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

by Venkatesh Rao

  Sparring with a slightly evil twin, like all practical actions, happens in the banal world rather than the shadow world.

  Translating the Shadowy to the Banal

  To truly realize the power of shadow boxing though, you have to translate the intense drama of your private life back into the banal situational script. Because that’s where the action actually unfolds. Ultimately, you have to manifest your abstract decisions (such as “curb extroverted feeling”) in concrete settings. You have to pick friends and hobbies. You have to angle for promotions. You have to pick some projects and drop other projects. You have to decide how to behave at specific meetings or parties where specific things are happening. You have to pick authors to read.

  For people like me, this is the boring and tedious part. For people like my evil twins, who prefer situated realities to abstracted ones, I suspect it is the interesting part.

  This translation is a problem-solving skill. Your ability to successfully solve situational problems by translating them to and from the shadow world is what shows that you haven’t just acquired a vocabulary, but a full-blown narrative analysis and enactment language.

  For starters, try something simple, like picking a new hobby by accessing your shadow.

  Here’s an example. I’ve long wanted to get myself a pair of binoculars for bird and ship-watching. But I never got around to it, partly because I never thought through the psychology behind my attraction to the hobby, and appropriately prioritized it.

  Now with my new-found shadow analysis lens, I think I understand the impulse. The function known as extroverted sensing (basically the ability to pay attention to external sensory detail) is a deep shadow function for me (something that is seventh on my list of eight functions, which is why I am not a graphic designer). But when I am very relaxed, I enjoy exercising that function. As a kid in high school, I got into amateur astronomy partly because the subject interested me (a self-expression motive), but mainly because the physical act of quietly observing the night sky was very relaxing to me (a shadow-expression motive).

  Here in Seattle, where I now live, the night sky is visible perhaps two nights in a year, but there is plenty to observe out on the water: bird life, ships, waterfront activities.So I finally got myself a pair of binoculars last week, and went on my first birding walk along the waterfront yesterday. It was very satisfying. You might want to apply that heuristic to your last-minute gift-giving this year, if you happen to know the Myers-Briggs type of your giftees. But be careful. Don’t accidentally give them a shadow-based stressor instead of a shadow-based relaxant. I made this mistake once and the person in question has disliked me ever since.

  And getting back to Lee’s life situation problem, I only have one simple suggestion: he needs to re-narrate his situation in self/shadow ways, and then ask the question of what to do in terms of integrating the two.

  Rousseau vs. Hobbes Redux

  Suppose you are a well-known gunslinger in the lawless Wild West, widely regarded as a powerful but benevolent and enlightened being who can draw faster than anybody else, but does not crave worldly things. Everybody knows you don’t interfere with ordinary human affairs or use your powers directly to influence events. You only strive to create peace and harmony through indirect means.

  One day you come across a situation that is just short of a Mexican stand-off: two guys are facing each other. There is a sack of gold between them, that they found simultaneously. Both are unarmed, but clearly preparing to start a fist-fight over the gold. It is not clear a priori which of the two is stronger, but both are prepared to risk injury to find out.

  You come up with two options that you think might lead to a peaceful and harmonious resolution of the standoff:

  You could toss a gun to each, creating a true Mexican stand-off, and hope that the escalated cost of the conflict (risking death rather than mere injury) encourages the two to negotiate a peaceful sharing of the gold.

  Or you could appeal to their noble and selfless instincts and get them to share the treasure, trusting that neither really wants to fight if he can avoid it.

  What would you do? Would the size of the bag of gold affect your answer?

  Okay, this is a very contrived situation, but it is the simplest one I could come up with to illustrate two fundamentally opposed axioms about the nature of human beings. These axioms relate to a thought experiment in political science known as “man in the state of nature,” an imagined original human condition that is assumed to have existed before civil society took root. This original condition is presumed to be egalitarian. The civil society that emerges from this condition is decidedly non-egalitarian, but provides certain benefits to all. How does this happen, conceptually? Is it good or bad for humanity, overall, that we left the State of Nature?

  Thomas Hobbes made a fundamentally pessimistic assumption: that humans in this state of nature are fundamentally competitive, violent and corruptible (tending to become more evil or wicked if left to themselves). For Hobbes, evil is natural, good is an aberration. Hobbes’ is a tragic view of the human condition.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the other hand made a fundamentally optimistic assumption: that humans in the natural state are fundamentally harmony-loving, cooperative and perfectible (tending to become more good and noble, left to themselves). For Rousseau, good is natural and evil is an aberration. Rousseau’s is an idealist view of the human condition.

  Both Hobbes (1588-1679) and Rousseau (1712-1778) were channeling the pre-Darwinian intellectual environment of their times, the early period of modern state formation after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The two are evil twins,∥ and end up telling very similar stories about how political order emerges, but provide very different interpretations, and very different prescriptions about how to govern. Today’s conservatives are intellectual descendants of Hobbes, while today’s progressives are descendants of Rousseau. Sadly, both lineages have gotten increasingly dumb. What was once a powerful idealist-tragic dialectic is today an ossified detente that produces no political innovation. Each intellectual tradition has become inbred and anti-intellectual. The State of Nature experiment has run its course and ended up on a civilized plateau.

  Returning to my Mexican stand-off question, you could say that Hobbes would toss a gun to each, while Rousseau would try appealing to higher instincts (modern politicians would argue about what to do until it was too late to do anything).

  Today, if we had to reconstruct the ideas of Hobbes and Rousseau, we would abandon good and evil and turn to evolutionary biology. Francis Fukuyama does precisely that in his excellent new book, The Origins of Political Order. Turns out, the key change required is to think of extended kinship groups and tribes as the fundamental units among which egalitarian conditions reign. So “kin-groups in the state of nature” or “tribes in the state of nature” is a more accurate description of the likely conditions from which civil society emerged. Both Hobbes and Rousseau assumed the individual as the right unit of analysis. Turns out they were wrong. The modern notion of individualized person-hood did not really emerge till around the 13th century, in England. So as an approximation of real history, the thought experiment has the wrong units.

  But overall the Hobbes/Rousseau foundational pair of assumptions, appropriately adapted to reflect the ideas of evolutionary psychology and generalized to basic units other than individuals, still applies.

  So what determines which aspect of our natures is dominant? Today a rather naive belief is doing the rounds that whether we compete or cooperate depends on whether we believe in scarcity or or abundance. In terms of our hypothetical Wild West situation, there are those who believe that the size of the sack of gold matters. It makes sense on the surface. If the bag of gold were sufficiently huge, there would be no point fighting over it. There would be enough to make both gunslingers rich beyond their wildest dreams.

  But as both Hobbes and Rousseau recognized, abundance/scarcity is only part of the story. Above a certain minimum
size, the bag of gold is partly just an excuse for engaging in a fight for recognition. Each party has an urge to force the other to recognize him as worthy, via submission (an inherently quixotic urge, since recognition from a defeated adversary is devalued by virtue of the defeat). Ceding the gold would be a mark of such submission. Modern identity politics is often about recognition-seeking rather than a fight over resources, with or without guns.

  For Hobbes (and Hegel, and Nietzsche and Fukuyama) this struggle for recognition is a necessary and unalterable aspect of human nature, while for Rousseau and his idealist descendents, it is an unnecessary pathology that can be cast by the wayside on humanity’s quest for perfection.

  I have oversimplified a lot of key ideas here, but if you want to develop a more nuanced understanding of the Hobbes/Rousseau tragic/idealist dichotomy, I recommend two key texts: the show Deadwood, which was written specifically to tell a Hobbesian story, and The Dark Knight, which was written to capture a Rousseauish story. In the latter, despite the Joker’s best efforts to prove a Hobbesian theory of humanness, a Rousseauish outcome is achieved. You could also read Hobbes and Rousseau in the original of course (personally, I’ve only read second-hand summaries and sampled the originals).

  I’ll conclude with one thought to justify the “redux” in the title. Even though the major human political story among nations has ended in a vapid detente of sorts, a new Hobbes vs. Rousseau experiment is starting today – on the Internet. This one is in fact closer to the original thought experiment, since individuals have never been more powerful in relation to kinship groups, tribes and states. The Internet is also more of a blank political canvas compared to the physical Earth, with its continents, mountain ranges and oceans.

  So ask yourself: would you bet on Hobbesian or Rousseauean dynamics to better explain the evolution of the virtual world?

  Preparing to Play

  Status 101

  Status is a big and foundational subject. Fortunately, the thin slice of it that we need to bootstrap Slightly Evil behaviors is of manageable complexity. This is the breakthrough question: “how do I know what status to play in a given situation?” If you haven’t asked this question, it is very difficult for me or anyone else to teach you anything about status. Until you ask this question, you are in a locked-status mode, where the status you feel is in a predictable and unchanging relationship to the status you play. You cannot “play” it because you don’t have control. Your status behaviors are in firmware rather than consciously programmable software.

  Here’s a quick and dirty conceptual framework to help you understand “locked status.” Don’t push this too far, since I’ve simplified a lot of things to fit the 101 level treatment, but it is a handy starter model.

  Felt status, played status and perceived status have almost nothing to do with each other at a fundamental level. Any relationships among these three variables are therefore quite arbitrary. A beggar, waiter or doorman can feel and play high status, while being perceived as low status. A CEO may constantly and anxiously seek approval in cringe-inducing ways (felt and played low, perceived high). Let’s ignore “perceived” for now and focus on felt and played status, since these are the ones you control. There are four status patterns: feeling low, playing low (LL), feeling low, playing high (LH), feeling high, playing low (HL), feeling high, playing high (HH). If the root cause of the fixedness is intrinsic and psychological, the same stable pattern will appear in all situations. This is absolute fixedness: you adopt the same pattern towards all. If the root cause is extrinsic and social-psychological, you will use a different pattern based on perceived relative status, which is the difference between the perceived status of the other, and your felt status. Both absolute and relative personalities are predictable. You just need more data to model relative personalities.

  You can easily detect the 4 patterns, but it takes deeper analysis to figure out whether you are seeing an absolute or relative use of the pattern.The classic sign of LH, for instance, is “being rude to waiters.” Somebody who is feeling low, but playing high will feel the need to “prove” the played status by lording it over somebody nominally lower, who is too constrained by situational rules to bite back effectively. The reason this is particularly useful to look for in a date or an interviewee is that those are situations that commonly bring out LH patterns.

  LL might seem odd: why would anyone want to act low status without manipulative intent or a payoff? Turns out, for some people, life is so messed up that constantly validating an “I suck” life position, and enjoying moments of perverse vindication, is easier than doing something about it. This is normally done through game playing (in the sense of Berne’s Games People Play). A simple-to-detect symptom is the inability to graciously accept a compliment: “Your lasagna turned out great!” “Oh, it’s a little too salty.” Be careful to tease individual LL positions apart from cultural norms though, since self-deprecation in the face of a compliment is considered polite behavior in many cultures.

  HL is also easy to detect; the classic sign is what we normally perceive as “gracious” behavior, where someone is considerate, polite, scrupulously nice, and on the lookout for every chance to make you feel good. But it still feels like “reverse flattery” or noblesse oblige because they are perceived high, and typically don’t intend to truly act low in completely convincing ways (Dicken’s Uriah Heep is a notable exception). Opening a door for someone else is a symbolically a low status thing to do, but can be an effective HL behavior if done the right way (door opening is probably the e. coli of status science; I could write a whole essay just about that. Maybe I will at some point).

  True HH is actually the rarest type. Typically only spoilt children and leaders/emperors in ceremonial situations will play HH. Beggars will sometimes act HH (a case of “nowhere to go but up.” If they can make you feel “low” by pushing buttons, they win psychologically, whether or not you give them money). Doormen,** bouncers, waiters and others who enjoy derived high status through a uniform (representing someone else or a group with true high status) can also act HH.

  To tell scope, there isn’t really an easy formula. You have to observe the same person’s behavior across multiple situations, and their interactions with many others of varied relative status.

  Now, here’s why all this is important. Status is a variable whose importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you gravitate to preferred locked-status patterns, then you will expend energy preserving those patterns. You can be manipulated. Status matters if it matters.

  Conversely, if status doesn’t matter to you, it becomes available to you as a situational control variable when dealing with those to whom status does matter. We all start out in a locked-status mode, but if you start breaking locked felt-played patterns then a curious thing happens: felt status of any sort weakens. Turns out felt status needs the nourishment of being hooked to a projected (and perceived-as-hoped and validated) status in order to survive. If you spend enough years breaking patterns in unpredictable ways, felt status starts to vanish altogether, leaving a sort of “status vacuum” inside you. The designated part of firmware dedicated to status seems to decay. The variable can nearly completely vanish. I suspect this happens to really good actors, like William H. Macy, who play a large status spectrum convincingly. This is one reason I don’t consider Denzel Washington a good actor: he never seems to play convincing low-status roles.

  When two status-vacuum people meet, they typically recognize each other and abandon status-based manipulation altogether and spar with other weapons.

  There is a subtle failure mode here: if you break locked patterns in predictable ways, you simply lock in new patterns. I knew a guy who figured all this stuff out, but then got hooked on “pushing buttons” and enjoying the reactions. That reinforced a “felt high” pattern rather than shriveling felt status to a vacuum. He could be manipulated by hooking his button-pushing instincts. The best way to break patterns in random ways is simply to play situations
in ways that suit your situational objectives. Your objectives and the related optimal patterns, will generally be in a random relationship to any locked patterns.

  Now, on to the opening question: what status should you play in a given situation? Depends on what you want out of the situation, doesn’t it? What do you want the other person to do?

  Whatever you want, getting it involves correctly adapting to their predictable status behaviors. You can threaten their projected status, in which case they’ll move to defend it. You can validate it, in which case they’ll may move to express gratitude or ignore you. You can combine the two moves by first attacking and then validating. This is the familiar “give people a way to save face” sequence.

  Be careful of one thing though–how they react to your machinations depends on the way they perceive your status. You want to pick a position relative to the one they want to hold on to. Which side, and how far above or below, depends on whether you want to attack or validate, and how. You can’t shift too much because locked-status people can’t parse status-shifters. You’ll just evoke suspicion, distrust or confusion. Pick a good position and stick to it for the situation; shifting status in mid-situation is not a 101 level skill. Both distance and sign matter. For instance, if you want to validate the other’s status via compliments, you can’t be too far below (flattery won’t be valued) or too far above (you risk seeming patronizing). And you also have to pick a position you can credibly hold given the status signs that are important to the other. If the other person is only capable of seeing and reacting to how you are dressed, you can’t do a whole lot if you happen to be dressed like a slob. At least, not at 101 skill levels.

  How important is it to play status right? Overwhelmingly important. You can do everything else right and play status wrong and you’ll fail. You need to constantly practice status playing skills, and even then the game gets tougher all the time as you meet more complicated people, in more demanding situations. You will play things wrong often, so you need to spread risk over multiple situations and people.