This excellent blog post is making the rounds because the writer has done a great job of describing the dynamics of a dysfunctional workplace or interpersonal relationship.

How To Keep Someone With You Forever

It applies equally well to sick communal or religious systems, of course.

Excerpt:

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they've ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they've ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn't want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally?

You create a sick system.

A sick system has four basic rules:

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn't there. No energy, and your lover's dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can't turn off anyone's thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it's exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you're golden.

Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved. Make them love you if you can, or if you're a company, foster a company culture of extreme loyalty. Otherwise, tie their success to yours, so if you do well, they do well, and if you fail, they fail. If you're working in an industry where failure isn't a possibility (the government, utilities), establish a status system where workers do better or worse based on seniority. (This also works in bad relationships if you're polyamorous.)


There's much, much more, please check out the link!

Regarding interpersonal dynamics, someone added the following link in comments to the above post and the author edited to add the link:

On Interpersonal Badness

Great quote:


If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.

Ouch, i feel sick

Great article, thank you for posting it, Tapati! So much of it describes the workplace that I quit this spring. It was unintentionally sick (barring some weirdly incompetent people several levels up) and it did start out as a place of idealism with some very competent, generous workers.

I am still unemployed. Have just got through the ten-week "punishment period" when I get no unemployment benefit because I quit voluntarily. So I will start getting some modest money now. I don't know how long it will take to find a new job (although I am relatively sure it will be better than my former one...).

And I am enjoying my freedom immensely. The stress of uncertainty and being unemployed is nothing compared to the stress I was under. I never miss my workplace for a second. I will have to go visit sometime in August, to present my new book.

I did not like the person I was becoming, and I was close to developing stress-related health problems. Poor sleep, indigestion, losing hair, repeated colds. Nothing serious, but luckily I am good at pampering myself when I feel ill. Many chronically ill, burned out people say, "I should have seen it coming, all the signs were there." But they struggled on and hoped for the best. I was not going to become this kind of hero.

Funny, it seems to me that my experience leaving ISKCON had helped me see clearly and quit cleanly.

What if all these systems made it known they were only supposed to work for awhile and then be replaced? Then maybe they wouldn't be so sick. You could sit down with your temple pres, pop a cork and say "yay, we got it done".

Yes, I think we've all seen a very sick system so we can forever recognize them. That's a good thing, though hard won knowledge to be sure.

You clearly made the right decision. Sometimes systems are sick not as much through the fault of the people involved, but due to lack of resources and time to do the job required. I think may social service type organizations fall prey to this. There never seems to be enough money to hire enough people to do such work.