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

by Venkatesh Rao

  “With respect, Prime Minister,” replied Humphrey impertinently,... “The only way to understand newspapers is to remember that they pander to their readers’ prejudices.”

  Humphrey knows nothing about newspapers. He’s a Civil Servant. I’m a politician, I know all about them. I have to. They can make or break me. I know exactly who reads them. The Times is read by the people who run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by the people who think they ought to run the country. The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Independent is read by people who don’t know who runs the country but are sure they’re doing it wrong. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run the way it used to be run. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think it is their country. And the Sun’s readers don’t care who runs the country providing she has big tits.

  This is actually scarily accurate. And Hacker is right. While both he and Appleby understand the principle that newspapers pander to their readers’ prejudices, only Hacker has realized the importance and implications of the principle.

  You are likely better at this game than you know. If you are American, test yourself right now: who reads the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Utne Reader? What sort of person likes Ayn Rand? If I told you someone really loves the Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan novels and the History Channel, what image comes to your mind? If you are not American, pick your own examples.

  Examine your own reading tastes, and the books you quote most often. How do you think you appear to others?

  This is not blatant stereotyping, it is blatant archetyping. A subtly different (and morally more defensible) approach to typecasting people. Sure you’ll go wrong sometimes, but you’ll be right more often. Drawing conclusions from people’s reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the most robust ways to read people. It is really hard to fake your personality on this front. You can dress differently on occasion, and adopt various sorts of convincing mannerisms and body language to project certain personalities. But it is really hard to talk convincingly about books, television shows and ideas you know little about. If somebody watches a lot E! and TMZ, but pretends in a job interview that they watch a lot of History Channel and read biographies, it is easy enough to ask them to talk about shows/books they’ve recently watched/read. Even if you haven’t watched/read them, you’ll be able to tell whether they are faking very easily.

  Most people are far too cautious about making such judgments out of a sense of political correctness. Don’t be. The more you use this tactic, the better you’ll get at it. So don’t feel guilty about doing this. Go ahead and use the tactic and boldly jump to conclusions. Be prepared to self-correct if necessary.

  Candor, Cursing and Clarity

  Many newbie slightly evil types obsess about lying and lie detection. Seeing deceit everywhere, and preparing to battle a world based on lies, helps bolster a romantic self-image of “gritty realist in a tough world which eats innocents alive.” This is dumb for two reasons. First, lying and lie-detection are extremely non-trivial disciplines. To lie at a level that can fool experts who are used to being lied to (such as cops or polygraph machines), or to lie-detect at that skill level, takes years of practice. Acquiring either skill is a waste of time if you are basically honest and aren’t in law enforcement or in the spy business. In the everyday world, both lying and lie-detection skills are much weaker, and your current skill level will probably do. Investing more in those skills is like buying assault rifles and barricading yourself in your home in a dull, safe suburban neighborhood with no crime. A waste of time and money.

  Second, in case you hadn’t noticed, very few well-adjusted people (“well-adjusted” is not a compliment in my book) lie outright about anything consequential. The risk of being caught out in a lie is too high. They usually mumble, talk in circles, avoid certain subjects, act evasive, deflect or equivocate. All these behaviors are easy enough to detect and challenge if you feel inclined to do so. Here, the skill to be learned isn’t how to detect, but how to challenge such behaviors without provoking the person to anger. We’ll deal with that another day.

  The point is, the everyday social world is not a harsh and dangerous one built on widespread deceit. It is mostly a slightly timid, risk-averse and benign world, full of people who are uncomfortable lying about anything serious. The lying happens at the extremes: lots of little white lies on one end, that don’t matter and don’t snowball, and a smaller world of professional, risk-managed, money-making lying on the other end, that includes marketers, cops, con-men and spies. And of course, there is a handful of big institutional lies that are in a class by themselves.

  For everyday use, being able to tell apart people who are telling the truth from people who think they are telling the truth, is a far more important skill than lie detection. There are two important pseudo-truth-telling behaviors.

  The first behavior is candor. When somebody leans back, opens with something like “let me be completely honest here,” and says things in a very sincere, disarming and open way, chances are they believe what they are saying. People who routinely start conversations this way can’t even handle the pressures of evasion, deflection or equivocation. For them, candor is a way to relieve the stress of keeping emotionally loaded ideas bottled-up inside. They are being candid not because the situation demands it, but because they can’t bear the stress of not being candid. Truth-telling requires you to first calmly separate your feelings from the facts and tell yourself the truth before you tell others. Candid people often fail to separate things this way and blurt out unprocessed thoughts. If there is truth in what they say, you’ll have to figure it out by guessing their feelings and correcting appropriately. You have to listen like a therapist.

  The second behavior is cursing. When somebody gets mad and offers an opinion interspersed with curses. (“Look, let’s just admit the fucking truth here okay? That asshole was out to screw us all along! We got played.”) Again there is a failure to separate facts from the emotions associated with the facts, and an easy slide into aggressive posturing, under threat. The narrative that is offered is designed to bolster sagging self-confidence, seek validation and unconsciously simplify unpleasant realities in self-serving ways (being “blunt” blunts the truth). Opinions offered with a seasoning of curses will usually lack all sorts of key details.

  Both pseudo-truth-telling behaviors arise from internal narratives that are grounded in unprocessed denial, rationalization and the like. You are being invited to participate in a fiction they’ve unconsciously constructed to protect themselves. It is very easy to be tempted because all the signs of truth-telling are present.

  So what does genuine truth-telling feel like? It feels like clarity. When someone has processed their thoughts, separated fact from feeling, separated what is already known from what is new or as yet unknown, and is offering up something they’ve deduced as being both true and unknown to you (and hence worth sharing), you’ll experience at least a momentary sense of expanded clarity. Candor and cursing on the other hand, will provoke emotional responses from you, rather than moments of mental clarity.

  Or if you enjoy using old-school rhetoric as a lens for such stuff, simply separate the logos from the (unconscious) ethos and pathos.

  On Cold-Blooded Listening

  Glengarry Glen Ross is one of my favorite movies of all time (even though I only watched it this year, after having had it on my to-watch list for years). The story (spoiler alert!) revolves around a group of real-estate salesmen, some promising new sales leads, and a plot by a couple of the salesmen to steal the leads locked in the manager’s office, make it look like a burglary, and defect to a competing firm, where they expect to get a good price for the leads. My favorite
scene in the movie involves the tired, aging, former star salesman Levene (Jack Lemmon) and Williamson, the sociopath manager (Kevin Spacey). The scene illustrates a fantastic “slightly evil” listening strategy I call “cold-blooded listening.” Cold-blooded listening is, for slightly evil sociopaths, what nice, good-natured “active listening” is for losers.

  This scene occurs the morning after the robbery when Williamson is busy helping the police. Roma (Al Pacino), the most successful salesman, who knows nothing about the plot, has just yelled at Williamson, because the burglary has caused him to lose a certain sale, and stormed out. Levene (who is part of the plot), currently the least successful salesman, who has just managed to close a sale the previous night, after a long time, decides to join in the fun and yell at Williamson too. All the pent-up anger and resentment comes pouring out, as Levene uses his rare opportunity to tell Williamson exactly what he thinks of him. Here’s what happens:

  LEVENE: ...excuse me, nothing, you be as cold as you want, but you just fucked a good man out of six thousand dollars and his goddamn bonus ’cause you didn’t know the shot, if you can do that and you aren’t man enough that it gets you, then I don’t know what, if you can’t take some thing from that... you’re scum, you’re fucking white-bread. You be as cold as you want. A child would know it, he’s right. You’re going to make something up, be sure it will help or keep your mouth closed.

  WILLIAMSON: Mmm.

  LEVENE: Now I’m done with you.

  WILLIAMSON: How do you know I made it up?

  LEVENE: What?

  WILLIAMSON: How do you know I made it up?

  LEVENE: What are you talking about?

  WILLIAMSON: You said, ”You don’t make something up unless it’s sure to help.” How did you know that I made it up?

  LEVENE: What are you talking about?

  WILLIAMSON: I told the customer that his contracts had gone to the bank.

  LEVENE: Well, hadn’t it?

  WILLIAMSON: No. It hadn’t.

  LEVENE: Don’t fuck with me, John, don’t fuck with me...what are you saying?

  WILLIAMSON: Well, I’m saying this, Shel: usually I take the contracts to the bank. Last night I didn’t. How did you know that? One night in a year I left a contract on my desk. Nobody knew that but you. Now how did you know that? You want to talk to me, you want to talk to someone else...because this is my job. This is my job on the line, and you are going to talk to me. Now how did you know that contract was on my desk?

  LEVENE: You’re so full of shit.

  WILLIAMSON: You robbed the office.

  See what happened here?

  Williamson listened in a completely cold-blooded way to Levene’s rant (Spacey of course, plays this brilliantly, in his usual low-reactor way). The insults and ad hominems roll right off him. He is completely confident in his own assessment of himself, and feels no need to defend himself against Levene’s rant, or even acknowledge it (he does the same thing in response to Roma’s rant in the scene just preceding this one).

  But he does listen. He picks up on the one piece of actual information accidentally let out by Levene that is useful to him, the one piece that reveals that Levene knows something about the burglary. And suddenly, the tables are turned. Levene, who is being unusually cocky based on a sale (a shaky one that Williamson knows won’t stick, incidentally, since the prospects are known mind-changers) tried to do some high-status crowing instead of low-status whining and groveling for a change. But he is simply not as tough as Williamson, and the tables get turned.

  This is a fantastically valuable skill to learn. And a very difficult one. It goes well beyond thick skin. It is hardened-cop-style “anything you say can and will be used against you” listening. To get there takes a very special kind of personal growth:

  Get beyond thick skin: the only way to get to total impassivity in the face of strident criticism and insults is practice. And I am afraid this means developing a certain capacity for contempt. Williamson is clearly contemptuous of Levene’s opinion here.

  Beyond-thick-skinned, contemptuous listening means you don’t take what is said about your personality as serious feedback worth responding to. But this does not mean you don’t listen. You listen in a sort of objective, clinical way, like a researcher observing an angry animal in a cage. Your radar is primed for information that is useful to you, not information that the other party thinks you ought to know (and is maliciously delighted to be able to give you).

  And remember, listening does not mean agreeing or debating. You can choose to listen, draw your own conclusions, and walk away, or steer the conversation so it proceeds on terms that are useful to you (as Spacey did). You don’t have to convince the other person of your conclusions. Or even share them. Notice how Williamson doesn’t reveal his “you robbed the office” conclusion until after he’s done testing it as a hypothesis by following the clue and watching Levene fumble. Levene has no clue why Williamson is asking about the “made up” line, and Williamson doesn’t bother to explain. He just assumes, like any good alpha, that he doesn’t have to explain himself to Levene, and that he’ll get a revealing response without having to explain the question.

  I have to admit, I am not at the Spacey-Williamson level yet, but I have no problems admitting that I do aspire to it. I believe in responsiveness, empathy and listening. I also believe the world is phenomenally full of morons who are too full of themselves, whose opinions on most subjects can be ignored. Especially their opinions on your personality (heck, you are shooting for “slightly evil” anyway, which means you are shooting for effectiveness. Do you really expect to be liked as well?).

  This is not a defense mechanism we are talking about here. When criticized, too many people fall into one of two basic errors. The first is to take the criticism as true on the face of it, without analysis, and earnestly attempt to change. That’s just dumb. The second is to assume the criticism says more about the criticizer’s personality than about yours. This is the “explain it away” defense mechanism. No, we aren’t talking about either of those reactions here. The first is born of low self-esteem; the second is born out of a denial. What we are talking about here can only be practiced by people with a high degree of self-awareness and self-acceptance. This means most conversations can be processed in transactional terms (looking for information of value in the immediate situation, the robbery being navigated in this case) rather than getting sidetracked protecting your fragile ego from poisoned barbs being shot at you by inconsequential people. Had Williamson been in that mode, he might have missed the clue to the burglary while his mind was furiously occupied defending a self-image.

  Watch Glengarry Glen Ross. You won’t regret it, I promise.

  Orientation

  Organizing the World’s Delusions

  Since the core value of Ribbonfarm Inc., Be Slightly Evil, is transparently based on mangling Google’s goody-two-shoes core value, I figured I’d go ahead and mangle their mission statement as well to create one for my own. You can copy it if you like: To Organize the World’s Delusions.

  To understand what it means to organize delusions, recall this classic bit from Catch-22:

  “I really can’t believe it,” Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. “It’s a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They’re confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe we wouldn’t have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left.”

  In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.

  In Catch-22, Yossarian operates at the highest level of artistry in organizing delusions. It is a kind of extreme method acting; call it ironically absurd behavior. Yossarian manages to maintain a happily schizophrenic
state of mind where he is simultaneously messing with the system, and participating in the delusions himself. Sometimes he messes with things consciously, for the hell of it. But at other times, as in the case of moving the bomb line, he manages to be ironically absurd without being random, organizing and benefiting from delusions, and actually believing in them, by playing metaphysical confidence tricks on himself that would have made Kierkegaard proud.

  Organizing delusions is at the heart of all manipulation, but you have to start at much simpler levels, and work your way up to your Yossarian belt.

  The Hierarchy of Delusion Organization

  Getting out of the way: The most basic level is based on avoiding challenging others’ delusions, and factoring them into your own thinking. The “organizing” merely involves arranging matters so things and people you care about are moved out of the way of an impending train wreck.

  Creating a sandbox: At a more advanced level of practice, you catalyze, encourage and sustain delusions that benefit you. Organization gets a little harder: you have to create a safe sandbox so the delusion can survive a little longer than it would if reality were allowed to hit it too early. The benign example is of course, parenting. Geeks often call this a “reality distortion field.” Assuming that pseudo-technical labeling equals inoculation is a delusion pattern peculiar to geekdom.

  Pouring fuel on the spark: At the next level – it’s called PR – you fuel and amplify stabilized delusions on a more massive scale. All large organizations practice this. Both mass media and 1:1 word-of-mouth social media are your friends here. The polite term is “managing perceptions.” The less polite term is “managing the optics” of a situation, a phrase that more clearly links to smoke-and-mirrors metaphors.