Everyone with enough self-honesty and ability to discern power dynamics knows that when HR or managers talk about "bringing your whole self to work", they are signaling a covert game of power, not inviting you to be transparent and genuine at work. Your conscious self, with all of its qualities, such as love, empathy, curiosity, integrity, desire for freedom, dilligence and discernment, is not welcome nor is it rewarded. You are here to work, which is to say obey to the ones who have power.
Those who cannot discern that subtext and try to put honesty and excellence above pleasing the ones above them are in for quite a shock, for they will find themselves less appreciated than those who are far more mediocre than them, happy to do the bare minimum but using their extra time to bond with their colleagues. The ones who do the best in the insane environment we call the office are those who are so good at playing social games that there is essentially no difference between their conscious self and their social mask, because the former has very little influence in their life, which means they effortlessly present themselves in whatever way the management wants them to.
Most people are not like that, and have to compromise between the two, but the most successful don't even have to compromise in the first place, they have no conscience or integrity or empathy to begin in the first place, they are close to, if not straight up psychopathic. Thus from this—admittedly oversimplified—picture of the office, we get 4 classes, classified in a quadrant.
The first distinction has to do with how conscious someone is of the power dynamics at work. The second distinction has to do with whether they are personally engaged with the work or not. (the work, not the power dynamics) The 4 quadrants are then: 1
The most active of those 4 are obviously the clueless and the psychopaths, while the drop-outs and the incompetent sort of sit on the sideline of conflicts. The clueless favor work, excellence and integrity above everything else, and ignore social consensus if they see it as being an obstacle to higher efficiency, whereas the psychopaths are masters of playing social games, they are the ones who will be the most liked by their superiors despite doing barely anything tangible, the exact opposite of the clueless.
Because social approval is ultimately what makes a higher up like you or not, not what your real contribution is, the clueless tend to not be very liked. They are the ones who rock the boat, trying to get the company to change their habits to streamline a process, add protocols for enhanced security, demand excellence from other people, call out problems in an objective manner so that they may be fixed, which can often be interpreted emotionally, personally by the managers.
But why is that? Why is the real work not as important as the social games? It's because of several reasons, the first and main one being that managers have an agenda which is not aligned with the company as a whole. There is a divergence in interests between the management, who want to please the people above them and have people obey them, and the company as a whole, which tries to provide good products and services, as smoothly as possible.
To take an example from school, if you break a teacher's arbitrary rules, they will get mad at you, even if the rules were utterly stupid to begin with. You can try to defend yourself on the ground of virtues, or rights, or whatever a young child knows about life, but the reality is fundamentally that you are under someone who decides the rules and the judgement. There is no external Reality which informs the institution you find yourself in, it is all done internally, which creates these echo chambers and absurd logics that we are all well too familiar with, since so much of our life is dependent on bureaucracies and large institutions.
Thus how well a manager treats you is more about whether they like you than anything specific about your output, which in larger companies is far too abstract to assess reliably. Software for instance is incredibly complex and abstract, and often the manager is far less competent than the people they have to oversee, meaning they have to resort to proxies of real productivity, such as how many lines of code they wrote, or how many tickets they completed, which creates a new layer of absurd power games due to how easy it is to game those proxies—our friend Goodhart's Law shows up again.
Real productivity is also, as I have alluded to, not always in the direction of incremental additions. Sometimes the best thing to do for a project is to slow down and make a large overhaul, which will prove to be very beneficial in the long run. Managers typically don't like those projects, because the return on investment is very uncertain, because the higher ups want short-term results and don't care about technical constraints, and because large overhauls often require changes in other aspects of the process, and potentially of the company, meaning that there is also a social momentum which has to be pushed against.
Which leads me to another major factor to understand about social games, on top of the importance of social consensus, which is that people constantly try to minimize their blame, even at the expense of the whole. Managers are very aware of how much they can be blamed for something, even if they don't consciously think about that, which is why they always make sure to understand who is responsable for what, so that they can delegate a problem whenever it shows up.
Have you noticed how, whenever a large problem occurs, the first question has to do with who is to blame, rather than what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Our world is obsessed with fault and cares very little about responsibility, when in reality, it should be the opposite. Most large scale problems are no one's fault in particular, but everyone's responsibility, but our world tells us that it is our fault, and we should feel guilty for that, but it's fine because no one is responsible, no one needs to change how they live.
This cycle of madness is perpetrated in every institution, which is why there is a constant pressure to not stick out from the rest, in fear of being blamed for problems. This is one of the key aspects of being higher up in the social ranks, the extent to which you can blame other people for your problems, and have them do things for you as a result.
This trend towards minimizing blame is also why people tend to so often use incredibly vague language to talk about future projects and what they have done. There is no need to make confident predictions, and doing so would result in social punishment because your own words could be used against you, whereas vague claims can intentions can always be reworks to fit whatever you need to defend yourself in the moment. Vagueness is the enemy of clarity, but because real work and competence are secondary to the power games, they end up falling on the side, especially when discussing sensitive topics, which is why there is essentially no context where full honesty can be had, especially not between someone and their superior, a principle known as Hagbard's Law, that true information only flows between equals. 2
If we look at the 4 categories of people within a company that I highlighted, the clueless and the incompetent are the ones who are the most easy to blame. The drop-outs tend to be strategic in what they do, such that they minimize their surface area of blame, and so do the psychopaths, who are even more proactive because they can manipulate certain narratives to direct the blame onto others if they are particularly good at social games.
The clueless, by virtue of being more productive, produce more work and thus have more responsibilities and a higher surface area of blame on their shoulders. If a bug occurs in a program, people will look at who made the most recent change in the part of the code that crashed, and because the clueless are so much more productive than the rest, they are far more likely to be in charge of solving the problem, thus creating a constant feedback loop of responsibility and work, which is why I would say that more often than not, the clueless end up burning out, or in some cases learn about the power games at work and become drop-outs.
The clueless are the tragic heroes of the company they work within. It's said that productivity in larger companies follows the square root law, which says that 50% (sometimes more) of the work is done by the square root of the employees. This strikes me as correct, but obviously it's impossible to assess for sure, since real productivity is such a taboo (and nebulous) thing to track, because no one wants to show how little they actually work to other people, including themselves.
What can be done about all of this? Personally I have a very pessimistic view of power-driven collectives, which is most of them, because to talk about the power dynamics in the first place is taboo. There is a self-obscuring mechanism at play, and even to talk about it is not enough, if you manage to get this far.
The root of the problem has to do with the fact that the collective you find yourself in is atomized, such that people within it can get ahead for their personal benefits, at the expense of others. From what I can tell this is basically inevitable at a large scale, the health of the whole becomes so difficult to track, and it becomes so easy to do things solely for your own benefit that parasitic dynamics show up everywhere, and even the attempts to uproot those also end up being corrupted—regulations, governments, the law, etc.
Low scale environments do provide the possibility of talking about everything, but this is not always easy. Think for instance of a married couple who are growing more distant from one another, and do not even want to talk about that distance. It's not easy to be transparent, first of all because all of the power-driven institutions that I have discussed make us habitually act from a place of self-interest, blame minimization and deferring to a social consensus, rather than our own integrity and love, right from when we are young. Furthermore, our world implicitly favors those who have a closed heart, because they don't even have to compromise their soul to get ahead of others, they simply do what helps them, the same way that a boulder might roll off a cliff and crush anything in its trajectory.
But what this shows is that there are situations where our life is not dictated by power games, and the need to say what an authority wants to hear. We can at least start with being honest with ourselves, because all delusion is rooted in self-delusion 3, and expand outwards in our relationships with others. Often, love built on this foundation involves a great deal of pain, the pain of having our bullshit broken down and having to take responsibility, which is why so many run away from such a task. They want the comfortable lies, the pointless conversations, and the safe and predictable routines, because to be truly open to someone else is, for the self-informed self, like death.
But ironically, a world which is built on the avoidance of this death of the self with regards to Truth and Love, becomes more dead than alive. We find ourselves constantly repressing who we are at work, wearing a mask all day until the mask becomes us, until we lose sight of the inner child that we betrayed, and find ourselves in a sea of similar mask-people.
But eventually, there won't be much of a point to keep wearing the mask. What's the point of engaging in the bullshit power games if our power is running out in the first place? When people are on their death bed, they don't see the point of bullshitting themselves or anyone, because there is nothing to defend, and to me this is what the next decades are going to bring, much pain caused by clinging to what we cannot maintain, but also the fall of the mask, the mask of the self which has grown beyond its limits, and muffled our hearts.
1 Inspired by the "loser, clueless and psychopath" model. I don't like the term "loser" because I relate with that attitude the most.
2 The atomization of employees goes as such: you can be honest with people who work in entirely different departments than yours, but there is nothing professional to talk about because you don't have any shared context by definition, which means that the transparency is not useful to begin with. You can be somewhat transparent with people of your own team and who are your equals, though sometimes it is not advisable because it can be turned against you. But you can definitely not be honest with a superior, unless you want to run into all the problems that the clueless run into. What all of this means is that honest communication is by and large useless, unless you are fine with it being dangerous for your social standing within the company, which to be fair shows integrity, even if it is by and large punished.
3 "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept" from Calvin and Hobbes
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Bullshit Hr Office Powerdynamics Blame Clueless Psychopath Dropout
2026-01-09