The Gervais Principle

[Daddy]

I work for the gubmint.

And where I work - all promotions take place via an application form and then an interview.

Most people get weeded out at the application form stage - and the applications are 'anonymised' so the people judging them don't know who they are from.

And when it comes to the interview - you are interviewed by somebody who you have probably never worked with before. And an independent interviewer from a different office.

I mention all this - because I am not sure how common these types of 'strict, open and fair' systems for handing out promotions are?

And if they are common - I wonder if there is any point learning the strategies and thinking involving in such guides like 'The Gervais Principle' - if you are working in a place where no matter how much of a 'sociopath' you are, it won't affect your chances of getting ahead in the organisation.

Just wondering if others are in similar situations?

I used to work in an office environment like that. The union was extremely strong, the bosses were women, and there were strict rules like you mentioned about promotions, all in an effort to promote merit and fairness.

The consequences?

People found ways around them. Ass kissing remained the one and only important skill that made you move forward. The spectacle of the most shameless brown tongues was a hard thing to bear, especially when they were men on men.

If the boss knows the employees at the human ressources department for 10 years, then he has influence on who gets promoted. For every stupid rule the union made, there were 10 ways to go around them. As usual, the rules were meant for suckers.

You can't fuck with human nature. If the entire society works a certain way, then trying to build a large company that pretends to be different is a fucking waste of effort. In the end it actually makes it a lot worse, because the rules and corporate culture are built upon wishful thinking and denial of reality.

 

[cardguy]

Yeah - the unions are very strong where I work. They even have their own separate office in our building.

It is funny - but everyone just gets help with their application forms from their friends who are high up in the organisation who know how to fill them in. Which makes the application system a bit pointless.

And there is a definite skill involved. Unless you hit certain key words in your answer - you score zero points. It is like the world's most annoying parlour game. You can compare two answers - one which gets top marks. And one which gets no marks - and still have trouble figuring out which was the successful answer.

I don't mind though - since nobody gets rich working where I work. It you want to be successful you are better off working somewhere else than worrying about the promotions board.

 

[kosko]

I used to laugh at brown noses when I used to hold a management position. I had a staff of around 30 people and I had to do scheduling mostly and prep pay roll. Of course I had my favorites because they were fun to work with and I could count in them to work hard. Bitches wanting more shifts would pull shit all the time. Mind you I was one of three men on a staff of 40, 98% women so the cattiness was always around. Legs and chests would show around the 3rd week of the month, bitches would try to get me hot for some hours, it was funny to see, because I would just play along with the sced always set and then they would see nothing changed and try still weren't getting shit. Lol.

All of them chained smoked. They would waste away breaks outside chirping like fuking birds. I made a point to remove the butt container from the patio and move it across the building and make them walk in the freezing cold for 5mims if they wanted a smoke. That shut ended quick, when one girl complained, I told her she can move it if back she cleans it out fully and not leave it for the night cleaners.. She shut up.

 

[Claudio80]

Apparently not applicable to gov't.
In the comments Venkat says:
"Interesting that you bring up government. All this logic is upended in the world of government, and another Brit show, Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister provides a lot of the reasons why. In government, the sociopaths are in the middle, the clueless at the top, and the losers (as before) at the bottom."

 

[Lucky]

I finished this book some time ago. The aim of the book is the provide the reader a guide to organizational literacy. I particularly liked the sections on the different organizational languages.

Here are a few choice quotes pulled from the book that have stayed with me:

Achieving organizational literacy or even fluency does not mean you will do great things or avoid doing stupid things. But it does mean that you will find it much harder to lie to yourself about what you are doing and why. It forces you to own the decisions you make and accept the consequences of your actions and decisions. It makes it harder to blame others for things that happen to you . So to seek organizational literacy is to also accept a sort of responsibility for your own life that many instinctively reject.

Powertalk is the in-group language of the Sociopaths. Posturetalk is the language spoken by the Clueless to everybody. They don’t have an in-group language since they don’t realize they constitute a group. Sociopaths and Losers talk back to the Clueless in a language called Babytalk that seems like Posturetalk to the Clueless. Among themselves , Losers speak a language called Gametalk. This is the only language that has been properly studied and documented. I won’t cover it at all, but you can learn all about it in the pop classics on transactional analysis (TA) from 30 years ago: Eric Berne’s Games People Play and What Do You Say after You Say Hello , and Thomas Harris’ I’m OK– You’re OK.

Finally, Sociopaths and Losers rarely speak to each other at all. One of the functions of the Clueless, recall, is to provide a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. But when they do talk, they actually speak an unadorned language you could call Straight Talk if it were worth naming. It is the ordinary( if rare) utilitarian language of the sane, with no ulterior motives flying around. The mean-what-you-say-and-say-what-you-mean stuff between two people in a fixed, asymmetric power relationship, who don’t want or need to play real or fake power games. This is the unmarked black triangle edge in the diagram.

Gametalk is all about multiple (usually two) levels of communication. What distinguishes Powertalk is that with every word uttered, the power equation between the two speakers shifts just a little . Sometimes both gain slightly, at the expense of some poor schmuck. Sometimes one yields ground to the other. Powertalk in other words, is a consequential language.

When the Clueless or the Losers talk, on the other hand, nothing really changes. Relative positions remain the same all around. Shifts happen only by accident. Even in the rare cases where exploitable information is exchanged , its value is not recognized or reflected in the exchange. Posturetalk and Babytalk leave things unchanged because they are, to quote Shakespeare, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Gametalk leaves power relations unchanged because its entire purpose is to help Losers put themselves and each other into safe pigeonholes that validate do-nothing life scripts.

Status illegibility is necessary to keep a group of Losers stable. It is a deep form of uncertainty. I am not saying that there is a ranking that is just not known or knowable. I am saying there is no clear ranking to be known. If you’re silently screaming “Heisenberg,” please; some patience. We have a long way to go.

If your status is clear, and the status of the club is clear (which is by definition, the average status of all its current members ), then either your status is higher, in which case the club will want you, but you won’t want to join, or your status is lower, in which case the opposite is true. If status were precisely known all around, then the only case that allows somebody to join a club is if their status exactly matches the average of the club. The probability of this happening is vanishingly small, even if status could be measured accurately and quantitatively. Worse, this benefits neither joiner nor club.

But consider what happens when all you really know about the club is the range of status , from lowest to highest. If you know you belong in the range, but have no idea whether your status is above or below the average, the uncertainty allows you to join. And your fealty to the group, and the group’s to you, will be in proportion to the legibility of your status. If events conspire to make status too legible, competitiveness is amplified, weakening group cohesion, and stabilizing dynamics kick in, restoring the illegibility, or the group breaks down.

Among the Sociopaths, status is irrelevant. Table stakes and skill at using them is what matters. Sociopaths pay attention to what you have, and how well you bargain with it. Not who you are.

Bureaucracies are structures designed to do certain things very efficiently and competently : those that are by default in the best interests of the Sociopaths.

They are also designed to do certain things incompetently: those expensive things that the organization is expected to do, but would cut into Sociopath profits if actually done right.

And finally, they are designed to obstruct, delay and generally kill things that might hurt the interests of the Sociopaths.

 

[Surreyman]

Urgh, necropost much?

Nonetheless, this is the red pill of all organisations and businesses.

 

[Travesty]

The thing I got from this is that the two winners in this situation are the top sociopaths that make it and the losers the calculate the most compensation and stability for the least amount of work and this is why they communicate in plain fashion because they are most alike except in their optimism in being very successful.

I think I am always a "loser" for my organization because I only want to put in 100% effort into my own "sociopath" project that earns me money directly. I don't play well for someone else's team.

 

[Lucky]

I think I am always a "loser" for my organization because I only want to put in 100% effort into my own "sociopath" project that earns me money directly. I don't play well for someone else's team.

It sounds like you're on the right path.

Another insight from The Gervais Principle:

The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by. He has no intention of just getting by. He very quickly figures out — through experiments and fast failures — that the Loser game is not worth becoming good at. He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit. He knows his under-performance is not sustainable, but he has no intention of becoming a lifetime-Loser employee anyway. He takes the calculated risk that he’ll find a way up before he is fired for incompetence.

 

[Icarus]

Here's a good quote on law and morality:

Effective Sociopaths stick with steadfast discipline to the letter of the law, internal and external, because the stupidest way to trip yourself up is in the realm of rules where the Clueless and Losers get to be judges and jury members. What they violate is its spirit, by taking advantage of its ambiguities. Whether this makes them evil or good depends on the situation. That’s a story for another day. Good Sociopaths operate by what they personally choose as a higher morality, in reaction to what they see as the dangers, insanities and stupidities of mob morality. Evil Sociopaths are merely looking for a quick, safe buck. Losers and the Clueless, of course, avoid individual moral decisions altogether.

 

[Honorable Man]

This seems extremely useful. I'll save this info for my next job.

 

[Icarus]

On freedom:

Non-Sociopaths, as Jack Nicholson correctly argued, really cannot handle the truth. The truth of an absent god. The truth of social realities as canvases for fiction for those who choose to create them. The truth of values as crayons in the pockets of unsupervised Sociopaths. The truth of the non-centrality of humans in the larger scheme of things.

When these truths are recognized, internalized and turned into default ways of seeing the world, creative-destruction becomes merely the act of living free, not a divinely ordained imperative or a primal urge. Creative destruction is not a script, but the absence of scripts. The freedom of Sociopaths is the same as the freedom of non-human animals. Those who view it as base merely provide yet another opportunity for Sociopaths to create non-base fictions for them to inhabit.

So they imagine hidden social realities governing the lives of Sociopaths, turning them into forces of nature.

That is the ultimate imaginative act for non-Sociopaths: filling the inaccessible world of Sociopaths with convenient extrapolated social realities. Fictions that they can use to explain free Sociopath lives to themselves as being caused by some mysterious, hidden social order.

 

[TheWastelander]

In the corporate world, isn't a sociopath (according to this principle) just another pawn of a higher sociopath? If he doesn't own the business, then he isn't he just a more ruthlessly efficient worker bee than the rest? Like a soldier ant who's capable of getting the others to make money for the king. He may be better off than the clueless and the losers but it appears to me that he's still part of the same system.

 

[Icarus]

In the corporate world, isn't a sociopath (according to this principle) just another pawn of a higher sociopath?

The Sociopath is defined by his worldview, his freedom from petty moral constraints, his ambition and his risk-seeking. He is not defined by his position in the corporate ladder, but by his trajectory. "Up or out" is the Sociopath's trajectory.

The Sociopath may be a pawn now, but he's trying to maneuver upwards.

If he doesn't own the business, then he isn't he just a more ruthlessly efficient worker bee than the rest?

The Sociopath's work ethic is conditional. He may work very hard and efficiently, but only if he benefits from it. He sacrifices comfort for cash, visibility, publicity, credibility, a good reputation, access to investors, etc.

The Loser is a comfort-maximizer and risk-minimizer. The Clueless tends to have an unconditional work ethic and sacrifices himself for nothing. Perhaps for a meager raise.

 

[mr-ed209]

I've been binging on a lot of the old ribbonfarm content since i read The Gervais Principle last year. Venkat's books, which are mainly a collection of his long form blog posts, have some great content regarding the philosophy of work and negating status battles in life etc. (Be Slightly Evil: Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Getting Away, Crash Early Crash Often) are 3 good reads. He touches on a lot of the new cultures of remote work and 'lifestyle design' - with a realistic frame. As well as presenting a lot of unorthodox advice and mindsets in how to find your appropriate career.

What i like about his writing is it's one of the few sources on the workplace that seems appropriately cynical. There's no call of follow your dreams; or hard work and being a bastard will get you ahead. Instead, his theories are deliberately ammoral; which gives them a feeling of realism and truth. Some of his stuff is quite profound, but well worth a read for anyone contemplating where/how to go in their career/lifestyle.