> It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality.
I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.
I think this is an artifact of any large organization of people.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
> The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.
Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.
It seems to me that this suggests that providing diverse career opportunities and strong social safety nets may be a valuable tool in fighting fascism.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.
My wife had a brief career in state-level politics and this article resonated with me. Rather than national politics or media narratives, I thought of specific state level senators, representatives, and administrators she had to interact with.
It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
Any sort of extremism can be fought if you provide all people with opportunity. Its not just a social saftey net but also a purpose and jobs and the idea of a better future.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
> Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the ... social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
On your first phrase, you can look at how the actual proper-name Fascism and its friends happened. Or at any anti-democratic movement from the current ones all the way back to the ancient Rome's rise of the empire.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
I bet you are someone who can't believe why Trump keeps winning. And yet you continue to whine about "mediocre white males" and wonders why white men vote for the other guy.
> they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged
I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.
The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.
Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.
Here is the problem. The "liberal" parties in Europe are pursuing exactly this policy of H.R Enshittification for the entire public sphere. More surveillance, more regulation, more state over-reach, less political freedoms and less free press. I don't see the difference between what's happening in the US and the supposedly good guys that rule me. It feels like they want to return to serfdom where your entire life is dependent on the lords (state) blessing.
In other words, democracy dies when it no longer serves the interests of capital.
This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state.
Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
So faced with the normal process of up or out, low performers choose to join the secret police and engage in torture etc to 'thrive'.
I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'.
ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play.
And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?
This is not very different from what is exposed in Hanna Arendt's book, "The Banality of Evil" (english translation from the title most known in my country for Eichman in Jerusalem).
The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.
Everyone farms the idiots, the liberal establishment over the last 50 years sold working class jobs overseas and imported labor to devalue their wages. Don't be surprised when another faction uses these "idiots" against you.
I’m pretty sure Hannah Arendt examined this pretty extensively in Eichmann in Jerusalem and in the relevant chapters in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She described several ways the typical loyal party member is mediocre and eager to follow orders merely for career advancement.
I mean, yeah? Those of us who generally sit on the polar opposite of the scale have been parroting this for decades, now, to no real avail. I’m glad research is finally backing up what we already knew, but it’s also still targeting a specific bullseye rather than broader generalizations necessary for meaningful organizational reforms.
Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same.
This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point.
I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve
never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years.
I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.
Let's note that while we celebrate democracy in government, business often runs as autocracy or oligarchy. Imposing "business"-mindedness encompasses not just taking care of finances and outcomes but also running things the way the leader demands.
HR exists to protect the company by leaving a paper trail they can point to to burn you at a moment’s notice while projecting the idea that they care about your well-being
Very few things scare me much more than cold, unfeeling bureaucracy.
I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself.
At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.
I'm reminded of the classification of military officers by Karl Von Hammerstein-Equord. The people described in this article seem to fall into the "stupid and industrious" catagory, which are classified as the most dangerous.
Interestingly, this was a major subplot of Harry Potter, seen in the Dolores Umbridge character among others. I'm not saying anything further than that I think this is a pattern that people have long observed.
47 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] threadhttps://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...
I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
That's why the article actually mentions it.
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Marburg_(1924%E2...
And naturally this is a controversial take since Arendt and Heidegger have defenders to the present day.
Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.
It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.
The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.
Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.
Hope that provides some context.
Maybe with AI? In the future?
This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state.
Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...
https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'.
ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play.
And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?
The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.
Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same.
This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point.
I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years.
I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.
I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself.
At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
Shows up for immoral industries such as gambling and smoking too.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/give-a-little-whistle
People being asked for blind loyalty or to step aside.
It is ironic hear people whose whole life was dedicated to chase immigrants being surprise when it evolved to chase each other: police state.