 where the sociopath is king
Is looking out for yourself (especially to get out of a negative situation as Michelle describes in the previous post) necessarily "dark" or "fear-based"? Maybe looking out for yourself is the only way to survive a difficult patch in your life, so that you can go on to contribute to others. Staying in a soul-destroying, confining situation so as not to upset other people surely isn't a love-based reaction?
I know lots of self-centred, greed-based, competitive people, having gone to a top MBA programme and worked in management consulting. I always stood out like a sore thumb with my personality and ideals.
That's why I left that world where the sociopath is king to do a gentle, ivory-tower PhD--whereupon I got stabbed in the back and bullied by a fellow academic, who used more deviousness and ill-will than I even would have imagined coming from my former business-world colleagues.
I also have just worked for (and resigned from) a substantial, successful family-run business where the family members treated their employees quite, quite appallingly, and held each other to a very complicated set of unwritten rules that often resulted in the weaker family members being totally controlled by the powerful members. --I innocently had expected a family-based business to be nicer and more cooperative than a business made up of unrelated people. Wow: to my considerable cost both emotionally and financially, I could not have been more wrong.
Even in the cutthroat business world, acting with cooperation, kindness, generosity can be quite effective and successful. Not just because people don't expect it and are taken by surprise, but also because it simply works (e.g., see books such as "Co-opetition").
There are theories that business and economics students study about the different sorts of choices people can make when interacting with each other and the part that self-interest plays (basically, the decision to cooperate with others, versus the decision to "grab your piece and run"), of which the "Prisoner's Dilemma" is the most famous. Even the greedy, self-interested, competitive people can see the logic and proven results of these experiments/games -- and therefore they act cooperatively because it is logically best for themselves. (At least they know they should, even if their human behavior gets the best of them during the situation as it unfolds, and they can't help but cut and run though it means they are left with a smaller profit!)  |