Venkatesh G. Rao

The Gervais Principle

Gavin

A fun, nasty, bitchy taxonomy of social class / psychological theory of the firm; a mishmash of economics, psychoanalysis and literary criticism; a series of massive blogposts apologising for being a book. 

It splits employed people into three classes with terrible names - Leaders ("Sociopaths"), Loyalists ("Clueless"), Workers ("Losers") - and throws a massive amount of fictional evidence at each. That's obviously a formal hierarchy, Leaders > Loyalists > Workers, but Rao's first big left turn is to impose a second contradictory ordering on the 3 classes in developmental psychology terms: Clueless < Losers < Sociopaths. I like his subdivision of Losers into: Minimum-effort rationally-disengaged; Overperformers; future Sociopaths. It looks nasty, and Rao is uninterested in making it seem moral or immoral, but if this is how the leaders actually think, Rao is doing us (the 99%) a service. 

Is this system justified and true? No. Rao writes the best clickbait in the world, what he calls "insight porn". It is the verbal equivalent of the noise an F1 engine makes on a 200m straight. The class theory in this would make for a great literary theory, a blueprint for future Office Spaces. Myers-Briggs is marginally better than the dumb view of people as more or less defective versions of one character. So too is this better than "bosses/workers" cod Marxism. 

(He could have massively increased his audience and reduced unwanted connotations by renaming "Losers" to "Workers" 

   the Loser — really not a loser at all if you think about it — pays his dues, does not ask for much, and finds meaning in his life elsewhere

)

He has a weird relationship with the amoral elites - he often says things like

  
 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.


putting destiny and ultimate value in their hands. And he clearly thinks of himself as a post-reality-shock enlightened figure. And yet he rags on the inauthenticity, nihilism, cruelty, hollowness of his 'Sociopaths'.

There are dozens of acute, contentious, boggling passages like

  
 For high-empathy people, all this is natural. By participating in collective feeling in groups of any size, and reacting to basic attraction/aversion drives, you can actually safely navigate all the complexity by instinct.
 Not only can you do this, you will actually feel good doing this. This feeling is called happiness. I don’t have time to go into this, but happiness is entirely a social phenomenon, and there’s plenty of evidence that the best way (and from my reading, the only 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



  
 the level of abstraction that we are concerned with, all theories of developmental psychology – Freud’s, Piaget’s, Erikson’s, Maslow’s – say roughly the same thing about arrested development: you are born Clueless and clue up in fits and starts. Bits of you get stuck and left behind at different points, and eventually you exhaust your capacity for real change and stall (though you may retain an illusion that you are on a path of “lifelong growth and learning,” itself a pattern of arrested development)



I can imagine a teenager reading this and becoming absolutely insufferable. But much great writing can lend spurious superiority to fools - for instance Nietzsche.

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The Gervais Principle

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