"A Problem With Authority"—The Person You Think You Are Punching May Not Exist

On nonexistent people and the corporate crusade against them.

This was more than ten years ago, and the only person who could get in legal trouble is no longer with us, so I don’t think it’s indiscreet to tell this tale. As many of the worst tales do, it happened at a company. Late on a Friday afternoon, the CEO came to tell us—we were a small startup—that we were parting ways with somebody. This person (unless he lied) was disabled, but also irresponsible—he didn’t always use the drugs he was supposed to take, and he took quite a few he wasn’t—and it was interfering with our work, so nobody was really surprised by the decision, and one of the things we learned the man had done—if the boss was telling the truth, but he’s no longer with us, so who knows?—was of such a nature that even such a disability could not excuse it. He could have given that as the real reason for the termination, and no one would have had questions, but he had to run up the score with additional causes including—this is a direct quote—“a problem with authority.”

As a disabled person, I know when people are being unfairly fired over their disabilities—it’s illegal, but it happens all the time, usually with a chain of demotions (“gimp-tracking”) first—and this wasn’t one of those cases. There was nothing illegal about the termination, if the boss’s account of events leading up to it was accurate. Still, it draws suspicion that, in addition, the CEO had to add a nebulous attitude issue—exactly the sort of nebulous attitude issue that bosses love to create when they are firing someone illegally. “Resistant to change.” “Not a cultural fit.” “Overexperienced.” “Has a problem with authority.” These are all HR-speak for, “We know we’re breaking the law, but we’re not stupid enough to admit it.” This got me thinking, though: what does it mean to have a problem with authority? Is it a real thing? Are there such people? The answer I have come up with is that this beast probably doesn’t exist.

There are, of course, people who disobey authority, and sometimes they do it for stupid reasons. There are a lot of people who have anxiety around people in authority, but that’s something else. Civil disobedience is usually considered a good kind of resistance to authority, though rarely at the time it is exercised. There are endless debates about what kinds of authority should exist and how far such powers should go, but the concerns here are reasonable. I’ve never met anyone who would disobey an order because it is an order. Blindly flouting rules is even worse than blindly following them, but I suspect that such a tendency is like pathological trait laziness—it is used in arguments by people who want to cover up their intentions and biases, such as those who believe an innate aversion to work justifies society’s maltreatment of ethnicities they also personally despise, but it probably doesn’t exist. There is the general laziness we all have—when we evolved, useless caloric expenses were life-threatening, so we are all selective and cautious with our efforts—and there are mental conditions that look like (but are not) personal laziness, but the right-wing bugbear of individual trait laziness simply isn’t there. When it comes to constitutionally insubordinate people, I suspect it’s the same.

Let’s consider the most quotidian example of following an order: stopping at a red traffic light. We do not feel oppressed by submitting to this authority because we know why it exists—the traffic light imposes mild inconvenience, but allows us to safely use the intersection. A constitutionally insubordinate person, however, would be more likely to run the red light because he hates taking orders. Here’s the thing: when it comes to red-light running—I’m not talking about misjudging a yellow one, as we’ve all done, or safety-critical circumstances such as escaping a tsunami—we know why people do it. In many cases, they’re driving recklessly in other ways—unreasonable speed, distracted driving, intoxicated—and run it by mistake. Sometimes, they think they know the intersection better than the engineers who put the light there. Sometimes, they’re trying to impress somebody. Illegal racing is a major cause, too. These people know full well the order they are disobeying is a valid one, but they care less about personal and general safety than they do about something else—impressing the girl in the passenger seat, winning an illegal street race, getting home two minutes earlier. They have a problem, for sure, because what they’re doing is illegal and unsafe, but it’s not a problem “with authority.” It’s a problem of something—impatience, arrogance, ego.

You see otherwise functioning adults do stupid things for such reasons all the time, but I’ve never met this mythical person who is constitutionally or inveterately insubordinate. I think he is somebody that the petty tyrants who fill workplace bureaucracies made up.

I am neurodivergent. Without a formal diagnosis, I cannot say whether I qualify medically as autistic, though I suspect strongly that I am on that spectrum, even though my social skills in most circumstances are about average. In a small conversation, I can be funny, charming, and outgoing; only in chaotic group settings does my performance notably degrade. Of course, circumstances—fatigue from working long hours, sensory overload, or cumulative petty stresses that I am not able to discharge as fast as they pile up—can also cause masking failure, which is one reason why I am no lover of open-plan corporate offices. This version of mild autism, Asperger’s with normal-ish (15th to 50th percentile) social ability, is sometimes called the “female phenotype” although it can obviously exist in men; today, the term for it is pathological demand avoidance (PDA) which is not even close to being on the mark.

To understand what is true and what is false in this label, we should understand that a demand is not the same thing as an order—it is more broad. An order—an adult’s injunction to sit down, a police officer’s signal to pull over, a nightclub bouncer’s request to leave the premises—is one type of demand, but demands also include social expectations—such as showing gratitude at receiving a gift, performing subtasks implicit to explicit requests, and contributing to but not monopolizing a conversation—and performance standards such as: one’s paper must be submitted by Friday. I’ve never met a functioning adult who’d argue with me that demands are a part of life and that we all need to deal with them, and most demands are easy to fulfill. The problem is when they accumulate and combine—in scuba terminology, this is called task loading—until a risk of overload and failure exists. Neurotypicals have limits here, too. The issue for us who are neurodivergent is not that we are pathological or avoidant toward demands but that some demands, especially the social kind, require more of our processing power. In the workplace, where implicit demands proliferate—when a boss asks you to do a thing, he usually wants you do that thing and another thing, and another thing, and it is your job to figure all that out—and getting one’s rivals buried under everyone else’s low-value (“junk”) demands is a common competitive strategy, neurodivergent people tend to struggle, and it’s not our fault. Some people aren’t built to be supermodels, some people aren’t made to pitch fastballs, and some people aren’t meant to be workplace subordinates.

Managerial authority, in the workplace, is rarely given real justification. This is not to say that workplace authority is always illegitimate—many workplace rules are necessary, from a safety or legality perspective—but that neurotypical polytactic people usually understand the rules of hierarchy so well that they can decipher the implicit demands of their official managers as well as unofficial (“dotted-line”) bosses. Corporate capitalism requires this, because explicitly legitimizing managerial authority is actually impossible. The true purpose of a private-sector corporation—not simply “to make money” but to make money while restricted to methods that preserve the reputations, social class status, and organizational position of executives and owners—is socially unacceptable. It must never be named. Plus, it often reduces a person’s power if he is forced to claim that he has it, so this is usually only done as a last resort and concurrently with the transgressor’s employment being terminated. This is stuff that 95 percent of people just know and seem to begrudgingly accept—if ya doesn’t work, ya doesn’t eat; if ya isn’t team captain, ya isn’t team captain—but that monotactic people find absurd and repugnant. We understand orders and why they need to exist, but who decided we need to smile while following them? We understand operational subordination—stopping at a red light—but we despise personal subordination—putting one’s manager’s career objectives ahead of one’s own, or at least pretending to do so, and pretending to like it—and struggle to really understand it. Who decided that people who possess paper pictures of dead people are smarter than we are? Why is it so normalized to change one’s register of speech around glorified bureaucrats that anyone who does not do so will be read as making a direct challenge? When you’re neurodivergent, you have to prioritize demands and attend to the ones most valid. I’ll follow the law against running red lights, because I like being able to drive without reducing my life expectancy to hours. The workplace stuff? Let’s be totally honest; 99 percent of it is emotional labor. The meetings and initiatives and most of the projects are devised by some executive who needs to “feel like a man” because his family no longer buys his bullshit.

As I said, there’s no such thing as trait laziness. This pandemic of personal moral failure is something a bunch of psychopaths invented to justify social injustice, to drive mean-spirited economic and social policies, and to brag about how hard they worked to get to the position where they spend all day telling other people how hard they work. Similiarly, the “problem with authority” that workplace tyrants love to invoke when justifying harm they have caused or are about to cause to other people is, almost certainly, not a real thing. I have been a manager; I’ve dealt with all kinds of people. If your subordinates don’t like you, this is not because you are “authority.” It is either because you suck or because you represent a socioeconomic system, corporate capitalism, that is in fact morally illegitimate.

Workplace authority is, in truth, a strange beast. At some workplaces, it has every right to exist. Workplace rules like Don’t put hot nuclear waste in the coffee pot, or Don’t drive 157 miles per hour in a trailer truck, or Don’t teabag the boss’s grandmother’s cactus, are all one hundred percent valid. What is less valid is the authority that a manager has simply because he is a manager. It is strange that, as soon as some schlimazel makes the decision to join a company, that firm can select any person in the whole wide world—the boss’s 18-year-old son, the schlimazel’s middle-school bully, a convicted horse rapist—and decide to make that person the schlimazel’s boss. It has the legal right to do that! This is deeply weird. It is justified under the argument that the manager was chosen by people who were chosen by people who were chosen by the people who were somehow chosen by society because they happen to possess—it doesn’t matter how they got them—a large pile of the paper pictures of dead people that make the world go ‘round. It almost seems like our whole socioeconomic system is a bad joke that no one replied to, a non-Newtonian fart in an elevator that refused to disperse.

The reason we humans believe in this weird thing called managerial authority is historical. Until about 1740, wage labor was considered dishonorable. A free peasant can feed his family; a wage worker has no such guarantee. Even a serf cannot be legally sold into a factory, mine, or brothel; a wage worker might have to sell himself to one. Throughout most of history, wage workers ranked below serfs (bound labor with established rights) but above slaves (bound labor with few or no rights) in the socioeconomic pecking order. The 1740-2007 period, in which wage work was not only rendered respectable, but also required of almost everyone—rent increases and legal usury make sure of it—is probably the anomaly. I can’t predict when capitalism will end, but I can tell you that, if it sticks around, we are going to become that old type of society—there are owners, and there are workers, and you never become the former through work—again. The so-called “developing world” is in fact our future under capitalism, and it always was.

To make wage work respectable, it had to be stripped of all trappings of personal subordination. Institutions had to be made to appear to run according to objective rules, turning the workplace duties into operational subordination, which rational people tend to accept. The view then became that a wage worker of any repute does not work for a boss but for society at large—a profession—or, failing that lofty pretense, at least a company. Until about 1990, this was actually true in most white-collar jobs. If your boss didn’t like you, the company would let you transfer to another team. You had to make several very serious mistakes, not just annoy one manager, to get fired. Otherwise, the worst that would happen was an off-season lateral transfer that delayed your next promotion by a year or two. Managers had to take the needs of workers seriously, or otherwise the best people would simply move to other teams. Authority, on the other hand, existed within the company, and was only enforced against workers who had committed legal or safety offenses so severe that it would have been dangerous to keep them employed. This changed, obviously. That older, more forgiving style of management was replaced by the mean-spirited, psychotic kind—forced ranking, aggressive performance reviews, transfer options withheld—where the prevailing rule is: one strike and you’re out. This transition was driven by management consultants who realized that it was easier to sell deranged power trips than actual solutions to difficult problems; they branded all of this shit as “high performance management” even though there is no evidence that any of it actually works. Did it result in macroscopic improvements to corporate performance? No. It did, however, make workplaces far more political. Managers, in turn, realized that these new systems gave them far more power over their subordinates, and that they could compel them to support the manager’s career goals over everything else, and within a few years this became something managers had to do to survive, since they were competing for promotions and visibility against peers already doing so.

These changes in our economy and in how companies run were sold as improvements to efficiency, but they’ve been implemented and things are more inefficient than ever. Something I have learned is that every organization has a political temperature. If that temperature is low, people will generally treat each other with respect and do their own jobs well. There will be a few relatively harmless low performers, but the company will find ways to work around them. Once people start getting fired, the political temperature goes up. People start hiding information. Meetings are called to show that work is being done. Processes are established to cover tracks and deflect blame. Capable workers either leave or demand higher pay and more rapid promotion. People are nervous, so fights and turf wars break out for the smallest causes. Backstabbings lead to more backstabbings. It is very easy for an executive to raise the political temperature—this is sometimes done on purpose, sometimes by mistake—but there is no way to lower it other than to hope it will gradually cool. When a workplace goes hot like this, it’s no longer enough to do one’s job. Managers need constant validation that “everything is OK” and the bosses’ emotional labor demands balloon.

Neurotypical and neurodivergent people both hate when this happens. The difference is that neurotypical people can turn off parts of their brain and go into a “survival mode” where they turn themselves into an average of the five people nearest them. Indeed, this is how they survive workplaces. They understand that the 50-90 percent performance reduction that comes along with self-lobotomization isn’t going to get them fired—at high political temperatures, no one cares about productivity—while a failure of social polish absolutely will. We neurodivergent people can’t do that. We had to consciously learn social skills that we use in software, not hardware. If we turn off large parts of our brains, we start getting wrong answers. So we have to keep our brains turned on. In a private-sector workplace, this can make us annoying or difficult. We get sensory overload; we get anxiety; we can become way more conscientious, creative, and argumentative than anyone feels we have the right to be. When someone is on a hell-bodge just looking for “low performers” or “quiet saboteurs” or people with “a problem with authority”, this can make us targets.

It is so dysfunctionally irrational to fight against authority simply because it is authority that I am not aware of any functioning adult who has a pattern of doing. So, then, why do all the glorified bureaucrats who staff the corporate world still insist that such an animal as “a problem with authority” exists? Is this just language concocted to justify what would otherwise be illegal discrimination? Yes, often they are. If they are not, are they knowingly misconstruing the motivations of people they dislike? Of course, this is common. Still, I think there are cases where it goes deeper than that. As I said, I’ve been a manager, and I’ve also had plenty of managers, some excellent and some terrible. A recurring theme is that they don’t tend to love the job very much.

Work, in the private sector, is where non-bosses first learn what adult society really thinks of them—that they’re disposable, contemptible little assholes who better suffer because their right to exist is under review. What about managers, though? Why aren’t they enjoying their power more? Well, what managers learn is just as ugly—that they are bosses. Capitalism has created this mythology of “visionary leaders” with “reality distortion fields” by which a chosen charismatic few shall have the world move to support them, requiring no effort, certainly not the ugliness—commanding obedience not because one is loved, but because one’s organizational position entails the ability to turn off another person’s income—of management. Since they fire all evidence to the contrary—of course, they are not conscious of this being the reasoning—most business executives generally believe they are that charismatic leader. No one mentions (or ever would) that they are carrying out his orders solely because they are afraid of the consequences of not doing so. I suspect that this personal reality distortion field does not exist—the real reality distortion field… is around the reality distortion field. In truth, these bureaucrats and proprietors do not actually have such unique charisma and superior talent that other people—the sorts of people who work on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, no less—toss away self-interest and render intense personal loyalty to the “visionary.” But everyone has to keep this illusion up. This whole country, whether one is in a strip club or in an office, runs on making the people who own the pictures of dead people feel powerful and well-loved. The real work of every corporate subordinate is emotional labor. This is why, if you have a masking failure—you did the job, and you did it well, but you didn’t hide your displeasure at having been assigned it—you will be fired.

There is a point at which corporate bosses realize they are not the superhumanly charismatic theocapitalists they thought they would become—they are merely regular people whose orders are followed because they hold bureaucratic position. This infuriates them. They rage like King Lear on the heath. “Why am I not Steve—except, uh, thanks for not giving me cancer, please keep that up God—Jobs?” It does not matter that Steve Jobs was probably not, in this sense, Steve Jobs.

The total but uncharismatic truth of organizational capitalism is that these ubermenschen don’t exist. Steve Jobs won at capitalism because random circumstances made others’ rational pursuit of their own goals benefit him. The vision these people create around themselves is built by money and publicity firms, not the underlying reality. The truth about who becomes a billionaire is that it is mostly dumb luck, the east and west of a shitting bison as he crosses a prairie, that determines that. Nothing else. But people who grew up believing in capitalism cannot accept that this beloved bolus of bureaucratic businesses they call a society is, in fact, no meritocracy but just as arbitrary as the prior systems of privilege—hereditary aristocracies, divine right of the monarchy—we have been taught to despise. This cannot be! There must be some explanation—a sicario betwixt the staves, a spider in the spread, a secret malefactor with a deep-seated “problem with authority”. There can be no other explanation of the executive’s inability to attain the extreme wealth and notability the meritocracy of capitalism promised him.

Sometimes a manager feels this crisis within himself. At least as often, a group of colleagues will spot it in a superior and recognize the danger each of them is in, if the issue is not controlled and contained; they need to decide who, if catastrophic loss of income must be allocated, takes the fall. In the private sector, this is usually done through a nuanced, highly technical process known as the Throw Greg Algorithm. There’s always a Greg and, if you don’t know who the Greg is, I’ve got news for you. Greg, see, he’s not bad at his job at all but he… well, he just doesn’t like authority. No, he has a problem with authority. When Greg sees a red light, he doubles his speed. He sexually harassed himself three times before brushing his teeth just to see what it felt like. Greg’s first word was ten racial slurs, all said at the exact same time, producing a waveform not unlike those mysterious deep-ocean sounds. There’s not just one Greg, either. There was a Greg before this Greg, and there was a Greg before that Greg, and don’t be fooled by the name because two of my eleven Gregs were surely female and there is that one I am not sure about because I can’t figure out all these newfangled Greg-genders… anyway, I would be the CEO’s protégé—no, I would be the CEO—no, I would be a billionare—by now if it were not for… well, you-know-who. At the end of the day, we have all gone way out of pocket to circle back and cover the low-hanging fruit, and it has come to our attention that challenging headwinds in the foreseeable future require our strategic retreat to our core competencies and therefore we have gone all in on our alignment when it comes to the decision that we are no longer in the blue ocean and therefore do not have the bandwidth to allocate the historically expected compensation of this one fucking Greg.

It doesn’t matter if Greg doesn’t exist. That is how the corporate world actually operates. That is all ye know at work, and all ye need to know.