by Jay Palmer
Hate is what you derive from being screwed by others. Being screwed is inevitable; if you deal with other people, especially in the world of business, then you will eventually be screwed. This is because good people don't gain enough power to do good nice things; assholes gain power, and then lie, cheat, and stab others in the back to flex their authoritative muscles.
RULE #1: Trust no one.
RULE #2: Help no one.
RULE #3: Have no compassion.
Don't trust any 'good' people; most of them are so limp-dicked that they will bow their heads and look away while assholes screw over everyone around them. Even in the best of times, the 'nice' will never achieve enough power to be able to do anything for you; some asshole will get rid of them before they gain the least amount of authority. Protect yourself from the 'nice': never make friends at work; things that you would only tell a friend get repeated. Keep every negative thought to yourself. Never point out a mistake to the person who made it; be silent, smile, and then point it out to their superior. Never offer to teach anyone anything; they will thank you most sincerely and then never return the favor. In the end, they will do nothing but offer hollow sympathy as you are getting screwed. Which sucks.
Why do people screw over others? Assholes screw others for personal gain. When they need something from you, then they are your best friend; assholes will say or do anything to get what they want, including laughing and acting friendly, but it is all an act. The bigger their smile, the more likely that they are an asshole. To get what they want, they will willingly set you up, and then use you as a shield against their failures; when they lose, as they all do, as all assholes get screwed by bigger assholes, then they will need a fall guy, a sacrificial lamb, and no matter what they promised or how much you have done for them, they will toss you to the crocodiles with no regret.
The biggest assholes screw over other people for sport. Anyone who has been at a company for a long time or has proven themselves extremely competent are a threat to assholes; they can't allow others to get any credit unless they are profiting from it the most. Assholes prefer new people, as they are easier to manipulate and control. So what if the company is losing good, competent hard-workers, if some asshole gains a sense of security by their absence? Getting rid of anybody that they can is useful to assholes; perhaps they can gain control over your replacement.
The only way to fight assholes is to become one of them. Keep a work-diary, which you show to no one else: document everything that anybody says and be ready to use it against them. When the opportunity to be an asshole arises, take it. Be merciless. If possible, ruin lives. Hatred is not reserved for assholes; the 'good' people, who stand aside and allow assholes to stomp all over others, deserve just as much hatred. Always capitalize on any opportunity to be an asshole.
Morals and decency are what assholes preach to keep you from screwing them. If they are the only assholes, then no one will screw them over, so they can screw over everyone with impunity. Then they can rise to the top of the business while everyone else is slowly recycled to give them more power; their prominence increases as the pile of tombstones beneath them gets higher. This has become a stalwart part of our modern corporate culture; business ethics are taught and praised to keep idiots being the 'nice guys', constantly getting laid off, while assholes get promoted.
Not all bosses are assholes, but until your trust has been earned, don't give it. People with honor and self-respect are proud of who they are, and justly so. But they can't let themselves be crushed and their lives ruined by an endless stream of assholes trying to climb the corporate ladder upon their corpses. To assholes, honor is nothing. Self-respect is nothing. Assholes are unbridled ambition.
Appearance and authority are all that assholes care about. Any threat to their corporate prestige will be instantly and immediately retaliated against; despite what they claim, simpering subservience is all that they want. They would never admit it, but only toadies thrive under them, and then only until they are no longer new. Once anyone has been around long enough to have earned the respect of others, assholes get rid of them.
Assholes lie mostly to themselves. Assholes say that "they are doing what's best for the company by every decision that they make", especially if they are the only one that profits from it. The self-righteous assholes, the worst of the bunch, convince themselves of this. They won't admit that their decisions are always based on what is best for them, never on what's good for the company. Assholes depend on three lies to maintain their position:
LIE #1: Everything that they do, they do for the company.
LIE #2: Everything that they do, they do because it is morally right.
LIE #3: They would never purposefully do anything mean or unprofessional.
The minute that you hear one of these claims, recognize that the person speaking is an asshole. They will screw you over in a heartbeat because they have convinced themselves that everything that they do is correct and justifiable, because they are such an asset to the company, even if you do all the work that they claim credit for, that the company will fail without them.
How do assholes gain power? Assholes watch continuously for every aspect of everything that everyone produces. Even work which was perfect, when it was completed, may be less than desired a year later, and they gladly will present your great old work to your superiors as unsatisfactory new work, and you won't ever know about it or be able to defend yourself with the truth until they have slandered you so badly that your first inclination of a problem is when you are informed that you are no longer employed. If they have any authority over you, then assholes will give you unclear or poorly-interpretable instructions for a project, and then claim that what you produced was never what they asked for. Receiving unclear instructions is a clue that an asshole is preparing to get rid of you; always be aware that every asshole is your mortal enemy.
Denial of resources is another favorite tactic of assholes. When you are charged to do a simple task but not given the required data, files, permissions, or access to do it, and you must constantly wait for 'approval' which never has a scheduled date, when no one else will help you do what you have been ordered to, you are never invited to important meetings, your work is trivialized, and when they won't give you what you need, but want regular reports on your progress, then you are being set up as a sacrificial idiot to be slaughtered (terminated). Your failure to accomplish the impossible will be used as the excuse of why your superiors didn't accomplish their goals, and you will be dismissed to protect their job; the biggest assholes will even feel that this is morally-correct, as it protects them, and that is the only morality that they recognize.
Assholes protect themselves by doing nothing; they get other people, sometimes whole teams, to do their work, to plan their projects, and do all their research for their documents. When your work is praised, they will claim credit for it; when your work is questioned, they will place all of the blame on you. They will claim credit for your work in one office, and then walk into another office, and there blame you, without feeling any contradiction, as they are only seeking to benefit themselves. When an asshole must do some work, they sometimes talk about it, but you seldom see what they produce; they hide what they do, so that some higher-up asshole can't do to them what they would gladly do to you. When they do produce results, they need a large headcount so that they always have many sacrificial lambs to cover their many failures. 'Nice' managers think of large headcounts as a sense of power or authority; asshole managers see large headcounts as a bevy of potential sacrifices, each is an increased protection for them against other assholes.
One way of determining assholes in the office is to watch how they treat you. When you send them an email, and are waiting hours or days for them to reply, do they send you an email to explain that they are trying to get the information that you need, and will send it ASAP? They would do that for people that they respected, or at least, whom feel that they should suck up to. If they do not do this for you, then they are an asshole to you, and should be treated as such, even if they are nice to other people.
How can you become an asshole at work without becoming an asshole permanently? Who said that you should only be an asshole at work? The truth is that being the 'nice guy', while you are powerless, is pointless; you have too little power and too few resources to protect yourself from being used, or to reward those who are not assholes. Save being the 'nice guy' until you have the power to really help those who deserve it. Remember "On the morals of being a prince" (chapter 5, The Prince, by Machiavelli); look after yourself first, and then worry about your reputation once you have everything that you ever wanted.
How do you gain power in the business world?
-- In your work diary, write down names of everyone you meet, and a brief note about when and how you met them.
-- Make sure that you recognize everyone instantly by face, even outside of the office.
-- Always look like you are in a hurry.
-- Go to as many meetings as possible.
-- Avoid becoming responsible for anything.
-- Get yourself involved in every project as an advisor.
-- When you must agree to do something, always get clear instructions and a due-date, and write them down.
-- Document any changes to your instructions or due-dates.
-- When you can't claim credit for someone else's successful ideas, then praise that person loudly for their idea.
-- When you give instructions, give clear, precise instructions to everyone but one person (your scapegoat).
-- Never accept blame.
-- Always have someone else to blame if things go wrong.
-- Never have lunch with your coworkers or subordinates.
-- Always have lunch with your superiors, know when their birthdays are, and be sure to give leave politically-correct Christmas cards on their desk.
-- If your boss keeps you at a distance, respect that boundary, but always be open for a closer relationship, and quietly look for a new department with a better boss.
-- When you have an indispensable hard-worker underneath you, then have them show you everything that they do, and document it so that they can be replaced (if they become a threat to you).
-- When you have to do work, do it well, quickly, and quietly (don't tell others what you are doing).
-- Don't hand-off any finished project until its deadline (or others will have time to criticize it).
-- When your primary job is scheduling meetings and assigning projects, then be sure to invite only those whom you can't exclude and assign the good projects only to your most-indispensable workers.
-- Remember: your primary job is always to build up your resume so that you can get promoted or get a better job somewhere else.
Always be looking for a new team to join. The reason for this is that the new person usually gets one free pass; when a problem arises, the people who have been there the longest are the biggest threat to some asshole manager, so they usually are gotten rid of first. Moving from one team to another is always best. Note: When you move from one team to another, always keep it as quiet as possible until the last possible moment.
Never tell anyone the truth about how you feel about:
-- Them.
-- The company.
-- The project.
-- The product.
-- The customers.
-- Your job.
-- Anyone else's job.
Why not? For the same reason that you don't supply weapons to anyone who's shooting at you. Whatever you give to them, they will use for their benefit, not for yours. If you ever do have a great idea, then keep it to yourself, and only reveal it in the presence of a boss capable of implementing it, with at least one other boss, and several employees (who can be called upon as witnesses) listening closely; otherwise someone else will be getting a big bonus check for your ideas while they get rid of you to protect their false claims to your suggestions.
Assholes don't exist only in business. Anywhere where there is attention or authority to be gained, assholes gravitate. Clubs, churches, ballroom dance competitions, quilting circles, and even charity events are filled with assholes. Why? Many reasons: selfishness, fear, greed; assholes need the feeling of power to fill the hollowness inside them, caused by their total lack of honor. Be mindful: assholes feel the pain of having no honor like anyone else, they just react differently, trying to compensate for their lack of honor rather than attempting to change themselves. Assholes need to stand on top of others because otherwise they would be recognized as very small and insignificant.
Hate is an essential component when dealing with assholes. Hate is not a bad thing; bad people deserve to be hated. You need to embrace hate as a requirement of living in the real world. Hate is protection; people whom you hate can't betray you. You don't choose hate; hate is a necessary shield required to protect yourself from the vast and unlimited number of assholes that you will meet in your life; assholes force good people to hate. You need hate like you need insurance; hate is a tool for survival in this rotten business world.
Assholes don't deserve respect. Assholes don't deserve trust. Hate is the only thing that assholes deserve. The trick is to hate assholes from the start; assume that everyone who isn't a wimp is an asshole ... and hate them. This does not mean that you need to let them know that you hate them.
The trick with hate is that you need to hide it. This will be difficult at first; lies don't come naturally to honest people. You need to convince yourself that you are not hating anything; pretend that you are actually trying to be helpful. Three rules can help you succeed at keeping your hate secret:
RULE #1: If possible, say nothing!
RULE #2: Speak to the positive, no matter what you truly believe.
RULE #3: Do as little as possible to just barely make your deadlines.
Saying nothing is always best because anything that you say will be used against you. When you must speak, say what the listener wants to hear. Generalities are frowned upon, but rewording what someone else said is highly praised. Don't worry about what is best for the company; follow the example of the long term employees: "What's in it for me?"
How do you define an asshole? A non-asshole looks at any problem and considers all of the required and available resources, including the people involved, and tries to come up with the best option for everyone. Assholes look at the same problem, resources, and people, but they only consider only what is best for them, even if it doesn't solve the problem. However, as you must hide your hate, assholes hide their true nature. The greatest threat to an asshole is that their true nature might be revealed; if you reveal them, then they will use every weapon that they can to get rid of you.
Hate has been used as a tool of wise leaders since the dawn of time. Whenever a whole population has a serious problem, finding some other population to hate has always been the cure. Hate has spurred countless actions of evil, but it has also compiled vast sums of wealth; assholes will choose to act evilly, as that is their nature, and given a chance, they will relish being their true selves. The wise let others be evil and siphon off the wealth for themselves.
As long as you can hide your hate, then you can profit from your hate. Hidden hate allows you to gain the maximum benefit from everything by denying benefits to others. Hate is self-justified; if people do evil acts, and you don't hate them, then you are encouraging evil acts. You need not feel guilty for hating; the fact that assholes believe in their own lies does not make them nice people.
To pretend that you are following the same lies as assholes, you need to pretend to be everyone's best friend. Smile and say nice things. Never be negative. Always keep up the three pretenses:
PRETENSE #1: Always be positive.
PRETENSE #2: Always say good things about your coworkers.
PRETENSE #3: Never have an opinion on anything non-work related.
Remember: you are not hating anyone or anything; you are behaving in a polite and positive professional manner, following the wonderful examples set for you by your managers. (Following the three lies of assholes |
