One of the most versatile avian predators is the arctic skua, also known as the parasitic jaeger, a small but aggressive seabird. Like most carnivores, it is an adept hunter; also like most carnivores, it is not afraid to steal a kill. What makes it especially reputable is a specific and colorful feeding strategy: it harasses other seabirds until they vomit, then catches the jettisoned puke in midair. All’s fair in nature—the animal is doing what it evolved to do—but we would consider this antisocial in humans. If someone went around deliberately sickening other people, consuming the resummoned breakfasts for his own sustenance, we would probably want that person kept out of our vicinity.
That, or we’d make him a CEO. We do, as I shall establish, live in a jaeger’s world.
To start this discussion, though, we have to discuss neurodiversity and mental health, and the terminology gets confusing quite fast. Consider the word depression. It can be a passing mood that is not a sign of poor mental health and that anyone can experience. It can refer to a long period of this negative mood, which does become a mental health issue but that, again, anyone can experience. The word is also used for a disease—much more likely, a collection of diseases—that cause depressive symptoms and are usually considered lifelong because, even when the person is not depressed, the vulnerability exists. When it comes to mental health, I often remark that we are all—every single one of us—walking probability distributions; anyone can have anxiety or a panic attack, and anyone can develop disabling depression, and anyone can hallucinate. I would even bet that this is true of mania and (albeit, very rarely) psychosis. Trauma, physical disease, bereavement, job stress, and drugs (even when medically necessary) can have all these effects.
Since mental illness is not a character issue—there are mentally ill people of low character, but they are not correlated—I am not fond of the term at all. It is highly stigmatized, but it also used for conditions where we—that is, society at the present time—simply do not know what the physical cause is. Why should we inflict stigma on someone else when we are the ones who haven’t figured it out? Almost certainly, these are physical problems with mental symptoms. Yet, because we don’t have easy answers or even know one answer, we allow pearl-clutchers to indulge in the superstitious attitude that if the symptoms of a person’s illness are mental, the disease must reside in the soul itself.
Organizations such as workplaces are both so dysfunctional and so consuming of their denizens’ time that it is common for people without mental illness—or, to be more accurate, with only average vulnerability to it—to develop anxiety and depression, sometimes to such a paralyzing degree that they cannot continue the work. This is called burnout. It tends to have an anxious phase, during which sufferers are still able to get rote work done and to do it well—it is barely noticed by others at this point, though it is unsustainable—followed by a depressive one characterized by total motivational collapse. Burnout costs the world billions of dollars in lost productivity; we might ask why it exists and what, if anything, can be done about it.
As I mentioned, depression isn’t one “thing” so much as it is a collection of symptoms common to a set of illnesses. We know that it can be induced in anyone; it is not restricted to “the mentally ill.” I strongly suspect there is some truth in the “rank theory” of it, which holds that depression itself is not a disease process but can be—and, in our evolutionary history, was—an adaptive response to dangerous social circumstances. It is not disease, then, that the depressive mechanism exists, as it almost certainly does, in all of us; disease is present when it triggers inappropriately or idiopathically.
Contrary to the narrative of primitive communism—I am a leftist, but I do not romanticize prehistoric or preindustrial people—there is not overwhelming evidence that we are, in our natural state, innately good people. Evil existed before slavery and feudalism and capitalism and it will exist after capitalism is gone. There surely were noble savages, but there were equally ignoble ones whose existence required the noble to be so savage in the first place. In pre-monogamous societies, about half of all men died in conflicts over social status or resources. Although these wars, fought within and between tribal groups, did not involve the impersonal mass killing done by machine guns or explosives, they were frequent and they were every bit as brutal and hateful as modern ones. Men killing other men—don’t worry, we’ll get to women, who can be just as vicious—in positional conflict seems to be one of the oldest human stories. Vae victus; the loser dies. The stakes of social conflict in today’s world are, in general, much smaller.
At the same time, human life is (or, at least, can be) long. A young man who is fit but holds low status might have better odds if he waits a few years, for high-status competitors to weaken, sicken, or lose favor. Older rivals will wither and die. As terrible as depression is, the shutdown it induces—reduced appetite, diminished volition, low or nonexistent libido—may be adaptive still, for it eliminates the impulse toward conflict. It’s better, for one’s genes at least, to feel dead for a few years than to actually become dead.
Of course, depression occurs outside this specific context. It often seems to happen for no reason, striking people who would otherwise be in their prime. It attacks men and women, rich and poor, high- and low-status people. The process is natural and had a role once; the triggering is usually pathological—there may be a physical disease, there may be dysfunction of circumstance.
That this depression would be such a powerful force makes sense when considering that so much of our understanding of human nature and history derive from male reproductive greed and social competition. Evolutionary psychology can be reductive—it tends to assume that moral and cultural impulses fluctuate enough to cancel each other out; it treats reproduction itself (as opposed to the social benefits of family formation, as opposed to sexual pleasure) as one’s primary objective when this is usually not the case—but, when it comes to first-order approximations, it often works. Why does evil exist? There may or may not be a Devil, but the upshot of evolutionary psychology is that it doesn’t need the Devil to exist for it to have explanatory power. Evil exists because, for millennia, men who pursued it and were successful had far more children—hundreds, thousands of them—than men who did not. Rapists and warlords left more descendants than saints and artists.
The male perspective has been overrepresented here. At the same time, nature made men and women far more alike than different. I suspect that, in the quest to achieve the high intelligence of primates and, later, humans, no real separation of “male code” and “female code” could be afforded, which is why all of us have both, and why there is very little sexual dimorphism, especially in the brain. The brutal, high-stakes setting of male positional violence gave depression enough adaptive utility for it to exist, but it would not have taken long at all—in fact, it probably happened at the same time—for the same traits and vulnerabilities to emerge in women, who are now at least as prone to depression as men, and probably more so—today, they are more likely to be diagnosed with it.
We know what evil men—although I intend no digression into theology or morality, I believe good and evil objectively exist—did in pre-monogamous societies. The play book, for them, was simple. They killed their rivals, they started wars, they committed rape, and they enslaved other humans. This was probably done mostly to indulge base impulses and personal narcissism, reproduction being a tertiary objective if one at all, but it resulted in hundreds or thousands of biological children, while those who did not possess enough aggression to defend themselves and their kin against evil had none. This is not the only human story. I believe good also exists—in fact, good is (surprisingly?) more interesting than evil because I cannot come up with any non-theological reason why it would exist, seeing as evil people can do everything good people can, and we would therefore expect the players with more moves to win. However, evil and its aptitude for male positional violence is clearly a human story and, sadly, one of the major ones. As I said before, nature saw fit, in the acceleration of primate and later human intelligence, to make men and women far more alike than different,; thus, it surprises nobody that women are just as capable of evil, and of good, as men.
What, for an evil woman, is the payoff? The individual payoff for evil need not be reproductive—Jeffrey Dahmer, when he cannibalized young gay men, was not doing it to sire descendants—but evil’s tendency to prosper over generations requires it; it is through this lens that we treat reproductive greed as a primary motive, even though on an individual level it is usually not one. In this light, the evil man knows exactly what he has to do, but the evil woman still only has one womb. She can kill and she can rape, but it will never result in her having five hundred children. She must wait a generation. She must have an evil son. This, please understand, is why Cersei in Game of Thrones “loves her children”—her love for Joffrey is in fact sincere. It is why a small but notable contingent of women send love letters to serial killers. Still, it is not enough, in the context of the female-evil strategy, to have an evil son. Although evil seems to be a necessary condition for gaining and holding social status among humans, it is clearly not sufficient—there are plenty of assholes who never get anywhere. If she wants to make sure her evil son experiences reproductive proliferation, rather than getting killed in a bar fight, she needs to ensure his high social status, and the least risky way to acquire this is to be born with it. So, a high-status father is a must but, even then, it does not suffice. Alpha thugs in pre-monogamous societies had hundreds of children by scores of women; most of the offspring did not become alpha thugs themselves, because there are not many slots. In most cases, their fathers didn’t even know their names. Only a small set of favored children—usually, children by one or a few favored wives—will have a chance.
Feudal societies, having been stable for long enough to see the necessity of monogamy, at least as a general principle, solved this politically. The king’s one wife was the queen and her children—only her children—could be heirs; whatever children he had by other women were bastards. The queen might have felt some private disgust toward the king’s infidelity, but her children were safe—unless the king could secure atypical clerical support. On the other hand, in the openly pre-monogamous societies that were probably dominant during our evolution, high-status men had many “wives” who were, in essence, domestic and sexual slaves. This is not, of course, a statement about what should be or what should have been—it is abhorrent, but we must understand it. A woman’s merely being in the king’s or chieftain’s harem would not ensure that her children enter society at a decent level—she would have to become the favored wife, to rise up through the harem and become the queen, if she wanted her sons to be princes.
An evil man can win by killing all his rivals. If he loses, he’s dead—this is undesirable, but no worse from a genetic standpoint than nonreproduction, which was the median male outcome in pre-monogamous societies. If he has a chance of winning through violence, he will. An evil woman, on the other hand, must play a different game. She must win the favor of a man—often, a narcissistic man of comparable evil to herself—whose ego necessitates that he believe he is the one choosing a favored wife. If she kills her younger, prettier rivals, she will not win his affections but become despised—she destroyed, in the logic of such a society, his property—and may be killed herself. No one has ever won a beauty contest by shooting other contenders. At the same time, if she focuses on making herself more beautiful, she is only doing what her rivals are also doing, and she does not gain a competitive advantage by such alone. If she can’t make herself any prettier, she must make her rivals uglier. She can’t use overt physical violence, for reasons already discussed. If she only has one or two rivals, she might consider poison, but a pattern of suspicious deaths will draw suspicion, and it is not in her interests to kill rivals when it would be more profitable (less detectable, more effective) to manipulate them. Poison is the right idea, though; she wants to make them so sick they become ugly to the man—the polygynous alpha thug—who thinks he is the one making the decision. What if she can sicken them without any traceable poison at all? I mentioned before that all of us can be pushed to develop depression—a self-poisoning mechanism that, nevertheless, probably saved more lives at one time than it ended. When our efforts result in social rejection or lowered status, we respond as if they had resulted in physical pain or danger because, thousands of years ago, they actually did. Instead of using violence which would get her caught and punished, the evil woman in this circumstance prefers emotional abuse and the plausible deniability it confers. She can become the harem queen and stay in that position for as long as she needs it—the old idiot fathering her children will be none the wiser—and, while younger and prettier women will be added to the harem, she will ensure they seem too sickly hold the man’s stable interest. He will continue to impregnate other women, of course, but only her children will inherit his status.
Although I suspect the natural tendency toward depression emerged in the context of male positional violence, women developed the vulnerability almost immediately. Likewise, the social violence of the aspiring harem queen likely emerged in a female context, but men quickly learned how to use it too.
We now, finally, have developed the necessary machinery to understand capitalism. The mythology of capitalism is inextricable from notions of masculinity; the boss does not want to be seen as a selected supervisor but as an organic leader of the group, one who would be chosen even if the workers got a vote. CEOs and industrialists and tech barons tell us they are dick-swinging alpha males; thus, they justify and glorify capitalism, as if they were the singular descendants of the people (archetypically, men) who led hunts for big game or commanded armies. Is this true? Not at all. Corporate executives have far more in common with harem queens than with the blood-drinking chieftains and warlords they imagine themselves to be. An alpha thug can bash another alpha thug to death and acquire everything the decedent has, but in a corporate boardroom this approach would be, while amusing, ineffective. “The shareholders”—an abstracted alpha male, no different from the gods and ancestors and brazen statues of priapic minotaurs worshiped in the past for this purpose—will object; the right to select from the harem the contender they consider most beautiful (in this case, meaning: politically salable, morally pliable, and obedient) is theirs alone. Direct combat will not work; one becomes an executive by winning beauty contests—with the judges fully unaware of what is going on—and not through feats of strength.
Underlying the notion of sportsmanship—that is, prosocial limited competition—is an aesthetic viewpoint that society prospers when (traditionally, but not really, male) competitive energies are used to bring one’s own performance to its best, not harm the other player or team. Most basketball players would have been thrilled to face off against Michael Jordan in his prime, even though they would probably lose. Corporate competition is diametrically opposite to sportsmanship, though—you win its beauty contests by making one’s rivals uglier. You dismantle their networks, you sabotage their reputations, and you (with plausible deniability at all times) treat them poorly and encourage others to do the same so they will become sick—with burnout, with depression—and withdraw from contention. If you want to climb your way to the corner office, that is what you must do—and you must be better at it than the hundred other people who are trying to do the same thing to you.
What is above is clearly not how any corporation in the world wants workers to view its operations. The corporation—though it does not exist as a conscious entity; it is merely a pattern of intertwined and often subconscious behaviors—is the alpha thug who owns that harem and would not take kindly to an aspiring queen deliberately sickening his rivals; that is, damaging the corporation’s property. Still, these devices work. They are impossible to trace, and the people whose job it might be to watch out for such behaviors are unable to do so—they might operate on behalf of the abstracted alpha male that is the pile of money, but they are in the harem themselves. So, those who excel in office politics are not those who focus on making themselves more beautiful—or, in today’s functionalism, more productive or higher “performing”—but the ones who make their rivals look ugly. This is terrible but, under capitalism, there can be no other way.
Competition tends to take two forms: competition to excel, and competition to suffer. When people compete to excel, it is sometimes a stretch (except in sports, where the rules literally mandate competition) to say they are competing at all. The art of the achievement matters more than mere statistics; the zero-sum question of who wins is not all that important—a great game will draw a crowd and bring everyone fame and money; a shitty game will not. The idea of sportsmanship is that athletes should be competing to excel. We also see this, for example, in high school and college math competitions—while relative rankings give context to the rarity of a competitor’s own achievements, the goal is to solve as many problems as possible, not upstage the others. Sportsmanship reifies what we want to believe about sport—that we are not out there to squeeze out relative prominence and another’s expense, but to actually do something—to build that house or slay that dragon.
You do not see competition to excel in the corporate world. Instead, it is dominated by competition to suffer. Useful excellence is often novel and impossible to evaluate objectively; we know that art gives life value, but we can’t measure this, nor can we easily compare artists against each other. Alas, when evaluation of one’s work is subjective, it is nearly a guarantee of the human organization that it will also make it political. You are also, if you strive to excel, in danger of outshining the master—the most unforgivable sin of all. Excel, and someone in a higher position will find or newly invent a rule that you have broken. Thus, no one who wants to survive in the corporate world seeks to excel; instead, competition to suffer prevails. The person who seems to be taking on the most ugliness—without complaint, without reduction of performance—is the one who tends to advance.
On occasion, there will be an opportunity to excel. There will be a project or initiative that requires novel thinking, above-normal talent, or unusual drive, and there may even be—this is rarer, but it does happen—opportunities for recognition upon success. The problem is that, and companies know this, everyone would prefer a compete-to-excel project—even the people who can’t excel, who may or may not know they are in that category—over the compete-to-suffer work most subordinates get. The right to work on these projects—the right to excel, instead of suffer—becomes a token that will be allocated only to the politically favored. Thus, compete-to-excel work, when it exists, shall be gated behind compete-to-suffer projects. There are, for the individual, very few ways around this.
This is also why, in the corporate world, organizational dysfunction invariably accelerates and manufactured crises recur. These companies cannot do anything unless they rank people first—it is necessary to decide which opinions matter, and which don’t—but they can only rank people via competition-to-suffer, and since intentionally causing suffering is socially unacceptable—companies do it, but will never admit they do it—this usually happens, at least in part, organically in a weird equilibrium of stable dysfunction wherein the organization is pathological enough to cause suffering by default but not so pathological as to collapse. In not much time at all, a rank order emerges by attrition—people sicken, they get burned out, they drop out of contention. Drawing names out of a hat would be similarly effective and probably superior at choosing leaders, but it would make the corporate system’s native immeritocracy too visible.
Most of the people who lose in these contests do so because they experience—in most cases, transient—poor mental health due to social circumstances, but there is nothing wrong with them. They are not usually in permanent poor health; it is natural that the continuing association of their work—in which most people invest their identities—with subordination, artificial stress, and failure would sicken them to the point of being unable to do it. The ones who break first get fired; the ones who break last get promoted, and go on to set the rules that the next generation will have to follow.
Under this dynamic, people are measured not based on their capability but their decline curves, even though the critical region of said curve is something a well-functioning organization should almost never test. We can debate when it is and when it is not profitable to squeeze people until most of them break; in no circumstance is it moral. The information that companies use to rank people—heat or cold tolerance, or skill in competitive eating, or the ability to complete puzzles after traumatic head injuries, could be used to the same effect—is not irrelevant and the experiments necessary to acquire it are unethical. Still, there is really no fix for this. Competition to excel works to some extent on a trading desk or sports team, because scoring is objective and contribution is evident, but there’s so much subjectivity in the corporate world that even the task of deciding who should get opportunities to excel becomes political, and we’re back with the same old ugly problem—the zero-sum social contests to win such opportunities dominates the prevalence of said opportunities so much, it is effectively true for most workers that the latter do not exist: do get yourself assigned to the kind of project where work other than social fuckery might be rewarded and recognized, you must still be good enough at social fuckery to secure such a favorable assignment in the first place. Thus, the unfavored masses still toil on career-killing make-work where excellence does not matter and (real or apparent) suffering is their only means of distinction. Initial conditions mostly determine who succeeds and who fails; one wins this beauty contest by getting one’s superiors to “see things in” oneself—again, the same game aspiring harem queens must play. Those things that truly excel are too weird, too risky, and far too vulnerable in their initial stages to have any chance of surviving social competition, so they are crushed out of existence by the corporate logic that favors the immediately profitable.
Of course, suffering has an obvious issue—it hurts. Nobody wants to do it. Worse yet, long-term suffering results in the deterioration of one’s own social and intellectual functioning. It is not enough, in competition to suffer, to endure pain—one must do so without apparent loss of competence. One certainly cannot be afford to be seen taking on an inadequate supply of corporate suffering—this will get a person disliked and fired—but the consequences of too much actual suffering lead to the exact same negative result: political and social failure, usually followed by loss of income. One must then be discerning in what suffering one takes on. If the work is painful but not valued, an aspiring executive should delegate it. On the other hand, jobs considered more unpleasant or difficult than they actually are should be sought—at the least, the executive must get credit for doing the work; actually doing it is less essential. Reading the collective mood as it shifts is also mandatory. There are times when suffering is read as dedication; there are others when it is read as a sign of incompetence, in which it is better to make one’s achievements seem effortless. None of this game playing is achievable for people who are actually suffering.
There are people—about 4 percent of the population—who do not experience social competition as suffering. On the contrary, they are energized, rather than enervated, by these zero-sum social contests. Thus, they can play these games indefinitely. Sixty hours per week? Eighty? A hundred? No problem. These people do not necessarily enjoy causing harm (some do, but most are ambivalent to it) but will do so if there is personal benefit to be gained. They have, simply put, no conscience. The clinical term for this deficit is psychopathy. The psychopath is, like a cancer cell, individually fit at the expense of the organism; he or she exists because in the past—in pre-monogamous, violent societies—it conferred a reproductive benefit to be such a person. In corporate boardrooms, the prevalence of psychopathy is closer to 60 percent than 4.
The neurotypical consensus around competition-to-suffer is that it basically works. No one likes to go through it or wants to go through it often, but the general consensus seems to be that over the “middle” 92-ish percent of humanity, one’s ranking in such a game correlates positively to dedication and moral character. I have my doubts even there; I simply don’t have the space here to try to refute it. Nevertheless, we know this claim to be objectively false regarding psychopaths—we view their deficits of conscience as antithetical to good moral character, and yet they invariably win competitions to suffer.
I used 92 (somewhat arbitrarily) as an estimation of the percentage of people in the middle of the psychopathy spectrum—people who are clearly not psychopaths, but do not exhibit the disability, seen in about 4 percent of the population, that might occur from an excess of conscience. These people reliably lose compete-to-suffer games; we’re terrible at them. We are the anti-psychopaths. And please note that while most psychopaths seem to turn into bad people, no claim is being made that anti-psychopathy is necessary or sufficient to make a person good; questions of moral character are far more complicated than that. I only remark that anti-psychopaths reliably lose in corporate compete-to-suffer games—they are too trusting, they are too empathetic, they are too conscientious, they are too sensitive, or they are too morally rigid. I don’t know what proportion of anti-psychopaths would be formally diagnosed as autistic, but anti-psychopathy is a form of neurodivergence and, in corporate work, it is objectively a disability—in compete-to-suffer contests, anti-psychopaths tend to lose. This is mistaken for laziness or “bad attitude” but it is nothing of the sort. The machinery that neurotypicals have in moderate and psychopaths have in abundance, we lack. We aren’t built for zero-sum social competition; we exist to scout for positive-sum opportunities (“special interests”) and, when prevented from doing so, we get angry. The truth is that we have at least as much dedication to our work, when there is useful work to be done, as neurotypicals. Sometimes we do our jobs so well, we make enemies. We are bad at compete-to-suffer games because our minds recognize the impending loss and search for ways to make the suffering—not just for ourselves, but for everyone—go away. This leads to issues when the impediments are political in nature; we are often undersensitive to the desires of those who benefit from existing dysfunctions. Those who repair the world make an enemy of the damage.
I suspect there will be some debate, as we learn more about neurodivergences and especially the more disabling ones, about which constellations qualify as autistic. I don’t intend to get too far into this one. As a child in the 1980s, I would not have been considered autistic at all, as I had no verbal or intellectual delays. The mild social ineptitude I experienced in adolescence is sometimes called “Asperger’s syndrome” and is now considered a form of autism. However, when someone’s sole apparent neurodivergence is monotropism, we tend to call that ADHD; similarly, a person who has epilepsy but no other chronic impairments is objectively neurodivergent but would not be considered autistic. At any rate, I’ve know enough people on the autism spectrum to know that, by middle age, most are perfectly likable—very mildly socially inept, if at all—but, nevertheless, disproportionately vulnerable to the anxiety, depression, and fatigue that even neurotypical people tend to suffer later in life due to cumulative corporate abuse. Diagnostic signals, in neurodivergence, appear to be time-of-life dependent; autistic children once thought “cured” (or, at least, “high functioning”) still exhibit milder sensory processing issues in adulthood, and most people with Asperger’s syndrome will manage to achieve average social performance (but sometimes, in cases of excessive “masking”, at high psychiatric cost) by adulthood. Would a person with anti-psychopathy but no other disabling neurodivergences be considered autistic? I have no idea. My personal opinion, as I am not a clinician, would not be worth all that much even if I held one. What matters instead is the objective fact that, in a capitalist organization, the strength of character and conscience that comes from anti-psychopathy is, as are most neurodivergences even when they are otherwise totally benign, a major disability. In the corporate world, what differs is punished.
By law in most countries, employers are required to accommodate disabled people—including the multiply neurodivergent—if they can. Do they? No, of course not. And, as disgusted as I am by them and by capitalism in general, I understand their position. We neurodivergent folk learn, early on, that we are bad at compete-to-suffer games. We might fight hard enough to avoid last place and therefore not get fired, but we’re never going to win. If we throw as much of ourselves into combat as we’re expected to, we’ll lose the social polish (or “mask”) that is required for every job’s second shift—it is not enough to do the work assigned to you, but you must also make the people assigning it like you. If we could compete to excel, most of us would distinguish ourselves, but it should be obvious by now why we almost never get such opportunities—they are gated behind competition-to-suffer. What we tend to realize is that, if we’re really lucky, we might finish a compete-to-suffer game in the middle somewhere, surviving the next layoff or two, but for what gain? The difference between gold and silver is worth getting yourself out of breath; the difference between 117th and 118th is not. But, of course, it is mandatory to pretend one is in serious contention, to act is if the gold medal were a real possibility. Why is that? This one, of course, isn’t about us.
I’ve worked at all different levels of the corporate hierarchy, and I’ve been in management despite my neurodivergence, and I’ve been on both sides of that awful conversation where a person’s job ends. Never is a “low performer initiative” (stack ranking) about either real low performers or the politically disfavored people who suffer the low performer label; companies know low performers exist, but don’t really care. All that stuff is actually about the performance middle classes, the “Meets Expectations” workhorses who power the company but are unlikely to get meaningful promotions. The fact that good workers sometimes get knifed is, from an executive perspective, not a bug but a feature—it keeps them scared.
Similarly, office life for the masses has to be a little bit horrible for the whole system to work. Line-of-sight disasters ensure that people feel watched all the time, even when no one is actually watching. Erratic work hours enhance the status of managers who choose their own. A neurodivergent person who, knowing he will never win a competition to suffer, requests exclusion from it—he asks for the right to work from home, or for a quiet office, or for a project better matched to his skills—becomes the corporate executive’s second-most hated archetype: the snowflake. To which the executive’s impulse—doubled if he knows this person is neurodivergent, and thus perceives him as fundamentally broken—is to say, “Fuck you, youz nirn’t speshul.” To which I might actually agree. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m totally not. Everyone deserves respectful working conditions.” This is how you stop being the executive thug’s #2 mortal enemy, the snowflake. Unfortunately, you become #1—the rabblerouser.
It has been shown that accommodations for disabled people also tend to make life better or easier for the non-disabled. This is called the “curb cut effect.” Some hearing people use subtitles; curb cuts and ramps are useful even to people who do not rely on wheelchairs. In a cooperative setting, inclusiveness tends to benefit everyone. Unfortunately, business corporations view the curb-cut effect as potentially lethal. They exist to extract as much surplus value from workers as they can and, while there are a number of ways to turn a profit, the easiest way is to create unpleasantnesses from which exemption is a free perk. Pay is one motivation to become an executive, but escaping the misery of an open-plan office, insulting micromanagement, and artificial anxiety is as much of one. We can all agree, in isolation, that disabled people should be granted exemption from hindrances that result in lost productivity and harm. However, if considerations that disabled people need were also extended to everyone, companies would have to move beyond the “hall pass” model of motivation, which most firms consider an intolerable cost, not because wages would go up (although they might) but because managerial authority itself, as they see it, would be undermined.
In the long term, we know what compete-to-suffer patterns of behavior are ruinous: people who thrive in damaged environments, unsurprisingly, prefer damage. Society does not care about us neurodivergent people, so it does not notice when we are, for reasons unrelated to character or general fitness, early to drop off in these interminable hazing rituals. Nor does it have the perceptive capacity to realize that, in corporate compete-to-suffer contests, psychopaths tend to win. This is all insidious, and so gradual it is hardly noticed at all; no cure or even prevention for this kind of organizational decay, endemic in governments and business corporations, has been found. Psychopaths win internal social competitions for rank, because the assumptions used to judge and sort people do not work properly, and they ascend despite doing incredible (but, at first, hard to detect and attribute) damage; they are ruinous when they get to the top.
There is a stereotype of neurodivergent people that we dislike “neurotypicals” and this is one of those tropes I’d prefer not to indulge. There is a dysfunctional neurotypical society, but “neurotypicals” are not a monolith, and most of the traits of neurotypicals we dislike are traits they also disfavor in themselves. We share the same enemy; neurotypicals full well know that filth rises to the top of human hierarchies, and they know that the social immune system of gossip and reputation only punishes the smallest of the bad actors, while being weaponized by the absolute worst. They don’t know what to do about it and, on the whole, seem to think little can be done; most neurotypicals are not bad people, but they accept that the world is going to be run by bad people, as if no alternative were possible. Their opinions about corporate executives, political insiders, and capitalism’s professional-managerial clergy are all the correct ones, but they have clearly found no cure for this corruption, because corruption prospers. I am not sure we—neurodivergent people are so diverse that it is suspect to speak of a “we” at all—know what to do either, but I suspect we are part of the solution. As far as moral immune systems go, the bourgeois protocols are in a state of septic failure all over the world. One would have to work very hard to set up systems and modes of governance that are more permissive of psychopathic intrusion and more amenable to misuse against innocents than the ones we already have. So maybe we—perhaps I mean all neurodivergent people; perhaps I speak only of anti-psychopaths—were supposed, by natural or divine design, to be that immune system instead. Unfortunately, the rest of the world seems not to like us all that much; it treats us as a sort of autoimmunity. Only fifty years after we are dead does the world decide that we were right or, at least, had a point.
I suspect that a lot of our issues right now as a society is that most people’s cultural—and therefore social—maturity is cut short, deliberately stunted. Real adulthood has been cordoned off. The rich have no reason to go, since they face none of the adversity that might impel to betterment and maturity; most of the rest of us just can’t afford it. In capitalist countries, people stagnate at a socio-cultural age of about 13. Some people advance a couple years beyond that in college, but exhibit the requisite regression when forced into workplaces. We don’t—and under capitalism, we never will—know what widespread socio-cultural adulthood even looks like. Only a handful of neurodivergent people (clearly not all of us) have reached it, and we are not yet numerous or organized enough to work together. This impediment is one that our ruling class has, to some extent, knowingly caused: the widespread psychological immaturity of the masses is used to make a “human nature” argument that capitalism is the best we can do, when we really don’t know enough about human nature or neurodiversity to know what is possible. This, in the final hours of 2023, is the only way capitalism, so far gone in its terminal dysfunction, could possibly be defended.
Until capitalism is overthrown, neurodivergent people will be a pariah class, most neurotypicals will lead dissatisfying lives that also squander their potential, and psychopathy will thrive. It is possible that whatever systems we build after capitalism will have these vulnerabilities; but it is a guarantee that, if capitalism continues, they will be even worse. Organizations that serve no purpose—shareholder profit is, in essence, no purpose—are doomed to devolve into zero-sum social competition in which the worst sorts of people have an advantage dating back to prehistory, when their ancestors were in harems poisoning ours to move up the ranks. A society that chooses a no-purpose organization as the central unit of structure, and that rearranges both its communities and its governments to serve these, is doomed to failure; it simply cannot go any other way.
Most of us have seen the psychopath in action. It is almost impressive. He does not always begin as a boss, of course. More often, he is the “golden child” who seems to have the boss’s ear, who manages to get all the worst projects assigned to the (often neurodivergent) most capable people. Over time, he seems to be preternaturally gifted at “managing up” in spite of (or, as anyone who understands human psychology will attest, because of) his lack of redeeming qualities. The people who might be his rivals all seem to fail for reasons not always understood by others. We know now what is going on; we know how he operates. Until capitalism is overthrown, we shall all suffer the success off, and be ruled by, the sorts of people who effortlessly make us sick, eat our lunch, and fly away.
This is really superlative work. Especially enjoyed the discussions of pre-modern harem dynamics.
One harem queen in particular, the Empress Dowager Cixi, deeply influenced the modern era by causing the stagnation of the Qing Dynasty and its overthrow shortly after her death. Her insistence on holding onto power came at significant cost for both China and the rest of the world. (A strong Qing Empire that avoided the Century of Humiliation might have been able to resist the British and arrest industrial capitalism.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Dowager_Cixi
Also personally enjoyed this bit - "At the same time, human life is (or, at least, can be) long. A young man who is fit but holds low status might have better odds if he waits a few years, for high-status competitors to weaken, sicken, or lose favor. Older rivals will wither and die." I find it quite relatable, hahaha.