Manufacturing Delusions: At the most complicated level, you manufacture delusions. This is a last-resort approach, and requires far too much creativity to be worth it unless the returns are really high. It is usually far better to amplify and domesticate delusions that you find in the wild.
Simplicity and Scale
When it comes to straightforward falsifiable delusions, the more widespread it is, the quicker it will die. To counteract this, you have to simplify delusions as you scale.
You can sustain elaborate fantasies for a single person. For a large group, you can usually only sustain a few key beliefs. At the level of human civilization, you can only sustain extremely simple, but very fertile fill-in-the-blanks delusions, such as “the Universe is here to do your bidding” (it’s called The Secret, and the one thing the authors of that movement get right is that it is an age-old and very widespread delusion).
Believing Your Own Delusions
So far, we’ve implicitly assumed we’re talking about brittle, falsifiable delusions. Dabbling in such delusions is dangerous precisely because when they collapse, the orchestrators are unmasked as deliberate manipulators. You are at risk of being accused of crimes ranging from simple manipulation through silence, through comparisons with Michael Moore or Karl Rove, all the way to being a Goebbels or Stalin. A good defense against the latter, by the way, is to simply cite Godwin’s Law*. John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, for example, are masters at making fun of Fox News, using Godwin’s Law type criticisms. They do it so well, we often forget that they orchestrate their own delusion complexes, built out of a much more dangerous raw material: humor.
But opening yourself up to such accusations at all is the amateur way to play it. The way to really protect yourself is to adopt George Costanza’s law: it’s not a lie if you believe in it.
This is obviously hard to do with hard facts and falsifiable statements. Method acting only goes so far. The smart way to do this is to rely on unfalsifiability.
To be a professional organizer of delusions, you need to focus on delusions that it would actually benefit you to believe, at least temporarily, and then figure out how to adopt them for just as long as they can serve you.
Your overall goal is to create plausible deniability, even within your own mind, to defend against the accusation that you don’t believe something that you are pitching to others. Your lifeline back to reality is your capacity for doubt, which prevents plausible deniability from turning into a pattern of denial that persists long after the expiry date on the delusion.
It is much easier to do this if you discipline yourself to only work with delusions that are a sufficiently complex mix of metaphysics, morality arguments, metaphor, narrative and facts.
This is why you get the most fundamental axiom in delusion organization theory: the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell, and the biggest ones, bigger than even the civilization-scale ones, are the ones you deliberately sell to yourself.
Big lies are necessarily complicated constructs made up of the elements I mentioned: metaphysics, morality, metaphor, narrative and facts. If, for your own reasons, you deliberately funded an idiotic venture where all the numbers indicated that the market wasn’t there, nobody can fault you later if you hide behind the assertion: “I invest in people, not ideas, and this guy really had passion, so I trusted him to figure it all out. Looks like I was wrong. Well, it’s a numbers game.
But ultimately, even plausible deniability, based on hiding inside a jungle of unfalsifiable metaphysics, is not enough.
To win the Yossarian belt, you have to genuinely graduate to ironic absurdity, and traffic in delusions without getting attached to them. Without a sense of absurdity, you’ll just fall off the slightly evil path and turn into yet another greedy hack, peddling subprime mortgages.
Status, Harmony and Conflict
An interpersonal interaction is open if both parties are seeking to trade or discover information. It is closed if even one party is seeking status validation, conflict or harmony instead. This means, unfortunately, that most interpersonal interactions end up being about such social intentions, since either party can unilaterally close an open interaction. We generally understand conflict in for-and-against terms. You are either with me or against me is a raw conflict framing of an interaction.We general understand status in pure above-me-below-me terms. You are either better than me or worse than meis a raw status-framing of an interaction.These pure situations, however, are fairly rare in adult life. Usually, only children play pure conflict or status games.
Adults are more likely to mix a conflict/harmony intention with a status intention. So you get the following four basic types of attitude informing an interaction:
Condescension: I am better than you and for you
Contempt: I am better than you and against you
Supplication: I am worse than you and for you
Insolence: I am worse than you and against you
It is very useful to learn to recognize these four attitudes. It makes you twice as effective as most people, who are usually only conscious of one or the other dimension (status or conflict/harmony). The four basic attitudes create six basic types of interaction. I’ll let you work out the combinatorics, but here is an example of condescension butting up against contempt:
A: So what’s going on with the project? (neutral)
B: We’re mostly busy dealing with that situation with the new client that the VP mentioned. (neutral)
A: Well, I really don’t have time for this, but I guess I could help you out. (condescension)
B: Oh I wasn’t asking. We deal with this at the program level. You’ll hear about what we decide at the next meeting. (contempt)
The interactions between the characters of Al Swearengen and George Hearst on the show Deadwood contain many examples of another common pattern: condescension versus insolence. Many “Odd Couple” television shows are based on a stable pattern (usually condescension meeting supplication), but wander for variety into one of the other five patterns. At the other extreme, mutual contempt is usually a recipe for immediate breakdown and disengagement, so drama can be created when people who hold each other in contempt are forced by circumstances to work together. Many buddy movies start with this premise, and end with mutual contempt transforming into mutual supplication.
The fun really starts when the overt attitudes dictated by the situation do not match the actual attitudes. Imagine a nominally harmonious patronizing/supplicatory interaction like an entrepreneur pitching to a VC where the VC is actually in supplicatory mode, fishing for approval, because the entrepreneur happens to be the new “It” guy/girl. Or a young, poor and ugly male teacher feeling threatened by the wealth and looks of amale high school student, and being insolent while the student is being supplicatory (asking for a higher grade for example).
Mixing and matching status movements with conflict/harmony elements is one of the most fun ways to both read and imagine little conversation scripts. For the student of Slightly Evil philosophy though, such status-and-conflict games are generally time-wasters (though you should learn to play them because you can be forced into them by external factors). Wherever possible, you should attempt to move the conversation to an open one that is about generating or exchanging information, or disengage if that turns out to be impossible.
Conflict Without Ego
Consider a conversation that proceeds along these lines: A: We really need to prioritize the new version of our successful Widget and consolidate our marketshare lead.
B: I think we really need to consider a new Super Widget. There are some trends that marketing identified in the last review. We need to respond to them.
At this point, A and B are headed for conflict and both have become aware of it. It is A’s move and what he/she says will strongly influence what happens next. Here are some options:
I disagree, the stuff they called out in the review was bullshit.
Well, what’s the cashflow picture for
the next few quarters? That’s going to ultimately determine how much spare cash we can throw off for a new product initiative.
Well, so long as our revenue from Widget doesn’t decline until at least 2015, I am open to anything.
Which specific trends did you think needed a response?
These responses represent firing a warning shot across B’s bows (1), framing a zero-sum discussion (2), cautiously opening negotiations with some pre-conditions (3), a no-strings-attached invitation to debate (4) (note that 4 can also be a feint, to draw out intelligence to inform a more precise attack than 1, but this post isn’t about maneuvering tactics, so let’s ignore that subtlety).
Which of these responses do you think is the smartest one?
The Importance of Context in Conflict
The correct answer is insufficient information. We are missing data about context. If A is the product manager of the Widget product and B is the manager of the R&D laboratory, you should immediately suspect that this conversation is about protecting budgets by any means necessary. If A is the CFO and B is the CEO, the conversation means something else entirely (and the extent to which their respective salaries are related to the stock price adds another layer of complexity). If both are in sales, but A enjoys babysitting old customers while B enjoys the challenge of pitching a new product to new customers, you’ve got another interpretation. If the sales role involves a commission structure, that changes things as well.
What is common across all these contextual issues is that almost all of them are about individual motivations of A and B. Missing material facts that have no a priori coupling to individual motivations represent basic ignorance. Unless A and B are idiots, if that is an issue, they will very quickly agree to reconvene after they have the missing material facts.
Why Motivations Get Buried in Context
So as a first approximation, it is safe to say that what is buried in context is individual motivations; specifically the relationships between your motivations and those of others you are in conflict with. Which is surprising because everybody understands that conflicts arise from competing motivations. You’d think they’d be more visible, given their obvious importance.
Buried motivations can be further broken down intoextrinsic(motivations that are a function of the environment, such as role and incentives) andintrinsic(those that arise from ego issues, defense mechanisms, status dynamics and so forth).
Things break down this way because in modern culture we expect conversations to be based on facts and a posture of objective analysis. Nobody is supposed to want anything other than the “truth” in some procedural sense of the word. This is true even in close personal relationships.
The result is that in most conversations end up being a theater of superficial objectivity sitting atop a mountain of consequential context. You can imagine a sort of 3-layer model. The top layer is the overtly acknowledged objective stuff.
One level down you have extrinsic social motivations. Sophisticated conversationalists are usually able to gracefully foreground and acknowledge these as being either relevant or not, so that the overt discussion becomes more substantial. For example, in the A-as-CFO case, A might preface each of the possible responses with “I am not just saying this because I am coming at it from the CFO perspective,” a discounting move that may or may not work completely, but will definitely deepen the conversation.
But the hardest piece of the puzzle to take into account is buried in the third layer: intrinsic individual motivations. These might be so deeply buried through denial and repression patterns that they might not even be consciously accessible.
For example, assume that we’re talking about the product manager/R&D manager extrinsic context. What are the sorts of intrinsic motivations that might lead to response 1?
A might have been snubbed at the last party by the chief marketing officer and is subconsciously grabbing an opportunity to discredit marketing.
A might have deep insecurities around being considered “boring” compared to the people in R&D who are perceived as “exciting and interesting.”
A might have a chip on his shoulder about undue importance given to childish silliness going on in R&D while his group does the real work of bringing in the money.
A might have deeply repressed associations of anxiety relating to the kind of plaid jacket that B happens to be wearing,because a sadistic teacher in primary school used to wear such jackets.
A might be female. It might all be unacknowledged gender dynamics and the idea that she needs to be assertive so she’s not taken for granted as a woman.
The whole thing might have an undercurrent of sexual tension.
The whole thing might have to do with a sense of violence in the air (perhaps A is a powerfully built athlete while B is a scrawny weakling, and bullying instincts are kicking in).
How can you possibly navigate all this potential complexity? It might seem like I’ve defined an impossible problem.
Emotions About Facts, Facts About Emotions
It turns out though, that the key to cutting through this complexity isn’t this sort of detailed dissection and analysis (though that is useful too, on occasion, if done offline and explicitly for the purpose of learning). The key is to work towards what martial artists like to characterize as “conflict without ego.” Here, “ego” is shorthand for all intrinsic individual motivations, known and unknown.
The key to conflict without ego is the observation that you cannot get mad at facts. The sun rises everyday. Things fall to the ground. You need to pay employees.
If there are emotions in play, they necessarily relate to individual motivations. Even when the facts are about people. You cannot get mad at the fact that some people are more attractive than you. You can only get mad over desires relating to things that being attractive gets you.
Extrinsic motivations can and should be foregrounded because they play a role in objective analysis. In this process of foregrounding, you can also drain these extrinsic motivations of unhelpful emotions, because fundamentally they are outside you. This requires increasing skill and sophistication in conversation. Response 2 from A is actually an example of this. It is a move that brings an unacknowledged extrinsic motivation (“don’t touch my cash flow!”) to the discussion table, and quantifies the role it plays in a way that assuages nameless anxieties (the new Super Widget product is no longer a horrifying existential threat to A’s cash flows, but a quantifiable one amenable to trade-off computations). This takes both a certain level of domain-specific experience, as well as conversational skill.
But you cannot do this to intrinsic motivations. Even when you are aware of them, it may not be socially possible to talk about them. In the case of 7, what is A going to say? “I want to whip your scrawny ass, but since we’re adults, I cannot do that, but I am going to yell at you to intimidate you”? And in the case of things like 4 (the plaid jacket), you might not be able to dig out such factors even with years of expensive psychoanalysis. And there are thousands of such little tics buried deep in your psyche. You cannot possibly surface and compute with all of them consciously. More to the point, most of them are almost certainly irrelevant to the point under contention anyway (smart people will usually recognize truly logical connections quickly).
For these, the key is to acknowledge and bracket emotions and consciously let them go. Some emotions are easier to handle this way than others, such as anger and pride. Others are harder: an emotion might have no name, and manifest very weakly as a slight tension in your lower back. The only way you can process is to become aware of it and let it go, even if you don’t understand where it came from or what it represents (plaid jackets perhaps; but you don’t need to care about root causes, only manifestations that you become aware of). And because they are likely irrelevant anyway, it is safe to let them go for the purposes of the conversation.You can always have a different conversation of course, but so long as the nominal and overt topic of conversation is a genuine on
e, you can let irrelevant things go.
All this should be of no surprise to those of you who have tried mindfulness meditation or related disciplined practices. But even without disciplined practice, just being aware of the way these things work is half the battle. In an undisciplined, ad hoc way, you will slowly become better at grappling with the hidden realities of your psyche. That path is the path to conflict without ego.
Ideas and The Nature of Violence
But why conflict at all? If you can truly approach interpersonal interactions in this ego-less way, with intrinsic motivations handled, and all objective facts and extrinsic motivations on the discussion table, shouldn’t you be able to avoid conflict altogether?
I came up with this formulation: Violence is a necessary consequence of unavoidable ignorance on the part of systems that lack infinite wisdom. You cannot avoid it, or enlighten yourself out of it.
But for a long time I wasn’t able to translate this into a form more usable in everyday interactions. Only recently did I come up with an articulation that I sort of liked: The ideas of your friends are not always the friends of your ideas.
What does this mean? It means that even when two mindful and egoless individuals have adequately let go of emotions relating to buried, irrelevant, intrinsic motivations, and are dealing with the relevant facts and extrinsic motivations in sophisticated ways, and properly identifying and reacting appropriately to areas of ignorance, you will still have conflict.
Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1) Page 8
