The following originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2021/06/more-on-dealing-with-psychopaths-in.html.
***
I have put up with a lot of personal abuse in workplaces, some of it at the hands of, or in the course of standing up to, people who I feel are - or were - psychopaths. As an example, one manager a few decades ago tried to tell us all how to vote (liberal): I responded if people cared about the environment they should vote Green and if they cared about workers they should vote ALP.
In other words, that particular person was so arrogant they thought they were a feudal overlord who could dictate details of our life - and ignore various aspects of local anti-discrimination law (such as this - and this, but note those links are to current law: some of the other aspects did not exist at the time I am writing of).
They basically thought - staggering though it seems - they were being almost like a parent when they were trying to brainwash people into neoliberalism.
They were so incapable of handling dissent that when I was standing up to them on one occasion they put a black mark on my personnel record that was considered so blatantly unfair that it was later quietly removed by our Human Resources personnel.
That person was also such a bigot that they actively interfered with LGBT matters - including refusing to use correct pronouns for trans people. As a result, I will return that favour for the rest of this article by referring to them as “it” - which is what it was trying to do to all trans people.
(My view is that it was a bigot that created workplaces of damaged people that were riven by fear, despair and conflict - there were a few other professional concerns as well.)
In my decades long struggle against it and it’s legacy, what didn’t help was other people being cowards.
I got plenty of feedback from others - or acted on behalf of others. For instance, on one occasion it used a religious profanity in support of a view that people should feel despair over not making profit - no matter how good the job, which left one person who was deeply offended as the religious profanity. After the meeting I explained the reason for the person’s distress to it, but it was so fixated on “everyone should feel overwhelming emotional pain at low profits” that it could not comprehend that humans might be upset about something else.
So, as I wrote, all I did was based - in part - on feedback from others, but that tended to leave me exhausted - and the lack of gratitude from others was a problem. After around three decades of putting my neck on the chopping block for others I had had enough, and started to work less directly and actively, and attempt - unsuccessfully - to do more self-care.
Unsuccessfully because our world is still diseased by neoliberalism- an infestation that is actually far worse than the current pandemic, as neoliberalism has actively spread and supported the worldviews and values that have left us in an existential climate crisis.
That crisis is also an excellent example of the stupidity of such people - they have what I have described as a Newtonian worldview - see here (and also here).
It is also an example of the damage such people cause. I did have plans to write an article on how business was reversing civilisation, but for time and energy limits I’ll reduce that to this:
- the drive to address everything from money (which I have been fighting all the way back to the Shire Clerk in Queensland who thought all environmental values should be converted to a dollar amount so his limited brain could do a mathematical calculation [with fudge factors to get the result he wanted] ) is actually countering and reversing the specialisation that allowed the development of civilisation. Specialists are NOT motivated by money - they’re motivated by the love of the skill they have, or the intellectual challenge of the task facing them. Having a solution in mind, but having to say nothing about it because of contractual limits, is demoralising, drives people out of fields they are good at, and thus actively weakens civilisation (no matter how much money is left in various bank accounts).
(The argument that profits have to be made is true enough in our current world situation [see Star Trek
for an alternative world situation], but does not change the FACT that
attempting to motivate people by using something that has no resonance
with people is (a) ineffective, and (b) shows incompetence
at being a manager on the part of those managers who attempts to do so -
such managers" need to learn to suck up the damage of their concern
over profit/loss enough to motivate the humans under their care in ways
that mean something to those humans.)
Here's a few more brief comments that I am not going to get the time and energy to write up properly:
- “That’s the problem with the American Dream - it makes everyone concerned for the day they’re gonna be rich.” Character President Bartlett, TV series “The West Wing“, Season 3, Episode 4 – Ways and Means (at 38:57).
- the
Paul Principle
much as Murphy’s Law (which is “whatever can go wrong will go wrong”) has an adjunct, known as Smith’s Law (which is the saying that Murphy was an optimist - see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law), I am going to propose an adjunct to the Peter Principle (which is that people are promoted until they reach the level at which they are incompetent) which, in anticipation of a future “Mary Principle” I will call the Paul principle (apologies to that wonderful band): those who stay at their level of competence are overloaded until they reach a point of failure. - the Mary Principle
this is a variation on the Peter principle, where talented people are put into un-resourced situations like casting seed on barren ground.
These can all be overcome - at least in part - by treating people with decency - as individuals, not economic cogs driven by dreams of someone else’s profit / KPIs.
How does that happen in modern businesses?
By activist shareholders starting to take an interest in the personalities of those they appoint, and how much human damage is being created in the quest for profit.
And if such people consider they can outsource being human (or if they are uncomfortable with that wording: “outsource being decent”) , they should remember my comments above about cowardice - because they are.
They should also remember this.
The TV comedian Stephen Colbert - who I like for his stance for democracy, decency, and human rights under the nightmare of #45 in the USA - has started a series of questions to ask celebrities as a “getting to know you” exercise. One of those questions is “What is the scariest animal?” My answer to that would be, especially as I look out at a world ruined by the climate crisis and riven by inequity, inequality, and discrimination, humans.
