Organizational Man: Refined or Repressed?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal is the courageous, ancient Greco-Roman nobility, including the unashamed conquerors replete with self-confident will to power rather than shame at having vanquished formidable resistance. Rather than actually advocating that we return to the raping and pillaging that took place back then, Nietzsche wanted to depict modern, emaciated man as a contrast in order to turn the weakening of man around in Europe. Similar to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote his satirical novel, Babbit (1922) to showcase the utter vacuity of the middle-class businessman in America, Nietzsche laments “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal . . .”[1] By that he meant us: modern, enervated, and cultured incarnations of human nature relative to the full, untamed, and resilient lives of the ancient Greco-Roman conquerors. Having no knowledge of the lives that they lived in terms of full, unashamed and unconstrained will to power as will to living life with gusto, we scarcely realize the extent to which our societal institutions and vocational organizations box up our nature to that which is inoffensive and even polite even to competitors.

How very much our very nature has been contorted so as to fit within the modern straitjackets that we moderns ourselves have constructed. We have cut off our limbs and yet even as we still hold the knives, news of our deeds has not reached us, like light from a distant star has already happened but has not yet reached our planet. Nietzsche uses this imagery in explaining the death, or, more accurately, discrediting of the Abrahamic conception of God—Gott ist tot. Anticipating Freud, Nietzsche liked to remind us that we don’t really know ourselves as well as we think we do. In grizzled suits sitting in an office—something utterly unknown to the Roman conquerors!—are we not purblind when facing a mirror at “the repellent sight of the ill-constituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned?”[2] Who is aware of being poisoned when each dose is small and the course of weakening is of long duration? In fact, “the ‘tame man,’ the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man, has already learned to feel to feel himself as the goal and zenith, as the meaning of history, as ‘higher man.’”[3] Like arrogance on stilts during a flood, modern man speaks of progress while ignoring the weakening impact of creature comforts in sedating our will to power as will to experiencing the fullness of life into something like a will to comfort.

At this point in Genealogy, Nietzsche writes as only he has—vintage Nietzsche. “At this point I cannot suppress a sigh and a last hope. What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!”[4] Elsewhere in his writing, Nietzsche refers to the bad odor of the weak, voluntarily impotent creatures whose inner bird-of-prey nature has been replaced by spite and resentment of the strong under the subterfuge of polite society.

Modern man knows passive aggression all too well; university faculties specialize in it under the cover of calmness. To be not calm, but to shout at the betrayal of a friend—this we have almost lost. Stuffing feelings can diminish direct communication that is unashamedly honest. Even though direct, unfiltered communication of especially strong feelings is generally considered indecent in public, such communication clears the air by flushing toxic residue away so genuine human connection can finally exist or the combatants can separate cleanly and forget each other. This advice applies of course to romantic relationships, but also to co-workers in the workplace. How shocking it would be to Babbit to hear two workers shouting at each other in a workplace that has been designed to remove all but a pallid version of human nature in its fullness! Of course, the need for monetary compensation to cover rent, utilities, and food makes employees reasonably fearful of bringing their full human nature to work. My point is that the ubiquity of passive aggression in the workplace means that too much of our innate nature is repressed in the business world; perhaps two angry employees could take their argument outside, escaping the overly disinfected office space for a bit.

In an emotionally-fearful society of banal convenience, a person can be unaware of how “much one is able to endure: distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude. Fundamentally one can cope with everything else, born as one is to a subterranean life of struggle; one emerges again and again into the light, one experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things, like a bow that distress only serves to draw tauter.”[5] How different such an expression of human nature is than that which is permissible under the tight watch of security cameras. So much of our nature is proscribed by organizational policies—as if policies were laws and subcontracted security guard were police. In utter disgust at modern man having become “thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent,” Nietzsche yearns for even just a glimpse of a person “wholly achieved, happy, mighty, triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear! Of a man who justifies man, of a complementary and redeeming lucky hit on the part of man for the sake of which one may still believe in man!”[6] Nietzsche wanted to believe in our species but found a downward trajectory from strength to weakness—a “diminution and leveling.”[7] Nietzsche would likely claim that the hierarchies that exist in social/religious, business, and governmental organizations pale in comparison to natural hierarchies that enable a pathos of distance between the now-rare, strong breed that values and acts out ancient noble virtues such as courage and honesty and the now ubiquitous weak breed of timid, emotionally-vacuous organizational humanoids.

The modern woman who is attracted to the insipid corporate type sufficiently high on the corporate ladder has lost her way, Nietzsche would no doubt say, and is denying her primal nature; not so the woman who is instinctually attracted to a passionate, dominate male who lifts weights and is not ashamed to be vocal in overcoming resistance from a rival and even from her, and who wrestles or maybe even street-fights from time to time when provoked rather than calls on police to intercede, thus subcontracting his basic instincts. So distant the corporate man is from raw human instinct, and yet modern society counts business executives as powerful and of high standing in society. It is as if we all have been fooled into taking weakness for strength. Business ethicists lash out at business managers with “Thou Shalt Not!” as if the managers should be ashamed of the power that they wield, but this assumes that corporate power evinces Nietzschean strength as self-confident pride rather than timidity in overcoming obstacles. So very pallid is corporate speak, and yet how very many nonsupervisory, uneducated workers on the margins, such as at call centers, use the tone and lingo as a club as if from a position of strength rather than weakness. The weak who seek to dominate the strong—think of a call-center employee on the phone with a legitimately aggrieved customer—are not strong enough to master their most intractable instinct, Nietzsche claims, which is to feel the pleasure of power even by dominating if necessary. The strong need not dominate, for their self-confident power overflows. Confidence is attractive, whereas dominance, which Nietzsche theorizes manifests from weakness, is ugly.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 478.

2. Ibid., p. 479.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 479-80.
5. Ibid., p. 480.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Spirituality in the Workplace: Dealing with a Dysfunctional Culture

Mohan Vilas, a Hindu monk at Govardha Ecovillage, spoke at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025. He had gone from the world of financial derivatives to worshipping Krishna. Once he had fulfilled his “lower needs,” he looked for more. After obtaining a M.B.A. and while working in finance, he was hungry for knowledge beyond the world of business. So he studied ancient Vedic culture. His talk at the conference was on being an idealist surrounded by strategists. He addressed the question of whether the world allows individuals to practice virtue. Even when a person is not in a dysfunctional workplace or in a hostile society, the human mind struggles, Vilas said, to apply ethical virtues. Plato’s dictum that to know the good is enough do the good, and thus to be good, may be wildly optimistic, considering the instinctual force of urges in our nature to act immorally, even though other people are harmed as a result. It is even more difficult to get into a habit of doing good while “swimming upstream” in an ethically compromised workplace or an aggressive societal culture. An ethical Russian or Israeli soldier in the mid-2020s, for example, would have a lot of trouble refusing to bomb hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, and, moreover, invading another country and withholding food so to starve an occupied group. Such a soldier would be intolerable to both Putin and Netanyahu, respectively. Vilas’s question is the following: What happens when a person who is good is put into a selfish society? Must an ethical person finally inevitably exit a culture that rewards narrow selfishness, passive-aggression and deception?

The full essay is at "Spirituality in the Workplace."

Exposing Yale’s Sordid Side: “The Inner Ring” by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis aptly describes in one published lecture the nature of a very human game, which is really about how soft power, which is often buttressed by institutional position, works in any human organization. To use Nietzsche’s expression (which Lewis would have hardly appreciated), the dynamics of an inner ring is human, all too human, and thus hardly an extractible part of the human condition. Yet it is much more salient, and arguably even dysfunctional, in just some organizations, especially those that have an elite reputation such as Yale, whose essence, we shall investigate here, might be exclusion even within the university community, such that some vulnerable members are told they are not really members (but that their donations are welcome).

In my essay, “Yale’s Original Sin,” I describe Yale’s culture of inner-exclusion operating within the university, wherein some insiders are relegated by inner-insiders as outsiders. During my stay as an alumnus doing research for a book I was writing, I was astonished to read emails from non-academic employees in which they bluntly stated that I was not a “member of the Yale community” because I was an alum. Unfortunately, and quite tellingly, those explicit statements were just the tip of the iceberg. Much more common, in more sense than one ironically, were the intentional subtle hints given by some faculty, faculty-administrators, and even non-academic employees that I was not worth their time whether in replying to an email message or in conversation. This extended to the faculty culture being averse to allowing alumni (and other scholars, as a courtasy) to audit courses and to that of clerical employees not recognizing alumni in residence for a term as members of the Yale community. This self-serving, arrogant, and deeply mistaken attitude and belief applied in a counter-productive way to charging alumni in residence $4 more than students, faculty, and the non-academic employees themselves, for lunch at the university lunch hall known as Commons. A common mentality to be sure. 

In his lecture entitled, “The Inner Ring,” C. S. Lewis describes the ubiquitous phenomenon that he calls the inner ring of an organization. “I can assure you,” he tells his audience, “that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive . . . , you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.” In War and Peace, Tolstoy alludes to such an informal yet firmly hierarchical or concentric system: “(S)ide by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris.” The general is not royalty, and so he deferred to the prince even though the latter was of a lower rank. The general was thus an outsider in the immediate context of the prince’s conversation even though he is very much an insider among military brass.

We mere humans revile being relegated as outsiders; we very much want to be insiders. This is C. S. Lewis’ main point. “My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.” Specifically, he means here “the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” This desire and fear can be distinguished from the desire for personal gain and the fear of going homeless out of financial ruin. “And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected.” In other words, wanting to feel oneself as an insider and to avoid feeling like an outsider are desires that do not necessarily line up with, or reduce to, the desire for political or economic gain.

As with any desire, the desire to be an insider cannot be permanently satiated once achieved. C.S. Lewis wrote, “As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. . . . Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends.” Or perhaps a ring within that ring will emerge, and you will have a new impediment to feeling like an insider. Even if that is achieved, you would still suffer from the fear that you could become an outsider, for the grounds from relegating you are informal in this secondary system and thus secretive and hardly subject to the moral principle of fairness. C. S. Lewis goes so far as to declare, “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”

The combination of secrecy and informality in an inner ring, or circle, renders unfairness from personal like and dislike especially likely. An official hierarchy, in contrast, operates ideally on the basic of merit, with avenues for appeals. Money in the form of bribes and political power can less ideally come into play in formal hierarchies. So too can friendships. But these more informal means of promotion and demotion are more the currency of inclusion and exclusion in informal hierarchies, such as C. S. Lewis describes. To be rejected for lack of merit is, I submit, easier to take than by unfair means or reasons. The latter is evinced when the decision-makers are hidden from view and thus appeals to them cannot be made. This passage from C. S. Lewis describes the subtle mechanics of an inner ring very well:

“You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. . . . It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. . . . There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name.”

The subtle messages in the rude behavior from Yale faculty, academic administrators, non-academic employees, and even some students that I describe above and in “Yale’s Original Sin” are the means by which ill-favored Yalies gradually discover that they have already been rendered outsiders. That the realization of having been excluded can occur gradually opens up the outsider to embarrassment, for the insiders relish watching as if the person with a blindfold on is stumbling over furniture. The behavior could be regarded superficially as mere rudeness, so it can be difficult if one is on the receiving end to detect that one is being handed one’s hat on the way out. A person may just stand there, holding one’s hat, wondering why a person just felt the need to deliver the hat even if the other person intended to send the message, you are no longer welcome here but I can’t kick you out of the building. This is precisely the message that people in Yale’s inner rings (and there are more than one) want to send. Bottom line: such people refuse to tolerate even the very presence of a person they don’t like. This includes a person who holds a contrary opinion. The motive, in other words, goes beyond wanting to make sophomoric statements of superiority; the intention is also meant to convey to others that they are outsiders. Whereas gorillas establish superiority and push certain individuals out by physical means, our species is not so forthright and honest (or brave).

In the movie Contact (1997), Haddon, a millionaire, says to Ellie, a young astrophysicist who wants to be chosen to go on a space mission, “The powers that be have been very busy lately, falling over themselves to position themselves for the game of the millennium. Maybe I can help deal you back in.” By this he is referring to being dealt cards in a card game. Ellie takes the hint and replies, “I didn’t realize that I was out,” to which Haddon says, “Maybe not out, but certainly being handed your hat.”  Ellie has no idea that even her boss, in jockeying for position to be chosen as the astronaut, has been working to see to it that Ellie is eliminated from consideration by the inner ring of which the boss is an insider but Ellie is not. She has no access to that circle of power-elites, so she doesn’t even know that she needs to promote or defend herself, or even appeal. From outside the inner ring, its workings are shrouded with mystery, for outsiders are not privy to the phone calls and other conversations that take place within. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name.” Ellie’s boss gets pleasure from dealing her out, especially because this is being done without her knowledge. C. S. Lewis wrote, “It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.”

Interesting, C. S. Lewis must have known that the question of whether the phenomenon of the inner ring, even manifesting in a seminary, is evil was being asked. If, as I strongly suspect, exclusionary comments and actions are deliberately done at least in part to emotionally hurt other people, even just out of dislike, the question of whether such insiders are de facto evil is relevant. C. S Lewis focuses his answer at the level of the ring, but with implications for its inhabitants.  “I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together.” But this is just one side of the coin, or ring. Lewis admits that the “genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.” These last two sentences may aptly describe the dark side of Yale. This is not to say that the essence of Yale is exclusively exclusion, for that would imply that no other source of worth, in this case, academic, exists in the organization. Even so, exclusion is an excessive, or hypertrophic instinctual urge in many people there, especially in those who work there.

Lewis claims that the anguish in being reckoned as an outsider is a strong human motivating force in wanting to be counted as insiders. But if a group, or its inner ring, is filled with rude, petty elitists, wouldn't a normal person feel some solace and even self-esteem in being an outsider? I suppose whether this is one's own choice or that of the "members" of a ring makes a difference here. Nevertheless, Nietzsche wrote that the healthy should not visit the sick in hospital lest the healthy catch something. In Christianity, Paul warns about hanging out with fools. Depending on the group, a person might very well relish being an outsider, even if not by choice. Some rings have bad odors. 

A question posed by C. S. Lewis seems relevant: “I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable. I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.” From this, I surmise that Lewis reckoned that such people are bad, and even malicious, but not evil, because what he was describing was human nature itself.

In Augustine’s theology, we are all subject to original sin. Proverbially, we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Evil, it seems to me, cannot simply be human nature itself, but, rather, an extreme in enjoying human suffering. But even this definition is problematic, for sociopathy is a psychological illness rather than a religious phenomenon. Evil is a distinctly religious term. I think the problem is psychological where exclusion is allowed to fill in a void to become the essence of an organization. Taken to the extreme, exclusion as substance or the raison d’etre of an organization and thus being its very essence snuffs out other possible substances and thus must ultimately collapse. Relatedly, M. Scott Peck writes in People of the Lie that it is a sense of inner emptiness that lies at the core of malignant narcissism. Perhaps that is responsible for the dysfunctional organizational culture of inner-exclusion from within that has plagued Yale.

The Regensburg Domspatzen: Systemic Abuse of Kids in an Established Religious Institution

The utility from beautiful music for many does not justify the physical and sexual abuse of a relative few. Even though utilitarianism goes by the motto, the greatest pleasure (and least pain) for the greatest number, the severity of the pain to a few can, I submit, outweigh a more widespread, yet relatively superficial, pleasure for others. Surely the intensity of pleasure and pain must enter into the ethical calculus. I have in mind here the Regensburg Domspatzen, a Roman Catholic boys choir, in the E.U. state of Germany. This case points to the default power of established institutions and a religious psychology.

The full essay is at "The Regensburg Domspatzen."

Uber Tricking Law Enforcement: An Unethical Corporate Culture Externalized

A company with a culture in which in-fighting andheavy-handed treatment of subordinates are not only tolerated, but also constitute the norm can have good financials. With operations in more than 70 countries and a valuation of close to $70 billion in 2017, Uber could be said to be a tough, but successful company. Yet the psychological boundary-problems that lie behind such an organizational culture can easily be projected externally to infect bilateral relations with stakeholders. In the case of Uber, those stakeholders include municipal law enforcement. Even more than as manifested within the company, the external foray demonstrates just how presumptuous “boundary issues” are. Such presumption can blind even upper-level managers to just how much their company has overstep. In reading this essay on Uber’s program to evade law enforcement, you may be struck by the sheer denial in the company.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Mass Shootings in the U.S.: Why Are Americans So Angry?

Even though the United States account for less than 5% of the world’s population, 31% of the total number of mass killings worldwide between 1966 and 2012 occurred there.[1] I contend that a rise in passive aggression and the related intolerance accounts for much of the difference. In other words, it could be that Americans generally are getting nastier and more angry at each other.

Although not a mass-shooting, Vester Flanagan shot two former co-workers in August 2015. While it is easy to relegate the story by simply concluding that the guy was nuts, a closer examination reveals the situation to be more complicated. The nuances may help us understand what lies behind the mass-killing violence that goes beyond the killers themselves and is disproportionately an American phenomenon. In analyzing the Flanagan case, I want to stress that even if his coworkers had been at fault, the double-murder was completely unjustified. My analysis is oriented to uncovering a hidden trend in American society rather than answering whether the shooting is justified.

In a lawsuit against another network in 2000, Flanagan had claimed that a producer had called him a "monkey" and that he had been "made aware that other black employees ... had been called monkeys by officials affiliated with defendant." He also claimed that a Caucasian "official" had told him that "it busted her butt that blacks did not take advantage of the free money," referring to scholarship funds. Additionally, he insisted that a supervisor at the station had said that "blacks are lazy,” and that that another employee had told a black tape-operator to "stop talking ebonics." WTWC-TV acknowledged that an employee "may have made similar comments to another employee," but denied that such comments are "indicative of unlawful employment practices." The case ended in a non-disclosed settlement.[2] The admission of race-oriented comments to another employee lends some credibility to Flanagan’s assertions.

Even so, Flanagan may have made his own contribution to the workplace tension. The news station denied that his termination was the result of discrimination. It instead cited "poor performance," budgetary reasons and "misbehavior with regards to co-workers."[3] The latter in particular resonates with what he wrote regarding the cameraman (Adam) and reporter (Alison) from his next station. After announcing that he filmed the shooting, he wrote, “Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!”[4] Either Adam had overreacted or Flanagan’s treatment of co-workers was incredibly bad. Flanagan also wrote, “Alison made racist comments” to him, and that he had filed an EEOC report.[5] It could be a case of “white privilege,” or simply that Alison was racist (or that she took sides with Adam).

In any case, the shooting stemmed from anger in the workplace—people not getting along and not having the social skills to work things out rather than make things worse. Adam’s quick trip to the station’s human resources department may indicate a lack of tolerance, as well as a tendency to escalate matters rather than patiently work them out. If Alison made demeaning racial statements to Flanagan, then perhaps her attitude may have been condescending and thus inherently conflictual. Of course, both Adam and Alison may have simply been reacting to extraordinarily bad treatment from Flanagan—his report to the EEOC being an effort to go on the offensive rather than admit that he had treated his coworkers very badly.

I suspect that at least part of the problem is societal—Americans may be been becoming more passive aggressive, and this anger in turn might be kicking the outright aggression up a notch in some people. The lack of tolerance for disagreements shows up in the ideological fragmentation of the American news networks, for example, with Fox News and MSNBC employees on the air brazenly displaying utter disdain for progressives and conservatives, respectively. Dismissiveness toward others, or in other words being “too cool to talk,” stemming from an abject lack of respect for others, may have been increasing at least in the Millennial Generation. As the sordid attitude becomes more socially acceptable as a social more in America, then increasing anger and ensuing aggression can be expected. “Road rage” is a case in point: an extreme hostility toward other people ruffling feathers. Why are so many Americans angry? This may be part of the reason why the U.S. has a disproportionate number of mass killings, and I suspect that the same holds for workplace (and former workplace) violence.

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[1] Stan Ziv, “Study: Mass Shootings ‘Exceptionally American Problem’,” Newsweek, August 23, 2015.

[2] Dana Liebelson and Jessica Schulberg, “Shooting Suspect Sued Another Newsroom for Racism, Claimed He Was Called a Monkey,” The Huffington Post, August 26, 2015.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

New Birds of Prey in Modern Retail

In a dysfunctional organization, the shared pathology fortifies its defense mechanisms with an obstinacy that appears rock-solid. Lines such as, “Unfortunately, the product cannot be returned” can be seen as part of an egg shell that seems to be durable until it is cracked open. By analogy, cracking the egg entails parsing such lines as are typically dished out to outsiders. Let’s take a look.

First, the word cannot is incorrectly used in the sentence, for a store’s return policy is not a law; whereas a business is subject to a law, no such requirement pertains to a company’s own policies. To treat the latter as tantamount to laws is essentially to vaunt the self-importance of the company, store, and even the employee enunciating the policy-law. “Your policies are not laws; of course you can make an exception, even if your supervisor is the person who can do it.” The word cannot serves the organizational dysfunction by giving the impression externally that the company is more than it is (i.e., a state of sorts with its own laws). At the employee level, the devise is essentially a power-grab—a distended or exaggerated urge to control others being a typical symptom of insecurity borne of underlying weakness.

Substituting may not for cannot gives the customer at least an implied opening that from the standpoint of the organizational pathology could prompt him or her to push through the defense mechanisms and trounce the core weakness. Were an “upper” manager to even consider such a linguistic change, an underling would likely contend that every customer would be returning items. The fallacy in this reasoning goes by the wayside in the mechanizations of the organizational dysfunction. Indeed, ignoring or dismissing logical fallacies is itself one of the defense mechanisms!  This is arguing with such an employee or manager is apt to be an exercise in futility.

Notice the "exchanges accepted" instead of "accept exchanges." The passive voice extends to "are revised" and "are shipped," suggesting an underlying mentality of weakness. Also, the forcefulness of the "must" (as one might expect pertains to a law) is belied by the inherent subjectivity in "mint condition." Finally, the blood-red color, as well as the black background color, suggests a certain passive-aggressiveness in line with the use of "must" for what is actually a policy (rather than a law). (Image Source: omgmiamiswimsuits.com)

Second, the use of the passive mood also hints at the underlying weakness in the dysfunctional organization because the action is sidestepped. “We do not accept returned items” highlights the action (i.e., the refusing) of the company’s employees/managers whereas “cannot be returned” omits the actor entirely! The latter phraseology matches the insecurity that naturally manifests out of weakness. Besides implying that the power of the actor to act is in some way compromised or enervated, the passive voice hides the actor and thus protects him or her from being confronted. The actor’s underlying fear here is that a head-to-head clash would not end well for the actor, given his or her own and shared (i.e., organizational) pathology.

Third, just as the choice of the word cannot and the use of the passive voice both involve a manipulatory fabrication (i.e., lying with a hidden agenda), so too does the addition of the unnecessary adverb, unfortunately. For the stealth actor (i.e., the non-supervisory or managerial employee), the policy is hardly unfortunate; otherwise, the policy would not be “on the books.” Lest the adverb is intended to refer to the customer [rather, lest the policy’s formulator or the employee mouthing it is referring to the customers]—as though the fact that the customers would have to keep ill-suited products were unfortunate—the policy itself indicates just how much its formulator and implementers really sympathize, especially since the formulator can change the policy. In other words, the use of the word is a lie designed to give the customer the false impression that “the store” really cares and that unfortunately the policy cannot be changed (and by whom?).

Even the tactic itself in such a line is a lie in that the pathogens are utterly unwilling to tolerate the very same tactic directed back at them. A customer wanting more than a glimpse of the sickness need only reply, “Unfortunately any refusal to accept back the deformed item will have to be turned over to small claims court.” Even though the particular employee would have no involvement in such legal proceedings, and thus no rational reason to bristle at the customer’s stated policy/law, he or she would be too accustomed to dictating terms to customers to let that privilege lapse without at least a spike in anger and attempt to regain the upper hand. “You are free to do so,” an employee might retort, as though he or she were granting or allowing the freedom. In fact, the implication is rather arrogant, again as if the company were akin to a state rather than being a mere counter-party in a commercial exchange. 

The hidden agenda becomes apparent by realizing that the statement is duplicitous or redundant, as the customer obviously already knows that he or she has the liberty to sue. The employee knows this of course, either consciously or unconsciously, and is not really informing the customer that he or she can go to small-claims court. “I don’t need you to tell me I can do what I’ve already told you I know I am free to do,” an astute customer might retort in turn. 

The exchange of words is really a control battle stemming from an organizational pathology’s attempts to defend itself against potentially interlarding intruders. The threat is of course over-stated—hence the exaggerated intent to “nail down the hatches” to weather the perceived storm. Yet the “new birds of prey”—Nietzsche’s label for those among the weak who can’t resist their urge do dominate (even the strong)—are not content to merely defend, for they must have the upper hand in order to feel sufficiently protected. 

Going to Work: Is Money the Exclusive Motive?

In the month before the Oscars, Turner Classic Movies runs films under the promo, "Thirty One Days of Oscar."  Interestingly, in promoting this series, the network reminds viewers to watch the Oscars on another network.  Although the strategy could be that if people watch the Oscars, they will be more likely to watch TCM, it could also be that the people who operate TCM really do love movies and they are not bothered at all by viewers going to another network to view the gold standard of cinema: the Oscars. In other words, it could be that a passion for film trumps the incessant drive for more profit (i.e., greed) that typically occupies the attention of business managers. I submit that this is rare in business. 

The implication is that business as usual, the typical rationale for  business, can and should be questioned.  All of us can ask ourselves whether we feel the way about our respective industries the way that people love what they produce feel. A way to test whether you are in the right field is if you find yourself saying, I can't believe someone pays me to do this.  I suspect that few people can even imagine feeling that way.  Even so, I contend that human nature thrives in it and dies in a sense without it. That something so vital as work is so commonly relegated or dismissed outright in favor of expediency or greed is short-sighted, for he who does what he loves is apt to do it better than otherwise and thus earn more money. 

We in the West at least are so used to businesses being constantly attuned to getting the next dollar or euro that it is surprising when the managers of a company put the interests of their passion above their own company's narrow interests. We ought not, in other words, to take business as usual for our default. Rather, we ought to look for creaks of passion particularly where it checks greed, even if just for special events, at the balcony.  If passion spreads such that we put things before ourselves, society would feel much different. I suspect that we have no idea how much, being locked in as though frozen in constant motion.

On doing what you love, see "Corporate Analogies." 

On curtailing greed, see "God's Gold through the Centuries."