Here's a practical question: how do you make a person who does not listen to anyone realize what they are doing? I am going to focus here more so on companies, the mid to large size ones, but this applies to power dynamics in general. This problem of getting someone to listen is extra tricky because of several factors.
§1. Those people are usually in a position of power. Even politicians who have to get elected by the population can get away with this abuse of power, but most of the higher-ups in a company haven't even been elected to begin with 1, which means there is essentially no corrective mechanism to make sure that they have a good relationship with the people under them.
In a mid to large-size company, everyone plays their own mini-game of power. The people at the bottom try to do as little as possible without getting punished for it, because they know that they will not be rewarded for doing extra work, hence the class of people known as "losers" in the Gervais principle. The middle managers try to get the good favors from the higher ups, even if it comes at the cost of conflicts with those that they manage, because they know that the former rewards them, whereas the latter doesn't necessarily, hence the tendency to "kiss up and kick down", and how blame always flows downwards. And the higher ups do a combination of decisions which are good for the company, because they more directly benefit from its successes, and things which are good for them, depending on the situation and the type of people they are.
What this means is that there is no real feedback loop for ensuring that people listen to one another. Vertical relationships, those between people of a different level in the hierarchy, feature the familiar dynamic where the people below tell the people above what they want to hear, because they know that pleasing them matters more than doing a good job, something which is known as Hagbard's Law.
This doesn't bode well for the ability to get people in power to listen to those under them, because they have no reason to. Whether we like it or not, people only change when they have to, unless they are wise enough, usually from personally experiencing painful lessons, in which case they can see ahead and change before large problems. But by and large, people only change when they have to, and those with more privilege than others can afford not to change and instead push the problems onto those that serve them, because privilege is the extent to which you can ignore Reality. 2
§2. People in power are not necessarily nefarious, they can be more clueless than anything, but first of all, they serve systems which are overall evil, not aligned with conscious human qualities, and second of all, the fact that they do not feel like they have to betray any goodness in them is precisely the problem.
People in privileged situations often read complaints that power corrupts, or that the system is not aligned with human needs, and report that they've never felt pressured to do anything they wouldn't do. But that's exactly how the system works. The most perfect automaton to the system is someone who has no empathy to begin with, which means they can make ruthless decisions without batting an eye. This is why sociopaths are so common at the top, even though the population at large isn't sociopathic, because someone who would have to betray their empathy to succeed would not last very long in a high-pressure environment that asks them to prioritize profits over anything else.
This is also why people who do not listen to others around them tend to do well as managers, as strange as it sounds. You would expect that, being the interface between the higher-ups and the bottom ranks of the hierarchy, they are supposed to be good at listening to people.
But once again, the power dynamics need to be understood: appealing to the higher ups matters more to the middle managers than anything else, which is why someone who focuses a lot on taking feedback from the people under will hardly be rewarded for their strength, and if anything, be punished for it in the long term, because they will be more conflicted about what the dynamics incentivize them to do: please the higher ups.
§3. Managers, to the extent that they try (or pretend to try) to listen to other people, end up reducing it down to organizing meetings and being in the same room with people as they are talking. It doesn't occur to them that listening means taking decisions informed by what others report. What happens when managers "listen to others" more often than not is that they wait for their turn while others talk, and then say and do what they were going to do anyway. It's a pretense that power dynamics don't exist when they clearly do.
Again, this is not necessarily nefarious, but this is not a behavior that arises from sheer stupidity either. Those managers know that appealing to the higher ups will reward them, whereas being on good terms with the ones under won't really. What punishment is there for them if the ones under are dissatisfied? None. They might have to face more discontentment, have to fire some people once in a while, and see a higher turnover for their department, but nothing that they personally have to care about. There is no skin in the game, hence they don't care about the consequences of their actions.
§4. Thus it's not just that they are bad at listening, it's that they don't even know they are bad at listening. This is a phenomenon of meta-blindness. To the extent that they "listen", they listen only to the things that are convenient for them to hear. Or they think they already know what you're going to say so they simplify that to the nearest approximation that they understand.
It's impossible to convey to them what a better form of listening would look like, because it would require them to ... listen to external evidence, which is what they're bad at to begin with. They're stuck in an echo chamber that automatically translates what they hear into what they want to hear, and this chamber is called the ego-mind.
§5. The people giving the feedback aren't perfect angels either. They have their frustration, their lack of understanding about what happens elsewhere, and as a result their complaints might be overly personal instead of reasonable. But this doesn't mean that the complaints are entirely wrong either.
There are two main types of people in the bottom ranks of a company: the losers as I have mentioned, those who do the bare minimum and avoid confrontation, because they know that companies in general are a losing game for them. And then you have the people who try to work hard and elevate the standards for quality and honesty, but who have to constantly run into the mediocre losers of the other teams, the general resistance to change of the company, and the decisions of the middle managers.
Understandably, all of this leads to frustration, and also a sense of being sane amongst insane people, which means that their complaints about the rest of the company appear highly emotional, to the point of being blamed on their own personality as a result. To the managers and the other teams, it's not that there are systemic problems with the company, it's that this one particular person who seems to annoy us a lot is a special case that we should learn to deal with.
Tragically though, those people tend to be the most competent because they care the most about the quality of the work in the company. This means that people tend to be annoyed the most by those who try the hardest, which is why losers are so frequent in the bottom ranks, because it is what the dynamics incentivize.
Managers don't listen because they don't have to. People within a system do what they have to do, a constraint shaped by various things such as the ambient culture, the needs of the technological system, the path of least resistance, but most importantly, the power dynamics.
It's tempting to call people stupid, but more often than not they are simply doing what their local incentives push them to do. Not that people are perfectly rational agents of course, sometimes there is plain stupidity or incompetence, but by and large, the problem is in the game, not the players.
Of course this is no excuse for being a terrible person. The technological system is an utterly insane human collective, one that destroys anything that is real and valuable, from nature, to beauty, to peace, to love, to competence, to courage, to even sanity, and using that as an excuse for how one treats others is a sign of a morally bankrupt person.
But to me this analysis of company dynamics points to something simple: there is no winning in a losing game. Companies are inherently power-driven, and within this setting there is no possibility for truth, love and competence to rise to the top. It's a rotten game and the best thing to do is to play a better one, unless you need some money in the short term, which is why we must all work in one from time to time. But there is no solution within the box, you must exit it if you want to find people who actually care about the truth.
1 One of the many wrenches to the idea that we live in a "democracy".
2 See also Power buys you distance from the crime
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Privilege Echochamber Powerdynamics Company
2026-04-11