Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1)

by Venkatesh Rao

  BE SLIGHTLY EVIL

  A Playbook for Sociopaths

  Venkatesh Rao

  Ribbonfarm, Inc.

  First Edition

  © 2013 by Ribbonfarm, Inc. All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9827030-4-5

  http://ribbonfarm.com

  First Edition

  Contents

  Preface

  The Soul of Being Slightly Evil

  How Deep is Be Slightly Evil?

  Be Somebody or Do Something

  Double-Talk and Chaos-Making

  No Free Lunch Instincts

  Personality Archetyping

  Why Does Power Corrupt?

  The Perils of Bitter Loserdom

  The Unreasonable Man Effect

  Shadowboxing with Evil Twins

  Rousseau vs. Hobbes Redux

  Preparing to Play

  Status 101

  Should You Show Your True Colors?

  Small and Honest Moves

  The First Day in Prison

  Following the Rules

  Observation

  An Easy Way to Read People

  Candor, Cursing and Clarity

  On Cold-Blooded Listening

  Orientation

  Organizing the World’s Delusions

  Status, Harmony and Conflict

  Conflict Without Ego

  The Basics of Negotiation

  Decision

  Indifference to Sunk Costs

  Vindictiveness and Revenge

  Action

  On Petards

  Crisis Non-Response

  The Hierarchy of Deceptions

  The Art of Damage Control

  Disrupting an Adversary

  On Annoying Others

  Derailing the Data-Driven

  Rebooting Conversations

  Case Studies

  The Game of Hallway Chicken

  Door-Holding and Illegible Queues

  Napping in the Trenches

  Pistols, at Dawn

  How to Interrupt

  On Dodging Decisions

  Inside the Tempo

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Sometimes, ambitious projects are born of an obsessive-compulsive desire to tie up loose ends rather than elegant ab initio architectural visions. This book is one such project: a set of loose ends explored over three years and fifty-plus issues of the “Be Slightly Evil” newsletter, which I published between 2010 and 2013. The list grew from nothing to over 2200 subscribers today. I wish I could continue writing it, but the time has come to wrap up this long journey, put a bow on it, and seek out new adventures.

  To pull all the material together, I wrote one, final ambitious essay specially for this book, “Inside the Tempo,” a rather demanding 5000-plus word piece that pulls together much of the material covered in the last three years into one capstone idea to help you navigate the treacherous world of adversarial decision-making.

  I originally intended to publish this piece as the final issue, but a newsletter called Be Slightly Evil wouldn’t live up to its name if it didn’t pull at least one slightly evil move on its readers. This is that move: you have to buy the eBook to get the Grand Finale essay.

  The loose ends that I explored and tied up in the BSE list came from two sources: my first book Tempo, and the “Gervais Principle” series, which is now available as an eBook.

  Tempo was a book about decision-making based on a rather ambitious Grand Design that covered a lot of territory I was already familiar with. But I consciously left out the problem of adversarial decision-making under competitive conditions because I sensed the material was beyond the scope of the Tempo Grand Design.

  “The Gervais Principle” was a series I wrote on ribbonfarm.com about organizational politics and decision-making. Since that series evolved as a close-reading of the TV show, The Office, I had to leave out many interesting questions and ideas that I could not fit into that framework. Again, there was a Grand Design, this time one derived from the big themes in the show.

  So I was left with a large, messy dark continent of rich ideas for which I did not have a Grand Design. An email list seemed to be the natural way to explore this continent bottom-up, and so I began writing the Be Slightly Evil email newsletter.

  Over the course of three years, the newsletter explored questions big and small, silly and profound, deeply interlinked and stubbornly isolated. Thanks to the dozens of email and in-person conversations with readers sparked by those newsletters, I was able to explore the dark continent to my satisfaction. While I cannot say that I have truly mastered this space of ideas, I certainly feel like I’ve surveyed and explored it pretty extensively.

  So as a compilation of bottom-up explorations in the dark, this collection inevitably has plenty of rough edges and significant variation in the quality of the pieces. It also lacks a pleasing and clean architectural scheme. But what it lacks in consistency, polish and high-modernist design, I hope it makes up for in sheer, slummy favela variety and direct applicability. In contrast to most of my writing, I have not avoided specific prescriptions in these essays.

  While there was no Grand Design informing this book, Jane Huang, who helped edit and produce it, suggested an excellent overarching structure that we’ve been able to retrofit here. In reviewing the archives, she noticed that the newsletter issues each seemed to naturally fit into one of the elements of John Boyd’s famous OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) model, which you’ll encounter early in the book. So we partitioned the material that way. The partitioning is not perfect, and many pieces sprawl and leak outside their “home” sections, but overall, we think we’ve created a more useful navigation structure here than a lazy chronological ordering based on the newsletter sequence.

  While the book is still more of a random-access collection than a tightly sequenced end-to-end read, we think you’ll get more out of it if you read (or re-read, for newsletter subscribers) in the suggested sequence.

  Where do we go from here? I hope, for you, the reader, the future holds many occasions for refining your own Slightly Evil thinking and decision-making skills. If you discover any particularly clever ideas, I hope you will share them with me.

  As for me, my interest in the Slightly Evil space of ideas has forked down two paths.

  One leads to what I hope will be a future Grand Design distillation of the ideas here. If I ever get there, you might see a new and expanded edition of Tempo covering adversarial decision-making in a few dense new chapters. Or perhaps a whole new book. Or a James-Bond-Villain scheme to take over the world.

  The other path leads to practice and application. More than anything else I’ve written, the ideas here are ones I’ve tried and tested in real life a great deal. I hope to continue to do so. I’ve come to think of this as a special practice within my consulting business: the Slightly Evil Practice. An approach to business problems that isn’t all win-win and Happy Culture. Not all my clients are willing or able to adopt Slightly Evil approaches to business problems, but those who do generally find it to be a very fertile framework. Since they tend to have a great sense of humor, Slightly Evil clients are, to be honest, my favorite ones. They are just fun to work with.

  So if you’re in need of some support for your Slightly Evil scheming needs (anything from designing your own personal Evil Laugh to figuring out how your business can outfox the competition), you know whom to call. I can be reached at vgr@ribbonfarm.com.

  And in closing, a big thank you to all those who kept me company on this three-year journey. I hope this rough playbook for livin
g a Slightly Evil life serves as a worthwhile prize.

  See you around on ribbonfarm.com and elsewhere on the Internet. And don’t forget to check out the companion Gervais Principle eBook.

  The Soul of Being Slightly Evil

  How Deep is Be Slightly Evil?

  Is there more to Be Slightly Evil philosophy than just an adolescent attraction to being a bit of a bad-ass?

  I picked the name mainly because it seemed like a good joke at Google’s expense. “Don’t Be Evil” smacks of a certain paternalistic hubris that even that well-intentioned behemoth of a company should be wary of. I believe that at that scale of immense power, self-policing is simply too dangerous, and only checks and balances constructed out of outside forces pursuing different ends can curb true evil.

  But enough about the inspiration. What about Be Slightly Evil, the little baby antithesis at you-and-me scales? Yes, it is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but to me the phrase also stands for a few philosophical ideas, and keeping it constantly in front of me helps me remember those ideas.

  The universe isn’t here for our benefit: As best as we can tell, the universe is not a benign environment.

  Advantage Determinism: Known and as-yet-unknown unknown laws govern more of natural phenomena, including human behavior, than we like to admit.

  Humility: Towards nature and the unknown that is. Not humility in a social or interpersonal sense.

  Acknowledge “Evil”: I can’t define good and evil, but I do know that if the concepts are meaningful at all, we have at least a little bit of each in us. Acknowledgement beats denial.

  These ideas overall, add up to a pragmatic truth-driven philosophy of moral minimalism. Every new “true” thing I learn seems to shrink the domain where I can hold useful moral opinions. There is no point having a moral opinion about the law of gravity. So truth is also about increasing moral minimalism. As you learn more, you should have less need for moral opinions. Or as the French-Swiss novelist Madame de Stael once said, “When you understand everything, you can forgive everything.” We may never reach that asymptotic state within our human lifespans, but every little bit of pointless moral “responsibility” you can shrug off helps.

  But perhaps the biggest deep idea behind Be Slightly Evil is thermodynamics. I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of entropy. It suggests that not only is the universe indifferent to our presence, it is at least mildly hostile to it. We are low-entropy creatures trying hopelessly to swim upstream in a universe that’s gradually winding down towards a maximum-entropy heat death. So the universe itself is, in a sense, Slightly Evil. So by some sort of fractal logic, as little subsets of the universe, our true nature is probably slightly evil as well. Of course, this is a wild metaphysical leap in the dark, but something about this conjecture appeals to me at a deep level.

  One principle this philosophy gives me is what I call my amorality heuristic: an idea is Slightly Evil only if it is, in principle, equally valuable to both good and evil people. Anything that works better only if you are good, is naturally suspect in my mind.

  Be Somebody or Do Something

  To maintain plausible deniability, I try to focus on the how of the Be Slightly Evil theme, rather than the why. Besides filtering out means that are not justifiable by any ends, I leave means-ends justifications to you. I assume you have good reasons to be interested in the subject, but I’d rather not know. I adopted this principle as a basic precaution, but I had no idea it would actually be tested. An anonymous reader once emailed me asking for help with a whistle-blowing decision, and included details of his situation. Fortunately, he kept identifiable details, such as names, to himself. I hastily pulled back from the brink of becoming an accessory. I only like messes if I am being paid to handle them.

  Anyway, the incident got me thinking about why people turn to Slightly Evil manipulative behavior in the first place. Why can’t you just stay on the straight-and-narrow, pay your dues, and live an honorable life? I found a great answer in Robert Coram’s fascinating book, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, which has now bumped Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power to the #2 spot in my Be Slightly Evil reading list. You should also check out Chet Richards’ Certain to Win, an application of Boyd’s ideas to business.

  The answer is a decision that Boyd challenged each of his acolytes to make: in life you eventually have to decide whether to be somebody, or do something. Whistle-blowing is one of those situational decisions that can precipitate this bigger existential decision. But everybody eventually comes to their own personal be somebody/do something fork in the road. I hit mine in the summer of 2000.

  Ask yourself what you want your life to have been like, when you are on your deathbed. If you instinctively envision yourself in the future, at the peak of your life, you are a be somebody person. If you instinctively envision the impact you might have had, and are fuzzy on what you personally will be like, you are a do something type.

  Now for some background on Boyd before we dive into the idea, and interpret your answer.

  Who was John Boyd?

  Like most aerospace engineers, I had a passing familiarity with Boyd’s work before reading the book. I knew of his development of something called Energy-Maneuverability theory, which is the modern approach to fighter combat analysis and warplane design. I knew of his famous OODA loop.* But I had no idea that these were just the tip of the Boyd iceberg.

  Since Boyd never wrote down his ideas in book form, but spread them almost entirely through classified briefings, he is not very well known outside the military. But in terms of both depth and impact, his ideas were arguably more profound than those of better-known military thinkers such as Clausewitz, Schelling and Mahan.

  Coram claims that Boyd should probably be considered the greatest military thinker since Sun Tzu, and once you understand the Boyd story and the magnitude of what he achieved, you realize this is not an overstatement. Boyd was a virtuoso practitioner (the best fighter pilot of his generation), an incredibly creative idea guy, and an incisive philosopher to boot. Few people manage to be even two of those things, let alone all three. Boyd was a modern military Da Vinci. But perhaps the most fascinating thing about him is that he did not just change the way wars are fought. He actually used his ideas to win battles inside the military, running rings around the Pentagon bureaucracy, and building a cadre of acolytes who went on to transform every corner of the American military. Though his ideas helped win several actual wars, the greatest victories they helped script were won inside the military establishment itself.

  In fact, Boyd’s story reads like a real-life version of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, which we’ve talked about before. Except that Boyd, unlike Jim Hacker, took on the bureaucracy and won. The story has its humorous moments, but it is ultimately a sobering story. The victory came at a huge personal cost to him and his fellow reformers.

  I’ll probably mine Boyd’s work for more ideas in the future, but let’s start with the be somebody or do something life decision.

  The Right Answer

  If you converged on a “be somebody” answer like CEO, tenured professor, or simply rich and famous, you are in for some hard introspection, because Boyd had a definite “right answer” in mind: do something.

  Here’s a curious paradox: the more you insist on sticking to a straight-and-narrow path defined by your own evolving principles, rather than the expedient one defined by current situation, the more you’ll have to twist and turn in the real world. The straight path in your head turns into spaghetti in the real world.

  On the other hand, the more your path through the real world seems like a straight road, defined by something like a “standard” career script, the more you’ll have to twist and turn philosophically to justify your life to yourself. Every step that a true Golden Boy careerist takes, is marred by deep philosophical compromises. You sell your soul one career move at a time.

  If you are driven by your own principles, you’ll generally search desperately for a
calling, and when you find one, it will consume your life. You’ll be driven to actually produce, create or destroy. You’ll want to do something that brings the world more into conformity with your own principles. As Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

  Uncompromising private principles that you do not seek to justify to others are necessary but not sufficient. To actually keep moving forward, you’ll find that you need to twist and turn. Your terrain is the tortuous maze of truth-avoidance paths worn out by the “be somebody” types, and paved by the medal-awarding priests. Your mission is to tackle head-on, the truths that they work hard to avoid. Your own twists and turns are about avoiding or outmaneuvering those who want to deny truths and defend obvious falsehoods.

  At some level, the be-somebody types dimly realize that their apparently straight career paths are actually the philosophically convoluted truth-avoiding ones. That’s why the moves made by slightly evil types seem like “shortcuts” to them. They don’t get how somebody can get someplace meaningful faster, without being on what seems to them to be the straight-line path, and without awards to measure progress.

  Because ultimately the straight and narrow path defined by your own principles, grounded in truth-seeking, despite its apparent twists and turns in the real world, is the faster road to meaningful destinations.

  Legacies of Being versus Legacies of Doing

  If you are reasonable, and decide to simply be somebody, you can achieve your “be somebody” objective and wrap up your very successful life, having offended nobody, and with nobody caring that you actually lived. Display your certificates, medals and trophies proudly, and retire happy. Try not to think too much about the fact that you’ll be forgotten the week after you die, your certificates, medals and trophies mothballed in boxes in attics, to be eventually gotten rid of by an indifferent great-grandchild.