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

by Venkatesh Rao

  So the slightly evil lesson is this: to the extent that the society you are in is tribal, being vindictive and indulging in vendettas is rational in objective terms. To the extent that the society around you is civilized, these behaviors will backfire. Revenge on the other hand is never objectively worthwhile, whether the society is tribal or civilized. This is rather ironic, since it is actually revenge that takes the most intelligence and rational planning.

  Real-Time Vindictiveness

  Vindictiveness is a natural tendency to immediately and instinctively push back when pushed, as hard or harder than you were pushed. If you cannot push back immediately, you remember the slight for as long as it takes, and push back at the first opportunity. Let’s talk about the immediate case first, and the remembered case (vendetta) later.

  Vindictiveness is a hard-wired operating assumption that if somebody is initiating a conflict with you, they are probably in the wrong. Road rage provides a good illustration. So when somebody honks loudly at you and gives you the finger as they pass, there are two possible reasons:

  They did something wrong, like trying to speed, that led to a dangerous situation, and are blaming you.

  You did something wrong, like making a dangerous lane change, and they are punishing you.

  If you instinctively curse, honk back harder, and give them the finger (i.e. assume hypothesis 1)before you can figure out what the situation is, you have a strong vindictive streak. If you instinctively shrink back and get uncertain and start wondering “Oh, what did I do wrong?” you might be a bit of a wuss (unless there are good reasons to default to the assumption that you were wrong, like being a new driver).

  If you suspend judgement and immediately start looking around to actually figure out what happened, you are assuming nothing. This is the apparently rational, data-driven way to proceed. In contexts where winning matters (honking matches on the road aren’t among them), it is also a way to lose.

  The problem with the apparently rational response is that such situations are often fast-moving and ambiguous, and it is hard to tell who was in the wrong. Often there is shared blame as well as a role played by bad luck. If you don’t act immediately, your rational analysis will not matter. Inaction is loss.

  So vindictiveness is a default tendency to blame others when you suffer a loss, and reacting by trying to get even. Getting even is the key phrase here. Vindictiveness is a status-leveling move. If somebody hurts you, it doesn’t matter what the reasons and backstory are. If you don’t hurt them back, you’ve lost status points.

  So the intensity of an vindictive reaction is usually proportionate to the perceived status loss, not to the actual material loss in the situation. This is why for instance, even if they do the same damage, an open-handed slap across the face, a back-handed slap and a punch are very different moves in terms of status signals. The first is an attempt to lower the other’s status. The second is an attempt to assert your own. The third is a neutral move whose status significance depends on context.

  Beyond proportionality, to the extent possible, the reaction should be of the same kind. An eye for an eye. We’ll see the importance of this later.

  This is a tough idea for win-win types to accept: vindictive pushback is a very rational reaction. Though the highways and large anonymous cities are mostly full of strangers, vindictiveness makes a lot of sense in the context of older, more tribal cultures where everybody knew everybody. So even if there are no witnesses to a honk-and-honk-back type skirmish, you will likely interact with that person again, and he/she will likely report his/her version of the events to the rest of the group. You will likely do the same on your end.

  If you don’t push back, your opponent has a story to tell where your inaction can be read as acceptance of guilt, “Yeah, I yelled at him, and he had nothing to say. The jerk knew he was in the wrong.”

  Pushing back vindictively in a skirmish is the real-time equivalent of pleading “not guilty” in a courtroom. You create a raw story that’s harder for your opponent to spin in his favor. If you push back, the symmetry of the skirmish creates a record of facts that can be spun either way. If it comes to that, the he-said-she-said incident will be decided by a majority vote. Social proof of character and power, rather than material proof concerning the truth about the incident. This is where tribal dynamics around “honor” come from. This is why it is crucially important in tribal cultures to develop a reputation as someone who cannot be pushed around, someone not to be messed with.

  This also explains why (again, in tribal societies) it is rational to push back harder than you were pushed. You prefer a decisive outcome to the shoving/pushing/shouting contest for three reasons, especially if there are witnesses. First, you should visibly exact a penalty for the opponent starting an unjustified conflict. Second, the opponent knows personally not to mess with you again, out of real fear of hurt. And third, if he does spread his own version of the story, even if he convinces his friends that he was morally right, you actually get PR for your not-to-be-messed-with reputation, because you won the actual fight.

  In fact, you could make a stronger statement, based on the analogy to the “not guilty” plea:

  Even if you know you were wrong, if you ALSO know the other person cannot possibly know that, it pays to take offense and push back.

  Why?

  Because accepting blame without proof (i.e., needlessly admitting guilt) legitimizes the other person’s authority to act as judge, jury and executioner without proof. If the opponent were a noble and perfectly virtuous person, this wouldn’t be a bad thing. You could trust them to bear the honor with responsibility. But if the opponent is a flawed human with his/her own agenda, legitimizing their actions is the equivalent of creating a corrupt mini-court just to prosecute you. Everything you say can and will be used against you (and your entire clan), with extreme prejudice.

  The tribal world is full of such ambiguous, adversarial skirmishes. Being very generous, always giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, handing over information advantages regarding the material truth of a matter without a fight, and turning the other cheek without regard to the character of the opponent – all these civilized responses are recipes for getting killed very quickly. There is a reason prison cultures have the rule that you should beat up somebody on your first day.

  Social Memory and Vendettas

  When you cannot immediately respond to an attack (perhaps it was indirect, like somebody spray-painting insults on your door, or beating up an ally who couldn’t fight back), you have delayed responses. In tribal societies, this leads to long-running vendettas for two reasons: first, the natural tendency to push-back harder even in the real-time case, and second, another tendency that exaggerates it: a sort of social compound interest. The insult festers and grows in magnitude with every moment, and every telling of the story.

  This isn’t just a subjective sense of growing resentment. The status loss results in an ongoing series of real transactional losses until you correct it, since it will put you at a disadvantage in other transactions, with others who have heard the story.

  A vendetta is not a revenge. There isn’t a whole lot of deliberation, planning or subterfuge. In fact those tend to make for ineffective vendettas, because the point of every move and counter-move in a vendetta is to demonstrate raw power and making a “not guilty” case in the court of public opinion. The point is not to demonstrate intelligence. In fact, it pays to make your vendetta move as visibly close to the original as possible. If they killed one of your sons, you kill one (or two) of their sons. Complicating the story with clever moves makes it much harder to read socially, and third parties are left feeling uncertain about what is going on. You want it to be completely obvious that you were responsible for the counter-move, and what motivated it. The symmetry in the stories cancels out everything except the raw status accounting.

  Vendettas though, are inherently unstable, because of the ambiguity of the compound interest process and th
e coarseness of real-world options. If they killed one of your sons, and you suffered the compounded effects of status loss for six months, you can only kill one of his sons or two of his sons. If the mysterious calculus of tribal justice leads to the implicit public consensus that you are owed 1.2 sons, there is no way to respond with a move that cancels out the original move. You either underreact or overreact. Worse, if the opponent does not have a son, and you do something like burning down his house or kidnapping a daughter, you’ve now created more ambiguity. The equation becomes more illegible over time, not less. The status market has inefficiencies.

  Vendettas therefore, naturally escalate, because in the short-term, it makes more sense to overreact and let the other person deal with the market inefficiency, than to underreact. (Technical note for the game theorists here, which the rest of you can safely ignore. You may be familiar with the idea in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma that the “Tit for Tat” is an evolutionary equilibrium. It works because in a perfect information, zero-ambiguity setting, it is actually possible to react in exact proportion to your opponent’s move. The real world, sadly, is not so clean.)

  There is only one way to resolve a vendetta, and that is to draw a dividing line and create a detente with occasional skirmishes to make sure everybody remembers the vendetta. Or one group moves away until old memories are forgotten.

  That brings us to revenge.

  Revenge

  The modern world is an uneasy mix of tribal and non-tribal dynamics. We don’t live out our whole lives in small communities where everybody knows everybody else. Group memories are weaker. Tribes form and disband more easily. We have a lot of interactions with strangers. The idea of “honor” evolves from being a life-or-death intrinsic measure of reputation to something that lives in medals, degrees and expensive cars. There are also many trusted externalized institutions, and many more conflicts can be adjudicated by truly disinterested third parties who don’t belong to either of the warring tribes (which in modern settings is no more than the friends and immediate families of the litigants in a courtroom).

  We call this evolved, non-tribal context “civilization.”

  Vindictiveness though is not a carefully planned context-sensitive behavior. It arises out of instinctive status computations under the assumption of a tribal context. The push-back-when-pushed way of setting goals, and the compound-interest calibration of required magnitude continue to drive goal setting. If civilization gets in the way (your tribe dissolves around you, the other person moves to another city and starts a new life...), you bring all your rational powers to bear to engineer a payback opportunity.

  The Count of Monte Cristo is of course, the best known of such revenge sagas. Edmond Dantes goes about systematically taking the lives of his opponents apart after he escapes from prison. Things have changed so much though that they don’t even recognize him until he reveals himself.

  This is of course, completely hollow, as Dantes himself realizes at the end. If there is no shared tribe around you, and no interested third parties comparing the two of you and making relative status calculations, the whole affair is mostly pointless. At best you’ll balance out some irrational internal status equation that even your opponent cannot parse (there is a hilarious reductio ad absurdum of this kind of story in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker series, where Arthur Dent unwittingly kills the same creature in multiple reincarnations).

  The other thing that can happen to vindictive instincts unleashed in a non-tribal context is that you can develop a sense of injury and resentment against large and faceless institutions rather than individuals. If you were deeply screwed over by some bureaucratic process, but it is obvious even to you that the hapless clerk you dealt with is not culpable, you end up wanting to push back at the institution.

  In the best case, this can lead to tough, assertive behavior when dealing with customer service centers over the phone.

  In the worst case, it can turn you into the Unabomber.

  Just how messed-up is revenge against institutions? About as messed up as revenge against wild animals. If your brother accidentally fall into the lion’s cage at the zoo and it eats him, you wanting to kill the lion is just plain silly. It was not playing status games with your brother. It was looking for lunch. Revenge against institutions is often equally silly. When they hurt you, it usually isn’t due to tribal status motives. Hence the wisdom in Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

  Of course, judges are real people too and the transition to institutionalized civilization can be tricky. There is a wonderful Hindi short story by Munshi Premchand, called God Lives in the Panch. The premise of the story is that one of the two parties in a vendetta gets appointed to the Panch, which is the tribal council of elders, just as the other party is about to go on trial in an unrelated matter. He starts to fear that his enemy will abuse his position to hurt him. As it happens, the newly-appointed councillor feels a sense of respect for the role the moment come over him as he assumes office, discovers a higher nature within himself, and delivers a fair verdict.

  So revenge is obviously a deeply messed-up expression of vindictiveness. It is hard to even call it “evil.” It is just plain insanity. A result of deeply messed-up thinking.

  But you cannot make the leap from that obvious point to the conclusion that vindictiveness (or even vendetta-seeking) are irrational. Our world is not fully civilized. Everything does not get adjudicated in courts run by judges who behave respectfully towards their offices. To the extent that an extended conflict is playing out in the same tribal context (such as a corporate department), where reputations matter, and to the extent that individual players are legible (i.e. you are not railing against a system to which you are imputing tribal motives), calibrated vindictive behavior is valuable.

  To put it in the context of the most familiar battleground for most of us, if you do not push back when pushed in the office, you will have people walking all over you. A nominal organizational peer attempting to assert authority over you by “delegating” work to you over email requires immediate pushback to establish the right status relationship. Possibly with a cc to the joint manager. And yes, this does create a problem for the manager to deal with. That’s his/her job: to civilize the essentially tribal interaction for the greater good.

  And yes, sometimes marketing and sales need to engage in a period of vendetta so they can deal with each other with the right level of mutual respect, instead of one organization walking all over the other. And yes, this does create a problem. It is a tough kind of inter-tribal warfare problem, and the CEO has to tread delicately so that an attempt at “civilizing” the interactions does not end up killing the tribal passions that also get real work done. It’s the sort of problem CEOs are paid to solve. And they are certainly paid enough, so we need not feel sorry for them.

  But to the extent that our world is not tribal, you do need a place to direct your vindictive instincts. There are only two real options: learn to forget, forgive and move on (probably to a different tribe), or go insane.

  Action

  On Petards

  When I first started collecting notes on Slightly Evil tactics, I noticed that a lot of very effective people had a favorite one: hoisting others up by their own petards.

  As I collected examples and pondered, I began to realize that this isn’t just another Slightly Evil tactic. It is popular for a reason: it is the grand-daddy of them all. Many other tactics can be derived from it.

  First things first. Petard is a French term for a small bomb used to blow up fortifications. Apparently, during medieval sieges, they were hoisted into strategic positions before being blown up, and the engineer lighting the fuse would sometimes get entangled in the ropes and get hoisted up along with the bomb, and blown up. Hence the phrase.

  In modern usage, the phrase is used to describe the tactic of using somebody’s own arguments against them. Like using somebody’s own momentum against them in ma
rtial arts, this is a very basic principle. Here’s a typical example you might encounter in the workplace.

  Alice: Let’s finalize this right now in this small group, before the all-hands meeting.

  Bob: I thought we believed in transparent, open processes. I cannot support back-room machinations. We should take this to the all-hands meeting.

  Alice: Fine.

  ... (a week passes)

  Bob: I need you to sign off on this purchase order.

  Alice: I think we should refer this to the committee.

  Bob: But we obviously need this widget for the project.

  Alice: I thought you were all about open and transparent processes?

  Why does it work? The answer is rather subtle.

  In the civilized parts of our world today, we normally don’t settle disputes with fists or yelling anymore. We pretend that everybody is reasonable, and therefore resort to reason, at least on the surface.

  Now reasoning is a mechanical process only for simplistic computer programs. For humans, it is a matter of pulling out favored patterns of argumentation from a playbook in memory. Our plays may have been actually thought through and appropriately deployed sometime in distant memory, but mostly, when we deploy a “reasoning” play, we’re engaging in a pure stimulus-response behavior. We vaguely recognize a situation, and trot out a favorite argument that we’ve used to “win” before, with some hasty adaptation. Often, our plays are learned via imitation, and have never been examined at all.

  The key here is the association with “winning.” In human social interaction, winning is rarely about the facts or the truth. It is usually about ending an interaction in a preferred status relationship (“I am better than you” or “I am worse than you”). Whether the preferred outcome is reinforcing the status quo or a establishing a new status pattern, winning or losing is defined in terms of status.