This is probably the second-to-last item in my series on MacLeod’s organizational hierarchy and the Gervais Principle. (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.) I’m leaving the country for a little over a week, and intended my “tie it all together and solve it” post for today, but that will have to wait until later in the month. I’ve decided to take a detour into certain unanswered moral questions associated with the MacLeod hierarchy. What does it mean, morally, to be a MacLeod Sociopath? Is it necessarily harmful? (Answer: no.) What about Losers and Clueless? Are there not psychopathic Clueless out there? (Answer: there are.)

The Alignment model

As it were, the most useful classification I can come up with, in order to assess the MacLeod organization’s moral bearings, is the two-dimensional alignment system of many role-playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons. These present a moral spectrum (good vs. evil) and a civil spectrum (law vs. chaos). These are independent of each other: one can be lawful and evil, or chaotic and good, for example. I’ll use that system to analyze the moral correlates of the MacLeod hierarchy.

The Moral Spectrum: good vs. evil

How do we define good and evil? It’s not an exact science, of course, but I think that most peoples’ definitions of “good” come from the so-called Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As a general ethical guideline, this is a good one, and it’s the spine of almost all major religions. However, it’s simplistic and flawed, as I’ll address later on. Evil is miltant disobedience of that ethical principle, in favor of a “power does as it can” world where the winners gloat and the losers suffer. Most people, of course, are in between. They buy into the values of good, but sometimes indulge in evil behaviors as well. About 80 percent of people’s actual behaviors are in the “neutral” midsection of the spectrum, with 10% on each side being good and evil.

There’s a problem with the Golden Rule, which is that it fails to account for asymmetry, and that it can be warped to justify actions most people would consider evil. Perversions of the Golden Rule could be used to justify rape (asymmetry in sexual desire) and the rule has been (ab)used to justify religious persecution, it being better for people to suffer in this life than in the hereafter.

Trade, on the other hand, is all about asymmetry: comparative advantages, differences in value. It’s an action that seems, on some level, to oppose the Golden Rule, in that the two parties have exactly opposite financial outcomes. What makes trade “good” (not a violation of the Golden Rule) is the unequal value of the traded items for each party. As long as both gain, according to a difficult-to-define pseudo-quantity called “utility”, the trade is good.

At scale, there are very few actions that are good for everyone, resulting in debates over justice and politics, and attempts to resolve massively multilateral disputes through aggregation (voting, markets) that will drive general improvement, although it is impossible to make everyone happy. Ultimately, the Golden Rule falls in favor of the Silver Rule: do less harm to others than you do good. This represents the evolution from an inflexible but absolute good to a more flexible, pragmatic sense of “good”. Societies must favor the Silver Rule over the Golden one, in practice. Murderers must be jailed, and roads must be built.

The Silver Rule, however, is also flawed for computational reasons. How are good and harm measured? Gathering and processing information is an activity that itself imposes a cost (to others, but especially to oneself) which means that at some point, decision makers have to stop hearing all sides and just decide. This leads naturally to the Bronze Rule, which is: do your best, with the information and resources you can reasonably get, to do more good than harm to those you can credibly affect. This tends toward a more local sort of altruism that (inadvertently or intentionally) favors the well-connected. We’ve left the realm of the good and are now in the neutral-aligned territory.

The issue with the Bronze Rule and its tolerance of localism is that it enables selective goodness, because people can modulate how much weight they put into others’ concerns and how much effort they put into discovering what they need, and this leads people to favor those who are close (genetically, culturally, religiously, and geographically) to them.

The natural tendency of most humans is not to be egotistical or to be altruistic, but to be local. People want to confer benefit on those with whom they have personal affinity or similarity. Egoism and altruism are extreme points on a spectrum based on how people define their moral neighborhood. The extreme egoist defines it to contain only him, and the extreme altruist inclues all humans (or, perhaps, all living beings). Yet almost all of us are localist when it comes down to our day-to-day interactions with other people. It’s how we work.

Cognitively, most people know that inflexible or militant localism (which can tend toward racism, elitism, or jingoism) is wrong, but are not unusually energetic in pursuing the right. They give it a try, but it’s not crucial to them. They’re selective in how much effort they’ll put forth in the pursuit of good, depending on the affinity they have for the beneficiaries. That’s how the neutral alignment works. Good and neutral are localistic in practice; the difference seems to be in aspiration and energy. Good people will make serious sacrifices for others’ benefit; neutral will generally not.

If the Golden Rule is the archaic and idealized good, the Silver Rule is the practical good that accounts for asymmetry and massively multilateral decision-making. The Bronze Rule is the constrained, more austere spin that accounts for informational surface areas and human exhaustion, and generates the neutral alignment.

Finally, we have one more metallic ethical rule, the Iron Rule: take whatever you can get. This is the militant or even psychopathic egoism most commonly associated with “evil”. Actually, Iron-Rule psychopathy isn’t actually the extremity of evil. Beyond it are sadistic reaches that I don’t care to explore: people who actively seek harm to others, rather than merely tolerating it in the pursuit of their own needs. For this purpose, the sadists (as a class apart from psychopaths) aren’t important.

The Bronze Rule, I would contend, describes the state of nature. We are not naturally evil, egoistic, or psychopathic. Nor are we naturally good, universalist, or empathetic toward all. We made decisions (most, with an earnest desire to make the right ones) under extreme scarcity of information and with heavy influence (some of which is intractable) from the biological evolution that made us, and that makes us naturally localist. What generates the moral spectrum is where people try to go. The good aim for the Golden and Silver rules in their interaction with other people. The neutral tend toward Bronze Rule localism. The evil celebrate Iron Rule egoism or, worse yet, tend toward sadism.

The Civil Spectrum: law vs. chaos

The second dimension of the alignment system is the civil spectrum, which pertains to one’s approach toward authority and social stability. As with the moral spectrum, about 80 percent of people would be classified as neutral, with 10% on each side being lawful or chaotic.

Good and evil describe the direction that people, personally, try to take from our Bronze Rule state of nature. Of course, there’s another dimension, which is a person’s willingness to cooperate with authority. While good people will ultimately oppose an evil society, the reverse also being true, an overwhelming majority of complex societies are neutral, regressing to the mean as they get large. Thus, most peoples’ attitudes toward authority will often be more of a function of their personal biases toward law or chaos than of the character of the society, predominantly because large societies are not that different from one another in any morally meaningful way.

For personal ethics, the Silver Rule is to do more good than harm to others, with the tacit intent to take in as much information as one can absorb. Lawful people believe in analogous Silver Rule with regard to society, which is that authority will best aggregate the available information and do the right thing. (However, a lawful evil’s person’s definition of “the right thing” may be harmful to those judged not to matter. Lawful evil people place faith in society’s ability to decide who matters.) Lawful people do not believe necessarily that societies or organizations are infallible, but only that they perform far better than individual judgment.

Civilly neutral people believe that societies implement the localist Bronze Rule. Organizations and those who hold authority may try to do their best, but are limited by their informational surface area and limited time and energy. Ultimately, those who are close to those in power enjoy an advantage, also known as corruption. It’s not that organizations tend toward self-serving pathology or even intentional elitism, but that a certain degree of localism is inevitable and mostly tolerable. Civilly neutral people believe that societies tend to be no better or worse than individuals.

Chaotic people believe that those in power, in most societies, will follow the Iron Rule. They distrust authority, believing that power will almost invariably be used toward bad ends, and that those who are in control will take whatever they can get. Neutral people admit that civil authority can tend toward localist corruption, but chaotic people believe that organizations tend toward defectiveness. Chaotic good people believe that authority will, over time, lead to evil. Chaotic evil people view those in civil power as contemptibly incompetent.

Social acceptability

Lawful good represents what people are “supposed to” be, ideally, while the central “true neutral” alignment is what they actually are. Actually, I would argue that neutral may be the wrong term, since people seem to be, by default, weakly good and weakly lawful. Anyway, what all of this means is that people who are lawful or neutral on the civil spectrum, and good or neutral on the moral spectrum, fall into a category that people are familiar and comfortable with. This 81 percent of the population will generally have no difficulty following social norms.

What remains is an L-shaped region (19%) that contains the chaotic or evil. Chaotic people face above-normal rates of social rejection. Evil people are punished and despised– if they are caught. Chaotic evil are the pinnacle of dysfunction, and only succeed amid severe environmental disorder. One example (from Final Fantasy VI) is Kefka. His chaotic evil (as opposed to Emperor Gestahl’s lawful evil) renders him an incompetent nincompoop in the (ordered) World of Balance, but he becomes a demigod in the (disordered) World of Ruin.

In general, the utter social dysfunction of chaotic evil (1%) divides the “L of social unacceptability” into two separate islands, each of which can be socially functional under some circumstances. One contains those who are evil but lawful or civilly neutral (not chaotic). These people can succeed socially as long as they can move faster than the consequences of their actions catch up with them. The other contains those who are chaotic but good or morally neutral (not evil). They can succeed socially as long as they are in environments that recognize the benefits of disruption and that value creativity over uniformity.

I describe the chaotic crowd as “those who wear hats”, using the hacker terminology where good guys wear “white hats”, the neutral wear “gray hats”, and the bad guys wear “black hats”. Wearing a hat (of any color) indoors is, at least traditionally, socially unacceptable. The lawful and neutral take them off. An environment that tolerates hat-wearing is one in which the chaotic can thrive.

This explains my desire to split the MacLeod Sociopath category into two. People use “sociopath” to describe those who live in this “L of social unacceptability”, the chaotic good radicals being “good sociopaths” (after they are recognized as good, the reality being that most people cannot parse chaotic morality in its own time). In my view, this deserves further exploration.

Psychopaths are, as I’ve defined the moral spectrum, evil. That doesn’t mean they participate in evil’s most brutal manifestations, but they devalue others’ needs, gains, and losses outright. Technocrats are chaotic by nature. Rather than gaining power through typical social means (dues paying, credibility, deal-making) they attempt to create radical and new forms of power. The goal is to take superior craftsmanship, art, science, and knowledge (techne) and turn that into influence, wealth, or power (kratos). That is innately disruptive to those who are vested in the old forms of power.

This does not exclude the possibility of “black hat” Technocrats forming an organizational presence, but my experience is that chaotic evil people very rarely move into positions of power or importance. They are just too socially dysfunctional. Complex societies will form subcultures that give chaotic good and chaotic neutral people second chances… but chaotic evil people only seem to acquire power in damaged environments.

The MacLeod pyramid

With this understanding of alignment, it’s possible to approach the MacLeod pyramid in the context of the moral and civil spectra. Perhaps not surprisingly, the civil spectrum is more correlated to it than the moral one.

MacLeod Losers, at the base of the pyramid, tend to be civilly neutral. Whether they are morally good, evil, or neutral doesn’t matter much to the health of the organization, because they have very little power. Since they view the organization as a Bronze Rule localist organization (not a Silver Rule, omnibenevolent meritocracy) they have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude and will show loyalty so far as they’re accorded social status, stability, and comfort. The Clueless, predictably, tend toward lawful alignments, but can be anywhere on the moral spectrum. Organizations actively try to make it this way. They don’t especially care about good versus evil in grunts or middle managers, but they want rules to be blindly enforced when necessary and blindly broken when authority requests it. 

If corporations could consciously choose leaders, they’d generally want people who are morally and civilly neutral, because that’s what most organizations are. Neither an overbearing lawful, chaotic, good or evil bias is beneficial to the organization’s objectives, and all can be harmful. Additionally, 64 percent of the population falls into that “true neutral” category. So it seems like the desirable set is a large one. However, rapid organizational ascendancy is abnormal. It breaks the rules of the on-paper pseudo-meritocracy, and it favors the stand-outs, who tend to fall into one (or two) of four categories:

• those who exert above-normal energy for the benefit of others, the organization, and the world (good).
• those who exhibit an unusual ability to conform and subordinate (law).
• those who will do anything, even harm others, in order to acquire power (evil).
• those who pursue disruptive and possibly anti-authoritarian avenues toward creativity (chaos).

In general, stand-out good people don’t get promoted. They get more responsibility, but not power. Stand-out lawful do, but at a plodding pace through “front door” avenues, and rarely past the effort thermocline. This leaves the evil and the chaotic, who tend toward variability because organizations just don’t know what to do with them. They exhibit an “up-or-out” distribution of organizational success. They’re either promoted or fired. (Sometimes it’s both.) They are the only ones who can pass through the effort thermocline.

A fully self-conscious organization desires neither evil nor chaos, so people judged to exemplify either are usually expelled from it (fired). the only forms of these that survive are those that manage to “trick” the organization enough to go undetected. Of course, this only reinforces the bias toward the promotion of evil or chaos, since deception is usually motivated by one or the other.

The surprising (sociopathic?) result is that the most successful people will come from the “L of social unacceptability”. Organizations, to the extent that they are conscious, try to exclude them. The result is an arms race between such people (as they fight to get as much out of organizations to survive or coexist) and the organizations, as they strive to improve their detection of law, chaos, good and evil. The winners become leaders; the losers get fired.

Eligibility pools

People who are lawful or civilly neutral (90 percent) are eligible for Loser-level roles in organization. Those who are lawful (10 percent) are eligible for Clueless middle-management positions. These numbers correspond roughly with a typical organization’s needs at each level. At the upper-tier, executive level, there’s a surplus. The “L of social unacceptability” (19 percent) is much larger than the organization’s needs for executives, so it can be selective. It can favor chaotic good, chaos, evil, lawful evil, or even chaotic evil. It gets to pick. In theory. In practice, almost no organizations exhibit anything like conscious, rational “thought”, so the selection is likely to be subconscious and by default.

Evil, I would say, is almost never desirable. Even if we were to judge evil to be necessary (with which I don’t agree) the darker shades of the moral neutrality can usually be coerced into it, especially if they have a civil bias. Lawful neutrality will support evil laws, and chaotic neutrality will oppose good rulers. Although many corporations devolve into macroscopic evil behavior and internal strife, and plenty of them are used for evil purposes, I still contend that even the most evil owner or executive would prefer not to have evil lieutenants. (Lawful neutrality is more desirable in a subordinate.)

The forward-thinking leaders that companies (if they are to remain adaptable in a chaotic world) should want, then, are the chaotic good and chaotic neutral– the Technocrats– with a hand-over to civilly neutral people as the organization grows. What remains an open question is which of these two alignments is to be preferred. That one, I would have a hard time to answer. I am (for obvious reasons) in favor of chaotic good, but I tend to think that chaotic neutrality may be more adaptive. In the rare case where a chaotic individual obtains power, the chaotic good person will limit her own power and create a system of checks and balances, creating a tougher job for the next generation of power holder in that institution. Chaotic evil people will abuse power so flagrantly that others will rush in to halt them. So chaotic good and evil both lead toward the reduction of power. It may be that chaotic neutral people (who just don’t know what to do with power) are the best ones for an organization to have hold it, because they are more likely to transmit it untouched to the next generation.

Conclusions

It seems that the worst pathologies of the MacLeod hierarchy come from the tendency to favor psychopathy at the top layer– the one called MacLeod Sociopaths. It is psychopaths who continue the dishonesty that deludes the middle layers (MacLeod Clueless) and the poverty that depletes the workers (MacLeod Losers). However, organizations create such bureaucratic walls that only stand-outs, rule-breakers, and tricksters can get through them. That favors evil or chaos (with those who exemplify both often being too pathological to succeed). It seems that organizations are doomed to have one or the other become prominent within its leadership. Therefore, the best antidote toward psychopathy (evil) might just be an increased tolerance of chaos.