Rao: Gervais Principle

Finally,

Sociopaths and Losers speak rarely to each other at all. One of the functions of the Clueless, recall, is to provide a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. But when they do talk, they actually speak an unadorned language you could call Straight Talk if it were worth naming. It is the ordinary (if rare) utilitarian language of the sane, with no ulterior motives flying around. The mean-what-you-say-and-say-what-you-mean stuff between two people in a fixed, asymmetric power relationship, who don't want or need to play real or fake power games. This is the unmarked black triangle edge in the diagram.

Fluent powertalk (among the sociopaths) is about the unsaid.

Ex. Wallace casually invites Jim to blow off the party for a while and shoot hoops in the backyard. Once outside, Wallace nonchalantly asks, "So what's up with Jan and Michael?" He is clearly fishing for information, having observed the bizarre couple dynamics at the party.

Jim replies, "I wouldn't know... (pregnant pause)... where to begin." (slight laugh)

David Wallace laughs in return. This is as eloquent as such a short fragment of Powertalk can get. Here are just some of the messages being communicated by the six words and the meaningful pause and laugh

The key here is that only Message 1 is comprehensible to the truly Clueless; this is what makes for plausible deniability. You cannot prove that the other messages were exchanged. Losers can partially understand, but not speak Powertalk. To them, Powertalk is a spectator sport.

Powertalk is that with every word uttered, the power equation between the two speakers shifts just a little. Sometimes both gain slightly, at the expense of some poor schmuck. Sometimes one yields ground to the other. Powertalk in other words, is a consequential language.

In Powertalk, you play with money (the currency is most often reality-information).

Had it been Michael in the above example, he would have been so gratified by the attention that he would have babbled out an incoherent and epic narrative without further prompting. Wallace would have taken the information and walked away without paying.

Maybe true maybe not.

If you've watched movies dedicated to the evil sorts of Sociopaths (like say Wall Street or Boiler Room) you might be under the impression that Sociopaths communicate by retreating to places where the Clueless and the Losers can't hear them. Out there on the golf course, or in private dining rooms in exclusive restaurants, you might think, they let their guard down and speak bluntly, with liberal cursing and openly cruel jokes about non-Sociopaths

You couldn't be more wrong. That sort of private candor is actually a type of aggressive Posturetalk prevalent among the Clueless in the more superficially macho (finance) or actually dangerous industries.

The bulk of Sociopath communication takes places out in the open, coded in Powertalk, right in the presence of non-Sociopaths

Both the Clueless and Losers are too self-absorbed to put in much work developing accurate and usable mental models of others.

True powertalk is about custom mental models and the real information of the world.

Interesting sub-point

The laws imply that in a group of ten people it is much easier, both for insiders and outsiders, to identify numbers 1 or 10 (alpha and omega) than it is to identify number 4 unambiguously. They also imply that alpha and omega are weakly attached to the group, while the obscure middle is stably attached

“Aocdernig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Vinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the Iterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt ting is taht the frsit and Isat Itteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey Itteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh?”

Status illegibility works a bit like this, but is stronger. It requires that the middle be jumbled up. There can be no correct rank ordering, but the group is still meaningfully coherent

when all you really know about the club is the range of status (lowest and highest). If you know you belong in the range ("that dude is cooler than me, but I am definitely cooler than that loser"), but have no idea whether your status is above or below the average, the uncertainty allows you to join.

Wow. Loser delusions obscure pervasive mediocrity. Loser delusions are maintained by groups. You scratch my delusion, I'll scratch yours. I'll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we'll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued by these different measures.

The delusion lies not in a false assessment of her artistic skills, but in the group choosing to evaluate her on the basis of art in the first place. Losers are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other

Interesting follow-on. Not sure if I agree.

Ryan (talking to the camera later): I don't want to be like, a "guy" here. You know? Like, Stanley is the crossword puzzle guy. And Angela has cats. I don't wanna have a thing, here. You know, I don't want to be, the "something" guy.

The "uniqueness" game is a game of mutual delusion. In the big games of life, those involving the Darwinian dimensions of sex, money or power, we don't get to define the rules. And it is only those games that can create social value.

Wild way of putting it

The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by. He has no intention of just getting by. He very quickly figures out — through experiments and fast failures — that the Loser game is not worth becoming good at. He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit.  He knows his under-performance is not sustainable, but he has no intention of becoming a lifetime-Loser employee anyway

Wild. Visualizes that Clueless are made as a buffer so you don’t have the natural master-slave dynamic and society can function.



Alternatively: A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

had me puzzled for a long time, because I was interpreting it in cultural terms: the kind of person you call a “loser.” While some may be losers in that sense too, they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain. They’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. Traded freedom for a paycheck in short. They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create. They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out. The good news is that Losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning Sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The Losers destined for cluelessness do not have a choice

Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will. They contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages,  where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are also the ones capable of equally impersonally exploiting a young idea for growth in the beginning, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies.

Losers have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.

So why is promoting over-performing Losers logical? The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the Loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse.  Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless Loser.

Losers mycan create diminishing-margins profitability, but not sustainable performance or growth.  You need a steady supply of Sociopaths for that, and you cannot waste time moving them slowly up the ranks, especially since the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed. The Sociopaths must be freed up as much as possible to actually run the business, with or without official titles.

This is why you end up floating onto a project and running things

You cannot enter a group group easily at a clear (Omega-1) position by aligning yourself under them because you are not useful as a safe calibration point (the group has already invested in making Kevin the omega), and you don’t raise the value of the group. You can't enter at #2 either. Only the alpha can legitimately confer the #2 title, and there is rarely a good reason for the alpha to do so unless he/she is planning to exit. For the alpha, keeping contenders guessing through unpredictable signs of favor is better

Sociopaths pay attention to what you have, and how well you bargain with it. Not who you are.

Interesting idea. happiness is entirely a social phenomenon, the best way to get happy is to get sociable. Non-social feelings that seem like happiness turn out, upon further examination, to be distinct emotions like contentment, equanimity or hedonistic pleasure.

Probably why Naval’s equanimity point hit so hard -> equanimity allows you to circumvent zero sum games

the qualities people think they look for may not be what they actually react to at the office, at dinner parties, or on the street. Therefore, answers to a sociologist's interview questions may not reflect real life. Office - ability to add value, ability to make things happen. Parties - sex appeal, interestingness, news/information. Street - physical power, money, attention of others in spite of discreteness

For sociopaths, HIWTYL (heads I win, tails you lose) is not about hacking reward/penalty structures after the fact. It is about proactively engineering systems and processes that reliably, predictably and stealthily generate HIWTYL outcomes. In other words, they look for ways to systematically claim paternity for successes, and orphan failures.

Ex. First you would cut a deal for a performance-linked bonus for a successful marketing campaign (but no penalty for failure of course).

Next, you would set up a committee and charter it to collect, vet and recommend ideas, perhaps with a promise of some nominal rewards, such as gift certificates, for successful ideas.

You would then drop hints and suggestions to create ideas, like the Golden Ticket scheme, that you personally favor.

And finally you would create the appropriate level of urgency in the work of the committee to achieve the risk-levels you want in the ideas produced.

If it works, you praise everybody generously, hand out a few gift certificates, keep your bonus to yourself, and move on. If it fails, you blame the people in charge of the work for failing to consider an "obvious" (with 20/20 hindsight) issue. The chair of such a committee would likely be Clueless, his appointment being a false honor - a case of being set up take a fall.

Standard blame sidestep. you blame poor systems and processes and mitigate the blame with "well, at least we learned something, and can improve our processes next time."

Systematic HIWTYL means bureaucracy, you hold the forms, you get people to do what they have to do to achieve the goals you set, then if something goes wrong you use the forms to cover your ass.

The key, when betraying the Clueless, is to get them to blame themselves. With Losers, the key is to get them to blame each other.

But by their very nature, emotions overweight social behavior over material substance. Having a $100 bill thrown contemptuously at you hurts. Being politely handed $10 feels good. The Loser mind, predictably, sees the first act as a slight and seeks revenge, and the second act as nice and seeks to repay it.

With Losers, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

Sociopaths encourage this mode of processing by framing their own contributions to betrayal situations as necessary and inevitable. They also carefully avoid contributing to the emotional texture of unfolding events, otherwise their roles might come under scrutiny by being included in the emotional computations.

This is the practical reason for the low-reactor affect of Sociopathy.

What the Clueless and Losers cannot process, the Sociopaths withdraw from the scene.

The Clueless can process the legible, so a legible world is presented to them (e.g, KPIs, afterlife calculus, retirement fantasy, fairness games).

Losers can process a world where emotional significance is the only kind of significance, so a world pregnant with emotional significance is created for them (us vs. them, you are special/important).

Which means that the power of Sociopaths derives from the things they remove from the scene: illegible, emotionally charged material realities that are potentially infinite in their complexity (e.g., intense financial negotiations are a place where the material cannot be separated from the emotional).

In other words, the raw material of power.

Sociopathy is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.

Everyone else wants to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe.

All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy.

So the process of ripping away masks of social reality and getting behind them ultimately turns into a routine skill for the Sociopath: game design. Once you do it a few times, it becomes second nature, a sort of basic power literacy. An understanding of the processes by which the fictions of social reality are constructed, and growing skill at wrangling those processes.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent that all social realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. Reality that does not revolve around the needs of humans

Weather the shock. This is reality shock the visceral experience of the fact that there is only one reality, with no special place for humans.

"All life is sex, and all sex is competition, and there are no rules to that game.

There is one person in charge of every office in America. That person is Charles Darwin”

To weather the shock is to suddenly awaken to the deep freedom the condition represents.

Daddy and Mommy are not here. Anything is possible, and I can get away with anything. I can make up any sort of bullshit and my younger siblings will buy it.

2 freedoms.

1. The Sociopath's complete creative freedom in scripting social realities for others. Cherished human values are merely his crayon box.

2. The Sociopath's complete freedom from accountability, in his exercise of the agency ceded to him by the Losers and Clueless, via their belief in the reality of social orders.

The key to solving arrested development is to be taught by the people below you. They are stronger than you in many areas and should be constantly teaching you.

If you are the student in the student-teacher relationship, and the teacher will not learn in any of the weak points you can help them, your development will be arrested if you don’t exit to a new relationship.

Control the clueless through 3 beliefs:

1. I am OK if Mommy applauds my performance (early childhood, Michael)

2. I am OK if I earn badges from teachers (pre-adolescence, Dwight)

3. I am OK if I can sit with the cool kids (adolescence, Andy)

Interesting

Michael is able to derail the conversation. His trademark joke, "That's what she said!" is an extreme example. It makes no sense in most contexts where he trots it out; its only purpose is to dissolve tension and displace threats. Either laughing with Michael or throwing up your hands in frustration is a victory for him. The only effective response is to calmly ignore his disruptive actions, wait for the reaction to die down, and continue the conversation in dominant mode, like Cesar Milan with his dogs. If you attempt to make sense of it, you've already lost. As Cesar Milan tells Mrs. Cartman, "Do not reason with it, do not argue with it, just dominate it."

For the Clueless, "The most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought." Why is lack of originality a clear indicator of cluelessness?

Here is why: delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michael's database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that don't require much present-reality data to retrieve.

Wow - part of the reason we recruit at top schools…

Michael is not quite as enamored of medals and certificates as Dwight because (as a lousy student) he never got very good at earning them, and could therefore not get seriously addicted to them.

Truth about the world

Michael has poorly developed peer-affiliation drives. He wants to be the center of attention, not one among many equals in a huddle of peers. He believes that specific people, rather than formal or informal groups, are cool or admirable (proxy parental figures, older siblings). If they are not cool or admirable, they must be made to view him as cool and admirable (younger siblings).

On desirous clubs: Michael would only want to belong if specific people, from whom he sought proxy-familial validation, belonged. Dwight would only want to belong if it involved a hierarchy of skilled superiors and formal tests of prowess or craftsmanship. Jim is invited to join, but being on the cusp of sociopathy, is unable to take it seriously.