The little Hitlers of the corporation
From Nick Cohen’s extended piece on Trump and lies and the people who believe his lies:
No one in the west has seen Trump’s kind of triumph in politics since the age of the dictators. But look around your workplace and perhaps you won’t be so surprised by their victories. If you are unlucky, you will see an authoritarian standing over you. The radical economist Chris Dillow once wrote that, while the fall of communism discredited the centrally planned economy, the centrally planned corporation, with the autocratic leader who tolerated no dissent, not only survived 1989, but blossomed.
Dillow is not alone in worrying about the harm the little Hitlers of the corporation might bring. Since the crash, economists have looked as a matter of urgency at how hierarchies encourage petty tyrants to brag their way to the top. They exhibit all the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder: a desire to dominate, overconfidence, a sense of entitlement, an inability to listen to others or allow others to speak and a passion for glory. If you want to know how they can win the votes of those around them, remember Fred Goodwin’s vainglorious decision to takeover ABN Amro. Perhaps the single worst decision in UK business history, whose consequences we are still paying for, was not opposed by a single member of the RBS board.
Narcissists in business are more likely to seek macho takeovers and less likely to engage in the hard work of innovating and creating profitable firms, the researchers found. They are more likely to cook the books to feed their cults of the personality and make, if not America, then themselves look great again. Academics from the University of California have asked the obvious question: why would rational companies let the fascism of the firm survive? Surely they ought to be protecting their businesses, as free market theory dictates, rather than allow dangerous and grasping men and women to risk their destruction.
They found what most of us instinctively know to be true: in the right circumstances, compulsive liars can create compulsive believers, as Trump has done. “Overconfident individuals attained status” because their peers believed the stories they told about themselves. It should not be a surprise that Donald Trump, Arron Banks and oligarchs backing the Russian and east European strongmen come from business. The age of the dictators never came to an end in the workplace.
We are all his Apprentices.
And the other reason they survive. In my workplace, we have an autocrat. Whenever anyone makes a move to stand up against him, the others all back away. Everyone is afraid that a single dissent will lose them their job, their career, their pension…and they’re probably right.
If people can’t stand together, than the dictator only has to deal with a lone dissenter or two, which is easy because you can paint them as weird, different, strange, fringe. They will become shunned by their own friends, even those who know they are speaking the truth, because self-preservation trumps the other instincts.
In other words, the system feeds on itself – you get up a feedback loop where the very existence of a dictator helps to promote and increase the favorable environment for a dictator.
Yes. Autocrats also rely on other petty autocrats to stay in power. I discovered to my regret that most organisations contain a hierarchy of petty Hitlers and their arse-licking followers and they’re often very well disguised. They’re the equivalent of the “block leaders” that the Nazis used to monitor the German population.
Any account of the difference between private enterprises and their vulnerability to being infected by narcissists and their followers and (e.g.) civil service/military/professional organizations and their corresponding vulnerability? (To the extent there is one.) They’re certainly hierarchical too, maybe even more so. I suppose that, if there is a better measure of merit for a position, false and flamboyant self-promotion would have much less of a role to play, and there may be less role for deception (the book-cooking, organizational flim-flam) to exercise in puffing up a reputation. I’m just not confident that that is it.