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

by Venkatesh Rao

  The Slippery Slope

  Let me be clear that there maybe a free lunch for you personally, which you can cash out in the popular currencies of sex, money or power. In our sales example, if your selling effectiveness increases 10x, but 8 of those new 9 customers doesn’t actually need what he/she bought and realizes it later, and quits, you can still come out ahead if you’re in the sort of business where long-term customer retention is of no value and you expect to make a million bucks off a short-lived fad. You’ll get your mansion, and chances are the suckers who bought things they didn’t need will not find it worthwhile to react, but instead write the experience off as an unpleasant and expensive lesson learned.

  But you’ll be on a slippery slope. And quite apart from costs paid by others, you’ll pay the sorts of deeper costs immortalized in fiction through various “pacts with the devil” type stories. In other words, easy rewards may come with deep costs.

  How slippery is this slope? A reader from Chicago, who was recently in town, shared his view (which I think is correct), that once you start, you get addicted and turn to increasingly unconscionable uses of your skills. He made the point while describing a toxic company he once worked for: “a company that starts down the road to evil in even a small way will end up totally evil.” His point reminded me of one often made in Agatha Christie novels by Hercule Poirot: that a murderer who has killed once finds it increasingly easy to kill again and again. In one novel, Death on the Nile, Poirot gravely tells a character, do not open your heart to evil.

  The Dehumanization Loop

  It took me a while to reconcile this conjecture with my own belief that it is possible to be Slightly Evil in a stable way. But I think I’ve got it now. You can only stabilize at Slightly Evil if you make sure you always “pick on someone your own size” in a general sense. I don’t advocate fair fights entirely for moral reasons. I advocate them for the same reason physical trainers have you train with weights of increasing resistance. It is the only way you can grow. If you get too used to fighting below your weight class, your muscles will shrivel to match.

  Hacking someone at a subconscious level presents the danger that you’ll get addicted to regarding everybody as an adversary, and further, reducing them to opponents who cannot fight back. Not because they are fundamentally worse than you in the particular battlefield, but because you’ve picked up some skill they haven’t (yet) learned to defend against.

  This is an impoverished view of interpersonal relationships at two levels: you’ve lost the richness of non-adversarial relationship dynamics, and you’ve lost the pleasures of interacting with fully human people. It’s a loop of dehumanization, and ultimately a path to deep estrangement with the rest of the human species.For those of you who have read my ribbonfarm post, The Gollum Effect, †this is what gollumization looks like on the Mad Men (or Sauron) end of the game.

  There is a special case here. If you hack yourself, using self-suggestion techniques and other ways to deliberately delude yourself, this loop of dehumanization works much faster. Your most important relationship – the one with yourself – can get infantilized. Self-gollumization is the fastest kind there is.

  So if I had to draw a boundary around Be Slightly Evil I’d have to say this: it stops being “slightly” evil when you start impoverishing your non-adversarial relationships in any way, particularly the one with yourself. In a conversation with a marketer friend recently, I phrased this idea as “keep your customers fully human.”

  This isn’t an easy boundary to recognize, understand and respect. But then, if it were that easy, we’d all be billionaire saints leaving the world a better place than we found it. One good heuristic is to ask: after an encounter that you “win” in some sense, does the other person feel like they learned something valuable at a reasonable price or that they were played for a sucker, or paid too high a cost for the learning?

  This only works if you haven’t already dehumanized the person in your own mind. One way to test for rationalization via dehumanization is to ask: would you want to win that way against a spouse, friend, child, pet or parent? (Actually, having an empathy calibration scale is valuable in a lot of situations, not just this one).

  A quote I recently encountered, attributed to Victor Papanek, captures this philosophy of persuasion very well: “in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, commercial design is probably the phoniest field in existence today.”

  After a half century of this mindset, we have today’s consumer culture. That philosophy of persuasion is being rapidly ported to the Internet, experience marketing and social media, and vastly amplified in the process. Bigger no-free-lunch forces are being unleashed than were ever unleashed by the Industrial Age.

  The Costs and Rewards of the Hard Way

  When you choose to do certain things – liking building a reputation in business, a trusted clientele or a solid personal relationship – the hard way, the costs and rewards get flipped. Instead of easy rewards and deep costs, you end up with easy costs and deep rewards.

  An easy cost is a cost that is easy to pay. Money is the perfect example. It is the easiest way to pay for things, and also the easiest thing to give up, beyond a certain point. As many people like to say, money is a problem to be solved, not an end in itself. Once you’ve got yourself “problem solved” levels of money (corresponding to the lifestyle you want), giving up more money is far easier than (say) giving up a potentially rewarding lifelong relationship that you are tempted to exploit for immediate gain, simply because you can.

  The rewards, on the other hand, are the deeper ones. A sense of deeper understanding of how the world works, and a sense of gradually increasing peace with my place in it, is the main one for me.

  Playing the game of costs and rewards this way is a self-reinforcing life choice. If you accept deep costs, you will become shallower as a way to insulate yourself. It is part of your self-dehumanization. If you start to appreciate deep rewards, you will naturally become a deeper person, capable of enjoying those rewards.

  Personality Archetyping

  Why Does Power Corrupt?

  There is a fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal about the dynamics of how power corrupts called The Power Trip.‡ It describes recent research that suggests that it is actually the nice guys rather than the jerks who get power. Apparently though, the old “power corrupts” idea is true. It is getting power that turns people into jerks (which is different from being evil, slightly or totally). Here’s an extract:

  ...This result isn’t unique to Berkeley undergrads. Other studies have found similar results in the military, corporations and politics. “People give authority to people that they genuinely like,” says Mr. Keltner...

  Now for the bad news, which concerns what happens when all those nice guys actually get in power. While a little compassion might help us climb the social ladder, once we’re at the top we end up morphing into a very different kind of beast.

  “It’s an incredibly consistent effect,” Mr. Keltner says. “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

  Fascinating though it is, I think the research is a little narrow in its focus. It does a good job of describing what happens, but not why it happens. This is a common failing in certain kinds of psychology and neuroscience research.

  The “why” of any sort of behavior is usually a mish-mash of situational realities, conscious and subconscious self-interest, and distorted echoes of unexamined distant hunter-gatherer behaviors (a.k.a “evolutionary psychology.”)

 
So there is a flaw in the “people give authority to people that they genuinely like” premise in the article. This is only one of the reasons people give others authority in real life. It is an important one though, as the person who forwarded me the article thoughtfully pointed out:

  The popular mandate authority is more “natural” and “primal” [than other reasons] though. Even Chimps and Macaques have “democratic” leaders, not elected by ballot, but by a mix of “clannish” power inheritance, Machiavellian alliance-making, and the results of fights/aggression etc. When such a “troupe leader” transgresses authority by being an ass/rapacious/stupid/overbearing, or when the leader’s “total power” (a convolution of inheritance, alliances and approval) goes below the threshold of other “potential” leaders (who also have inheritances, alliances and muscles), there is usually a large fight (with bloodshed, murder, and killing of the babies of the loser clans), to replace the alpha monkey.

  But there are at least two other reasons. We also have the pre-social one-on-one kind of authority dynamics: A gives B authority if B can beat him up (physically or psychologically). This has historically been declining in importance for thousands of years. But it is still sometimes a factor, when situations force a lot more 1:1 interactions than one to many, such as in sales.

  But perhaps the most interesting reason is an extremely recent one in human history: we give people authority even when we don’t like them and are not afraid of them if they possess valuable information or skills.

  There are many such “authority-earning” skills, but one of the most important is the ability to see reality as it really is, in minimally-deluded ways. Democratic votes can be overturned when somebody is able to see and convincingly frame realities in ways that turn matters of opinion into matters of fact. If a bunch of people are marooned on an island, who are they going to elect as leader? The jerky survivalist who is the only one who can keep them alive, and is likely to walk away and just take care of himself if crossed, or the nice guy?

  In that vein of thinking, my favorite definition of a CEO’s job is from A. G. Lafley: “A CEO’s job is to interpret external realities for a company.”

  I have met many people who’ve gained power and authority due to this particular trait, and it might conceivably be part of the explanation why power turns people into jerks. Reality is usually somewhere between neutral and slightly unpleasant, so most of the time, the “interpret external reality” job is a delicate balancing act on the leader’s part: you need to keep your people connected enough to reality to be effective, but not so connected that they are demotivated and demoralized.

  In other words, the “interpreting reality” part of leadership is rather like parenthood. Call it “information parenthood.” You have to sustain a happy bubble for others. At the same time, as a leader, your own parent is reality itself, and it isn’t a very nurturing one. Drunk and abusive Father Reality, not nurturing Mother Nature. Constantly facing the doubts and uncertainties of unfiltered realities, while protecting others, can be brutal. When things get hard, you will want to scream, “Why am I the only adult around here?”

  This is also the reason leadership is often described as a lonely job. Your job is to survive a lack of incoming empathy and generate a positive atmosphere and empathy for others under your “information protection” umbrella. You yourself become the reservoir of harsh reality information that is yours alone to handle. Reserves of empathy can get drained, resentment of the demanding children can turn into sadism and justification for abuse. In the worst cases, the stress of being alone with the filtered-out realities that you cannot share, can break you. You can regress into child-like behaviors because you decide to take your turn at being the “child.” You are tired of being the adult, and you’re going to abdicate for a bit whether others like it or not. A great deal of executive coaching, such as the excellent advice from Marshall Goldsmith§ , is really about increasing your endurance at the “information parenthood” game.

  And this is why, finally, it can be so rewarding, and such a huge relief, to find people to work with who are tough enough that they don’t need to be protected in order to be productive. This is why startup founder teams of two are better than solo entrepreneurs. Two people who can be brutally honest with each other, knowing that the other can take it, is a very powerful combination.

  The Perils of Bitter Loserdom

  I read an interesting piece in the HBR magazine, a guest piece by Rosabeth Moss Cantor titled “Powerlessness Corrupts.”¶ It is short and pointed, and makes a single interesting point: that there is a kind of corruption that can come from bitter, angry middle-management types. She describes the type as follows:

  Powerlessness is particularly apparent in the middle ranks. When companies slash midlevel positions, they often increase the burden on the remaining people without increasing their efficacy and influencea combination likely to arouse risk-averse rigidity. Hemmed in by rules and treated as unimportant, people get even by overcontrolling their own turf, demanding tribute before responding to requests. They vent frustrations on others who are even more powerless. Its like a cartoon sequence: The boss chastises a worker, who curses his wife, who yells at the child, who kicks the dog.

  In the Gervais-Principle based language we’ve been using, this is a case of the clueless finally getting clued in, and recognizing their exploited status. But it’s too late to do anything about it. They’ve already been trapped into the clueless-pawn world. This is how petty bureaucratic tyrants are born. Unlike losers, who never rise to this level, and normally retain the producer-skills required to move around in the economy, this type discovers loser-level clarity a little too late. And turns vicious. I’ve met a few. Normally, I run a mile. Unlike the regular clueless, they cannot be easily manipulated.

  Call it bitter, trapped loserdom. They are losers caught in clueless positions, with eroded individual contributor skills. They can’t move up, they can’t move down. They’re too much company men/women to easily leave and find other jobs. They only leave if fired or laid off. So they silently endure as more work is piled on.

  Why is this dangerous? This is the beginning of the end for organizations. In this state, smart people start exiting from both top and bottom as and when they are able to engineer exits.

  The Unreasonable Man Effect

  The Idealist-Tragedian Paradox

  A key schism in the universe of ideas concerning the question of how humans should live their lives is the one between idealist and tragic views. Let’s call the two associated types of people Idealists and Tragedians (a safe overload of the term in theater).

  Idealism is based on a belief in the perfectability of humans. There are innumerable philosophies, religions and self-improvement theories that derive from the idealist stance. In fact the very term self-improvement reveals the core idealist assumption that improvement is possible. The more recent term, personal growth, conveys that assumption even more clearly.

  Idealist views (and strains of religion) represent mainstream thinking today, especially in America.

  The tragic stance on the other hand, is based on the assumption that human beings are unchanging. That they have constant natures that are deeply limited and flawed, that cause them to fail in predictable ways (hence the connotation of tragedy). Historically, it has been been at least as popular as the idealist stance except during one very exceptional century: the twentieth. Thanks largely due to the global influence of American culture, and the dominance of idealism in America during the twentieth century, the tragic stance has been a minority stance.

  “Slightly Evil” of course, like all vaguely pop-Machiavellian philosophies, belongs in the tragic camp.

  The common belief in America that Democrats are idealists while Republicans are tragedians, is a fundamental mistake. In America, all politics and religion has been idealist for the last century. Hippies and evangelical Christians alike, have been idealists. Main Street middle class types and hipsters both tend to b
elieve in some variant of the American dream, though they often won’t admit it.

  Now here is the paradox: idealism believes in change and creates unchanging human beings. Tragedism (to coin a word) believes humans cannot change their fundamental natures, yet believing in it actually transforms humans far more radically than the idealist view.

  This isn’t a deep metaphysical paradox. It is a superficial semantic and social paradox. While idealism at its best can be very deep indeed, in practice it mostly loses its way in its pursuit of deep “growth” and ends up as superficial adaptation. A group of disenchanted cubicle dwellers may discard their suits and laptops and go form a commune based on vague New Age values, but they will almost certainly take their psychological baggage with them. I am constantly amazed by how such idealists are able to ignore the obvious similarities between the corporate politicking that they have nominally left behind, and the internal dynamics of their own “new” groups with supposedly healthier cultures.

  That is why I call it adaptation. Idealist models of human change merely help believers conform (often via cosmetic rebellion or deep socialization) to their environment. Nothing changes around them, and deep down, neither do they. Hence the commonly-observed irony: believers in “progress” (of both Republican and Democratic varieties in America) often help maintain the status quo by occupying stable marginal positions. The revolution never comes.

  I am biased of course, but I find the tragic end of the paradox far more interesting.