The Saturday Exhale Episode 27: Who Serves Whom?

I ask them to put themselves in my shoes as a founder and entrepreneur, and consider why I’d hire them.

They usually state that they were hired because I needed an x/y/z title, and they had experience.  So I ask them from a more hypothetical, why would I hire anyone. And they answer something like “to make more money,” or “to do a job,” and so on. 

I let them know they’ve got it completely wrong. Entrepreneurs hire people for two key reasons:

1. They see an ability in the person that can be utilized to help them achieve their goals/mission/purpose, either for active progression, or necessary protection (i.e. accounting, attorneys, etc). 

2. They see an ability in the individual that will help make their lives easier/more enjoyable i.e., remove a stress of some kind.  

Even after explaining this, virtually none of those I questioned who didn’t immediately understand prior to the explanation gained any clarity. They simply seemed more confused. This brings me to an observation:

Society, within its enterprises such as corporations, is predicated upon symbiotic relationships. When others are tasked with helping an entrepreneur achieve their goals, the entrepreneur is obligated to help them achieve theirs. This is supposed to ripple down through the ranks. However, if along the way (including at the top) this first principle concept isn’t understood, collaborations cease to be as such. They lack the symbiotic nature required for function and progress, and drift into performative actions towards a poorly understood destination. 

We get employees that cosplay some role they hold a loose concept over, detached from any purpose. They fill their days with tasks that feel “in character,” without any comprehension on if they’re contributing towards forward movement and progress for the organization, individual, or collective they purport to serve. They define their competence based on the normative behaviors of departmental colleagues across their, and other industries, involved in the same roleplaying act, offended by any suggestion their actions are ill advised in specific situations, or perhaps all situations. 

We get employers and hiring managers involved in this same contrived behavior, seeking actors to fill predetermined roles with minimal awareness of what direction they’re heading. They look past human potential and how said potential could help them achieve their goals in favor of trusting a spread sheet with rigid requirements and expectations. In this act, every individual is coerced to become what the kids call an “NPC,” or non-player character.

Through this civilizational-scale mass delusion, we have forgotten who we are and what made us great. We’ve lost purpose and connection, and condemned many of the most prominent actions of our lives to be empty and transactional. We’ve allowed this false act to define us, choosing an illusion over the uncomfortable reality that there is nothing that makes us “us,” except our relationships with each other and other external tethers that allow continuity for our ever changing collection of “selves,” which I wrote about in the last newsletter. This transactionally driven cosplay ironically poisons said relationships, those that help construct who we are,  in the process—meaning we are effectively destroying our chance of becoming through an ill advised attempt to protect who we believe ourselves to be. Through this, we’ve allowed an illusion, that of finance and our economy, to dictate our very existence, trapping us within this melancholy existence, demanding we actively pretend the act is real, lest our very reality, and sense of self, disintegrate with the fading illusion. 

It’s a prison of our making, but it can be undone—one person at a time.

VG: I am your employee, and you didn’t come to me with this inquiry. If you did, I would probably answer something like, “You hired me to edit your books.” If I were to consider the second-order aspect of your question, which follows your reasons why entrepreneurs hire people at all, I’d say you see within me a knowledge base (and a disposition towards that knowledge, which is as critical as the knowledge itself) that aligns with your purpose and mission. We agree on enough things that you can pull ideas and feedback from me in a reliable, if almost mechanical manner. At the same time, we disagree on enough things that it makes for creative tension that is entertaining when spelled out. This is clear both in your newsletters and The Stone Wall, as well as in your upcoming book Manufacturing Minds.

With the way the corporate and financial system is structured, it certainly does appear that people know not what they do for a living (we have discussed this in previous newsletters when commenting on Mark Fischer’s notion of Market Stalinism, that capitalism functions as a kind of perpetual re-education camp), hence the performance. I have worried in the past, though less contemporarily, that my work is parasitical. “Do I provide a service?” I ask myself. Certainly, when I worked at a research institute, I could have a 40 hour week (I didn’t work more than that since I’m not a masochist) and feel that nothing got done. At least, in my current position with you, Alex, I feel like things get done. Books are produced and media that supplements them follows.

While what I do may or may not provide a service, the grass is always greener on the other side. Individuals who I meet in the trades or the medical sciences want to discuss Ancient Greek philosophy or conspiracy theories, and they are jealous, perhaps for good reason, that I can engage with such subject matters for a living. Meanwhile, I wish I had the skills to do my own plumbing, much less the skills to solve technical problems on a large scale, that tradesmen and medical professionals I feel have. At the same time to this, there are bums on the side of the road providing ostensibly no service who have not thought about these dynamics to a large extent at all, and this is in a way “fine” too. It’s fine in the sense that you will never absolutely remove parasitism for society, nor will you remove the phenomenon of people with reasonable jobs unsure of what they do or concerned that they are the parasites. 

AT: To be fair, I have only posed this question to my executives as a test, as well as to some of the staff, and supervisors of said staff, that initiated actions that, while sensible within their silo, were catastrophic to the totality of the overall objective. Since you do not fit this bill, you were never verbally put on the spot to think about this query. As you state above, your evolving role within my ambitious and ever-expanding intellectual project demonstrates you sufficiently understand the purpose of your role. In fact, you stated to me early on that you hoped to expand your efforts with my goals, as “my enemies are your enemies,” and you believe in what I am trying to accomplish. This brings me to another framing of the question on why we hire anyone as entrepreneurs, and why those hired should spend their lives working for said entrepreneurs. Instead, we can ask:

“What becomes possible because you’re here that wouldn’t otherwise be possible?”

And then, the potential partner joining the organization can be posed with the question:

“What becomes possible in your own life because you are here?”

The first question works to identify the value the potential addition brings to the collective, while the second helps cohere what value the collective may bring to said individual. Through this questioning, we can ascertain if a truly collaborative and reciprocal relationship is about to occur, or if said relationship will inevitably descend into performative actions that parasitically extract from human potential, and individual human existence. Consider the following:

If an employee cannot answer the first question, there is the potential they do not understand what their contribution to the organization will be, meaning the possibility they create value is tenuous at best. If they cannot answer, nor understand, the second question, they may lack an understanding of their own purpose. This limits the usefulness of the allegiance, and renders their participation in said allegiance, even if they bring value, volatile. They may abandon their post for a myriad of reasons, never truly understanding why they have joined in the first place. 

This holds true if leadership fails to comprehend both questions, as well. If neither the potential candidate nor the employer can comprehend or intelligibly respond to either question, the organization itself may have mutated into a complex and elaborate apparatus working for the sole purpose to perpetuate its own existence, meaning any societal value, or value to the collective inhabiting said institution, is no longer considered and as such likely inconsequential. This becomes more likely to be true the longer an organization exists without this necessary framing and coherence in its purpose.

Traditional wisdom suggests that people need to work harder; that we need better training, tighter specialization, and more rigid requirements streamlining “task completion” into a robotic manner. I believe that calling this “traditional wisdom” is a misnomer, as it is decidedly unwise. Instead, I contend that enormous improvements will occur through the restoration of the foundational principles in which human cooperation developed: the connection between intention, action, and consequence, all facilitated by the necessary human relationships envisioning all of it. 

We used to understand this concept, and in fact, we utilized this understanding in the pursuit of creating systems that maximize this dynamic. Along the way, we lost track of the original purpose, leading to the unfortunate elevation of the systems themselves above the original purpose for the creation of said systems. Through this transmutation in which we have transferred human purpose to organizational systems, we have elevated job titles above the human contribution said title is supposed to identify. Likewise, the hierarchies developed, bringing with them a rigidity that is counter to human cooperation, now outrank the collaboration said hierarchies were designed to enable. We see this in finance, as well, with the valuation being weighted greater than any productivity the organization actually enables, creating a culture in which pre-revenue operations existing within a hypothetical future gain greater attention, prominence, and in turn tangible valuation than businesses with proven track records of delivering tangible outcomes. 

How have we allowed this to occur? I believe the answer is relatively simple, albeit tragic and uncomfortable. As I discussed in my last Newsletter, 26, “When Death Enters The House,” I do not believe there is a static self. Rather, each of us is an almost infinite number of selves, baseline “scripts” or “codes” built off pattern recognition, which run in tandem with each other, surfacing based on external scenarios, and perpetually mutating due to our learning from new experiences, new environments, and our ever changing physiological states. Since there is no static or permanent “self,” in order to reconcile the existential query of “who am I” we require external tethers to act as bridges across our continuity. Our pets, our relationships, sometimes tragically our possessions, and almost certainly our job titles and roles within this grand act. 

Since our job title is a tether that connects our past, present, and hypothetical future to our momentary self, losing said identity, or having said identity challenged, challenges the very notion of who and what we are. It forces us into an existential reckoning we are often ill prepared for. So, we devote ourselves to the act, and in the process we have mistaken this representation for reality itself, such as the prioritization of our titles and the normative actions of those within our roles as the goal, rather than any human-conceived aspiration. Through this inversion of prioritization we lead ourselves to a scenario where we have subordinated reality in order to maintain the representation that was originally predicated to serve the future reality envisioned. 

This abstraction in which we define our self with our title and role leads to the expression of a new type of tribalism. We align with those we view as our “like,” our “in-group,” leading to out-group distrust and xenophobia within the same organizational ranks. Sales professionals clash with marketing professionals, while the scientists, engineers, regulatory, and quality professionals maintain close to zero concern of the roles of business generating actors. Operational team members likewise exist within their own silo, neither sufficiently concerned nor interested in the actions of other departments, despite their explicit duty requiring them to be. Contempt flows between departments, and cold wars are waged in order to seize more attention and power for each department, always at the expense of the others. In this manner, individuals can experience profound loyalty, belonging, moral conviction, and even a misguided sense of purpose, all the while providing little to no value to themselves, their organization, or society as a whole. In fact, through this division, individual actors, and collectively within their in-group, may convince themselves that only they are providing value, all the while contributing to collective harm. 

We have always, meaning collectively, required some sort of tribal identity as at least a partial substitution for personal identity. Human beings have developed increasingly sophisticated systems for representing cooperation, belonging, and value, but those representations have increasingly become disconnected from the biological and social needs that originally made cooperation advantageous, even necessary. Through these abstractions, and the subsequent loss of understanding, the psychological experience of meaningful participation and the reality of meaningful contribution have largely become separated. 

It’s time to reframe how we view cooperation, and remember where we came from. If a founder successfully establishes a genuinely symbiotic organization, one of the pieces of evidence of that success must be that employees eventually stop understanding themselves primarily as employees. Through meaningful cooperation, those enlisted in our mission must

begin to understand themselves as autonomous people voluntarily contributing their abilities to something they find worthwhile, in cooperation with other people doing the same. Perhaps their titles remain, as signs and signals remain necessary to avoid confusion, and of course their compensation remains—preferably in a capacity that reflects their true contribution to the organizational goals. Responsibilities remain, as well, but are reframed towards the purpose of cooperation and a common goal, allowing malleability in behavior. This is critical, as rigid job roles undertaken to mimic in-group norms are demonstrably harmful to human cooperation, this is a hill I will die on. 

Additionally, the psychological relationships formed within our collaborations must change entirely. We cannot seek to enlist others to our mission, while forcibly subjugating them to a precise and predefined role. This is modern slavery of the spirit, differing only from historical slavery by way of improved physical comforts. We must free ourselves, and those around us, from this institutionally crafted demand that we all exist as NPCs within someone else’s constructed reality. Instead, we must liberate those around us, support them in gaining agency and capacity, and work towards a future in which they’re consciously participating in the pursuit of a shared vision of a future reality.  

In order to achieve this, we must first help others understand the first principles of society, cooperation, and organization. This challenge is daunting, as our entire lives have led us to the reality where we’ve learned how to participate in a system without understanding that we have agency in determining what the system is for. We accept the institutional explanations for our systems, and the predetermined job roles requiring different actors, each with rigid expectations, without any comprehension or clarity on the human purpose behind the systems, the roles, or intended outcomes.

We need to immediately stop allowing our existence to be ruled by the tools and systems we developed to facilitate human agency.  When we forget the original purpose behind a tool or system, eventually said tools and systems replace said original purpose, inverting them in a manner that enslaves us to the very things we developed to free ourselves. This is the tragic irony, and it only ceases to be tragic, and begins to change, when we change as individuals—one of us in a position to do so at a time, until the new normative we create is one that serves our evolved purposes.

VG: I agree with this notion that the institutions were “set up” with a specific use case and, through ‘natural’ evolution and mission creep, became something else entirely. On their song “Tomorrow is Already Here,” Stereolab (namely Lætitia Sadier) sings, “Originally / The institutions were set up / To serve society / Now the roles have been reversed / And society / Serves the institutions.”

This is evident. I think it’s also true that institutions are simply made of people, so a kind of ‘drift’ based on the incentives set up, intentionally or not, of the institutions is inevitable. I further like this notion of yours that, in a sufficiently evolved entrepreneurial setting, your employees are doing the job they want to do, more or less autonomously, so far as it contributes to your mission or goal. I think this vision would be the ideal outcome of the entrepreneurial experiments of the 2010s, although these efforts determined that ping pong tables and bean bag chairs were fundamental to realizing this symbiosis, a symbiosis that I dare say is analogous to G.W.F. Hegel’s “master-slave dynamic” before this concept was co-opted by Karl Marx as a moral negative. The ping pong tables and bean bags weren’t “it”; they were just symbols of open-mindedness that the executive team wanted to project.

What should founders do to engender this kind of symbiotic relationship between them and their employees—such that organizationally they are analogous between the bidirectional dependence of Hegel’s “masters” and “slaves”? It certainly doesn’t appear to be wearing jeans to work. I think part of it involves commanding enough of a personality that people learn about themselves through you, as you remark we often learn about ourselves through others. This suggests to me a highly personalized, idiosyncratic element to successful business, not to mention social enterprises of any kind. The line between management, gossip, and therapy is extraordinarily thin, and a founder or a CEO has to manage more social relationships than a Mexican soap opera writer. This is why the higher you go in a company, the more meetings you have, the less you appear to “do.” What you are doing is keeping the mutually-beneficial symbiosis of your relationships intact.