Hells Canyon, Idaho/Montana Border

Understanding the Anti-Empathetic on a structural basis is challenging — mostly because the ones we run into at work may, for the most part, seem just fine, most of the time.  There’s a distortion in much of the web content, as well as some of the psychological literature, that people suffering empathy disorders, or High Conflict People (HCPs), as Bill Eddy describes, are always out to lunch.  I remember seeing a video posted on a psychological diagnosis website describing Narcissistic Personality Disorder –whatever that exactly means — remember that even the insurance companies a la the DSM V can’t come to a consensus.  The actor displayed happened to be a woman, and she was wildly unlikable.  No one, upon encountering such a person, would ever listen to them.  But that is absolutely not the way they regularly roll.  HCPs/empathy-disordered people are often very charismatic.  And some are quite famous.

There are reasons for the distortion of image.  One is that much of the psychological research on personality disorders are done on people in prison populations — not the ones loose in the world.  The second is that there are no truly effective treatment modalities.  Aside from some modest gains with techniques like Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), which was invented by a self-admitted personality disordered researcher — Dr. Marsha Lineham at the University of Washington — there’s not much out there.  And there’s not likely to be much in the future.  People with empathy disorders tend not to think they need treatment, or that there’s anything wrong with them.  When they have a problem or conflict, they think there’s something wrong with you.  As such, they tend not to go to psychologists.

And then there are problems in understanding how they interact with the people tasked to study them — namely psychologists.  My observations have been based on systems theory — connecting things together.  If you ascribe to the theories in this blog, that social/relational systems create the way different communities think, there are few communities that are as heavily legalistic as the psychology community.  Only small offshoots of the community delve deeply into connection issues (family systems therapy comes to mind), and the field has been slow to work its way out of gender stereotypes of the different personality disorders — which once again, are a reflection of the knowledge structure produced by the social structure of psychologists!

If you’re having a hard time swallowing this, I do understand.  But examine your own thought in the following scenario.  You are depressed.  You are sitting in your therapist’s office.  You tell the therapist:  “I am depressed.”  The therapist says to you “now XXX, who’s in charge of your happiness?”  What do you impulsively answer?

If you’re a typical American, we all know the answer.  You’re almost 100% likely to answer “I am.  I am in charge of my happiness.”  Yet we all know intrinsically that this is simply not the case all of the time.  Sometimes we are — but sometimes we are locked in a system with an abuser.  And if that abuser is of the chronic variety, odds are they have an empathy disorder — or are a High Conflict Individual.

How then to understand these people?  The conclusions that follow are my own — but at some level, I want to make sure I make perfectly clear that I lean on my external definition 🙂 — I am an engineering professor — not a professional, certified psychologist.  I’ve read widely, but I am sure not completely.  So this is my informed take.

High Conflict Personalities (HCPs), especially when activated, reside primarily in the Authoritarian/Egocentric v-Meme.  It is not clear that they really possess any other intrinsic behavior other than what serves them.  But they have a tremendous ability to use Mirroring Behavior to blend in.  What does that mean?

Like everyone, HCPs have two primary relationships with self.  One is Externally Defined — what culture, organization, and in general, the outside world think of themselves.  For this, HCPs are extremely sensitive — in fact, there is a case to be made that they are hyper-sensitive.  This hyper-sensitivity may come from hypervigilance — basically a sense of constant arousal and awareness to threats.  Hypervigilance, and the anxiety associated with it, may be a forcing function that creates the empathy-disordered mind.  If one is hypervigilant, it means that someone’s temporal and spatial scaling is constantly activated, and as a result, temporal scales essentially collapse inside the individuals’ head.

Hypervigilance often comes from a trauma background, and is often associated with PTSD.  But trauma alone does not explain the complete profile of the empathy-disordered.  There is likely a genetic component, and this is poorly understood.  For those interested, do look up Simon Baron-Cohen’s work.  HCPs and the empathy disordered also likely have symptoms of what is called an attachment disorder —  an inability to attach, or form appropriate empathetically based relationships with primary figures in life during childhood.  I believe (and maybe someone’s beat me to this thought!) that this results in poorly formed ego boundaries.  This has profound consequences in how the HCP/empathy-disordered individual moves about the world.

How does all of this work?  The HCP/empathy-disordered individual lives in a world of poorly defined self.  In many ways, their Independent Relationship with their self is in shambles. And since that poorly defined self has poorly defined boundaries, the person is not able to discriminate between themselves and the outside world in any instantaneous mode.  When you fold in a phenomenon such as hypervigilance, where they feel constantly under threat, they adapt.  But the way they adapt is to develop mechanisms of control — it’s control uber alles.  

How they develop those strategies then depends on the Survival v-Meme assets that individual has.  For someone who is physically attractive, it’s not surprising that they would develop traits associated with narcissism.  For someone like Josef Stalin, small in stature and with a pockmarked face and uncharismatic  personality, it is again not surprising that they would develop more direct methods of control.

Regardless, the fundamentals of empathetic development cannot be avoided.  The collapsed sense of independent self leads to a collapsed sense of independent time. While appearing to be a liability, also serves as an asset — the HCP/empathy-disordered can shift time in their head at will, without conscience.  Lack of boundaries also manifests themselves in varying ways.  Something that gives them pleasure is there for their taking — it’s not really separate from them anyway.  Social conventions, if not explicitly enforced, are something the HCP/empathy-disordered can use at their liking.  There is no internal feedback loop that constrains behavior.  Ever try to conceive how a child molester, an extreme manifestation of these types of behaviors, justifies their behavior?

The key to understanding, though, lies in the well-developed Mirroring Behavior function in the empathy pyramid.  In many ways, deficits in other areas of empathetic development are exaggerated as surplus quantities in this level.  For the HCP/empathy-disordered, hypervigilance becomes an asset.  A true, high functioning HCP/empathy-disordered individual can walk into a room of people and immediately know what those people want to hear.  And not worry if what they tell them is utter B.S.  Lying doesn’t affect them internally — because there is no internal ‘there’ there.  It is merely one more tool in the toolbox.

The lack of boundaries also serves as an asset.  HCPs can distort and lie willfully, even when the truth may be easily accessible. It’s not surprising that various CEOs have been accused of being psychopaths.  Many of the advantages associated with disassociated temporal and spatial scale processing have advantages in the business world of today.

There is deep cultural knowledge of these types of personalities, contained in myth.  One of my favorites is the vampire.  What does a vampire see when he (or she) looks in the mirror?  Nothing, of course — what could be a better paradigm for a collapse of independent definition?  And how does a vampire dress (always in a tuxedo)?  Remember that daylight (exposure to scrutiny) will make the vampire wither and die.  When presented like this, it’s pretty obvious that the archetype comes from aggregated cultural knowledge of narcissists — not some creepy dude in Transylvania.

It should be noted that there are degrees of empathy disordered.  Not every person that has some level of anti-empathy is completely unhinged, and some can be reached with epiphany during crisis.  But for those real Princes and Princesses of Darkness,  realize that they are only constrained by immediate external scrutiny.  And that’s terrifying.

Takeaways:  HCPs/empathy disordered suffer from core empathetic deficiency — a distorted and typically collapsed sense of time and space.  This leads to extreme egocentric/Authoritarian v-Meme behavior, and a strong desire to control.  Some of this may be caused by an attachment disorder — a early childhood failure to attach to appropriate authority/parents.  Trauma can also lead to this type of behavior, turning hyperawareness/hypervigilance from a liability to an asset.  Poorly separated through appropriate ego boundaries, and knowing no inner peace because of it, the HCP/empathy-disordered person works to control their world with the talents and tools available to them.

Dead Salmon, Lolo Creek, Clearwater National Forest, Idaho

One of the challenges when discussing bad leadership — or even disordered leadership–  is that it’s, quite obviously, a sensitive subject.  And the person one is accusing in being a bad leader typically doesn’t like it.  So I’ve decided to take a different tack.

Let’s discuss whom I call ‘The Big Three’ — the seminal tyrants from the mid 20th century.  All three did things that were, in short, amazing.  And all three did things that, regardless of the amazing things they did, turned out to be ultimately terribly destructive for the countries they led.

Who are the Big Three?  Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.  What is interesting to me is that each member of The Big Three embodied the manipulation forms of three of the most dominant negative personality-disordered leadership styles.  Stalin was a cold-blooded psychopath.  Hitler was histrionic.  And Mao was a narcissist-to-end-all-narcissists.

Stalin — Anti-social Personality Disorder

The story below is likely apocryphal, but it is widespread — I copied it off this website:

When Josef Stalin was on his deathbed he called in two likely successors, to test which one of the two had a better knack for ruling the country. He ordered two birds to be brought in and presented one bird to each of the two candidates.

      The first one grabbed the bird, but was so afraid that the bird could free himself from his grip and fly away that he squeezed his hand very hard, and when he opened his palm, the bird was dead.     

Seeing the disapproving look on Stalin’s face and being afraid to repeat his rival’s mistake, the second candidate loosened his grip so much that the bird freed himself and flew away.

      Stalin looked at both of them scornfully. “Bring me a bird!” he ordered.  They did.

      Stalin took the bird by its legs and slowly, one by one, he plucked all the feathers from the bird’s little body.

      Then he opened his palm. The bird was laying there naked, shivering, helpless.  Stalin looked at him, smiled gently and said, “You see .. and he is even thankful for the human warmth coming out of my palm.”

Josef Stalin was a classic Anti-social Personality Disordered Psychopath.  He was not known as a particularly charismatic speaker.  He did, however, establish a centralized command economy in the Soviet Union, while modernizing the economy — effectively moving the Soviet Union out of an agrarian economy, imprisoned millions in the Gulags in the Far East/Siberia, as well as starving at least 10 million people in the Ukraine during the Holodomor.  Stalin is interesting as a disordered leadership paradigm insofar as he embodies a very pure Authoritarian v-Meme.  Enemies were not only shot.  They were famously erased from photographs.  As an example, embodying the psychological distortion known as gaslighting, Stalin had his head of secret police, Nikolai Yezhov, arrange for purging all the old Bolsheviks as part of the original revolution, then turned on Yezhov himself and had him executed as well.

Stalin is a great example of the overwhelming weaknesses, as well as marginal strengths of pure Authoritarian systems.  On the one hand, Stalin (as well as the Russian winter) resisted the Nazis’ invasion during Operation Barbarossa, and turned the tide of WWII.  On the other hand, the dramatic failure and collapse of production and productivity during the various collectivization campaigns run inside the Soviet Union should give any Executive Board pause when dealing with a CEO that says things like ‘I need absolute power to run a tight ship.’

Stalin displayed many elements of Narcissistic Personality Disorder as well — but he primarily operated through control of resources, fear and terror.  He made others dependent on his system, while simultaneously ruthlessly killing or starving anyone that got in his way.   Yet the cold-blooded manipulation of truth inside the system, while aggregating economic as well as political power inside the Soviet Union serves as an exemplar of how to terrorize an entire continent.

The main characteristics of the ASD leader are:  unremitting commitment to control; use of fear and dependency to enforce allegiance;  and cold-blooded cruelty to transmit the message that there are no boundaries that are sacred.

Hitler — the Histrionic

So much has been written about Hitler, there’s little I can say in a few sentences that can add to the record.  The reason he is listed, with the fear of invoking/violating Godwin’s Law, is that there is little question that Hitler was one helluva motivational speaker.  Inevitably, though, his speeches would follow an arc whereby he would claim a.) Germans had been victimized by Jews, b.) blame external enemies for any fault, and c.) the only way for Germans to redeem themselves from the past was to follow him — which they did.  Hitler was also extremely fatalistic in his long-term analysis of any efforts to build the 1000 year Reich — it was all supposed to go to ruin anyway.  In fact, in this essay (one of my all-time favorites) Lee Sandlin makes the point that Hitler used to sit around with Adolph Speer, his chief architect, contemplating the ‘ruin value’ of his works.

The key takeaway from Hitler’s characteristics is his potent distortion using Victim/Blaming/Condemned Hero strategies that allow unification of a group of people behind him.  Even though fantastic, the strategy, coupled with historic patterns in German culture — not just anti-Semitism, but Hitler’s ability to tap into Germans’ deep connection with a magical past — helped manipulate a downtrodden people at the end of a period of intense economic desperation.  It’s no surprise that Hitler’s favorite operas were written by Richard Wagner.  Hitler even allegedly swore on Wagner’s grave, in 1923, to maintain the performance venue of Bayreuth as the only place Wagner’s famous Grail redemption opera, Parsifal, could be performed.  In many ways, it was Hitler’s mastery of borrowing the power of myth and deep story that gave him power to manipulate an entire country into mass murder, and their own destruction.

Mao Zedong — The Narcissist

There can be a healthy debate among historians on who was the worst of the Three Great Tyrants.  But there is no question that Mao gives the other two a run for their money.  Not only did Mao control, dominate and murder hundreds of millions of people, but he also ran experiments on entire populations inside his own country.  Where Hitler had some level of In-group/Out-group separation, however execrable, inside Mao’s China, everything was fair game.  It is true that if Mao favored anyone, he at some level gave lip service to the peasant class.  But with his authority, groups like Mao’s Red Guards wreaked havoc on the entire population, and drove large-scale relational destruction and social re-integration through campaigns where intellectuals were sentenced to peasant camps and mass redistribution and destruction of cultural property was also the norm.

Though there were other large-scale campaigns perpetrated by Mao, most people have heard of the Cultural Revolution, where Mao destroyed the universities and killed close to 3 million people.  During the Cultural Revolution, Mao, through forced relocation, and campaigns like the Four Olds and the Four News, systematically replaced centuries of Chinese tradition with what is known in the psychological literature as narcissistic supply directed at him — termed Mao Zedong Thought.  Mao demanded and programmed such levels of thought in the populace that even simple utterances, like “Sweet potato tastes good” became popular slogans with the Chinese peasantry.  In the end, Mao demanded the thought control of a god.

Yet at the same time, there are indisputable figures and indicators during Mao’s reign of terror that in aggregate, the lot of many, or perhaps most of China’s citizens improved.  Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949, to 63 by 1975.  In many ways, China pre-Mao was frozen in time, and falling further and further behind the West.  Mao, through a catastrophic program of narcissistic relational disruption, in many ways altered the social structure of a nation that had been stuck in a Magical/Authoritarian v-Meme for 2000 years, and created the environment for China’s current rush toward modernity.  It is difficult to know (and not the point of this blog) or to judge Mao’s larger legacy.

The key takeaway from Mao’s efforts in an effort to understand disordered leadership is this:  the Narcissist, through a combination of external terror and the constant drumbeat of self-aggrandizement, coupled with the demands for leadership worship, creates a Black Hole effect around the population they manage.  Everyone looks toward that leader that can alternately be charismatic or cruel, and are drawn into their orbit.  The goal of such a leadership style is a collapse of personal boundaries and agency, with that inculcated passivity ending with the individuals being drawn over the Event Horizon of the culture created.  Coherent action in the population is created through an infinite fragmentation of other relational networks — no one has any other binding relationship that exceeds the relationship with the leader.  And while this can create patterns of coherence greater than the other two styles — Psychopath and Histrionic — in the end, cognitive and intellectual diversity are fundamentally destroyed.  And this leads, in the long-term, to a collapse in creativity, as well as upward information flow in the system.  In the end, such behavior is self-defeating.  Because no one can think completely for an organization — or a nation.

Takeaways:  The Three Tyrants of the 20th century can offer iconic perspectives on anti-empathetic leadership.  Stalin, with ASD, shows the power of unrelenting fear and terror,  social dislocation, and economic control in creating broad-scale passivity that, in the end, dramatically effected the economic productivity of an entire part of the world.  Most important of Stalin’s legacy was the collapse of peer-level trust in Eastern Europe, as well as the Soviet Union.  

Hitler demonstrates the power of what we call v-Meme borrowing — the borrowing of deep, resonant stories from people’s backgrounds for the purpose of manipulation.  As an exemplar of a Histrionic personality disorder, he also successfully used the Victim/Blaming/Condemned Hero triad as a way to garner sympathy and gather control over supporters.

More than any of the above, Mao shows the power of the narcissist.  He took hundreds of millions of people, and through the constant drumbeat of self-aggrandizement, infinitely fragmented millions of relationships and made them focus solely on him.  As a master relational disruptor, he took China’s iconic reverence for scholars and intellectuals, and turned this into class-based rage that resulted in the deaths of millions, and the destruction of an enormous part of China’s cultural heritage.  The creation of coherence through subordination has created an empathetic relational crisis, and through that, a creativity crisis, that modern China is only beginning to recover from today.

Friend Doug Bostrom, on the newly formed Cramer Rapids, Salmon River, Idaho

““You underestimate the power of the Dark Side”  Darth Vader

If you’ve been working for a while, in a modestly less ideal environment that I’ve described in the previous post, I’m sure a lot of this regarding empathy and empathetic development seems pie-in-the-sky.  There are whole classes of businesses that exist where empathy hardly matters.  The majority of academics, for example, aren’t even aware of the role of empathy — and are likely to criticize, or just flat-out ignore its importance.  Even the best of them — folks actually doing empathy research — don’t really have a good grasp on how connection evolves.  Franz de Waal’s book on The Age of Empathy, has the bottom three levels of the empathy pyramid I’ve discussed (that I didn’t pick up on the first reading!) but there’s not a whole lot out there besides that.

But there are worse things than academic hierarchies and a lack of evolutionary understanding.  And these also can manifest themselves on high performance teams.  That is the world of the empathy-disordered — a relatively unexplored space.

There has been a fair amount of diagnostic work on personality, or empathy disorders, with psychologists mostly characterizing surface-level traits of pathological individuals.  For those interested, the digested results are listed in the DSM V, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders.  For those not in the know, the DSM is the manual psychologists use to bill insurance companies — and that’s important to remember.  The names may be familiar to some of this blog’s readers — Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and a bunch more.  The reality is that there are no clear cut lines between many of these, and psychologists, arranged in their professional Legalistic v-Meme hierarchies, tend to be categorizers who argue all the time about which is what, and so on.  Synergies be damned!

The key here, which should not be surprising to anyone who reads this blog regularly, is that there is even less research on how such people interact in networks.  And managing their effects in networks is really the crux of it, as aside from a couple of potentials, there are really no good set of  treatments for the individuals.  They wreak havoc in relational systems, and many a successful organization has been upended by these personalities.  Or taken over by them.  It’s hard to argue that many of the leading bankers in the world are NOT empathy-disordered.  Yet they are hugely successful, at least financially — at least in the short term.

To understand exactly how they work, though, it is useful to consider a very organic model of empathy — a more functional concept.  I particularly like the metaphor of empathy as an active radar system.

Here’s the basics.  In order to create empathy and connection, every person’s brain is equipped with an Empathy Detector, and an Empathy Processor.  What these are, biologically, still remain poorly mapped.  In the context of the v-Meme medical researchers have, (fragmented, disconnected analysis arising from the hierarchical social structure!) neuroscientists have used fMRI research to pinpoint the exact spot on the brain they think empathy is centered — the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex.  And while this area may be critical, it’s by no means the only spot the brain uses to process empathy.

The Empathy Detector reads whatever the cues are that are being given off in an exchange with another sentient actor.  After these cues are received, they are then processed by the Empathy Processing centers in that person’s brain.  What a person will do, given a set of information, is highly variable.  It certainly is going to depend on dominant v-Meme level of the individual, Principle of Reinforcement and cultural sidebars, as well as the core biological response of the person.

Biologically queued empathy, likely best represented by mirroring behavior, has been around for a long time, and serves as the core of coordinating physical interaction.  It probably dates back to the Silurian, when ancient fish used to school for protection for the first time.  Below is a picture of Velociraptors, using mirroring behavior to corner a Diabloceratops.

Istockphoto — Velociraptors and Diabloceratops

Humans, as coordinating mesoscale hunters, also have hard-wired neural systems for coordinated empathetic response.  The vagus nerve, for example, connects the stomach to the lower jaw.  You can, if you can see someone’s face, get in essence a whole-body health reading on them at that moment.  Pretty handy if you’re trying to manage a group hunting a wooly mammoth.  You can tell pretty quickly who ought to be throwing the spear, and who’s just having a bad day.

Though everyone obviously has a range of both empathetic detection, and empathetic processing, two groups stand out as having more profound issues — people who have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and those that have personality, or empathy disorders.

In the case of ASD, it’s bad detector.  There’s nothing wrong with the processor, once the empathetic information gets through — and one of the things that I’ve noticed, teaching and interacting with engineering students, is that in a population where ASD is likely more well-represented, once social behaviors are learned, they are acted on.  Empathy, not surprisingly, re-routes itself out of the more instantaneous centers that may not work so well, to other, more promising brain real estate.  The bottom line is that while certain people with ASD may be not so quick on the uptake, once they figure it out, they do fine.  The short version is that they are capable of appropriate empathetic response.

The other side of this is the Dark Side.  These are people that have empathy problems, but their problem is not so much in the detector.  Their detector is just fine — in fact, I will argue a little later that their detector is far above average, for many of the most effective ones.  Their disorder is in the processor — how they respond when given a situation that one might expect kindness or compassion.  Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, that’s Sasha Baron-Cohen’s, the famous actor’s, brother) as head of neuroscience at Cambridge, and a specialist in Autism, separates these two things slightly differently, but with the same effect.  He calls the two sides of this problem 0+ (ASD) and 0- (empathy disorder or deficit).  The video below is well worth the watch.

How to understand this from the Empathy Pyramid?  Let’s pull up a picture again.

Essentially, for reasons we’ll discuss, the personality disordered crowd mostly live in the hard-wired world of mirroring behaviors.  When it comes to displaying emotional empathy, or higher forms, there is a level of volition in response that most of us don’t have.  They can, as they see fit, turn that part on or off.  Maybe.  It’s not clear.  It’s so converse to the way humans in systems work, it’s really hard to understand how much independent agency they actually have.

Jumping to the punchline, what I’ve seen among the personality-disordered, or really what Bill Eddy calls High Conflict Personalities, is that they exist in a world of what I call Collapsed Egocentricism — the only v-Meme they really know is a virulent form of Authoritarianism.  This is usually coupled, among the high-functioning ones we have to deal with at work (the low-functioning ones often end up in jail, where most of the studies have been done — not very useful!) with a kind of Super Radar that enables them to detect others’ moods and predilections.  They then engage in what I call v-Meme Borrowing — borrowing from others’ dominant influential patterns — to make their points, which inevitably they distort to establish control and personal benefit for themselves.

How do they act in a network?  The best way to understand them is akin to a splinter in the palm of someone’s hand.  When the splinter is in the palm, the hand swells — it appears that the whole system has problems.  But when the splinter is withdrawn, the hand very quickly returns to normal.

We’ll unpack how these individuals work in the next couple of posts.  There’s really no way to avoid talking about them — no matter how unpleasant.  Bill Eddy has made the point that the NIH has said approximately 14-17% of the population has some characteristics of High Conflict Personalities.  You can’t get away from them.  So you have to learn their effects, and how to deal with them.

Takeaways:  Personality, or empathy-disordered individuals are not well understood as individuals, regarding their various personal motivators.  But they are even less understood in how they act in relational networks.  And that is the main concern we will attempt to address.  We’ll leave the more complex individual analysis to the psychologists.

Further reading/watching:  There is no better expose’ of the various relational manipulations than Christopher Nolan’s movie, The Dark Knight, and the portrayal of the Joker by Heath Ledger.  Highly recommended for a pre-watch — we’ll be revisiting the Joker’s character for understanding in depth the modalities present in High Conflict individuals.

Hohensalzburg — Salzburg, Austria

A couple of interesting stories came across my FB feed, courtesy of Professor AG Rud, of the College of Education.  AG is the former Dean of the College, and writes about a variety of subjects, including the role of Reverence in Education.  This is of particular interest to me, as I view Reverence as an empathetic ladder, particularly applicable to elevating those in Authoritarian systems toward a more appropriate, kinder Legalism.

The headlines of the two stories were:  Sexual Harassment Case Shines Light on Science’s Dark Secret, and University of Miami Sued Over the Handling of Colin McGinn Harassment Claims.  In both stories, a professor (both male) is featured that severely sexually harassed a female student.  The protagonist in the first story is an astronomer — Geoffrey Marcy.  In the second, a philosopher — Colin McGinn.  After reading (or listening) to either story, you’ll likely easily conclude that they are guilty of the behavior described.  It’s just nuts.  Both are, in academia-land, very famous — Marcy has been touted for the Nobel Prize.  McGinn, a famous philosopher, was even courted for a position, after his resignation at the University of Miami for ostensible sexual harassment, at East Carolina University.

Journalists (and other academics as well) hunt for answers referencing the discipline.  “It’s the sciences that have the problem,” or something special about the liberal arts.  What in science, per se, is so unique that would cause this kind of pathology?  On the surface, even this type of hypothesis is enough to make one blush.

What these people could use is a big dose of ole timey v-Meme theory.  People in academia are largely organized in Authoritarian power structures.  As part of our job, we are PAID to be an authority.  It should come as no surprise that a certain percentage of us display the pathologies of the v-Meme, including corruption, and an assumption of the right to impose our will on those beneath us.  So many aspects of academia are constructed to facilitate such acts of abuse.  Remember that Principle of Reinforcement stuff way back when on the blog? There’s virtually none of us that share office space, for example.    And our offices are lined up, with closed doors that have the privacy and social order of the solitary confinement section of a prison.  Fine if you’re healthy, and integrally constrained.  But for those with an empathy disorder?  Eh, not so much.

The definitive study hasn’t been done, but it’s hardly surprising if male-> female sexual harassment is more common in the sciences.  The statistics of the distributions of people in power (science obviously has more men in power than women — it’s a well-known problem) vs. the people not in power lend itself to this kind of manifestation.  Add in the factor of how a pathological Authoritarian male would view sexual domination as a privilege of elevated status, and, well, it’s not too hard to figure out how things work.  Authoritarian males have had concubines for literal ages.  Old habits die hard — including those of the younger women, even at the outset, not questioning why they are receiving special access and privilege.  Both victims in both cases noted that from the beginning, they were receiving special treatment.  Didn’t they stop for a minute to question why?  And this isn’t blaming the victim.  They are NOT responsible for the professors’ behavior.  It’s merely a point that we all play into the dance inside our social structure.  Self-awareness is key.

Nothing I’ve said above would be any surprise to someone studying power dynamics in social systems.  But what’s even more interesting to me, though, is why the woman highlighted for investigating sexual harassment in the sciences in the NPR piece, Katie Hinde, an assistant professor at Harvard, contextualizes her analysis to women in the sciences.  As part of a fragmented, authoritarian social structure herself, she reaches out to pin things on men in the sciences — it’s where she has her data, after all — and practices some level of egocentricity.  It’s HER v-Meme set as well.  Instead of generalizing and contextualizing the issue in a larger frame of non-empathetic power structures, it must be worse where she is.   To be fair, I haven’t tabulated any numbers myself.  But maybe what we fundamentally need is to confront how we’re organized, and evolve our communities.  Note to readers — consider the v-Meme set of any given observer.

On a personal note, I can understand how this works.  A while back, I heard a piece on NPR talking about how overweight people had a problem with disconnection and loneliness.  The thesis was that ‘because we’re fat, no one will look at us or greet us.’  The thesis seemed reasonable, and feeling like this was something I could make a small dent in with an act of kindness, on my bike rides, I started saying ‘Hello’ to all overweight people I saw walking on the trail.  But what I noticed was that on the Chipman Trail, most people didn’t reply.  It didn’t make any difference what they looked like.  I was the only one saying ‘hi’!  I still say ‘hi’ to everyone on the trail.  But I also understand a little better the nature of egocentric analysis.  It’s not that people don’t greet overweight people.  According to my very limited experiment — no one was greeting anyone.

What’s the moral to the story?  Instead of looking at surface-level reasons, we might look a little deeper at the fundamental empathetic dynamics of the social/relational systems we set up.  It might yield more profound solutions than pinning things on a discipline, or an assumed code of ethics that are not reinforced by either the environment, or the empathetic evolution of the people in the system.

Further Reading:  This is an interesting table on the statistics of sexual harassment.  The majority of complaints are by women, not surprisingly.  But note the relatively constant, monolithic increase over time of men’s complaints.  Have things really changed, or are we starting to see a larger receptivity toward men feeling culturally comfortable to file a complaint?  Or is this a manifestation of women moving up in power positions in society?

Olympic mascots, outside the Birdcage Olympic Stadium, Beijing, China

One of the points Don Beck, one of the primary innovators of Spiral Dynamics has made (so frustrating that I can’t reference this correctly!!!) is that leaders of organizations can be at a given v-Meme level, or one above.  This kind of makes sense — a leader at a level above pushes evolution of the dominant v-Memes his or her group possesses, and helps them along their way.

All this sounds fine.  And if you go back and read about my various posts on v-Meme conflict, it makes sense.  There’s no guaranteed conflict between folks only one step on the Spiral apart.  So, in an Authoritarian society, a Legalist could be the leader, and help the Authoritarians evolve up a step to realize that a system that didn’t just depend on the judgment and favor of the Top Dog, but instead,a scaffolded system of laws guaranteeing everyone’s rights.  They would also be forfeiting their privilege in the process, in getting others to evolve.  Confucius’ edict, ‘A good emperor doesn’t kill his own people,’ definitely falls into that category.  By removing the Emperor’s authority over life and death of his subjects, and hopefully subjecting such decisions to a process, the society evolves up a notch.

But how did Don Beck conceive of this, and how do I think that would make me believe this is a reasonable notion?  And what does this have to do with Servant Leadership 2.0?

Thinking about this led me to this seemingly simply edict about this fundamental meta-property of leaders.  Evolutionary leaders help their people evolve, on average, up the Spiral.  It applies no matter what level you’re at.  So, in a Tribal/Magical society, an evolutionary leader would be someone who would move a loose grouping of tribes into an Authoritarian system.  Genghis Khan would be a great example.  Not surprisingly, he did this with incredible, pathological violence in the process — but he also establish the beginnings of an empire that provided stability — and established the contiguous nature of the Silk Road, which led to permanent ties between East and West.  Talk about an empathetic ladder, from one of the most violent tyrants in history!

It doesn’t stop there.  One of the points I make in a paper I’ve written about evolutionary entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurs at one v-Meme level typically leave a lasting legacy at the level one up.  Authoritarians like James Buchanan Duke, and Andrew Carnegie left behind the Legalistic institutions of Duke University, and Carnegie-Mellon University.

So this seems to make sense on the surface.  But what’s really going on?

One of the things that hit me with my own epiphany is that as an American, I have been inculcated with the cultural attitude that things are always getting better.  If we’re Legalistic/Performance-based in ‘Murica, then we must be moving on up into Performance-based/Communitarian.  And we should attempt to influence those around us, if we are leaders, in the ostensible values that go along with a more Communitarian society.  All that sounds good, and it may be true.  But it puts a fundamental gap in our thinking.  What if we’re not getting so much better all the time?  What if we’re actually going downhill?

What this thought forced me to recognize is that societies are either evolving, or devolving at any given time.  Remember — the Spiral is not a hierarchy.  It’s not always onward and upward.  Leaders are either evolutionary leaders, or devolutionary leaders.  And they’re either evolving the empathy in their communities, or they’re devolving the empathy in their communities.

But what does THAT mean?  What does empathetic development, which follows the Spiral, tell us?  As we move up the Spiral, we evolve the ability to have more, and more complex relationships with more people.  So that means implicitly that a leader at a level above his or her society, will be creating an environment where people can be having more, and more complex relationships with people around them.

The recent legalization of gay marriage is an excellent example of a Legalistic v-Meme evolution in American society.  There was a widespread recognition that gay couples were given the agency to a.) define their sexual orientation, and b.) receive the rights, responsibilities and protection of the state for their choices in a single-partner situation.

This led to my development of a fundamental Evolutionary Empathetic Principle of Leadership:  a leader who is Evolutionary and Empathetic will work in the context of their community to help grow more healthy, appropriate, diversified and differentiated relationships among members in that community.  And someone who practices Servant Leadership 2.0 will do so in a self-aware fashion — that they recognize why they’re doing it, and will have some idea what the outcome will be before they start.  Servant Leadership 2.0 demands self-aware relational diversification.

The nice thing about this is it allows relatively easy benchmarking and reflection for the leader.  In the process of simplifying the org chart of your organization, for example, are you simultaneously allowing more opportunities for people to create their own relationships?  If so, you are likely Evolutionary and Empathetic.  If not — then what exactly are you doing?  And why are you doing it?  There are, as always, no set answers.

Was Genghis Khan a Servant Leader 2.0?  Likely not.  Though he created an empire that had many benefits, he did it in a decidedly anti-empathetic way. What was his level of self-awareness?  Once again, not clear.  I try not to moralize, but needless to say, I never consider genocide as a sign of enlightenment.

That then leads to the next question:  if an Evolutionary Empathic Leader is mainly characterized by relational diversification, what is a Devolutionary, Non/Anti-Empathetic leader going to do?  If we apply Beck’s maxim, it would imply that such a leader would be AT or BELOW the level of the general population.  And instead of diversifying relationships in their community, they would be relational simplifiers.

How does one simplify relationships?  The only way I can think of is through disruption.  So, that means that leaders at, or below the dominant social organizing principles of their constituency, are relational disrupters.

And the more common term for such people are empathy disordered — or, to simplify a little bit myself,  psychopaths.  And how they work, as we will discuss, is a fascinating pathology, as well as a not-so-merry chase.

Takeaways:  One of the fundamental principles undergirding Evolutionary, Empathetic Leadership is attempting to create more appropriate and diverse relationships in the organization or society one is responsible for leading.  Servant Leadership 2.0 demands that you are aware of what you are doing, and are attempting, as best as you can to create an environment where more people can connect.

Further Reading:  There’s a lot to unpack with that final statement, and we’ll be getting to that a little later.  But you can get a head start by reading Bill Eddy’s Blog on High Conflict Personalities.

Chianti, or probably more accurately, Sangiovese, in Chianti, outside Florence, Italy

I occasionally read Medium, an interesting website that serves as some kind of pass-through for good writing, but at the same time, doesn’t seem to pay anyone for the writing that they do.  Which means that it typically serves as a platform for either the very famous, who don’t have to get paid to write, or those starting out and hoping for ‘exposure’.

This morning’s feed contained an interesting article from Umair Haque, who seems to fall in the former category.  He is unusual in that he actually gives out his e-mail address (good on him, though at some level I’m sure it’s burdensome!) so I’ll e-mail him a link to this post.  Umair makes the point in this piece that Twitter is dying, less and less people are doing it, and his reason is that it is because abuse is rampant on Twitter.  You Tweet something, and then nasty people attack you.

Fair enough.  I’m sure he’s right.  I don’t have a Twitter account, though, because I’ve always thought that it was a great way to get into trouble.  Twitter’s format of 140 characters, along with the various hashtags, constrain thought to what devoted readers of this blog, few though those are :-), would recognize are knowledge fragments, identifiable with Authoritarian v-Meme agents and social systems.  Not surprisingly, lots of these Tweets are going to pop out of people’s impulsive, limbic mind, and are at best going to correspond to some modest level of emotional empathy.  At worst, they’re going to be the tool of Relational Disrupters, and other various icks of the empathy disordered.

Umair also makes the point that over time, people are going to drift away from Twitter, or things like it, because, well, it’s unpleasant.  No one wants to voice a thought and be attacked by strangers.  But we can also see the emergent behavior of our social/relational journey at work.  The Internet is nothing if not a tool of connectivity, and carries with it the potential for generation of larger empathy.  Through information sharing, we have far more awareness of far more great things, as well as abuses, throughout the world.  Twenty years ago, who would have even known, or cared about Boko Haram, the group that kidnapped and married off 200 young girls in Nigeria?  A cultural anthropologist of the time might even have characterized it as culturally appropriate, considering the tribal structure of the area.  Now, everyone knows, and has an opinion of their own.  And through the Internet, over time, there is going to be more of a global consensus on this kind of thing — in the case of Boko Haram, that it is a tragedy, and we should care.

What’s interesting is that less connected knowledge structures are going to behave in the fashion of their fundamental information-theoretic dynamics — not the wishes, no matter how noble, of their founders.  Those that live by the knowledge structure they adapt, die by the knowledge structure.  And there’s little way to establish a larger dialog in 140 character bites.  No matter how profound the individuals are, or accessible the medium is.  It turns into a low-probability situation.  It’s not that it couldn’t happen — and I’m sure there are Twitter proponents who would argue that it has.  It’s just that the odds are against it.

Umair also makes the point that the various parties responsible for creating the resource don’t seem much to care and fix the problem of abuse on Twitter.  Once again, not surprising and predicted from the writings on this blog.  People who refine code are, for lots of righteous reasons, likely to occupy the Legalistic v-Meme, unless there are larger cultural sidebars that would force different behavior.  ‘Faster, less computational time, etc.’ are not characteristics that immediately cause an increase in empathetic interaction.  Or rather, it is a constrained interaction.  Content and its effects do not come into play.

Evolving communications environments that structurally create emergent empathetic evolution of the actors engaged in them is something I’ve been thinking about.  Twitter, at some level, shows the way not to do this.

Takeaways: When you create communication pathways that only use given knowledge structures, you shouldn’t be surprised that they create the behavior, good or bad, associated with the corresponding v-Meme.  Those that live by the Authoritarian Tweet, die by the Authoritarian Tweet!  It’s very difficult to have multi-solution thinking in a 140 character SMS string.

Stradivarius — Inside the Accademia, Firenze, Italy

One of the great questions that could be asked about a lot of the stuff I write about might be this:

OK – you say we can’t just write down a bunch of rules, or bullet points, and expect to have people figure this out.  What can we do?

The challenge in evolution of social systems is helping those used to more rigid systems see the  potentials for flexible work environments. Management has to give others that may have more difficulty taking the old ‘Org Chart’ with a grain of salt, a window into the possibilities.

This article on Kaizen events for Manor Tool is just about perfect.  They center many of their Kaizen, or continuous improvement events, around safety.  In today’s environment, no one argues about the need for workplace safety, or the avoided costs when ergonomic or safety concerns are surfaced.  As such, spending a day to address these types of issues is a company-uniter.

But what’s even better is the way they execute this.  Everyone is involved, and people from different departments, with fresh eyes, are required to watch work practice from outside their area and make suggestions.  Not only do the new perspectives help, but employees walk away with a far more holistic set of relationships inside the company, along with a positive shared experience, and tons of new empathy developed.  What’s not to like?

A Quiet Moment — Mt. Rainier National Park, Adjacent to the Longmire Visitor Center

One of the challenging issues that many executives are just waking up to is the fact that, like it or not, they must consider social/ethical issues in their production or supply chain.  In their heart, they may want to service their inner Authoritarian — but the connectivity of the Internet, what I’ve called the evolving nervous system for the planet, isn’t going to let them decide that they get to lop off large parts of the world for their own use.

Once we understand how emergent social systems (as well as the people necessary to run them) evolve, we start accepting that V-Meme scaffolding will happen.  And it might behoove players to get involved with the game a priori instead of finding out, too late, and getting punished or crucified.

The Servant Leadership 2.0 Servant Leader has far more going for him or her in heading off conflict, and negative consequences at the pass.  Because they’ve moved beyond total egocentricity, they’re open to exploring others’ agendas, as well as functioning at a higher level of total responsibility, than someone who views their role as master and commander.

A great example of “it’s gonna be Global Holistic, like it or not” might be the rise of the group, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).  RAN is a different kind of environmental group.  Operating largely on international issues spatially far away from their home office in San Francisco, RAN has successfully run campaigns to save coastal rainforests in British Columbia, stop cattle ranching and exportation in Central and South America that were driving deforestation, and toxic waste dumping in Ecuador. It does this through a variety of tactics, including civil disobedience, media campaigns, but most importantly, corporate campaigns directed against large multi-nationals.  In the world of Spiral Dynamics, they are a coupled Global Holistic/Performance-based V-meme organization, focused on results, as opposed to process.  Though they may participate in larger conferences involving both governmental and non-governmental organizations, their focus is on bringing change on issues they are concerned with inside a created social environment of informed consumer outrage.

This is in direct contrast to more typical environmental organizations, that, in many ways, ‘play by the rules’ laid out by governments and their statutory legal environments.  The results have evolved the organization into one of the most effective actors in the social change portfolio.

Consider their actions against Chevron in their ‘We Can Change Chevron’ campaign in 2009.  Chevron had acquired Texaco, along with its liabilities in Ecuador, in 2001.  Chevron claimed that it had honored its commitments to past Texaco liabilities by funding 1/3 of their cleanup for dumping toxic waste in Ecuador, in its shared business with PetroEcuador.  Through a combination of legal action in Ecuador, as well as an extremely well-managed PR campaign, run jointly with the satirical group, the Yes Men, Rainforest Action Network crowdsourced multiple farcical advertisements from supporters, while essentially destroying an $80 million Greenwashing ad campaign run concurrently by Chevron.  Judges in Ecuador ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion to the plaintiffs.

Still other campaigns, like the latest Conflict Palm Oil campaign, instead of looking solely to punish companies using palm oil grown on deforested lands in Indonesia and Malaysia, recruit companies into signing pledges for sustainable sourcing.  Palm oil, a key ingredient in snack food and noodles around the world, has been a driver of deforestation and serves as an extinction threat for animals such as orangutans.  Through coupling a combination carrot and stick approach, along with connections across issues — the palm oil campaign highlights not just forest destruction and species extinction, but human slave trafficking, child labor laws, and native community destruction — RAN creates effective higher-level empathetic hooks in developed countries that then put pressure on Authoritarian v-Meme governments, like Indonesia, to evolve.

The point here is simple — the idea of a painless neocolonialist approach toward using areas off the communication channel, with the intent of reaping profits, doesn’t exist anymore.  The Internet, and the tools for creating all sorts of media content, are ubiquitous.  RAN, and other groups like RAN, are coming for the non-empathetic corporation.

At the same time, I should say that in RAN’s latest campaign to save orangutans, as well as the forests they live in in Indonesia, has no guarantee of success.  Wouldn’t it be better if we evolved our multi-nationals to a more enlightened level of leadership in the first place?  Especially when the larger external costs so often end up in corporate ledgers.  Doing the larger, right thing is also the best thing for the bottom line.

Takeaways:  The idea that ‘what you don’t care to know can’t hurt you’ is simply no longer true.  Servant Leadership 2.0 offers a channel to understand multiple stakeholder perspectives and develop pathways for consequential thinking before things go south.  

Further reading:  In case you want to understand just how bad the orangutan situation is in Borneo, you might read this article.  And then think before you buy — do you really want 2500 baby orangutans living in cages because a company that could use an easily substituted commodity needs to make a couple extra bucks?  A small note — this situation has not changed significantly since the publication date of 2009.

On the Piazza, Lucca, Italy

Once we understand the origination of a given paradigm, we can map how it might evolve empathetically — as well as assess how difficult it might be to move groups of people up the Spiral to higher levels of connectivity.  Servant leadership is one paradigm that can motivate a group of individuals — leaders in the business community — to start that journey.  Even though, as we’ve seen, servant leadership rests on independent, trust-based relationships, it is a status trigger for those down there in external relationship v-Meme land.  Getting to deny, then proclaim oneself striving for servant leadership is good bait for the status conscious.

But because it is based not on title, but an aggregate of empathetic relationship construction and actual performance, anyone that’s healthy in the head is along for an upward ride.  That’s the point of Servant Leadership 1.0.  It’s an implicit evolutionary ladder.  You do the various tasks — build your team, focus on performance and measurement, catalyze your team, and so on — you’re going to grow empathetically.  Because you have to.

Servant Leadership 2.0 is also an evolutionary, empathetic ladder — with Servant Leadership 1.0 nested inside of it.  But with its focus on self-awareness, and inner development of the individual, it unlocks larger potentials in terms of leadership team function.  And because mindfulness training is millennia-old, far more evolved minds have debated and discussed it.

But if you have to boil it down, it’s going to come down to two core practices.  The first is debate with others.  One has to open oneself up to exchange with other constituencies — the broader, the better.  It can’t just happen with a bunch of white men sitting in a board room.  The broader the constituencies, the larger the growth.

The second is meditation and reflection.  The two are tied intrinsically together, because you simply can’t get to the silence of meditation without reflection.  For me personally, it happens on my bike — I start riding, and after about 30 minutes of getting through my stress and anger about whoever I perceive is doing me wrong today, I get to a point of positivity, and then start thinking about the good things in my life.  And then, after about 15 more minutes, I’m through those thoughts.  And then there’s just me.

Debate is an intrinsic element of learning to build independent relationships with others.  Anyone that aspires to servant leadership has to effectively, empathetically master it — because without it, the information coherence in the channel simply can’t be sufficient for the effective leader to receive accurate information.  That means the Servant Leader must place-take constantly, because if not, the person they are talking to may shut down, and not tell them something critical they need to know.  The quality of the grounding of experience with others is directly related to the openness one approaches the dialogue.

And as well, reflection and meditation must be core practices for Servant Leadership 2.0.  Why?  Because without an inner dialogue, where one deals empathetically with oneself, how can one develop an honest dialogue with our own insides?  Because if we want to have data-driven, trust-based relationships with others, the first person we must construct one with is ourselves.

Once we accept this paradigm, many pathways open up for development of Servant Leadership 2.0.  There may be some direct algorithmic training involved — breathing exercises and so on.  But by and large, it’s going to involve interacting with others — experiential learning.  Varying the scales of such learning, both temporally and spatially — from short-term to long-term relationships, as well as friends here, and friends across the globe, in different cultures and places — is key.

When enough of a cohort of such individuals are gathered together, the possibility of interconnected, empathetic collaborative teams offer a pathway to larger, Global Holistic modes.  No one independently needs to be the spiritual master.  It’s the whole — not the one.  And skilled in open debate, as well as private reflection, decisions can be jointly made that benefit the larger whole.  That’s how you get Global Holistic out of a team of Global Systemic thinkers.  Each one is a self-aware node on their authority and realm of influence and responsibility.  And because all parties are well-formed, they know what they know — as well as what they don’t.  That then yields to the integrated landscape necessary for running the modern, empathetic global corporation.

Further Reading:  Some interesting work on the development and merging of rational thought with spiritual practice.  Though I haven’t heard much since I read about this four years ago — teaching Tibetan monks neuroscience —  I’m wondering how Arri Eisen’s work has proceeded.  Not surprisingly for followers of this blog, the development of a rational spirituality opens the door, when even previously unexposed, to the methods of science.