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CHAPTER 2.WORK: SORROWS OF WORK
The Boss Hater – and Those Who Despise Authority
i. What they are like
They are one of the more curious, confounding species to be found in modern offices. They tend to be bright and highly educated. They read a lot and might have a copy of Adorno or Heidegger to flick through in their lunch hour. They may be very efficient and experienced – and cause no overt or costly problems. The issue has more to do with their manner than their output. When one listens to their conversation, a dispiriting pattern emerges: one of constant wry and caustic references to authority, to management, bosses, profits, hierarchy, ‘the senior team’, ambition and – in their more expansive moments – capitalism and the legitimacy of modern business as a whole.
Some of their views are thought-provoking and others funny (in a dark way), but the overall effect of being in their vicinity can be wearing. There’s always just enough evidence – when one starts to look for it – to support their narrative as to the fundamental selfishness and exploitativeness of those in charge, but their distaste seems neither cathartic nor geared towards any desire for change; the cynicism is simply remorseless and circular. Bosses are only in it for themselves; it’s always the bootlickers who make it to the top; a supervisor who tries to be nice is an ingratiating arse; a young colleague who puts in extra hours is a deluded puppy.
Given their abilities and how long they’ve worked at the company, they might by now have progressed rather more than they have. They have their allies and admirers. But whenever there’s an opportunity on the horizon, they seem to scupper it with a display of seemingly deliberate aggression and surliness. One has to conclude that they don’t in the end really want to take on any further responsibility, let alone wind up as someone else’s boss. It would in their eyes all look too much like desertion, like joining the other side; like becoming one of ‘them’.
© Flickr/GMB Birmingham & West Midlands Region
ii. Origins
The boss-hater doesn’t dislike bosses out of a dispassionate examination of the facts and a rational survey of the likely distribution of evil and egoism within those in authority. They hate out of necessity, immediately and viscerally; they hate out of emotional compulsion and a desire to protect themselves from certain ideas. They hate because it would be too painful not to. However awful certain bosses can sometimes be, it would – for these characters – be a great deal more awful not to be allowed to think of them as inevitably and universally beyond the pale.
To understand the role that hostility plays for boss haters, we might consider with sympathy what thoughts might enter their heads if they could accept that there could on the planet be one or two managers who weren’t entirely evil – and that progressing in one’s career didn’t automatically have to constitute a definitive betrayal of one’s purity and sincerity:
– If all companies weren’t hate-worthy, then the boss-haters might need to think about why they’d never identified one that truly suited their talents and aptitudes.
– If all that companies achieved wasn’t invariably silly and selfish, then they might need to consider their suppressed desires for improvement and their sadness for the years they had wasted.
– If work didn’t always have to entail unhappiness for everyone, they might need to confront why they themselves happened to be so particularly unhappy.
– If they weren’t compelled to stick at a job they hated, they might need to acknowledge how pleasant it is to hate one’s chains compared to the challenge of making the most of one’s liberty.
– If all those who had achieved something in the professional world weren’t necessarily cretins, they might need to question on what basis their claims to intelligence and virtue rested.
– If all superiors weren’t horrific, they might need to befriend their own exiled longings to be someone else’s boss – and their fear that they would never be given the chance.
© Flickr/Jason Hargrove
And, to tackle an even more poignant psychological backstory:
– If they couldn’t hate every company and every boss, they might need to think about one or two specific people in authority who had damaged them unbearably. They might need, for example, to hate a father and at the same time realise just how much they had once adored him and longed for him and how badly they had been betrayed at his hands – and, tragically, how much energy they had squandered in the decades since hating every last aspect of authority on account of a sadness that didn’t know itself.
iii. Ways forward
The aim is to loosen our hold on our hostile certainties through the application of compassion – accompanied by a new understanding of why the hate once felt so necessary. We should note our levels of suspicion, and beneath these, the extent of our orphaned envy, shame and fear.
We should accept how we may have come to loathe authority not because we are bad people, but because we are hurt; because it is more comfortable to resent than to use freedom well; because alleging one is trapped is a reassuring alternative to confronting one’s options and because it so much easier to insist that one never had chances than to consider the appalling possibility than one might have dramatically squandered them through self-ignorance.
We need to take that most grown up of steps: exchange blame for self-knowledge and grief.
Exercise:
If the following statements were true, what consequences might there be for your life? What might you need to surrender? Which of your assumptions might you need to rethink?
What if powerful people are sometimes rather nice…
What if status and money are not always overrated…
What if we are often free to decide our destinies…
What if it wasn’t invariably someone else’s fault…
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