I’ve posted a lot about organizations and their corrosion (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9). but there’s something that I realize I have not covered, and it’s one of the most important topics to address before attempting to solve the general organizational problem. What are we up against? What is it that makes organizations turn toward moral failure (tough culture) or extortive self-diminishment (rank culture)? What are the personal motivations of people who cause organizations to deteriorate? What are the natural forces that drive them? Why do they exist? What do they want?

I’ve discussed evil abstractly, but not what it looks like, or how it works. I mentioned that truly toxic people (Psychopaths) are superior at social competition without getting into what “social competition” is and why it tends to easily to evil, when other kinds of competition do not so commonly go that way. What is it about social competition that makes a certain alignment (lawful evil) so good at it? What is it that organizations do to fill their top ranks with the horrid people who give the MacLeod Sociopaths such a bad name?

Rank theory of depression

No one knows for sure, but I’ve suspected for a long time that the rank theory of depression is, at least, partially correct as an explanation of why the disorder exists. According to that hypothesis, the depression machinery (psychological “source code”) exists as a way of helping people adapt to low social status. Reduced libido and appetite, physical lethargy, and disinterest in social activity would conceivably be useful in helping a person survive low status in our evolutionary environment, in which status conflicts were a frequent cause of death among males. Of course, it would only confer an evolutionary benefit if it existed to handle transient social disadvantage. (In the long term, evolutionary fitness sees no difference between death and non-reproduction, so an organism would do better to fight permanent low status and risk death, than to accept it.) The moodiness associated with adolescence may tie into this: young men, not yet at their strongest, are presumably the most prone to the transient low status that mild depression helps a person survive.

The above being said, clinical depression– which is, to complicate things, probably a collection of diseases with similar symptoms rather than one illness–  is almost certainly a pathology of that system. Old code that is maladaptive in modern society is being called by inappropriate triggers (possibly biological malfunctions). The person might be reacting as if to low social status for no discernable social reason.

Rank theory, to me, seems to explain, for example, why exercise helps so much for mild depression. The brain takes bodily activity as a signal of a person’s social status. An active body means that one has been invited on the hunt and that tells the brain that its low-status response is inappropriate. A sedentary lifestyle means that one has fallen to low rank and is one of the less necessary and subordinate people, making semi-hibernation adaptive.

One piece of evidence weighing against rank theory is that it would predict depression to be more common in men– for whom, there was more variation in social status (for reproductive reasons) and a higher rate of positional violence– while it seems to be at least as common, if not moreso, in women. The reason I do not believe that justifies a challenge to rank theory is that I think there’s an extremely large amount of “code sharing” in the human brain between genders. If it took millions of years for that code to emerge through natural processes, one might expect nature to reuse as much as possible of the hard-to-make stuff that made humans intelligent. I don’t see any reason to believe there’s any gender-specific code. Certain pieces are called more often in men than women, and vice versa, but it seems to be all available to both. The rank-theoretic function of, at least, mild depression may have had the original purpose of keeping men alive during spells of transient low social status but, once it evolved, there was no reason it could not be triggered (especially by pathology) in women as well. We’ll get to a much more exciting case of code-sharing (from female evolutionary incentive to mostly male application) later on.

Good and evil

What are good and evil, in truth? Every religion or philosophy has a different stance on it, but one issue that it seems to get tied up with is the fact that there were two evolutionary pressures that were on our ancestors: r- and K-selection. The first, r-selection, favors rapid reproductive proliferation. This is seen in many of the lower animals, where a brood of hundreds of spawn is common, but only a few live. Parental investment is nonexistent or low. K-selection, however, favors quality: a smaller number of offspring, with each of them given high parental investment, with the hope of making them more successful.

Early in their evolution, human societies developed a tension between K-selective– monogamous, family-building, future-oriented, superego– lifestyles and r-selective– polygamous, harem-building, present-oriented, id-driven– behaviors. Among the more powerful men, there were the r-strategic “alpha” males who’d have harems and hundreds of offspring, with almost no paternal investment in any of them: lots of kids, most would fare poorly. Then there were the K-strategic “beta” males with small numbers of wives (one or two) and fewer children but who put high levels of investment in them. Finally, there were the omegas who had no wives, little or no access to sex, and a strong reproductive drive to positional violence to better their opportunities. Modern civilization began as the K-strategists took over and started laying rules to reduce positional violence: men didn’t covet others’ wives, murder was no longer acceptable, polygamy was discouraged. Monogamy encouraged paternal investment, and it also introduced stability due to the reduced rate of male positional violence, with fewer men being left sexless. It also was the first move toward gender equality. While not all women in monogamous marriages were well-treated (history tells us that a horrifying number weren’t) they were undeniably better off than in harems, where they were treated like livestock. A man who is going to have all of his children by one wife is going to have strong incentives to treat her well.

If it seems sexist that I am focusing on male status variance and polygyny only, that’s because there is, in nature, more cause for status variation in men, due to the reproductive bottleneck of the woman’s womb. Men can sire five hundred kids but women cannot. They have more reproductive upside. They also have more downside, since low-status men are judged to have nothing to offer (except unneeded sperm) and ignored or discarded by society. A woman has a womb, putting a higher floor on her reproductive value. So it was typically men who went to extremes in social status– and had evolutionary incentives for antisocial behavior.

Societies quickly learned the value of monogamy, even if no human group perfectly observed it. It reduced positional violence and, by requiring men to treat women better, led to healthier offspring. It made a world in which the most successful men took an interest in social justice and progress (to create a better world for their few children; “few”, here, meaning less than 20) rather than acquiring more wives. Much of our evolution was an arms race between the r-strategists and K-strategists within us. Religions defined the r-strategist as “evil”– irresponsible, dangerous, malicious– and the K-strategist became “good”.

Over time, we’ve developed a more mature understanding of this. Sexual activity is not the best way to assess moral decency. It was the dishonesty and violence associated with those powerful and promiscuous men that made them so toxic– not the sexual pattern only. There are good people who are sexually prolific, and evil people who are restrained or even abstinent. So it’s not especially useful, from a modern view, to overemphasize this dimension of morality over other, more important ones, like honesty, compassion, and altruism. Nonetheless, we’re aware of the fact that, for evolutionary reasons, there are two conflicting personalities that live within us. Most people have a mix of r- and K-strategic tendencies, due to the fact that both strategies played a role in our evolutionary history.

There is an adaptation that seems to shut down the K-strategic personality outright, although that person may conform to social norms (law) and observe traditionally K-strategic behaviors (monogamy, sexual restraint). Like a cancer cell, the person becomes more fit at the expense of the larger organism. We call this type of person a psychopath.

The less-severe sociopath is used to include, as well, chaotic people with conscience (good, neutral) but not the socially-induced superego. It’s also preferred in popular use because psychopath sounds like psychotic, while those categories of illness are quite dissimilar. The problem with the concept of the “sociopath” (one who is chaotic or evil) is that it lumps together types of people who could not be more different. When we finally solve “The Organizational Problem” (as if it were that easy) we’ll see that the battle between chaotic good and lawful evil (two opposite sets of people labelled “sociopaths”) is one of the most exciting conflicts.

Two kinds of psychopathy

Most people associate the word psychopath with a serial killer or common criminal living in social depravity, but those are the lower classes of psychopaths. The upper-class psychopaths are the white-collar criminals who rob companies for nine-figure sums and often get away with it. These are the people who ruin companies. To understand the latter category, we need to understand social competition and its evolutionary frame. It was born, I believe, in the harem.

A male psychopath (extreme r-strategist) in the prehistoric world had his work cut out for him– kill men, rape women, enslave children. One might expect that would should be (because of their reduced reproductive variance) K-strategists, but with code sharing, it’s quite likely that there will be females with the same impulse. How does she do it? How can a woman play the extreme r-selective game of the male psychopath? It’s biologically impossible for her to have 50 kids. In a typical pre-monogamous context, she has to do it in two generations. She needs to have a high-status, psychopathic, alpha-male son. How does she do that? It helps, but it’s not enough, for such a spawn to have an alpha father. As an r-strategist, he’s going to have a lot of progeny and most will be failures. She needs more than a high-status father, because that alpha’s throwing seed all over the place. How does she maximize her chances of her children being the ones who inherit that paternal status? She has to establish herself as the queen of the harem and the legitimate wife, so her children are heirs and the other womens’ are bastards. Within the harem is the birth of social competition.

This is a different sort of contest: a degrading and subordinate kind where the victor is chosen by an external agent. The high-status man needs to believe he is making the choice as to the favorite in his harem. From his perspective (and that of proto-Clueless women in the harem) it’s a beauty contest. He picks a favorite based on some measure of attractiveness that is presumably correlated with reproductive health. Of course, the more effective social competitors (proto-Sociopaths) know that it’s an easy contest to corrupt.

The would-be harem queen must engineer a situation in which she’s the most attractive. The psychopathic man kills rivals, but she can’t. As a means of tearing down a rival with more natural beauty (however it is defined) physical violence is out. The man views his harem as personal property and won’t accept it if one of the women in it starts harming or killing the others. He might punish her and, even if not, it won’t have the desired competitive effect. The hurt rival will then appear injured, not ugly or unhealthy. Recall what I said about depression and code-sharing: that process of adaptation to (temporary) low social status exists in both men and women. A would-be harem queen could win if she were to find a way to trigger this depression process inappropriately in her rivals. After she does so, these others (of superior natural beauty) will appear sick and weak (and therefore reproductively unfit) to the alpha male. So the aspiring harem queen would harass her rivals– especially more attractive ones– in order to inflict an invisible injury that the alpha-male judge would not see: induced depression. She’d continue until only her supporters remained. The alpha would then perceive her as the most beautiful, and choose her.

Thus emerged a second variety of psychopathy focused on social competition rather than violence. The old-style, violent sorts (chaotic evil) of psychopaths became the lower classes. They could be useful to an evil organization attempting to establish itself, but were too impulsive to be trusted to rule it. The socially competitive and dishonest ones (lawful evil) emerged. Of course, the code for socially competitive nastiness crossed genders quickly, if not immediately. Women do not have a monopoly on this sort of pernicious social competition. Men can do it, too. In the modern context, it seems to arise independent of gender. It’s just what psychopaths (male and female) do to climb social hierarchies.

The workplace

It should be obvious where I intend to go: the workplace.

The metaphor is strong. The harem queen competition is a degrading and subordinate “beauty contest” where “beauty” is assessed by an external agent– a dominant and brutal male who perceives the harem as his property. The corporate contest is a degrading and subordinate one where “performance” is assessed by external superiors called “management”. A would-be harem queen is only effective if she can trigger invisible mental injuries (depression, anxiety, motivational collapse) in her rivals that look like low reproductive fitness; otherwise, she’s found-out for being antisocial and destructive and will be punished or expelled. Analogously, a corporate social competitor is only effective if he or she can trigger invisible mental harm in rivals that looks like low performance; otherwise, he or she is found-out for being toxic and “political” and will often be terminated.

What makes corporations different is the recursive nature of the harem. At the ground level, the harem queen is the managerial favorite (“golden child” or ladyboy) and the “alpha male” is management, but that manager is often vying to be a harem queen within another harem. It’s harems all the way up to the executive suite. Who’s the “alpha male”? A pile of money. Kapital. An imaginary psychopath called “The Corporation”. This is not so far-fetched. Humans have been inventing imaginary psychopaths and using them to control other people for thousands of years.

The private-sector social climbers who claw their way to the tops of typical corporations are not “alpha males” as the Ayn Rand fantasy they have would suggest. Corporate strivers are emasculated harem queens. At least to the men among them, who are often insufferable in their machismo, it should be pointed out at every opportunity. (Minor nit: entrepreneurs aren’t “alpha” males or females in the pre-monogamous sense either. They’re beta. Why? Alphas are r-selective, present-oriented and consumptive; betas are the positive-sum, future-oriented productive people who built civilization.)

Companies often give a spiel about “accommodating depression”, but the truth is that for the bulk of companies– rank and especially tough cultures– this is impossible. Depression is a landmark feature of the “corporate ladder” competition that they use (because of a lack of vision) to evaluate their people. It’s a war of attrition, and depression is one of the most powerful agents of that. It cannot be accommodated; it would break the game. The context-specific, socially- or occupationally-induced mental illnesses– usually mild, but with paralyzing motivational consequences– that punctuate the corporate career, popularly known as “nervous breakdowns”, must exist in the corporate game. What’s the alternative? Letting everyone have a real career?

Technocrats want to change the game. They want to unleash creativity and improve processes so everyone wins. They don’t want their colleagues to become depressed and fail out to make space. True Psychopaths (social competitors) do want that. They’re made for a negative-sum war of attrition. Just as the would-be harem queen makes her more attractive rivals appear unhealthy via a campaign of harassment, corporate psychopaths turn more talented rivals into non-performers or social misfits through a campaign of discouragement, dishonesty, and sabotage.

MacLeod Losers just don’t want to have mental breakdowns– that’s understandable– so they avoid risk and discomfort. Their intentional restraint of dedication prevents them from reaching a level of emotional investment in the organization where its volatility could effect their mental health. They stay out of the worst social competition and generally avoid getting hit with anything that would ruin a career. The Clueless cope by finding or creating a “reality distortion field” that protects them from induced depression and, additionally, encourages them to want things that don’t actually matter (and thus, for which there is not much competition). Psychopaths have a natural skill at social competition; it’s natural to them. Lack of conscience and adeptness at social competition have a million-year-old genetic correlation. It’s the Technocrats, who want to end the zero-sum social competitions of yesteryear, who are most exposed.

Cultural dysfunction

Corporate macroscopic evil (Xe/Blackwater, U.S. health insurance) is notorious but rare. Very few corporations exist for evil purposes; most are macroscopically neutral on the moral scale and, while insistent on their own law, macroscopically neutral on the civil scale as well. My exposition has been all about the internal moral and civil character of organizations, that tends to emerge despite the “true neutral” macro-alignment of an organization as it relates to society. Rank cultures (MacLeod-style bureaucratic dysfunction) are lawful evil. Tough cultures (sink-or-swim, Enron-style cultures) are chaotic evil. Guild cultures (progressively conservative, with symbiotic hierarchy) are lawful good. Self-executive cultures (Valve-style open allocation) are chaotic good.

Previously, I was hand-waving with terms like “negative sum” or “egoism”, but now we have a firm understanding of what drives most internal corporate evil: social competition designed to interfere with performance. Inducing depression, anxiety, or loss of motivation in more talented rivals is one of the most powerful tools in the social warrior’s arsenal. Now we know why MacLeod organizations are so goddamn depressing: for the same reason that compost heaps are hot. The stuff is generated everywhere.

Lawful evil wants to dominate while chaotic evil likes to destroy. So the purpose of induced depression is different in a rank versus tough culture. In both cases, the means of warfare is to load someone with unnecessary, counterproductive stress until that person breaks, then rationalize that person after-the-fact as being “not a team player” (rank culture) or “a piker” (tough culture). The difference is that, in rank culture, the person need only submit and the induced-depression campaign stops. In tough culture, the attacker won’t stop until the target’s performance has dropped so low as to drive the person out of the company.

This micro-character may emerge in spite of the organizational macro-alignment. For example, while tough culture is an emergence of chaotic evil, most tough-culture executives see themselves as neutral. Like pre-monogamous alpha males, they think they’re objective and infallible judges of the beauty contest, capable of assessing and rewarding “performance”, but the beauty/performance they are able to see is the outcome of a attritive social war that has already happened; the harem queens (“top performers”) have already been determined– the people who were most ruthless in that prior social war, not those with the most actual merit.

From a macroscopic perspective, tough cultures actually perform badly. People do a lot of busy work, but the error rate becomes intolerable and the vision is lost as power shifts to the (non-strategic) people with the strongest reality distortion fields, and to the antisocial players at the top, who loot and rob the organization. The chaotic good who might stand up to a rising tide of evil in the organization are long gone by that point. It turns out that an epidemic of unnecessary depression and anxiety is not good for business; who would have guessed?

Rank cultures, into which tough cultures evolve when let to their own devices, tend to be less radical and quick in their toxicity. What happens after a while as vicious but rationally repressive systems stabilize is that the punishment (induced depression) is replaced with the threat thereof. Instead of actually creating a hostile situation that will interfere with performance and induce illness, only the capability to do so is needed. The gun is waved but never fired. Tough cultures actively induce anxiety, which becomes depression. Rank cultures are just uninspiring, from inside and without. Over time, the rank-culture organization becomes so inefficient that it’s not even good at being evil.

That internal currency that companies create called credibility plays a role. You need credibility to get anything done that involves other people and, in the contemporary Theory-Z (teamist) environment, a lone actor can’t accomplish much of anything. Because low credibility makes it impossible to get anything useful done, it’s demoralizing and humiliating. Credibility reductions are a great way to engage in the social warfare that comprises the vast majority of any company’s internal evil. If there is no credibility floor, evil is at an advantage.

Guild cultures account for future potential in assessing credibility and thus create a floor for a diligent student. One can escape from social warfare, hit the books and get better at one’s craft. It’s safe in the library. Self-executive cultures have a more fluid, market mechanic for operations but recognize markets as short-term noisy and only eventually consistent, so they assess a basic minimum credibility to individuals, even if ruthlessly killing off failed ideas. Tough cultures do not have a credibility floor. One can fall all the way to zero due to unpredictable fluctuations. A worthy player can be killed by the dice. Psychopaths love tough cultures. They figure out how the damn thing works and load the dice. Rank cultures emerge out of tough cultures because, when there is no credibility floor, most people (MacLeod Losers especially) prefer the comfort of a dictatorial, extortionate manager who can unilaterally ruin them, but won’t do so if certain easy-to-fulfill conditions are met, over a capricious market that has no rules and might kill them off “at random”. Who is it that profits most from that change? Lawful (and neutral) evil psychopaths, whose network of extortions and alliances will hamstring the chaotic evil tough culture and form the next generation’s rank culture.

Now, we’re more equipped to assess concept of good, evil, law, and chaos as we attempt to attack the MacLeod Problem. We have a much stronger sense of what evil, in this context, is. We have a better sense of what we’re up against. Now we can focus on the ultimate chaotic-good Technocrat’s problem: taking these parasitic, social-climbing harem queen bitches (that term used gender-neutrally, most of our adversaries being men) down for good.