At the risk of making a grandiose statement, I think the fundamental question in ‘management’ is how to make people want to do things. All else is secondary, subsumed under this. This applies also, like the word ‘management’, to a vast assortment of fields – sales, security, law and order, diplomacy, teaching – nearly everything under the sun.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I think Saint-Exupéry expresses the idea well, though I confess I’m skeptical how far it’s applicable in most contexts. In any case, I’m the wrong person to write about how to go about it, so I won’t bother trying. It’s just that this basic problem, of things needing to be done and people not wanting to do them, is interesting to think about, even if one doesn’t propound any solutions.

Why would anyone want to make other people do things? That’s because firstly, certain things have to be done (for whatever reasons, whether mandates or necessity), and secondly, these things that have to be done are typically those that most people, exceptions notwithstanding, left to themselves, wouldn’t want to do. You don’t need to pay people to binge on shows or gorge pizzas or smoke – they themselves pay to do it. But you do need to pay them to do the mundane work most jobs require them to – conduct boring meetings, write uninteresting reports, undertake painful physical labour and the like. It goes without saying, that those fortunate to be paid for doing what they’d do for free are beyond consideration here.

And another reason might be that people do a better job at something when it’s a thing they want to do. So for work beyond the ordinary, for achievements that require innovation and insight rather than solely grit and effort, it seems almost a necessity – it’s hard to imagine a scientist coming up with discoveries at gunpoint. But a soldier or a dishwasher or a security guard, one might imagine, may get the job done satisfactorily with a sword hanging over their head – though even here, I’m sure, willingness, if one could instill it, would yield better results.

So in fields that demand breakthroughs, creativity, insight and the like – things that can’t be forced out of a person through fear but demand willingness – it’s vital that people want to do the work. Which is probably why research and technical innovation are driven by carrots rather than sticks – perks, pay, pampering, and perhaps more than all, freedom and curiosity and autonomy and even a little brainwashing through adulation, awards, and recognition. And so you’d expect the culture at a company like Meta to be quite different from say, a local governmental office.

So there’s a reason to want to make people do things, but then you run into the question – why is it hard to make people want to do things? I’ve assumed it is hard, because I find it so, and I think if it wasn’t difficult then the world would be a very different place. Nevertheless, someone who finds it easy has my admiration. But, assuming it is hard, what makes it hard? Firstly, the same reason as before, that if you need to make someone do something, it’s probably because they don’t want to do it of their own volition. And, even if that’s not the case, then, at the risk of generalizing from personal experience, the very act of mandating something – telling someone they have to do it – makes them not want to do it, or worse, want to not do it.

Not wanting to do something is usually the default – it’s not having a desire to do a particular thing, which is natural, given the infinite number of things out there and the finite number about which one has opinions or desires. It doesn’t imply any resistance to be overcome – it requires the effort needed to turn a stationary being in a particular direction. Of course, the force you have to apply is proportional to the velocity with which you want them to turn, that is, the momentum you need to impart.

Wanting to not do something, though, is having a desire to avoid doing that thing. In this case, there is resistance which needs to be overcome, and hence, to achieve the same velocity or momentum as the previous case, you need to impart a much greater force. That’s because the being has its own momentum, in the opposite direction, and the change in momentum, and thus the force, required is now significantly greater.

Except, in this case, applying force might actually increase the resistance, if, the more one is told to do something, the less they want to do it. The coefficient of static friction, 𝜇_𝑠 increases, which makes the force required to move the being also increase, and that has to increase at a greater rate than 𝜇_𝑠 to eventually overpower the friction. Perhaps this feeling needn’t be true in the case of everyone, but, I imagine, at least some will share it. To be ordered to do something, even if you’d have done it anyway, is, in a sense, to be deprived of some autonomy (except, obviously, when you know the ordering is done with the intention of making you feel this way, as a joke).

So there is a reason to want to make people want to do things, and it is difficult to do. How then, does one do it? There are, I think, enough books on influencing people or becoming a leader or some such thing that advise on how to go about it, written by people better placed to impart such wisdom.

I think A Clockwork Orange, however, has a different, and nice, if currently infeasible, solution. A new technique of reformation, an aversion therapy behaviour modification treatment called the Ludovico Technique, involving injecting a patient with nausea-inducing drugs while compelling him to watch violence in films, eventually makes the subject physically ill at the mere thought of violence.

In a sense, however, it’s not perfect. Ludovico can make someone not want to do what you don’t want them to want to do, like a juvenile becoming sick at the mere thought of crime, but it can’t make someone want to do what you want them to want to do (with so many wants, perhaps this sentence is wanting). It can’t, for example, make the juvenile want to go about volunteering at orphanages.

It’s much harder to make a person want to do something than it is to make them not want to do some other thing, and so we usually settle for the latter as a proxy for the former. It’s harder to make someone want to work at office longer, but, by shaming or penalizing, it’s relatively easier to make them not want to (or more accurately, not be willing to although still wanting to) leave the office early. Of course, it’s less effective, because, someone coercively restrained from leaving in all likelihood now wants to leave all the more, and, retained against his will, probably just marks time until he’s allowed to go, defeating the purpose of the whole exercise.

The most perfect mechanism, I would guess, to make someone want to do something is literal, physical brainwashing, to be able to impart a message to the brain that the body, or mind, wants that thing, presumably by triggering dopamine release to ensure motivation. Testosterone and sugar seem to work along similar lines. It’s probably more difficult, though, to recreate the effect for something mundane like reviewing a checklist. And so we end up with proxies, what we call incentives – something in place of the real thing. Pavlov used a bell as a proxy for food, the way money or awards are used for work. Leaders, I suppose, do the same, just dressed up differently. As Napoleon said, You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led.

I suppose it’s good enough if one is able to achieve the goal with a proxy, to ask for more is simply greed. It’s hard to imagine any mechanism, for instance, that could make people want to work in coal mines, that works on millions of humans (the odd exception always exists). So if you could achieve the objective through monetary rewards or recognition or certificates – and even this is a mighty task, perhaps itself impossible – it’s commendable.

Is there any difference, though, in the outcomes? A proxy is, of course, an extrinsic motive, as opposed to an intrinsic one. I have an innate distaste for extrinsic ones, perhaps simply an idiosyncrasy, but have to admit that, in most cases, probably, it doesn’t matter. In fact, in many instances, I’d guess, the extrinsic reward is the better mechanism, maybe even the only feasible one.

Yet a proxy works only as long as and so far as one recognizes it, that is to say, one gives it any value. The moment one ceases to associate the proxy with any worth, the show comes crashing down. If, for instance, a worker gets it into their head that their cherished certificate is but a worthless piece of paper probably signed en masse hastily by another human being. Or an employee decides their bonus money is worth less to them than their time and effort that it took to obtain it.

For such reasons, I’ve never been able to share the fascination of those who swear by ‘gamification’ to get through arduous tasks, or even more daringly, learn skills and languages. Why the hell would I care about someone’s made up points? The difference is not moral but simply whether one considers the self-deceit worth the outcome. Fame or wealth or some such motive I could comprehend, and even appreciate the job the proxy does covering up the real thing, but artificial ‘points’ that one cooks up simply to get through a task feel like a shoddy disguise that doesn’t actually disguise anything.

One can also counter that the same problem remains even without a proxy. One may cease to value a proxy, one may also cease to value the thing itself. A manager whose star player plays soccer to win trophies may cease caring about trophies, but he may also cease caring about soccer, so, proxy or no proxy, the outcome is the same. In fact, one could argue a proxy is a kind of insurance – a player may play soccer even if he stops caring about it, if he continues to care about a proxy like fame or money or awards (conversely, proxies like wealth, fame might come along as byproducts without aiming for them). As long as one can find proxies, the show will continue.

The only counter to this I have is a weak, unconvincing, anecdotal one – that the things I do without a proxy give me far greater happiness than those with one, and the people I’ve met who spend more time on things than on proxies seem to me happier. The caveat, however, is that without a proxy, a person seems beyond ‘management’ – that is, beyond the question of ‘making’ people ‘want’ to do things.

Why do revolutions end up as the opposite of what they ostensibly set ought to do?

Does skill and effort ever become obsolete with technology?

Improving enough to not be plagued by always needing to improve.

Sometimes, the price one pays is more than what something is worth.

Whether to treat the last the same as the first.

This is – usually – right up there amongst the most cliché of clichéd topics, and yet, somehow, also the most popular, if one goes by how many people nevertheless seem to want to discuss it.

There are few subjects more done to death over the millennia than that of god, this being a major reason for its boringness, that there is little, if anything, new – at least, nothing that is easily found. The other reason is because of the warlike camps it is divided into. One is immediately asked to pick a side, to classify oneself under a suitable label – theist, atheist or the like, though why someone’s belief or lack of it should matter to anyone else is difficult to fathom.

What is interesting about faith, however, is that it’s one of those topics you can have multiple diverging views about, and thus affords the joy of holding two directly contrasting opinions, completely at odds with each other, simultaneously. The label I do think comes close to one is ‘apatheism‘. In a nutshell, the theist believes, the atheist disbelieves, the agnostic doesn’t know, and the apatheist doesn’t care.

A very common take on god is attributed to Pascal (though, apparently, is a misrepresentation of his intentions). A distorted form of Pascal’s wager goes that to believe in God is net-positive and thus good reasoning. If you believe, and he (I’ll go with a ‘he’ for now) exists, you supposedly gain a lot (all that matters to ‘him’, apparently, is belief). If he doesn’t exist, you lose little, whereas if you disbelieve, you gain nothing if you’re right and supposedly lose a lot if you aren’t (‘he’s’ apparently very vindictive to doubters).

I’m always surprised by how many people seem to be wowed by this reasoning (which is obvious enough), as though ‘faith’ was simply logic and expected value calculation. If something is in your interest, you don’t need to ‘believe’ to accept it. Just as, if you only believe in something because it benefits you, you don’t really believe in it.

The opposite of the wager, I think, is the apatheist’s lack of interest, the question being a matter of complete indifference, of zero expected value either way. If he’s existed, he’s always gone on existing, and if he hasn’t, he’s gone on not existing, and either way, life has gone on and will go on, in his absence or presence. There are, perhaps, more interesting things to ponder upon, and in any case, if he exists, he would surely have better things to concern himself about than what a nobody believes (though one can, as Kierkegaard does, dispute this, that if you don’t love him, you hate him, that you don’t have an opinion on that which you look down on superciliously).

Another trite take is the ‘spiritual but not religious’ one. Perhaps one doesn’t want to or can’t bring oneself to believe the usual dogma, but still prefers lofty ideas and abstractions of ‘higher powers’ to shallow, earthy facts like that of human beings as little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium. Obviously, this is simplification, and everyone has their own reasons, from the one who genuinely thinks someone watches over, to the one who is afraid no one might be watching over. And, of course, more prosaically, it makes life easy for those who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, be on good terms with the atheist (I’m not religious) and on good terms with the priest (I’m spiritual). Whatever the reason, this once niche segment now seems to be a huge market – I recall an astro-tech founder smirking that over 75% of their customers were ‘spiritual but not religious’.

The opposite of ‘spiritual but not religious’ is quite literally ‘religious but not spiritual’, the mirror image on the axes. That is, I think, close to what Søren Kierkegaard writes on faith, and is also why I don’t care for the distorted Pascal wager logic. Faith is, after all, not a mere hedging of costs and benefits, that I believe X if it brings me gain, or reject Y if it doesn’t. You don’t need any faith for that. Faith is, in fact, the opposite – that I believe X even though it costs me significantly to do so.

Anyone can believe anything when it’s convenient. One doesn’t need faith for that, only a flexible enough spine to turn in the wind like a weathervane. To be an orthodox believer in the time of the Inquisition is not just uninteresting but likely, though of course not necessarily, a sham, a self-seeking move to reap power and pelf by aligning with the regime. To hold the same beliefs under the Communists or Nazis is quite another thing.

If faith is not a mere balancing of costs and benefits, neither, I think, is God. And yet it is a common enough notion, that of god as a merchant and religion as a transaction, whereby you chant or kneel or pray or sacrifice, in return for something else. It is, in essence, that I do X for you, and in turn you do Y for me, the X taking whatever form it does, whether a sacrifice of cash or food, or deeds performed for a purpose, or rituals engaged in. One doesn’t have anything against merchants, but surely a god isn’t simply a merchant, weighing the scales and supplying services against wares provided.

In religion, then, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, “I do not trouble God with my petty sorrows“. Someone who believes would not ask their god to do anything for them. And a God who is not a merchant, is a God who would not do anything for me. Faith is not something that makes my life easier; on the contrary, it only makes it more difficult.

This absence of gain differentiates faith from the rest, ‘religion’ from self-interest or, more pointedly and interestingly, even ethics, as Kierkegaard tries to show from the stories of Abraham and Agamemnon.

On the journey to Troy, the Greek fleet is unable to sail to Troy until Agamemnon atones for his sin against the goddess Artemis by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia, which he does. Difficult as his decision is, one can, at least from a certain perspective, understand it. This is Kierkegaard’s ‘tragic hero’, the one who makes the movement of ‘infinite resignation’ by giving up what is most precious to him. One is in the realm of the ethical here, for whether you agree or disagree with the choice, you can at least comprehend it, that the tradeoff is of the individual’s sacrifice for the greater good. What is comprehensible, one can still thresh out, as the Greek commanders did with Agamemnon, and write intelligibly about, in favour or against. Iphigenia herself, apparently, in some versions of the story, desires to give herself up for the good of the many. The tragic hero drinks the bitter cup of sacrifice to the dregs, but he is always understood, and, usually, praised.

But what of Abraham? The story of Abraham, who was to sacrifice – or to shun euphemisms, kill – his son Isaac at what he took to be the command of God, is a familiar one. Too familiar, in fact, that one glides over it effortlessly. And yet, if one really goes into, sees it from the first person point-of-view, as Kierkegaard does in astounding detail, rather than as a legendary fable of a hero, the feat of Abraham is, whether admirable or insane, incomprehensible and unsurpassable. “It is repugnant to me to do as so often is done, namely, to speak inhumanly about a great deed, as though some thousands of years were an immense distance; I would rather speak humanly about it, as though it had occurred yesterday, letting only the greatness be the distance, which either exalts or condemns.“

As Kierkegaard writes, imagine a parson who preaches the tale of Abraham so powerfully that a man is moved to sacrifice his son. All the parson’s eloquence would be as nothing to the earnestness with which he now strives to undo the effect of his own sermon, upon what he considers to be a madman out to commit infanticide, such is the insanity of Abraham’s actions.

For that is what Abraham does, and for no apparent purpose, other than that he supposes it to be the command of God. Agamemnon one can still understand, even honour, for giving up what was dearest to him for what was supposed to be the collective good, but Abraham? To sacrifice what is most precious, or to shun abstractions, to kill one’s own son, for no purpose whatsoever other than an imagined command, is incomprehensible, and if anything, condemnable.

A disclaimer – one can, obviously dent this story severely by pointing out that Abraham had seen God and hence for him a leap of faith was far easier than another, and that is undeniable. The point is, however, not Abraham or Agamemnon, but the religious and the ethical – they are only examples of the concepts.

In that sense, then, Agamemnon, dealing as he does with the ethical, is still in the realm of reason and logic. You can quibble about whether he was wrong or right, whether he was heroic or demonic, and draw on your internal logic to back your claims. The utilitarian may laud him for sacrificing the happiness of the few for the many, the deontologist might condemn him for abandoning his offspring.

Faith, however, both in general and in the instance of Abraham, transcends reason, in the sense that one can’t ‘comprehend’ it. I use the phrase ‘transcending reason’ with caution, well aware of the patronizing sense it is used by theists of all breeds, having been on the receiving end myself countless times, to seek to imply that the doubter, however smart he thinks himself, lacks some sophisticated higher understanding the believer possesses, and doubtless, one day, will learn the error of his ways. There is no such ‘right’ understanding implicit in ‘transcending reason’ here; transcending reason simply implies that reason doesn’t get you to faith. If you do get to faith, there is a leap involved; but whether one wants to (let alone needs to) make a leap, is a purely individual choice, and certainly not an injunction to be obeyed. As far as leaps go, for that matter, there are certainly many other leaps in the market, whether it be the hedonistic or absurdist or nihilist one. Thus far, and no farther, says reason. Beyond that is a leap, whichever one, but everyone leaps.

Faith transcends reason, but it also, I think, goes against reason, at least a particular kind of reason, the reason of self-interest. One can transcend this reason without going against it, but the peculiarity of faith is that it goes against it as well. It is in this sense that the pseudo Pascal’s wager fails the test of faith, though it doesn’t transcend reason either, and instead, in fact, originates from it. To go against such reason is to necessarily do something ‘unreasonable’, that someone ‘in their right mind’ wouldn’t – like, in fact, Abraham killing his son for no good reason. An orthodox believer’s faith might transcend reason in the Inquisition or in the atheist gulag, but it only goes against it in the latter, which, I dare say, would be a truer test of it.

As already pointed out, faith is incomprehensible, and the reason for it’s incomprehensibility is this leap beyond the edges of what reason takes you to. But what also follows from its incomprehensibility is silence. Faith, true faith, is silent for the reason that it can’t be comprehended. Agamemnon could, and in fact did, thresh things out with the Greek commanders, for his sacrifice of Iphigenia for the expedition’s sake was immediately comprehensible, even to those who wouldn’t agree with it. Imagine, however, Abraham seeking the opinion of others of his plan to kill Isaac in obedience of a demand he believed God made of him. Disgust, condemnation, if not physical restraint awaited him. What one cannot explain, one cannot speak of, and must remain silent.

Silence is also a prerequisite for another reason, that, whether or not virtue is its own reward, the appearance of virtue is certainly a reward. The faith that makes a virtue of itself, that breathes tales of its own heroics and sacrifices and self-negation, or glorious deeds and benefactions, has already had its reward of self-validation. It is firmly in the realm of reason and self-interest, transactional in its exchange of services provided for rewards reaped, rational in the sense of falling on the positive side of the cost-benefit ledger, and easily understood.

This is not the sort of topic I typically write about, and, I think, one I don’t do too well either. Making the claim that something transcends reason is always fraught with risk, usually cringe-inducing even to read, let alone write. Too often, that claim is a way to weasel out of defending a position you take, an excuse to write loosely and get away with it. With reason, as far as it takes you, you can follow the writer’s steps, detect stumbling blocks he overlooked or attempted to paper over, and observe the explicit or implicit foundations on which he builds. At any rate, you can agree or disagree, and know why. Whereas, without reason, you either believe or disbelieve, usually because you already believe or disbelieve.

The market for lemons at work.

Two familiar books, that weren’t actually that.

Difference of thought is too easily written off as irrationality.

The beginning of sin.

The performativeness of the third person POV

Happiness need not be alike.

Friendship, devoid of transactionality..

What is rational, optimal and even ethical in an ordinary interaction is rarely so on the assembly line of interactions.

The relation between the unhappy and the interesting in writing.

Whether character comes from suffering, and whether it’s worth suffering for.

Writing on narrower themes, for no one.

The implications of privilege, and its checking.

Causality precedes prescription

Whether deliberation makes something unnatural, and whether it’s enough to be genuine to be natural.

Discipline and truth, force and natural inclination.

The neighbour as a metaphor against elitism and abstraction

The terms and conditions for caring.

The question of what to work on.