaking an age-old one like good/evil or optimist/pessimist just requires an airy dismissal and some trite substitution; if it were that easy we should all be much happier.

  Let me see if I can offer some food for thought around this unnamed, unlabeled 2x2, and break the dichotomies locally to prise Slightly Evil thinking out of its obvious location just south-west of the origin.

  Surveying the Four Quadrants

  Historically, optimistic-evil has been associated with grand social engineering projects. The Nazis were associated with soaring eagles, 1000-year visions of a perfect society and so forth. Communists have been surprisingly similar despite nominally being the political antithesis of the Nazis.

  Optimistic-good is the stuff of New Age visions and traditional religion: on the Left, they believe in vaguely comforting and fuzzy ideas about generativity, positive-thinking, abundance and general all-around benevolence in the universe that just requires great intentions to succeed. On the Right, they believe in roughly the same things, but with specific, rather than vague, religious trappings.

  Pessimistic-good is often associated with a deep sense of justice and concern for protecting good (in particular, already-achieved putative good) from the threat of evil. Dedicated cops, doctors and military types have this sort of pessimistic good mentality. The pessimistic good usually see themselves as protectors of the childlike innocence that characterizes the optimistic good. In their youth, they are often guided by a strong but unexamined and untested social values. But as they age, and experience things like war and crime-fighting, which they are naturally drawn to, disillusionment with the naivete of most social values sets in, and a set of private values takes over. Clint Eastwood has played many such characters, from the classic Dirty Harry to the more recent Gran Torino, (the Dirty Harry movies were basically vigilante movies designed to pander to gun nuts, but the stock character evolved into a much more subtle one by Gran Torino).

  And finally, there’s the last quadrant: pessimistic-evil. This quadrant is most often associated with a narrow, selfish sense of fatalistic and hedonistic individualism. It is a gloomy world view that sees human nature as eternally flawed and unchanging. To act according to this mindset is to look for zero-sum exploits and social hacks to prey on the other three quadrants. Crime is distinguishable from political ideologies like fascism and communism primarily by the fundamental pessimism that informs behavior. There is no perfectability of man for Tony Soprano.

  In movies, complete disillusionment turns the pessimistic-good into the pessimistic-evil (comic-book super-villains like Two-Face in Batman are examples). There is some truth to this trope. Most who walk this path of disillusionment, however, end up bitter and ineffective rather than actively evil.

  Realism and Pragmatism

  There is some evidence for something called “depressive realism” – the idea that pessimists are genuinely more realistic than optimists, but it is decidedly shaky (not least because “real” is primarily a philosophical question, not a psychological one), so it is safest to assume that no quadrant has a monopoly on realism. You might also choose to go all the way to solipsism and decide that realism is impossible.

  Realism is a way of viewing the world, pragmatism is the related way of acting within it. So where do realist-pragmatists fall on this 2x2? You might be tempted to think they hover somewhere around the origin, but I have come to the conclusion that pragmatism and realism are somewhat meaningless concepts in relation to this 2x2.

  This is because people in each of the four quadrants view themselves as pragmatic and realistic and the others as hopelessly unrealistic.What’s more, they can all be right.

  This is because pessimism and optimism aren’t really attitudes about real things, which makes “realism” moot. Good and evil are about intentions, so realism is mostly irrelevant there as well. Optimism and pessimism are attitudes about possibilities when there is no empirical basis for assuming anything. It is possibly to be realistic about facts in all four quadrants, but be optimistic or pessimistic about possibilities and good or evil in terms of intentions.

  Naive realists are people who are avoiding taking a position about possibilities altogether. Their attitude helps them win when events are outside human control, but they tend to miss out on opportunities involving human beliefs that rely on social proof. Things that become social truths if enough people believe in them. Beliefs that create social capital rather than truth.

  Naive pragmatism is similar. It is the desire to act in realistic ways to be effective. Naive pragmatists abhor empty gestures and obviously futile endeavors. Again, this works in their favor when it is the actual outcomes that matter. When “making an effort” has its own social-signalling value, naive pragmatists miss out. An example of this is a politician making a brave and futile attempt to solve some impossibly wicked problem, and earning brownie points just for trying. Naive pragmatism is for bureaucrats, not effective politicians.

  Naive pragmatists are people who choose to act only when there is a realistic chance of being effective. This often makes them the most unrealistic people around, since they forgo all the fascinating possibilities of symbolic creative failure and its social rewards.

  I recently read a piece in The Atlantic by James Fallows analyzing whether Obama has been a chess-master or a pawn in his first term. My own opinion is that the question itself is naively pragmatic (so it makes sense that a very seasoned journalist like Fallows, who has been covering American presidents since Carter, should ask the question). When you add social capital into the equation, you could say that in the beginning Obama was something of a bureaucratic naive-pragmatist. Through the first term, he has turned into more of a real politician, capable of manipulating social capital with symbolic failures and declarations of belief in what seem like prima facie ludicrous positions to naive realists. Fallows sees this as tactical brilliance in the Truman mold, but this doesn’t quite capture the transformation.

  But ironically, the country itself has gone fro
m an optimistic (“Yes, we can!”) to a naively pragmatic, bureaucratic view of his presidency (hence questions based on chess metaphors, which sort of miss the essence of social capital dynamics). We evaluated Obama as a politician when he was a bureaucrat, and now that he has turned into a politician, we are evaluating him as a bureaucrat. Time lags are strange things.

  Personally, I resolve this particular dichotomy by thinking of realism as a desire to see the world realistically, and pragmatism as a desire to be effective. Believing you have achieved either desire is probably a sign that you’re actually trapped within one of the quadrants. It is skepticism and doubt that mark sophisticated realism and pragmatism, and distinguish them from quadrant-locked attitudes and behaviors.

  Attitudes Towards Change

  When you look at the compare good and evil optimists, you realize that both believe in change and the idea of “progress.” The optimistic evil, when they really get going, tend to put everybody who disagrees with their idea of progress into concentration camps.

  The optimistic good pursue a softer version of the same strategy: they seek out like-minded people with whom they can achieve positive resonance, and avoid people or thoughts they label “negative,” a label they apply to any kind of non-scripted dissent. When they pursue action around fundamentally ugly realities, they still look for “heart-warming” and “inspirational.” They are fundamentally what Barbara Ehrenreich has labeled “Bright-Sided” people. Whether or not the realize it, they put people they disagree with on the sidelines in cultural concentration camps where their voices are drowned out by positive cheerleading. This is a “tyranny of the vocal minority” consequence, since the optimistic-good (both Right and Left varieties) are so vocal in singing the same tune. Voices of dissent do not harmonize as well.

  There is a certain merit to this heuristic. Serious change requires collective action, motivation and energy. Negative thoughts and people do drain this energy. But the heuristic gets dangerous when it turns into an unchecked, runaway sort of self-reinforcing positivism.

  Equally, the bottom half of the 2x2 is associated with apparent inaction and lack of change. For the pessimistic good, it is stability maintenance against the forces of evil. For those who use established social values as a proxy for “good” it is natural to consider destabilizing forces evil. Again you can find distinct Left and Right varieties.

  For the pessimistic evil, ideas like balance of power and eternal patterns of exploitation have a natural appeal. The aesthetic of acting without actually changing anything appeals to both classes. In a way, they too act in ways that make stability and changelessness self-fulfilling prophecies. They are less likely to recognize this compared to self-declared progressives who instinctively understand the dynamics of self-fulfilling prophecies.

  Given these divergent attitudes towards change, it is no wonder that pessimists view optimists as ignoring the darker consequences of change, and optimists view pessimists as purely inertial forces.

  Being Slightly Evil

  I sometimes think I should have named this philosophy “Do Slightly Evil.” Because Slightly Evil is to my mind, a do-something philosophy rather than a be-somebody philosophy. But oh well, the name is locked in, and the Google joke is too good to give up.

  On the optimism/pessimism axis, Slightly Evil is an agnostic philosophy, but unlike naive naive realism/pragmatism, it is not an inactive one when social proof and signalling through empty and futile gestures are in the picture. It recognizes the value of social capital movements around obvious falsehoods and ineffective behaviors. There is a certain inevitable level of doubletalk involved here, in that stated intentions and beliefs will not match the ones actually held. But doubletalk is at least better than doublethink.

  On the good/evil axis, Slightly Evil drives towards action whether or not the consequences are clearly good or evil upfront, and starts with the assumption that simply acting for the sake of acting (otherwise known as creative destruction), and choosing churn over stability, is central to life. This is not “good” because it does not equal a belief in change as progress. But it is also not “evil” because it is not a belief in value-driven stability. Action for the Slightly Evil favors chaos creation.

  But this is only a partial, local override of the powerful dichotomies we are talking about. You can see how hard it is to actually get beyond these age-old divisions: the best I’ve been able to do to justify Slightly Evil is to label it as “double-talking chaos-creation.”

  No Free Lunch Instincts

  When you have a philosophy called “Be Slightly Evil,” people are inevitably going to connect the dots to things like the pick-up artist (PUA) movement, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and all those clever ideas and techniques being constantly invented and refined by Internet marketers and big names on the speaker circuit.

  I’ve had several conversations about these sorts of things with people who are convinced that I should talk or write about them and also apply them to my own business. They think I should be making a lot more money than I do. I totally agree; I just have problems with their suggested route to that outcome.

  So I’ve been spending some time examining my own unease with this whole body of thinking. Why am I at ease with conversational jiu jitsu, organizational politicking and sociopathic philosophical attitudes, but reluctant to embrace things in this bucket of practices that I’ll call “subconscious brain hacking” of other humans? Is it just a kind of moral squeamishness? Hypocrisy? Some misplaced sense of honor and fair play? Rationalization of lack of actual skill in these skill-intensive domains?

  Because these ideas are certainly effective. Without a doubt, there are valuable skills here, that can be learned and applied. If you are interested in cutting-edge thinking in this department, you might want to try the work of people like Ryan Holliday, advisor to people like Tim Ferriss and Tucker Max.

  Hidden Costs

  In situations like this, where my instincts tell me to stay away from something even if I cannot figure out why, I always find out later that there are hidden costs that I did not understand consciously, but my gut was reacting to. I call these my no free lunch instincts. These instincts are driven by a common belief among people with a certain sort of scientific sensibility: that all true knowledge is expressible in the form of constraints or conservation principles. So if someone tells me that there is a free lunch somewhere, I make the default assumption that someone (or something), somewhere is paying/will pay costs corresponding to my gains. And until I am sure that someone isn’t me (or someone/something I care about), I am not ready to use that partial knowledge, even if it is true. Even if I am taken advantage of in the meantime.

  So to your list of “subconscious brain hacking” acronyms (PUA, NLP, SEO) you can add another one: NFL. No Free Lunch. If you cannot figure out who is paying for the lunch, you might want to reconsider eating it (or in a more pessimistic form, if you don’t know who the sucker is, it is probably you).

  In the case of subconscious brain-hacking skills, the costs are fairly obvious, once you think them through. Consider an example.

  Let’s say you learn a few clever techniques to close sales. You know the sort of thing I mean – using words that have subliminal persuasive effects, specific gestures or facial expressions, priming, cues unrelated to the sale like sexual imagery – things like that. Things that hack the overt intentions of whoever you are interacting with, and bring unrelated desires into play. You’re dangerously close to playing with the psychological equivalent of roofies.

  Let’s say you’ve been making sales based on non-hacking communication before, with a success rate of 1% of cold calls leading to sales. Suddenly, your effectiveness explodes. You are now closing 10% of all sales. A 10x improvement.

  The costs are obvious: by hacking the other person’s brain this way, you’ve put the valuable intelligence informing their intentions and decisions out of play. Or to put it more crudely, there’s a good chance you sold sex to a mo
nkey that wants sex, instead of (say) graphic design skills to a company that genuinely needs it. And lost a chance to make the world of business a slightly smarter place.

  I am of course, caricaturing the value proposition here. Most practitioners insist that you can be “ethical” about such practices. That you can take on the burden of making sure you don’t sell people what they don’t need. In other words, you are trusting yourself to navigate conditions of moral hazard with seriously incomplete information.

  There is one situation where this assumption is completely justified: outright conflict. When you are genuinely in a fight, you don’t want a fair fight if you can help it. You should prefer a dumb enemy over a smart one.

  But most everyday situations are only partly adversarial. To the extent that they are not, you should assume that there is value in having the other party’s fully engaged intelligence in play. There are non-adversarialsituations when this assumption is justified, for example in parenting very young children, making certain, very limited kinds of decisions that affect the lives of (say) poor and uneducated people, or when you are a doctor attending to a patient. But even in these situations, it is generally unwise to completely put the other party’s intelligence out of play. Parenting, urban planning and the practice of medicine all benefit from intelligent engagement on the part of everyone involved. Moral hazard is a hazard because you can be tempted into rationalizing things that benefit you when you take on the burden of representing the interests of others.

  Which means, if you hack someone else’s brain to get your way, there is a very good chance that you will be tempted into acting in ways that are against your best interests, as defined by a broader appraisal of the degree of alignment between your intentions and the other party’s.