The altruistic act is oft misunderstood, as misunderstood as the self-regarding act. Most acts are arguably self-regarding, and it is important to bear in mind that if they seem, on quick inspection, to be for others, they may be ultimately be for the self. In fact I would go as far as to say that if you tease them out to the furthest point of their implications and their impact, they prove to be this way, and that is no bad thing. The act may be in response to another act, or part of a chain of events that lead to reward, even if that reward is as simple as creating good feeling on the part of the actor. To do to receive, or create, good feeling, bolstering self worth. For Kant (philosopher), reward means that these are not moral acts if they are done with a purpose that is to gain something for oneself. They are not moral acts if they are done because of human conditioning. or understood as part of duty, unless that duty is to the moral law (which his circular argument proposes). They are moral acts because they are the right thing to do, and could be viewed that way by independent observation. If, in doing them, you are acting for something other than the moral law, then they are indifferent. This identification and defining does not attempt to condone or excuse the bad type of selfishness we encounter and recognise, merely to identify the truth of the motivation behind the act. Selfishness then, like many human traits, stops being a purely value-negative indicator, and moves more fittingly onto a sliding scale with what we might name a reasonableness point, a socially or scientifically acceptable line in the sand laying somewhere between its extreme edges. Maybe we could make an XY diagram like in economics, where there are two intersecting lines, one where selfishness rises and another where social utility falls. This is not an unfamiliar way to look at things, consider a similar trait such as ego, where self love is a necessary part of the human psyche, but too much fondness for the self can become problematic, or consider cowardice, where a reasonable amount may be said to be self-preservation, but too much and one may never stand up for anything important.
Acts for others can be part of a religious mandate, warranted by the teachings of a speaker on behalf of the deity, and may have been codified in a text written long after a mythical person was proposed to have lived. They may be a simple plagiarism of the text of an earlier deity’s spokespersons. Understood this way they have no moral impact either, because they are duty. Not felt and understood as part of a personally arrived at set of rights and wrongs based on reasonableness, just rules to be followed because the follower wants the promise of the myth makers. If you feed the poor during the winter festival of Christmas at a salvation army soup kitchen, yet for the rest of the season you ignore the spikes placed under motorway overpasses to prevent the homeless from being dry, then you are acting under the direction of your clergy when they call, but you are unconcerned with what is right or wrong in the world. I personally would go as far as to say if you have ever voted for a right wing political party then you have revealed yourself to be already engaged in a dissonance between caring for self and for others, negating the possibility that you give a hoot other than for being seen to personally participate in putting the band-aid on the stab wound. I think the term for socially effective effort that is solely motivated toward self promotion of the created self, the one that likes likes, is virtue-signalling. It is my belief, I may be wrong, that no religiously motivated charity has ever worked toward preventing homelessness or poverty, they have merely made an opportunity for prominence out of the malady. This is not an argument against religion, I already have many of them on my blog, and I’m not sure that that would be useful at this point anyway since I’m going to make a point later about the social usefulness of false kindness and guilt driven charity.
Dawkins challenges the idea that any act is not selfish, stating that an action, even that of ultimate sacrifice, contains the purpose of the genes of the individual being able to continue, or possibly that which has already been produced by those genes, it’s children (replication), gaining an advantage or staying safe for now. Let’s imagine the scenario where a combatant throws himself on a grenade to save his fellow combatants, this action may be regarded as individual heroism, but the other soldiers, the ones prevented from harm, are not his genes. On closer inspection though, what could be the purpose of what the gene wants (in an abstract way, the gene has no will to want anything with, but evolution may have some sort of driving mechanisms that modify our behaviour that we are not aware of. Genes may turn out to be the subconscious of the subconscious)? Dawkins might propose (how bold of me) that, having already replicated itself, the act of heroism may be advantageous to the children of the actor, that their father was a hero, and that that fact may serve them in their future. Or it could be that a person acts for country because they have a stake in that country, they have left something that needs a future, or an assured continuance, their children, behind. Would a young single man with no family do the same, or would their efforts be more focussed on self preservation, cowardice to some, so that they could potentially go on to replicate before their demise? I know that I, having no children and no nephews or nieces, will not be leaving anything replicated behind (no continuing genetic material), hold a very different attitude toward the fate of humanity, or the planet, than somebody that has those family members. For instance, I find myself in total agreement with George Monbiot that we need to change our behaviour, but I no longer personally care about the environment because it will not effect me, I will be gone, I didn’t do the damage, I don’t feel any guilt about it, I can’t make any difference to it, so why expend the effort? I find myself much more concerned with the now, human emancipation within my lifetime, not the effects of landfills or fossil fuels centuries from now. But I am a semi-free man in a semi-free country (let’s not get into the details), so why do I care about those that aren’t? I wish to participate in the betterment of the lives of others because of how it affects me physically, financially, and emotionally, it is self regarding my concern and I admit it. Dawkins may be making an argument for selfishness on the surface, but his ultimate argument is that each successful selfish gene is the greater survivor, and better for the genetic pool in the long run for these ones to have been prominent, as this insures the success. Altruism is only an immortal possibility because of selfishness, and in the meantime a pleasant by-product of it.
Some people maybe think that they are people pleasers, that they act often for the good of others because they think they are nice people, I know a lot of people and I think this may be a self-deception. These folks will often describe themselves as such (and don’t people just love to narrate their own drama). When we act under the practical postulate that we have free will, without predetermination of a direct reward, our motivation is often differently expressed based on whom the act concerns. If we act to please those that hold some form of power over us we might do so to be noticed by power, or we may possess a concern that we wish not to have been noticed to have not acted. If we act unnecessarily to the betterment of others who have no need of it then we might falsely use the term kindness to describe our actions, but kindness is only kindness when it is ubiquitous, affect not effect. More ordinarily we might act based on circumstance, in the face of a perceived power over us, pleasing the masters of our domain, and often in the obvious absence of a personal relationship such as a friendship (where preference does not mean prejudice). The term for the act, with preference, prejudice, and motivated by personal gain, is sycophancy. Sycophancy is not a social act, it is by its nature competitive, it is the act to gain advantage by providing more of something to somebody that has the capacity to provide something in return. In this sense we could say that sycophancy has a useful purpose to the actor, but I will argue that it also has a negative effect on those that have not been the beneficiaries of it. It may seem like a nice and friendly act to let somebody out of a busy junction, but what of those behind you that you have held up to do so, have you not acted detrimentally towards them? This is the downside of any action when it favours one person over another, or is competitive, that in a competition where there is a winner, then by implication there must also be a loser, or losers. Much like Newton contended when concerning himself with the laws of the universe, all acts of man towards fellow man could be argued to contain an opposing force elsewhere.
Friendship doesn’t get off lightly either, it means that there is a justifiable prejudice, love is the same. These relationships are also focussed on personal gain. I enjoy the company of my friends, it is pleasant and useful to me in many ways to have them around, if it wasn’t then I wouldn’t have these friends. I love my partner because of how having her in my life makes me feel, and I must suppose it is the same for her too. The fact that we are important to each other is because of how we affect each other in physical and emotional ways. I’m very deliberate not to create duty from the idea of our partnership, or to let it creep in, as duty in a relationship is manipulative, creating things we must do because of the pressure of expectation. She doesn’t owe me anything, I don’t possess her, I don’t grant myself the illusion of the right to enable or restrict her, she is her own master. But I must admit to holding a rather selfish preference that she chooses to restrict herself, in terms of depth of commitment, to me and not someone else, that’s ultimately up to her. It would be foolish to think that we act to purely please another, and it may be a mistake to think that we act to please others at all. Some unions of persons (don’t want to say couples, that’s too limited), seem to form their relationships around the idea that they, by being in a relationship, gain powers over the other/s, but I would challenge that notion also. In a dominant-submissive style relationship, one that is entered into freely by both parties, the submissive is not a slave, they are giving up control to gain a feeling of safety and care, and remember that a relationship is not a contract with a fixed point at which it ends, free people can step out of it at any time. We all do this in some way if we are satisfied citizens of a country, or members of a collective, this is often referred to as the social contract. Seeding power can be a way of expressing power, in fact, to give power to somebody, in the absence of any type of coercion, is to indicate that you are free to do so in the first place, and that that power resides with you primarily. If you are not giving it freely then it is incumbered, subjugation of a sort, slavery, occupation. All relationships between people are a compromise, a form of bargaining, where we offer something to get something in return. I’ll grant you that, described in this way, it makes them look transactional, somewhat cold maybe. The man who wants nothing is the happiest one amongst us because he has what he needs and has no need of giving anything more or compromising. So true happiness, or what may be better described as contentment, is derived from the condition of being pleased and not having to work too hard to please, or to give too much for an unequal amount in return.
You still cannot get off the hook when it comes to kindness though, the sort of kindness that we might call consideration. Again I would make an argument here, it is my limited observation that people are considerate if, and only if, there is something to gain or something that might be lost otherwise. My neighbours are not considerate when it comes to the way they park, in fact all the people of my adopted home town will mostly choose to be an active inconvenience to other road users and pedestrians when they abandon their personal transport, choosing the plot for their vehicle based on a value judgement that is as self serving as it could be. Their path of least resistance, where their primary preference wins out over other considerations like how many people they might be hampering. People just normally act as if anyone else’s inconvenience is unimportant to them, but not as if they hadn’t considered it, they do know they are an inconvenience but don’t care. They will stop outside shops when nearby is a car park, on double yellows because they know we have no warden, across from junctions, on the road even if they have a driveway because it’s quicker to get away than to reverse. If we were to judge the parking habits of the inhabitants of this one small village in Wales, and use it as an indicator of human cooperativeness and consideration, we would be left with no choice but to conclude that there is not much to be hopeful for as this small facet of kindness goes. I admit that is a daft argument, but I choose to think that people are never cooperative nor considerate, or even kind, until there’s a carrot or a stick.
We make decisions for the macro world in a differing way than for the space around us, the micro. The macro matters until the micro is considered, this is why politicians are so often so flawed, expressing preferences that address their immediate concerns rather than being arrived at through rational consideration of others or everyone (which is their actual job). John Rawls proposes a beautiful solution, the veil of ignorance, in it he asks us to imagine the sort of rules we would enact if we were able to build society, but from the starting point that we would not know what position we would occupy in that society. In this way we would only create a prejudice, an inconvenience, if we were willing to live with it ourselves. When an MP votes on wind farm placements, it might enlighten us to ask if he/she has any interests in the energy sector, and how that will skew what they think to do. Because of rampant self interest it may be important to isolate the consequences and benefits of decisions in the macro world from those persons that make them, to make sure that farmers are not empowered to rule the ecological spaces, to detach taxation from business interests, to keep energy companies from having MPs moonlight as board members and advisors etc. Plato proposes this in the Republic, his system is one where wealth is detached from power, it’s very interesting and too hard to explain here, but the main point I am making is that 25 centuries ago a quite clever guy knew that the link between wealth and governance (power over many) would lead to corruption because we cannot escape our own best interests, we can only decide as a collective that it is a good idea to enact laws to prevent the circumstances where this very human instinct is left unrestrained.
When we act toward those that have no power we might think that we can’t be being sycophantic as there appears to be little or nothing to gain, so we may again falsely attribute kindness, but yet again we would have to caveat that with the realisation that, if not ubiquitous, it may be motivated by other factors. Factors such as guilt, which more drives donations to charity than kindness ever could, or simple self satisfaction, a contribution to the way we would like to feel about ourselves. Kindness, understood properly, would be preventing the circumstances whereby a person goes without, i.e. creating a world that doesn’t need charity, whereas charity is the condition whereby you first let someone go without, but you give them what you have gathered in excess of what you can use, your surplus, so that you don’t personally feel bad about their circumstances; so for your own good rather than for theirs, regardless of if they benefit from, or in any way appreciate it. That doesn’t mean that people could not be kind, just that societies are have a tendency to be unkind, and since societies are made from collections of people, given enough time they would become kind if people were built that way. Since they are not, then obviously people are not, a simple logic. Kindness is a mind-set, charity is merely a reaction. If you hold a door open for somebody and they walked through it without thanking you, would you get a little angry that they were not polite? If you kept doing this, and the same thing kept happening, no “thank you” spoken, would you continue to do it, does their lack of sending pleasure your way effect the validity of the act? If in fact it is an act of kindness, would it not continue to be so regardless of their lack of reaction? For Kant it would be moral and need no reaction at all if it were simply the right thing to do, but for the average person I fear they would stop.
So far I have taken aim at the notion that acts of kindness, charity, and politeness are anything but selfishness, I’ll now give some ground. Even if these acts are motivated the way I think they are, they have a societal usefulness to them. They sometimes produce reactions in people that may ease their suffering, their sadness, or their loneliness by some measure, and that is not a bad thing even if we could prove their illegitimate motivations. Yet if we recognise at all that beliefs have actions associated with them, and some of these actions are positive by nature, then we must also recognise that falsehoods believed may have dreadful consequences associated with them also, you just can’t get away from that bind. And so we find ourselves back at the point where the truth of things becomes important again. It could be argued that a delusion, bought into by both parties, serves to create good feeling, and can even create great art. To me that would be the enjoyment of gospel music in a church, maybe sung by a choir that contained Aretha Franklin, Dione Warwick et al, with Stevie Wonder playing the organ. Or it could be to gaze at the David by Michelangelo, or any of the art or architecture I saw in Florence that was religiously motivated. Separating the thing created from the motivations that created it is not that easy, but it is in some cases necessary, Hitler’s art may have been brilliant, it may not, but can it stand alone? The church may be a force for companionship and comfort, while also being the source of most of the hatred in the world for fellow humans, one facet may be good and true in isolation, but not enough to redeem the whole. But do convenient falsehoods give less comfort than solid truths, or the sort of satisfaction that wears off quickly? There is also the fact, pointed out by Sam Harris, that none of this necessitates the existence of a higher power, every biblical act of goodness, or the creation of beautiful objects, could have been done in the absence of religion, it just so happens that there were no non-religious people that we know of in those parts of history, and the churches and kings had all the wealth. So if acts of kindness have falsely motivated origins, do we then discard them as not at all useful to society? To do so would be to remove them and face the consequences of people being able to freely express their first preference in all things, and I imagine that would be more awful than believing in a falsehood. I’ll grant that the will of persons to be seen, falsely or otherwise, to be good actors, has a usefulness to society, but I’ll also say that that aspect is quite obviously self serving, so in-theme with what I am saying overall. The goal here is to say and see it like it is, not to destroy it.
Social force is the force that is understood by most people but not codified in law that acts to override the personal choices that may be in contradiction with the better interests of the masses, it does this by way of guilt and shame and the possibility of being excluded from society by the members of that society. Actual law is the force that is codified and overrides individual choices that may be against the better interests of the masses, it does this by using actual force and the threat of consequences such as incarceration. They both do the same thing, but by differing means, one is choice based, the other not. If one chooses to not obey the actual law then bad things will happen, things that we all agree are bad. If one chooses not to obey social forces then one can be rebellious, and there will only be consequences if one chooses to value them in the first place, for what punishment could there be to be banned from the pub if you do not socialise, play darts, participate in a pool league, or drink beer? This is the exact distinction between the idea that taxation is an imposed inconvenience, and giving to or working for charity is a worthwhile use of your efforts. Tax is a mandatory payment to the state to look after those in society that need help, charity is a voluntary method of giving what you don’t need to people that have to ask or beg you for it, and your participation is based on your guilt or your need to feel positive about yourself. You likely whine about the tax you pay and brag about the charity work you do, to me that is the wrong way round. The acts of government that are premised on the idea of a better society are moral acts that are necessary because of a distinct lack of human kindness, they make you act toward fellow man, they force us to contribute to a better society. If the state didn’t exist, and charity attempted to do this alone, we would be back in the times before the state had an eye to welfare, read a history book!
Another aspect hadn’t really occurred to me until a good friend read the draft of this, what of sycophancy directed downwardly from the empowered toward the seemingly powerless, or less powerful? We could identify where the act is from the position of master or leader or supervisor or king, toward the underling, enslaved, or employed recipient of it, and examine why that should occur. Isn’t it often the case that a sense of benevolence is cultivated? Mistaking this for kindness, we may come to believe that our boss actually acts for our own good, or the good of the team, but in reality this may also be a bargain. If we go back to the soldier scenario and imagine a field of operations, we might say that what we call leadership is in fact motivated by the will of the mooted leader to be more likely to personally survive the conflict, not an act toward the better situation or survival of soldiers, but an act that has a self serving ultimate outcome or reward to the actor built right into it, to carry on the gene. In ancient Rome the upper classes knew that their power was tenuous, they knew that the mob heavily outnumbered them, and that they had to give back a certain amount of their wealth so as not to be overrun. All through history the power of small groups of persons, be they monarchy, government, wealth takers, or clergy looks like it is top down, but in truth is based on a two way relationship between them and a greater body of people, ordinary citizens. Throughout history there have been mechanisms to ensure stability between these opposing forces who have different life needs/goals and motivations, the break down of that relationship would be revolution. Power at every level of every structure has been subject to this consideration, be it political power, corporate power, religious power, or the power of the product. In what reports itself to be a democracy the powerful repeatedly attempt to create more solidity to their power, and more legitimacy concerning their goals, by using obvious processes, one is to coerce the masses through media, another to coerce by financial means. What we mistake for benevolence then is better described as the base minimum reciprocation to the needs of the masses to prevent revolution and bolster existing structural inequality, and we could conclude that these measures would not exist if not proven necessities. looked at in a critical way is it any different to coerce people with bad media than it is to coerce them with armaments, if the same toxic relationship is the result? Mark Twain said that if voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it, what he meant was that the semblance of democracy was present but the effects were not, and I think he meant also that the only circumstances they, the powerful, will let us vote is if they already know how we will, and they know this because they made it so.
The pleaser’s target is normally a living thing, like a person, but in my case rescue cats (if I am honest they make me feel good about who I am) because I really don’t much like people or wish to please them. Let us say that a person in the group, tribe, collective, or workforce, is a self-described people pleaser, and let’s also assume there is a structure to the group. Let’s further contend that that structure, organic or otherwise, is easily identified and pyramidal (as structures of persons often tend to be). If we were to monitor the activity of any single person within the group who self-identifies as the aforementioned, we might test the validity of their contention by observing who it is they focus their efforts upon. A person who looks more to addressing the imagined needs of the boss than of persons occupying their own stratum, or beneath, could be said more correctly to be a sycophant than a people pleaser. Remember that people is also, as kindness, a ubiquitous term, it means everyone. Not that there aren’t arguably circumstances where a person may have acted so as to not deserve kindness, say for like a nurse that kills other people’s babies deliberately. Under some conditions we might reasonably say that the identified person has violated the moral law so much that they have negated their right to be treated with kindness or know pleasure. And, let us also consider that there are prejudices that we can understand, and some that we do not consciously. If the pretty young girl gets favour in the male dominated workplace then that happenstance is quite easily explained, yet if the most clearly identifiable natural leader is side-lined in favour of a nitwit we may have cause to look for a deeper motivation on the part of the power granter. If the same person had equal concern for the janitor as the principal, then we may say that they were a person who has the intention of kindness, and we might more correctly regard them as a better person, but that doesn’t mean they are a people pleaser, keep in mind the ubiquity clause. But the principal, as we have discussed, holds means, so the focus of real acts of consideration should more readily show up in the areas where they were most needed, toward the Janitor possibly. Apply this thinking to your own observations and rethink who maybe who are the real moral actors in your structure, you may be surprised. The self-identified people pleaser may in fact turn out to be a brown nose, a person of singular focus, who has identified those persons who it would most benefit them to please. It looks a bit different now?
I haven’t watched much of Downton Abbey, but I get the thematic. The staff, being from a background of lowly means and opportunity, serve the gentry, who expect, because of their power and wealth, to be served. The power exerted is not organic, it is as a result of the ownership of resources (the moral rights of that condition are for another essay!), and an identifiable emerging method that provides mutual benefit. The servant is paid to fulfil tasks that the aristocrat has no time for, the aristocrat pays to have those tasks done, the level of remuneration is dependent on the competition in the market for servants. This is, on paper, a rather pure relationship based on the exchange of labour for value, though a good reading of Marx might leave a lot of it in question. How often though does the aristocrat wield more power than they have purchased, and arrive at a point where they think that they are entitled to violate the agreement or contract? I’m not sure if DA explores this, but being a National Trust member and visiting the stately homes of many an aristo, I get the feeling the servant girls may have been too often the target of the gentry for purposes they hadn’t signed up to? We now call this what it is, an abuse of power, manipulation, exploitation, unwanted sexual attention. The recent media cases in the news show this isn’t actually confined to history yet. If I am employed as a tyre fitter, and the boss decides that he wants a cup of tea, and I am busy fitting tyres, is it justifiable for the boss to ask me to stop what I am employed to do, so as to do what I am not employed to do, so that he is pleased, and should I have the desire to please him/her in the first place, if I am in fact rather good at fitting tyres? Is it reasonable to refuse, hoping that I am not acted against in a prejudicial way for not going along? Does the boss, because of their position, have an expectation that they should be pleased by the employee in acts other than what the contract states, and does it mean anything at all if the tyre fitter is a thoroughly unhelpful person in any aspect other than in what they are employed to do? These externalities may mean something if we codify them into the contract by setting them as values, then their remit must be fulfilled by the employee that signs up to them. Let’s say the advert for the job says “must be a team player”, what does that actually mean, is it that they could be asked anything of, or is it vague enough to mean that anything the boss asks, or the co-worker needs help with, then becomes a reasonable expectation? Where then do we draw the line, what becomes permissible and what does not?
In an employment situation the sycophant could be said to be acting against the better interests of their co-workers, the method of arriving at a detrimental outcome is to go over and above what they are actually employed, or expected, to do. This fosters the idea, in the mind of the employer or boss, that each employee should give of themselves the amount that the sycophant is contributing, a false comparison follows. Let’s say that our previously identified person, we will call him Mr Brown, is employed between the hours of 09:00 and 17:00, and has two breaks of 30 minutes, but choses to come in at 08:30 and stay to 17:30 most days, and often takes lunch at his desk. His reason for doing so is so that he can get his emails read before the phone starts ringing, and afterwards. Let’s say that Mr Brown is voluntarily a keyholder, voluntarily a first aider, voluntarily does the mail run to the post office after work, organises the xmas party and plays santa, and voluntarily attends work functions and recruitment drives in their own time. Let’s also say that you don’t do any of this, you start at 09:00 and leave at 17:00 on the mark, and you are adequate at your job. What is the result of this situation, that you are equally as well thought of as Mr Brown? Or let’s say Mr Brown answers emails on the weekends, evenings, and even on days off, what happens to the perspective concerning you if you don’t do this also, do you start to look like you are deliberately making yourself unavailable, and is it reasonable that the boss starts to think of you that way? We often hear from the IT department that you can access your emails on your own mobile device, giving you greater work flexibility, but is it so? Is that extra availability in any way serving you when you have a non personal device available within your contracted hours that you can use to get your correspondences? Is it not the case that your reading your emails in your own time is also and always an act of volunteerism? What happens to the expectations of the boss when they can contact Mr Brown, get a response, and make him aware of a task outside of his normal working day? What way do they see Mr Brown in comparison to you? Would it matter that your productivity (unit in ratio to unit out, per contracted period) may be equal to, or even higher, than theirs, and should it matter if they seem more available, more willing? One worker can make a workplace into a nightmare for their co workers by taking on labours that are not theirs to take, working hours they are not paid for, and being too willing. I would say that the people pleaser may please nobody but themselves and maybe the boss, and I would understand if their co-workers might come to actively resent them. Is it not entirely reasonable to say to the boss “I didn’t read that email, or start that task at the weekend, because you haven’t purchased that time from me”?
I have arrived at this point because I have been observing this false assessment for decades. My previous employers, usually extremely well remunerated individuals, had need for no special attention, though they often got it. They would not have known well the employee that showed that concern for them, but the employee would falsely assume an intimacy between the two of them, often knowing their wife or child’s name, or what their interests are, maybe what their political persuasions lean toward. This knowledge might prove to be useful, if you wished to please somebody it is helpful to know what rubs their buddha so that you could align. The mistake here is to think that it is your boss is the reason you have the job, more likely it is the years of skills development you have put in, and the demands of the marketplace, forming a combined force that necessitates that you have your employment. No employer ever, in the history of capitalism or before it, employed anyone for no good reason. The boss held already, within their reach, every resource they needed to cope through every problem that arose and grant mostly every wish they could have had. That never stopped some co-workers from exceeding the role that they had been paid to do and attempting to create avenues for their own succession by trying to fulfil needs they imagined their bosses to have. The reason is to please the boss, the motivation is to be noticed, the desired outcome is to be thought well of when prizes are given out; these prizes often taking the form of things you cannot buy groceries with, or lodge at the bank. Pieces of paper that recognise them, the employee, for what they are, valuable to the employer in some way that is not remunerable via money; whereas wages should be the true recompense for the time, intellect, and labour purchased from you. This individual, as we have said, will describe themselves as a people-pleaser in an attempt to feel good about the acts they carry out that are quite definitely focussed on the prominence of themselves, and likely to lead to themselves being exploited (the goal for working hard being more normally to be given more to do for the same wage, not to be remunerated better, that reward is negotiated). In doing so they reveal what I think is often the case with the majority of persons, that they are involved in a delusional relationship between what they are, and what they wish to be. What we are is revealed in what we do when we have autonomy, what we come to think or believe we are is the result of how we would like to be seen by others, a façade. I have written about this before in a piece I called The Others Confusion Effect (available on my blog), where I explore how I think a person creates the person they wish to be in a digital sense (social media), then quite problematically fails to live up to it. But that is just a modern version of this problem, I suspect there has always been those that have played the role of benevolent power user while being in no way actually benevolent. There is one caveat to all this though, they may create the situation where they would be picked to be the remaining person in the case of a redundancy pool, in fact they may actually avoid being in it in the first place by being recategorized enough before the pool is drawn, so as to be in no position to be included, and in this sense there may be a purpose to their efforts.
Successful people do not speak truth to power because that is dangerous, they instead guess at what it may be most pleasing to hear for the individual that holds power, they deliberately misinform those above them so that they do not appear to be the bearers of inconvenient truths. This results in a serious of bad decisions emanating from the upper tiers of the structure, most often based on spurious knowledge. Who can blame them, the bosses I mean? Just as we have said that the media is the mechanism whereby the ordinary person is misinformed, the sycophant is the method by way of achieving the same thing for the power base of the structure. Consultants are experts at playing this game, they are the pleasure givers and the ego boosters of the powerful, like courtiers and jesters they act for their own position, often against the best interests of the structure. They accept that their survival, their continued revenue, is premised on being the most pleasing and not the most convincing speaker. In this way the powerful may come to value feeling good, assured, much more than being correct, knowledgeable, or well informed. This is not limited to the world of business, it effects all power, how often do we see a pop star or sportsperson start to believe their own bullshit and act accordingly, isn’t this the effect of being surrounded by courtiers also? As an employee it is often easy to identify where a workplace succeeds in spite of the direction of management and not as a result of it, I’ve often heard the management of a structure described as a “puzzle palace” because they seem to know so little about what goes on on the shop floor, and this can only be as a result of bad information rather than bad intention. The utility of reacting to sycophancy with prizes and favour is itself self-defeating, if we assume that each person that has a role in a structure has a certain amount of usefulness in that role, and then we create opportunities within the structure for mobility and greater revenue (promotion), would we not then be more likely to fall foul of the Peter Principle, where persons are over favoured and over promoted until the point where they were clearly inept, making them useless to the structure and useless to the persons who put them there? There must surely be a difference between asking if that person deserves that more lofty position, and asking is that person the best fit for it? I have known dreadful supervisors and managers that may have been great team workers, and mediocre team workers that would have made great supervisors, and so have you.
The owners or bosses of a company have a motivation to succeed by employing the least amount of means to achieve the maximal output. For this they have labours that are necessary and they must allocate resources to those labours to effect the desired outcomes. While it remains true that each employee also has a vested interest toward the success of the company they work for, it also remain true that they are in fact an employee, not the owner, and as such they are not the person who has the responsibility to allocate resources to needs. They are paid to meet the remit or quota that their contract stipulates, everything else outside that contract is a voluntary act. Bosses love voluntary acts, that allows them to meet needs with lower resources, since, the act of volunteering in no way diminishes the expectation of the fulfilment of the contracted work. If you have 30 bins to fill an hour for 8 hours then you have 240 bins to fill in the working day, to volunteer to water all the plants in the offices is to take on additional labour at no extra remuneration, you will still be expected to fill 240 bins that day. This makes no sense to the employee, they have taken a job or negotiated a position for a set price, then decided to work harder than they believed they were worth, created an expectation that everyone else employed there can do this also, and created the perspective (for the boss) that they had had spare capacity in their day to be more productive, so beforehand they must have been being idle/lazy. We’ve all seen the situation where there was once 5 of you doing all the work, then 2 persons moved on, and quite stupidly the remaining 3 worked harder to fill the gap in output when it was not their gap to fill. The upshot was that the employer did not replace the two vacant positions because, from their new point of view there was no subsequent deficit. And what of those persons who will now not be employed to water the plants or empty the bins, have they also missed out because of volunteerism? In the event that there was labour to do the boss would have employed resources to do that labour, somebody would have been paid to do it if it was important to the company, but now it will not be seen in the same light, it will be an unimportant task.
How many times have we heard the term multi-skilled labour? This is more unskilled labour because a person who does many tasks will not be able to hold expertise in any of them, this makes them a less productive employee, and impacts the throughput of the company. Unskilled labour is of course less productive in each individual task than skilled labour. The paradoxical nature of the attitudes to labour shown by both the employer and the employee is unproductive overall, the opposite of what is hoped to be achieved. Demarcation, and the unions that protected it, looked on the surface to be a sort of stubbornness, and were often described as so, but in truth the protection of skilled labour may have been a very good thing for both the company, and the consumer. What if the tasks taken on become as important as the task that was employed for, watering plants becomes as important as answering the phone? If the firm now has to employ somebody else to make up the labour lost then does it replace the watering task or the phone task, and if it does replace the phone task has it now ended p paying someone £15 an hour to do a £9 and hour job while paying another £15 and hour to get someone to fill in their deficit? That might seem ridiculous, but it happens. I worked in a college that got rid of the admins, then set the admin tasks to the tutors who then couldn’t teach as many hours, so they had to hire more teachers to fill those hours, and then they were paying £20 an hour for admin work that used to cost £10 an hour. We must keep in mind certain perspectives, that employers always believe that their workforce has spare capacity, that they are lazy, that there are replaceable, that they are a drain to the business rather than the reason it flourishes. This is because those people who own and run companies often over-credit themselves for their success, believing that they had worked hard to be where they are. James O’Brian recently used a wonderful term for how some of those persons born into privilege like to think of themselves, “they were born three nil up, yet think they scored a hat-trick”. An oft found delusion for those that have benefited from original circumstance, luck, political movement, school ties, or the hard work of others.
I’ve focussed on the workplace, but what of the social setting? Our Mr Brown may be the loudest voice at the party, or the most attentive to the persons in the collective. He may fuss around making sure that everyone has a topped up glass and a sweet treat, and these things may seem like they are important to him in the sense that he appears to hold concern for the happiness of other persons. Why would this be a bad thing? Well maybe it isn’t, but I would still contend that this is selfish in that it is the garnering of a perspective in the minds of those present that is the important factor to Mr Brown, he wishes to be seen to be concerned, the act of concern and attentiveness has purpose. We could all reasonably expect the host to be attentive yes, but when Mr Brown overdoes it, exceeds the tipping point, he is being selfish if you follow our current logic…. At this point I may have convinced you that all acts are ultimately acts of selfishness, and I hope that hasn’t made you feel too deflated, or maybe you still disagree, and good on you, but let’s continue anyway… I believe that there are two circumstances where a person will be an overly enthused people pleaser, the first is where they have something to gain that is of high value to them, like getting to have that sex with that particular person, the second is when they have a psychological need to receive a constant stream of reward that has a value that fades quickly, physically or emotionally, because they have a low primary baseline of self worth that constantly needs propped up by the acts of reward that come from persons who validate, but do not truly value, them. The first is understandable, the second is problematic. Low self worth is not a problem that can be solved by false sentiment, it is a malady that is addressed by working to not need the external validation or favour of others. Nobody can give you self worth, it is an introspected value, and, if you are strong enough emotionally and psychologically, nobody can remove your self worth. How you come to believe of yourself is likely a result of earlier circumstances or because of your parents, if they instilled in you a deep need for validation, if they overprotected you, if they seemed not to care in the way a parent should have, if they made your decisions for you at pivotal times, if they were cruel, if you felt abandoned by them, etc etc etc, then you may have grown up deficient in some areas of your psyche where you evaluate yourself. I’m not saying that each individual should be complete, we all have baggage yes, but the approach to fixing the self comes from inside the self, it is not a provided set of objects such as attention, validation, pleasure given by others to you. Those are merely pleasant, they will not fix you.
The radically honest, moral actor (honesty is identified as a moral imperative in the supporting literature that underpins most, if not all, societies, even very corrupt ones), is not likely welcome in a society of fakes. To express what you actually think is not helpful to the delusional, as in doing so you would not be going along with their delusion (the Emperor’s new clothes). And, if the majority is delusional, and you are the minority, then you are the object most likely to face criticism, which is paradoxical since falsehoods should be the focus of scrutiny if progress is to be made by the human animal, in societal terms at least. If we assume that there are, within the reach of the lowly group or tribe members, limits to the available resources, and we spread these resources out amongst those that may not have the means to provide for themselves everything that they may need to live a life of basic happiness, then the favouring of certain individuals at the top of the structure, by removing these resources from the bottom of the structure, so as to give to them more than they need, is an act that is not morally indifferent. Dawkins proposes that the rational we employ for cohesion is an attempt to go against the nature of the gene, though he also proposes that this is in line with the purpose of the gene, since by collective acts that make a society prosper, each person in that society has the opportunity to individually prosper, to live healthier, and to reproduce more successfully with a healthy continuation of their genes. So even socialism is a self regarding act by that token, and I welcome that if I hold both Dawkins to be correct (I’m a fan), and am a bit of a lefty (which I am).
To take a chair that a machine operator is using, or a hard hat that a labourer needs to be safe onsite, or to reallocate a heater used by a large team of workers in a cold room, or to utilise a space that many could benefit from, or to make less available the most useful equipment, and to make sure that all these considerations and conditions are applicable then exclusively to the least likely person to need them and the least amount of people that benefit from them, possibly even a single individual, is to act in a prejudicial way toward the least powerful for the sake of an imagined possibility of need on the part of the most powerful and the most influential. It can only be a result of sycophancy, and obviously serves only the goal of personal prominence. It is not an indicator of the nature of a person engaged in pleasing people, it in fact indicates the opposite, a willingness to remove from the less powerful, those objects that they most need, so as to provide them to those persons who least need them, is an act akin to a cruelty for purpose. Good thinking, when using the power you have within a structure, is also not entirely focussed on fairness, as fairness is most often expressed in relation to persons, though fairness does remain a consideration in many circumstances. It is about organisational rational, where you use your power to create the best outcome (optimality) for the structure, this may even be expressed in a statement that proposes to define the goal of the structure (though that mission statement very often does not bear scrutiny well). Now that may involve the happiness of the persons in the structure, and yes that may mean a certain amount of unfairness, but utility should be the main driving force in using structural power. Utility may be the best way to look at political power also.
Of course this is all moot if the people involved have unequal ability, or do actually need special consideration. If a person needs a piece of equipment so as to be able to fulfil their role then special consideration is merited, say like wheelchair ramps, a standing desk, or an orthopaedic chair. In those conditions it is wholly acceptable to provide them with what others do not get, but these are the human considerations that are not structural, so external to this argument. It is an obligation to provide the circumstances whereby people of difference can achieve the same outcome as people who are lucky enough not to need such considerations, not just in the avoidance of feeling bad by not giving it, or for the feeling or righteousness gained by doing it, but for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. There is a line to be drawn however, yet nobody quite knows where to draw it. In the circumstance that a person is not capable to be in a position, because of natural traits, is it morally correct to elevate them to that position by means of an intervention that creates a prejudice against all others so as they individually can achieve what others then cannot? In sports we judge people by their speed, their size, their strength, their hand-eye coordination etc, and in business we should really judge people by their skill, mastery, vision, confidence, and intellect. These are judgements made on what benefit they will be to us, as a viewer, as an employer. But, if we were to contend that it is not fair that some folks are born with better traits than others, should we then set about to change the game, or the business, so as to enable the participation of persons that would be incapable or lesser able? Is that not to create unfairness, for the purpose of fixing unfairness?
I would contend that the division between these considerations should be rights based, and in simple terms I will use some examples I have thought up. A person who is a wheelchair user trying to enter a building is faced with steps, a ramp is provided so that they can access the building. By providing the ramp absolutely nothing has been lost on the part of the persons who do not need the ramp. A person doing an exam has a need to have the text transcribed by another person so that they can sit it, or gets extra time because they have a condition, every other person doing the exam has no help because they do not need it, this scenario I would say is arguable because that person was unable to do the exam without help so how could they do the job that they might gain subsequently? A person who identifies as a non binary person wishes to use a loo that is not what would be defined by their genetic physicality, this person wishes to gain the right to something in the circumstance where no right has been removed from them (they can still go to the loo that has always been available to them), so in this case it is a created prejudice to make them have the advantage they wish when there was no real need for it, they just wanted to be treated as a special case.
Let’s consider the effects of sycophancy. We, I think, have already established what the falsely self-identified people pleaser is. What of the target of these actions, how do they change because of the sycophancy they experience, as the recipient? I would imagine that we have many examples of this already from the structures we have been in (workplaces, social settings etc), but off the top of my head while writing this I’ll have a go at some obvious ones; Lord Sugar thinks he is an expert on all things business because he has been treated as such (there are many more failed businessmen than there are successful ones, they did the same thing but just weren’t fortunate), footballers being treated as expert tacticians because they had well-coordinated feet in their 20s, politicians being treated as experts on economic matters even though they may have studied as journalists or lawyers, pop artists and actors dying of medications they should not have been prescribed because they feel that they feel pain more than the ordinary person (a couple of Ibuprofen is not good enough for Prince or Jackson or Houston or Ledger), public figures speaking on subjects they have neither researched nor studied formally simply because they have established a forum by some other means (Eric Clapton is a great guitar player, but he’s not a scientist), commercial farmers being the loudest voices on ecology (farming has destroyed the ecology, felled the trees, killed the wildlife, saturated the livestock with pharmaceuticals, fed the livestock with products they would not eat in the wild, and polluted the rivers with fertilizers), businessmen advising those that manipulate the tax system (businessmen who live abroad to avoid taxation), businessmen influencing the social world and local governance, worlds that their wealth allows them to be oblivious to – the list of persons who have been fooled into believing, and then assuming in great confidence, their own expertise, without even considering that they may actually be the opposite, in subjects that they would be easily outmatched on if in the company of academics, trained experts, and autodidacts (those that reach understanding by self-teaching outside of formal academia or training) is endless.
This sycophantic process changes people, to be treated as special is to gain the perspective that one is special and to cultivate an undeserved confidence in matters unstudied and only lightly observed. If everyone laughs you may start to think you are funny, but what if they laughed just because you’re the boss? If people listen when you talk, is it because you have made statements of truth and usefulness that have a utility that others can recognise, or is it because you sign the paycheques and the people who are listening have mortgages to pay? If you employ people and they are courteous and attentive towards you, would they be so if you weren’t paying them? In short, how do you know who you are if the way people are treating you is skewed by the financial relationship you have with them? At this point I’m going to use myself as an example, and I’ll make a few quite bold statements about myself that I hold great confidence in, but given what I have said up until this point I may be completely wrong, but here it is anyways (we’ll get to the why of this in a mo)…
I really don’t like people (I like a few), and most folks really don’t like me – I’m ok with this, so I have no natural inclination to please, I do so for reward, and I recognise that in myself.
I am a moral actor, I treat all people the same, fairly I believe, until they give me a reason not to.
I make assumptions about people based on how they act when they have autonomy, not on how they describe themselves or act when directed by force.
I assume everyone is wrong in judging themselves, I include myself in that.
I believe that I have never gotten anywhere in life as the result of sycophancy, and because of a lack of ability to be sycophantic I have never gotten anywhere in life (in a work sense).
I believe that everything is open to scrutiny/argument, including me.
If I had power I’d struggle to hold on to a sense of self, just like everyone would, but I’d at least try.
I assume all news, and teaching contains the motivations of those that own the medium it arrives on.
I believe that primary school teachers are the worst of us, because they create conformity, destroy creativity, and fill curious minds with cannons rather than knowledge; they should teach people how to think, not what to think.
I believe in kindness as affect not effect, a mind-set rather than a learned behaviour. The terms “Please” and “Thank You”, or what we might describe acts of politeness, have no real meaning if they are autonomic (a result of conditioning).
It is not true that it is necessary to change as a result of how you are treated, but it is tempting to be bitter if you have been treated badly or to become egotistical if you seem to have all things going well. It is tempting to try to gain advantage over others by seeking to please the powerful, but this positions you as a chump, and it leads those that have power to think they have the right to treat you as a chump. I remember a certain person from earlier employment, and I’ve had a lot of jobs, named Ernie who stands out as an example of a man who became wealthy and powerful (to his employees), yet managed to remain what I would describe as a good, fair, and decent guy, but he didn’t have to be, he could have easily become an asshole. He did not seem to favour those that tried to favour him, instead opting for the brutal truth of the situation, asking a question and wanting the right answer rather than the pleasing one. I’ve been inspired by this man ever since working for him, though I did not know him well enough to assert with any great confidence that I am entirely correct in my estimation, but let’s say I’m at least inspired by the idea I have of how he was. I’ve also got an old friend who’s early childhood you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, yet against all odds he grew up to be a good family man. The boss does not have to give in to the temptation to be run around after, the boss can, and does, recognise false sentiment, the boss can spot where an employee is trying too hard to blow out the candles of their co-workers so as to make theirs seem brighter. Yet the temptation to reward the pleaser remains, and the pleaser remains, so the motivation to be pleased must overpower the rational mind. I can only conclude that this is a human flaw and it won’t be going away any time soon. My final point is this: you also don’t have to be either of these people, you can define yourself as anything you wish to be in others eyes and set out to become that bullshit (the social media way, the modern way), or… you can discover who you are and change it in reality by self-improving. Read books, get some therapy, demand of your friends that they argue honestly with you, test every theory you have about the world in the crucible of conversation with people who are better informed that you, learn about yourself by seeing what direction you go when you have the power to go anywhere, ask yourself are you helpful when you can be? Ask yourself if you are a moral actor and you do what is right because it is right, and no more? Discard the necessity or temptation of the validation of others (I write a blog that nobody reads but I don’t care, I write it for me), stop needing to be liked, accept and embrace your inner daemons as a part of who you are and don’t be embarrassed by, or ashamed of, your selfish desires…
Above the door to the Temple of Apollo was the maxim…
Know thyself
If I had such sign above my door it would read…
Be neither the kisser of ass, nor the possessor of the ass that is to be kissed
Paul S Wilson (with David J Watts)
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