This is a behavioral mechanics explanation, only.
I sit among friends being trampled by the world. The husband represents a company. His bosses are lying to the creditors they received product from and have not paid on. He is being told to lie to men he built relationships with on a handshake, at convention, in front of their children at a cookout, or in his office. He has a sense that he is being lied to by The Company as well. He is agitated, “Jay, I don’t lie—can’t, don’t believe in that shit. But these millionaires and their six-figure stooges, all they do is lie and they are doing well. My boss knows nothing about our immediate division, was just brought in a few years ago and gets drunk at a conference and I break up a fist fight with him and a client. There is no way to communicate facts, trends, solutions, up the chain.”
I advised my fighter, now in his 40s, with a family to care for, that the know-nothing manager was brought in over top of him, to run a department he knew zero about, because he could be trusted to lie. The decision to kill the company had already been made. The “bumbling” attempts at damage control and repair were nothing but cover for internal, top down, looting. In retail food we called this guy “The Closer.” [1] He came in and ran a location dry, driving down payroll, encouraging resignations, firing people, doing layoffs, lying to customers that, “No, we are not going out of business, we are here for you,” even as he had his receiver turn away deliveries of sold out food at the back door.
I advised my man that his company is going to let him go for failure to lie, that there is no greater crime under a managerial system, economic or political, than honor and honesty, that duplicity must reign.
May 22, at the same kitchen table
That was in early May. We agreed that he should go to the companies that stand to grow in the wake of the owners of his company riding the business into the ground and killing it so that they could loot it. The individual managerial figure, from the capitalist CEO down to the branch manager, are all encouraged to destroy the companies they run by the fact that only they and their chosen few get a seat in the lifeboat. A company, like a modern nation state, is a fiction, construed for the purpose of being an institutional scapegoat that takes the blame in the abstract for the crimes committed by its officers as they pilfer it.
Such fictional entities are like merchant ships freighted with promises, paid for up front. What investments there are, which were not lies woven of whole cloth, must be stolen by the captain as he lies to the crew. Perhaps the mate also knows that the ship is being steered into an iceberg. If so, he needs to be denounced, put in chains, slain, or brought into confidence. The crew and any passengers, must be surprised, so that the small, single lifeboat may be taken by the captain and his picked men, leaving the crew to attempt the salvation of the foundering ship and then cling to wreckage. This was the mechanism by which 16 grocery store chains went out of business in the Baltimore Metro Area during my 38 years in retail food. The results were always the same: managers and personally loyal assistants landed at another company, jobs already in place, before their home company went under. The company loyalists, along with the more cynical workers, ended up unemployed. Those who did manage to get new positions with the new chain taking over, or competitor taking up slack business, always went to work at lower wages. Part of this process was about plundering the company on the way and taking an escape hatch. The other part was driving down wages in the job market and renewing the grift at the helm of another ship. This is exactly how Black Beard, William Teach, in imitation of various companies, like the South Sea Company and Virginia Company, defrauded the sailors and soldiers and investors who had placed trust in them. This, I suspect, is the mechanism behind empires crashing at around 225 years according to Glubb’s observations, that we are observing the effects of internal looting.
Yesterday, three weeks later, he picked me up at an odd hour. He used to do this before or after work in Baltimore County, dipping into the city to grab me or drop me off. He arrived at lunch. While interviewing for a job, he had been fired by email, by a boss that landed the next day at another company with hand picked loyalists, the same supervisor that knew nothing about the working of the businesses he picked over like some vulture. My man had just been offered a job. He liked it, but was looking out for the only other honest employee in the company, a person who had been fired the week before, despite being the only employee in her division that worked all day, the rest gathered about the coffee pot. He recommended her and she got the job. Five days later he was done as she had been. If one is a captain who has looted a ship on the way to port to deliver promises to investors or voters, then one dare not leave any competent sailors on board who might be able to bring the ship limping into port, for the holds to be discovered empty. It must sink.
As he now looks for fresh work, he spends a couple days a month in court to get payment for his renters. The renters have not paid a month’s rent in a year, and simply game the court process. Again, the lie pays off. The renters lied about being employed. He did not discover this until after the lease was in effect. The lie wins because it implants a false expectation, an emotion based on trust, in the mind of the honest prey. This guarantees that the prey will hear hooves and assume it is the cavalry coming to save them, when in fact it is the horses of the savages, guided by the scouts of the cavalry, who have been told to stand down, who approach.
I hope these pirate and old west metaphors mixed with everyday life have not been tedious. Honor and honesty must be reserved for the honorable and the honest. Extending in-group trust to out-group actors is the surest recipe for disaster. That is why, the true art of the deceiver, whether he be manager or politician, is to make a promise that he has zero intention of fulfilling. This grants the crucial element of surprise necessary for effective money hunting in a system that has replaced a culture. Productive people want to trust, as all men of all races were once able to trust the men of their own tribe. That residual emotional attachment to “we” and “us” remains central to the functioning of the false entities known as companies and nation states.
When the abstract idea of people competing under “sacred” social contract backed by force, replaces that of A People, cooperating according to born compassion, then the obvious takes place, the worst, most cynical and predacious of the high functioning individuals gain control. This happens based on trust and is most reliably instituted through the lie. It does not matter if the system is democratic or oligarchic, capitalist or socialist. So long as their is an abstract system of value in place, the money hunter will not have to expose himself as the actor. The old time conqueror exposed himself to risk in many ways, like the hunter plunging a spear into the side of a bull. But the money hunter is like the rifle man on the opposite mountainside, in no danger from the bull he sights in his scope. More than the hunter afflicts mankind. There are his rivals the Money Farmer, the subject of #2 of this review.
Notes
-1. That is the Closer on a chain level. The Closer on the store level is the lowest ranking member of the management team who works the evening shift and locks up at night.
