Does Sauron Feel Bad About His Job?
Imagined Hegemony from the Point of View of The Hegemonic Themselves
Is being the Lord of Darkness something that keeps one up at night? The juxtaposition of one’s sense of self with one's actions makes one most deeply uncomfortable. Dark Lords? They don't keep mirrors around….
This is the Frontier Psychiatrists newsletter. It’s health-themed! It’s written by Owen Scott Muir, M.D. Today’s column is silly; fair warning.
This is a suspicion. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that serious companies like Mordor, Inc. sell seriously deadly rings, and with this knowledge in the real world, they use denial, not malice, to move forward.
Executives have to meaningfully grapple with the health consequences of those products. They might be forced to answer the same kinds of questions in the dark night of the soul that any of us do. Some people might be as embittered or corrupted as Sauron, but most are not. You need a ring that makes your motives invisible to yourself!
The relentless logic of not getting fired in large organizations, even for senior executives, makes it very hard to create a disruptive hypothesis around not selling very profitable products at a massive scale. You have shareholders to answer to, after all. If you are Sauron, you get hemmed in. Did you build an orc army? You are taking it to war. Do you run a half-orc breeding pilot? You are going to war. You lock yourself in with the inexorable logic of steps taken before.
This is not because it's an impossible problem to solve; it's just very difficult to argue for positive change if it undercuts dominant ideas. Let’s drop the ring.💍? No!
This is why I frame many of my arguments around what could or should change regarding Compliance. I think it's easier to argue: "If you don't do this very reasonable thing, you could be fired." This is opposed to: "Let's do this innovative thing that might be better than what we're doing now." That is just plain dangerous talk.
We are all well served to explain innovation as cautious to hegemony and its senior leadership. If you want to eliminate a deadly orc army, you need a balance sheet to support that argument. It needs to make sense to step out on a limb with half-orcs! Highlight a compliance concern! This creates a source of blame and recrimination that people have to worry about--to get to the change one might want to see in the world.
“The way we are searching for the ring is a problem.” is a winning argument.
I got through an entire column without roasting a major healthcare company. I know, I know. It’s almost as if one could draw a parallel between what I said and the kinds of things I usually write. That is in no way the intent. This is just me having fun with the Lord of the Rings, not talking about health or its care or businesses with human executive leadership who might find my words threatening. I love Tolkien.
What?