Systems that treat people as schemers attract and empower schemers
Hook
Design a system that assumes people will cheat, and you get cheaters.
Claim
If you design for distrust, you get distrust. Stock-based pay meant to align executives produced fraud, because it treated leaders as defectors and selected for them. One bad actor can drag a group down by a third. Power also removes the need to understand those without it.
Story
Benkler’s The Penguin and the Leviathan: agency theory as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Graeber on interpretive labour: those without power must understand the powerful, never the reverse, which is why systems feel dehumanising at the bottom and fine at the top. No single named person yet.
Sources
- extraction of Petar’s book note, second-hand; book: The Penguin and the Leviathan
- extraction, second-hand; book: Brave New Work
- extraction, second-hand; book: The Culture Code
- extraction, second-hand; book: The Utopia of Rules
- Petar’s unpublished tweet draft
Check before posting
- The core claim for the public sector (relationships and manipulation beat results) has no source here. Keep it about selection, never named people.
- The 30 to 40 percent figure needs the original study.
- Needs a person-level story.
Counterargument
This is also true in private firms. What differs in the public sector?
Post angles
Facebook (Croatian)
- Ako sustav pretpostavlja da ste lopov, privlači i nagrađuje one koji se tako ponašaju.
- Tko je moćan, ne mora razumjeti druge. Tko je nemoćan, mora. Zato se sustavi dolje osjećaju neljudski, a gore sasvim u redu.
LinkedIn (English)
- If a system assumes you are a thief, it attracts and rewards the people who behave like one.
- The powerful never have to understand the rest. The powerless have to understand the powerful. That is why a system can feel inhuman at the bottom and perfectly fine at the top.