The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
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Highlights
- At the heart of all tragedy, the Greeks saw a phenomenon they called hamartia: a fatal error born of unavoidable ignorance. Combined with a fundamental moral flaw, hamartia inevitably led on to destruction. For the Greeks, humans were cursed not just with mortality of the flesh, but also hamartia-driven mortality of the spirit. Hamartia was the Gods being Divine Jerks, randomly toying with human lives for their own pleasure, through cat-and-mouse games the latter could not hope to win. For the Greeks, any divine purpose, even subtly malicious randomness, in the ordering of the universe, was preferable to purposelessness. At least the gods cared enough to be cruel. Nietzsche saw tragedy differently. For Nietzsche, God was dead and only the flesh was real. There was only the indifferent Great Bureaucrat of the material universe, Chancellor Entropy, apathetically offering humans a form to fill out, with just one simple check-box choice: âdeath or booga booga?â
- The basic mechanism by which Sociopaths transfer blame to the Clueless, while reducing the overall severity of the penalty, is an application of Hanlonâs Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Because Hanlonâs Razor is often true, it is a believable dodge even when it is not. Coupled with another uniquely human trait, the tendency to link penalties to intentions rather than consequences (eg. first-degree murder vs. vehicular manslaughter), Hanlonâs razor can be used to manufacture predictable HIWTYL outcomes out of fundamentally unpredictable situations. How? By shifting blame from a locus where it would be attributed to malice, to one where it can plausibly be attributed to incompetence, the severity of penalties incurred is lowered.
- When ends are defensible, but means are not, Sociopaths feign incompetence, and you get the first kind of Hanlon Dodge. The simplest example is Ryan feigning incompetence in the microwave-cleaning episode: Ryan wanting the communal microwave cleaned is a defensible end, but openly treating Pam as a menial would be unacceptable in our time. So he uses his own incompetence, both to disguise the means he is trying to use (getting Pam to do it), and to insure against failure.
- In summary, seasoned Sociopaths maintain a permanent facade of strategic incompetence and ignorance in key areas, rather than just making up situational incompetence arguments. This is coupled with indirection and abstraction in things asked of reports. The result is HIWTYL judo. How do we know this is not just a case of giving reports autonomy and discretion in how to act? Simple: when you genuinely want to give reports responsibilities that help them grow, you give them autonomy where they are strong. When you want to use them in engineered âfailuresâ that give you the outcomes you want, you give them autonomy in areas where they are weak. If they can be relied upon to break laws, turn to violence, exhibit useful overzealousness or cut corners, those are the areas where you allow them discretion. Together, these two behaviors allow Sociopaths to exploit the full potential of Hanlonâs Razor. On the one hand, they can avoid doing unpleasant things themselves. On the other hand, they can achieve indefensible private intentions while maintaining plausible deniability.
- Until Sociopaths step in to exploit the precarious equilibrium. Loser group dynamics offer a natural exploit: almost anyone can be made to ally with, or turn against, anybody else, with no need to manufacture reasons. Almost any sub-group can be played off against any other sub-group, since there are no absolute loyalties. The presence of myriad fault-lines within a Loser group presents a canvas for divide-and-conquer artistry.
- The bureaucracy achieves its autocratic moral authority via an abstraction called the rule of law. Its emergent personality is Clueless by design. It is designed to fail in ways that achieve unspoken Sociopath intentions, while allowing them to claim the nobler explicit intentions enshrined in the law. But this only works if the members of the hierarchy actually play along. If they display any sign of autonomy, a precedent is set: human discretion can over-ride the rule of law. This puts the human stewards above the law, and makes them culpable when their decisions go wrong. âI was just doing my jobâ or âI donât make the rulesâ is not a defense if you have a history of deciding what your job actually is, and selectively breaking or bending rules.
- The on-paper solution is the right to appeal decisions or trigger exceptions. This solution is designed to work in exactly one case, and fail in all others. The cases that get through in a timely manner are those that would benefits the Sociopaths. For those that donât, the specific case is generally killed by the delay inherent in a converging appeals bottleneck. Future instances are handled by adding complicated exception clauses to the laws in the âdesigned to failâ ways we saw before. As a friend once remarked, tax law is complex for a reason: its primary purpose is to catalyze the growth of complicated exception-handling on top of an apparently simple percentage calculation. As an added benefit, this means that over time, the âlawâ gets increasingly burdened with byzantine complexity. It becomes progressively more error-prone and arbitrary. As it grows, the scheme evolves beyond the comprehension of even the individuals within it, making it progressively easier to get the members to play along. An enlightened bureaucrat might conceivably challenge a relatively simple form and attempt to exercise cautious amounts of discretion. A bureaucrat in charge of a truly byzantine process will likely be too confused and intimidated to challenge it (especially in modern IT-enabled bureaucracies, that are literally automated decision-rules systems run on computers, with only a few bewildered humans babysitting the beast).
- There are only three ways to get a bureaucracy to do anything it wasnât designed to do: by stealth, with secret and deniable support from allies in the staff hierarchy; by getting air-cover from a sufficiently high-up Sociopath who can play poker with whichever oversubscribed Sociopath is in charge of exception-handling for the specific process (i.e., jumping the appeals queue and calling in favors to ensure the required ruling); and through corruption and bribery.