Monday 6 August 2018

How come over-promoted mediocre middle managers are such vicious tyrants? - Because they are 'just following orders'

We live in an age when the over-promoted, mediocre middle manager rules most of the West: four quick examples are the Prime Minister of the UK, The Chancellor of Germany, The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But the phenomenon is general in all major institutions, organisations and corporations in all the major social systems: politics, government, the mass media, business, science, education, health, religion, law, the police, the military, the arts... you name it.

That such passive, petty, incompetent, unprincipled, ludicrous grey men and women rise to the top of a bureaucratic society ruled by committees and voting is no surprise; but their viciousness and tyranny is perhaps unexpected from individuals who lack the most basic personal qualities of a natural leader.

For instance, they are passive, reactive and have no long-term inner motivation - being slaves of expediency; they utterly lack personal courage and the capacity to dominate Men - being personally submissive, unimpressive, unadmirable, and unable to hold firm in the face of opposition; they have negative charisma; and they lack judgement - being unable to make a significant decision for themselves, but always sheltering behind 'implementing' the outcome of 'process'.


The answer lies in the simple fact of who is pulling the strings of the managerial puppet, whose is the hidden-hand thrust up inside and working the managerial puppet; who is the real power, who is giving the orders: in sum, the answer lies in the identity of those who promoted these mediocre, passive, instruction-implementing individuals to their present sham status.


What is a middle manager good at? A good middle manager is good at following instructions from his superiors... and that's it.

When we observe everywhere middle managers in leadership positions, and when - despite their submissiveness, passivity and mediocrity - they act with rigidity, aggression and spite in pursuit of the agenda of political correctness - what this tells us is that they are simply following the orders of their real Masters.

What it tells us is that the organisations, institutions and corporations that are headed-up by mediocre middle managers are actually being run by persons outside the organisation. This is why all modern groups are converging onto Leftist socio-political activity. They are all the tools of hidden puppet-masters. 

A middle manager fears his or her boss, more than anything; indeed it's the only thing he fears. Because it is the boss who put him where he is; and it is the boss who will take him out if disobeyed.  Thus the peculiar, indeed ridiculous, combination of feebleness and aggression, of submissiveness and inflexibility, of ingratiating niceness and venomous spitefulness.


We live in a world where the real power is hidden and where the official wielders of power are fakes; and the middle managerial takeover ought to be regarded as solid evidence of this fact. 


15 comments:

Chiu ChunLing said...

That this should be the outcome of our 'democratic' institutions speaks volumes about the lack of discernment of the people as a whole.

Bruce Charlton said...

@HRS - Thanks for your comments. I generally avoid topical references and links, especially from the mass media, since these are usually dishonest and always misleading.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CCL - You seem implicitly to be accepting the legitimacy of ideal democracy claims, as that voting systems can or should (when done properly) represent some kind of expression of a group mind. I don't accept this - indeed I think that something opposite often applies: that many democratic systems have a profoundly, dangerously, distorting effect on even the expression of a personal view. But the idea that these votes represent desires, that these quantified desires can be summed etc... well, its nonsense of an exceptionally deadly kind. Or, let's call it an unconscious assumption, passively absorbed - which then malignly shapes perception of reality.

Luther Burgsvik said...

These people sound like the grown-up version of the 'head girl' type that you have written about in the past. Given that the head girl is usually successful at school shouldnt it logically follow that the middle-managers should be successful, despite their numerous character flaws?

Bruce Charlton said...

@LB - This is the Head Girl article

https://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-head-girl-syndrome-opposite-of.html

The idea of the HG is that she is very good at nearly everything, but uncreative; therefore she is never a genius. It also emphasises that conscientiousness is the enemy of genius.

The modern mediocre middle managers are not very good at anything, except obeying the orders of their puppet masters. And they certainly aren't creative. They are (over-) promoted simply because they work hard to do whatever they're told.

Luther Burgsvik said...

Right, that's were I was mistaken then. I assumed that both the HG and the MM were simply doing what their superiors want them to do (albeit to differing standards) Thanks for the link and pointing out the differences between the two.

Chiu ChunLing said...

Hmmm...as it happens, I do think that discernment is a matter of desire, and that usually a lack of discernment stems from a lack of a desire to discern.

I don't feel that democracy can be legitimate except when the democracy is ideal in the sense of restricting the vote to those who make a real contribution to executing the outcome, and restricting the decisions to be decided by a vote to those which can in principle be sufficiently acceptable to the losers such that they would rather be consoled by winning other votes than overthrow the voting system over any one outcome. When 'democracy' encourages the participation of those who have no basic reason to be consulted, or allows outcomes that will tend to violent revolution, it is a matter of course that the results will be distorted away from any good outcome.

But ultimately I'm not inclined to really care why people lack discernment. Whether it is a matter of desire or of ability, the practical outcome is the same. A train doesn't care whether you jumped on the tracks or were pushed, after all.

Conscientiousness isn't so much an enemy of genius as a competitor with originality. Originality is necessary to real genius, but so is a degree of conscientiousness. But the point about social orientation is more apt, conformity does not imply conscientiousness and is clearly the enemy of originality.

Michael Dyer said...

I forgot who came up with it but there was a half serious theory of management that the real org chart consists of three groups in descending order

1)Sociopaths
2)Clueless
3)Losers

When you have a wicked system it rewards wicked behavior, all of which requires lies.

The loser (not necessarily a moral judgement) sees the truth but is powerless to fight it. He shouldn't be promoted because seeing the truth if he gets power he might try to change things. The clueless make good "sergeants" as it were because they can be duped into doing the bidding of the true "officer" class, the sociopath who has no issues with unethical manipulation.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CCL - These explain why voting is immoral

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=voting

@MD - There are sociopaths in positions of power, but not usually because they tend to be short-termist and impulsive. In D&D terms sociopaths are Chaotic Evil - and this prevents the pursuit of strategy by the demonic overlords; because everything tends to devolve into a free-for-all grab. At this stage, when a strategy is in place, the overlords want Lawful Evil minions - at least at the mid-level, those who will follow orders and be short-term self-sacrificing in pursuit of long-term evil.

Chiu ChunLing said...

Whether voting is evil depends on what is being voted on, and who is allowed to vote.

If you are having good people (including being honest enough to only vote because they have a natural right to give input into the outcome by virtue of their contribution) participate in making decisions which are not all evil, then voting can be good, or at least better than the alternatives.

If you allow evil people to vote, and eliminate all non-evil options, then the evil is baked into the outcome regardless of whether you use voting or some other decisive mechanism. It's true that participating in such a farce is evil, but the only non-participation that qualifies as such is active non-compliance with the outcome, not mere abstainance from voting.

All evil is relatively short-sighted and driven by impulse. In the real world there is no such thing as "Lawful Evil" people, only the impersonal evil of the implacable laws of the universe could be so termed, but the descriptor is ludicrously inadequate. The universe is not "Lawful", it is Law. Nor is it willfully "Evil", it is indifferent to questions of good and evil and would thus be neutral if not for the realization that such neutrality between good and evil is itself evil.

However much the overlords might want "Lawful Evil" minions, they are not going to get them because they don't exist and are impossible in principle.

Bruce Charlton said...

"Whether voting is evil depends on what is being voted on, and who is allowed to vote."

Well, no! My point is that voting is a morally illegitimate procedure; regardless of who votes - and the history of all voting systems shows this. Voting only *seems* to work when it is newly introduced, and people do not believe that voting - as such - provides the 'right' answer.

Think about it.

Chiu ChunLing said...

In many situations the alternative to voting is deciding the exact same questions (among the same set of persons) by resort to force. While voting doesn't ever ensure a more moral outcome, it doesn't always ensure a less moral one.

I can readily admit that voting is not magic that transforms what would otherwise be evil acts into moral ones. But I simply cannot accede to the assertion that it is never morally legitimate.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CCL - Only insofar as people have been socialised to regard the outcome of a vote as morally superior to any alternative; which is the exact evil I am talking-about.

Chiu ChunLing said...

No, it's not a matter only of socialization. In fact, when people have simply been socialized to accept voting as a morally superior process I'm always against it, simply because I regard people making decisions entirely on the basis of social conditioning as an evil in itself.

Thus I speak only of cases where the moral inferiority of the alternatives is not a matter of socialized consensus.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CCL - I would never say 'only' a matter of socialisation in that sense; my point is that reducing an issue to a proposition and taking a vote on it, and regarding the arithmetical result as being morally binding on all voters, is Not a thing that comes naturally to humans. Indeed, it would strike the naive human as a monstrous way to proceed - and that is, in fact, correct - it *is* monstrous.