let's THiNK about it

Part I: Protestant Work Ethic

Max Weber has a phrase: “secular ascetism” where you subjugate your impulses to God’s will, through “restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling”. This entangles religious values (hard work, self-reliance, frugality) with work values and success, but over time the religious trappings slipped, opening up to conspicuous wealth and consumer culture. So, while frugality disappeared, self-reliance, gumption, and a foggy notion that morality is linked to success/wealth remained in the workplace.

Yet, also the workplace was becoming industrialized through Taylorism, supercharging bureaucracy. This new bureaucratic structure took those once human/religious virtues and built them into the workplace through regularized time-schedules, work procedures, and administrative hierarchies.

We don’t need to know your character, we have spreadsheets.

This system of bureaucratic industry spread into government and private sector, needing clerks, technicians, and myriad levels of managers to maintain it. A new class emerged: the big salaried man completely dependent and devoted to the corporation. (So much for self-reliance or dedication to God or even family.)
As Jackall points out, is not just being IN the organization, but OF the organization.

PART I: Pyramid Politics

Corporations centralize authority in the CEO (the King) while decentralizing it through Presidents, VP’s, District and Regional Managers. Reporting becomes a “web of commitments'' tying people to goals and reinforcing fealty relationships.

To issue a command from the top triggers a cascade of downward pressure to achieve an improbable task, especially when bound by a bureaucratic system. Hence a willingness to sacrifice or bend rules to achieve the King’s whims is championed as “loyalty,” and CEO’s tend to promote those who have the “capacity for creative problem solving” ... which is usually shady.

But you must be loyal in the right order: The rule is, you should be loyal to your boss directly above you. Equally, part of your job is to protect your boss from embarrassing themselves or the company.

“symbolically reinforce at every turn his own subordination and his willing acceptance of the obligations of his fealty.”

Robert Jackall

Credit and the King

details are pushed down and credit is pulled up

Bosses give vague instructions, purportedly to encourage subordinates autonomy. But really it is a cover your ass method, 1) because they don’t understand the details, or 2) they need a fall guy and deniability.

Credit or praise is a currency, not to be casually bestowed, it is to be used at the boss’s prudence.

This type of sagacity is especially egregious around the CEO where managers engage in irrational budget expenditures to appease a perceived preference, a wish, a whim. Jackall talks of repainting a whole building to impress a CEO, or dropping $10k on a custom made book... and the justification is, if you don’t appease the capricious king or queen today, your head could be on a pike tomorrow.

One tool in a CEO’s chest is the “shake up” where they reorganize the whole company.

This does a number of things: it reorganizes existing fealty or alliances, breaking up plots or troublesome dissenters. It also hides mistakes, as now no one is sure where the blame should land when things go badly. And it makes the Board and Wall street think you are aggressive. Meanwhile, it promotes anxiousness and stress throughout your company, often reinforcing the perception of needing to cater to the CEO's capricious moods, lest you be fired.

PART II: Success and Failure

Striving for success is a moral imperative in America.

Once you become a manager, you have proven competency, and beyond and it becomes much more about social factors, where you must align yourself with the “style and ethos of the corporation.”

So... if you want to rise, you have to re-make yourself into what they company desires by staying attuned to social cues. This is known as Self-rationalization or self-streamlining, and it sounds a bit sociopathic, but we probably all do it to a certain extent:

Such a manager “dispassionately takes stock of himself, treating himself as an object, as a commodity. He analyses his strengths and weaknesses and decides what he needs to change in order to survive and flourish in his organization. And then he systematically undertakes a program to reconstruct his image ...” (p.59)

1. Appearance: indeed, the clothes do make the man.
2. Self-Control: Control all emotion behind a mask of amiable blandness, never lose your temper, never reveal a secret.
3. Be a Team Player: Con...

Part I

We all know we are addicted to our phones, but can it really be a bad thing to think all the time? Yes, it can. The stories we tell ourselves trigger a little a dopamine buzz, activating part of the DMN (Default Network Mode), which means we increasingly live in our own head listening to our own stories. The problem becomes compounded when the PCC (posterior cingulate cortex) is activated, since it often signals thoughts of obsessive control, rumination, induced morality, guilt, and depression.

All of these activities close off our ability to to see reality, increasingly letting us spin in a world of our own making.

I had done earlier research on the "observer effect" where we literally lose the ability to observe ourselves (self-perception) when our attention was highly active or we were doing a novel task. Equally, meditation and mindfulness practice have been shown to reduce PCC activity in the brain, allowing us to reduce the narrativizing tendency of the brain.

You are subject to sorrow, fear, jealousy, anger, and inconsistency. That’s the real reason you should admit that you are not wise.”

~ Marcus Aurelius

Part II

What does this mean in realistic terms?

People who play the psychology test, The Ultimatum Game, often get angry or disgusted at the perceived unfairness of offers. Often blowing up just to prove a point, even though they are playing against a computer. This righteousness doesn't hurt the computer, but it does hurt the subject, proving that we will hurt ourselves to prove a point.

Meditation or mindfulness practitioners seem to be able to de-couple or distance themselves from the negative emotions, taking them less personally, and thus reducing stress through empathizing with the other position. As well, they see little reward in hurting the other side, even if it is a computer.

This research shows that our cultural norms, our common sense and beliefs, may be harmful to us and others, and to engage in empathy without taking things personally points towards a universal human ethic.

Part III

Ryan Holiday put out a podcast that considers our addiction to thinking as a negative, harmful tendency that might be making us stupid and miserable. When we assign our role as a smart thinker, then we form opinions, not letting ourselves be open to new ideas or other people. As well, we do a disservice to those around us but thinking for them and not allowing them to take the exciting journey the world offers.

We need to remain open, and empathetic, moving out of the Nietzsche stage of a camel, hording knowledge, on to the lion, slaying our values, and embody the child creator. Which is so much more fun.

0:57 Dopamine and Daydreaming

2:35 Give your ego a break

3:26 You made your own story, and you are sticking with it

4:40 Hurting yourself for the principle of the thing

6:16 How do you halt your self-destruction?

8:30 Your cup is already full

Ryder takes a walk, and ends up musing about his neighbor's Xmas decorations, the lack of participation, and if that means anything. Expecting a conspiracy he researches the use of Xmas lights and a short history leading back to the White House and Thomas Edison.

Eventually he discusses the movement of all things from physical to virtual space. Pulling form the classic text "The Sacred and Profane" by Mircea Eliade, the question is raised that our portal to both is now the same.

Moving through the psychology of guilt vs Shame, and onto the societal implications of a shame-based or guilt-based culture, invoking Max Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic" as roots for our meritocracy, Hannah Arendt and Timothy Snyder's texts on the Nazi occupations and how people not only obeyed in advance, but used words to distance themselves from reality. This is linked to the American South, and the desire to avert shame or guilt of self through cultural constructions that benefit some while shaming others.

https://letusthinkaboutit.com/step-22-guilt-shame--group-think/

2:48 Social pressure uses Shame/Guilt to normalize behaviors, which is better than more laws.

5:01 Protestant Ideals: "Your Wee wee is from the devil"

7:23 Down with the Hierarchy! Don't obey him, obey me!

10:03 Shame leads to Rage: "it is not people that have passions, but passions that have people."

11:58 groupthink belief machine

16:06 "Their ideology ruined their relationship with reality"

18:02 Driven into toxic social groups through guilt, shame and a lack of forgiveness, people offer unwavering loyalty for guilt absolution.

20:44 Guilt and shame isolate people, for acceptance they pledge loyalty to toxic tribes.

Part I

In a reaction to the previous podcast, step 23, my wife and I discussed the problem of tyrants, or mini-tyrants, who practice repressive tactics based on fear, coercion, and cronyism, and how reducing guilt and shame may not be helpful in combatting them.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”

Carl Jung

The notion that is hard to fathom is that they are getting their rewards from somewhere, either their base or at home. Typically, shame or guilt socially would ameliorate their behavior, but when being shamed becomes a badge of honor, these tactics no longer work, and we must consider where they are receiving their rewards from to continue their behavior.

And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

Jordan Peterson

Part II

Considering how irrationality and groupthink produce a culture, then promote one of their own, we must consider how this culture of nonsensical “Common sense” is perpetuated.

If you ain’t first, you’re last

Ricky Bobby

Looking at Antonio Gramsci‘s work, a neo-marxist, we can see that the Cultural Hegemony (or cultural hierarchy) works to keep the bourgeoise (or capitalist ruling class) in power by aligning the Base (the working masses) with an ideology that reinforces their irrational allegiance to a system that keeps them in chains. He discusses a Superstructure of intellectuals (law, philosophy, education) as Shapers, who shape culture and the Base, while the Base maintains the Shapers, creating a loop.

However, cultural “common sense” is refuting many ideas from intellectual circles (the Shapers). This maintains the existing cultural hegemony, in part because both the workers and people in power are raised in a society that educates them with blind-spots and bias, creating an inability (at worst) or reluctance (at best) to be genuinely critical of the institutions surrounding them.

“Thank you sir, may I have another.”

How this manifests is multi-faceted, and considering the power/politics games involved we can only point out a few things to keep in mind:

• leaders use their position to remind you of hierarchy, and your role to follow
• leaders use economic coercion for alignment
• leadership is performative, utilizing clichés or truisms while ignoring other “truths”
• decisions are made to seem impersonal: it is the way the world works, like gravity or hurricanes
• bearing the burden of hard decisions evokes sympathy or honor, yet is a justification for “making the big bucks.”

All cruelty springs from weakness”

Seneca

Part III

If the mini-tyrant or leader is a singular individual, without the polis/oikos split from the Greek city/state, and he/she takes work criticism as personal criticism, then we have a leadership problem that turns reactionary, or self-saving (contractive) rather than open collaborative, organizational, or rational.

When all recourse to discourse, guilt, and shame are exhausted, we turn to the judicial branch, which tends to favor those in power due in part to the financial burden of the legal realm. This is a failure on multiple levels.

So, do we continue to fight on ideological principle? It is good to know you are in the right, but you will be battered for your principles. Is it easier to just give in rather than destroy your job and home life with the stress and pain? It is a “free country” so we can vote with our feet and leave, but this seems to be giving up the “good fight” when your society has somehow internalized and thrived on a dark morality.

3:14 Stop cornering people into a "join us or die" irrationality

5:21 Acting out to get your itch scratched

7:09 Man up and punch a girl, Ricky Bobby!

9:32 A banjo in the hand is worth 2 in the bush!

12:22 Speaking out against common sense

14:30 Leadership Tactics: economic coercion, cherry-picking truisms, injustice is a natural law