The Ape in the Corner Office

Throughout this book the author is trying to convince that monkeylike hierarchies are just the way we are period. Although I would guess there may not be a business with more than 15 employees on the planet that isn't a hierarchy to some extent, I'd still very much want to believe that there are some groups of people who truly live in an egalitarian manner. At least primarily in an egalitarian manner.

hierarchial living versus egalitarianism is like Force vs Reason or Fascism, etc vs Democracy... Capitalism versus Socialism, etc.

Or even Closedminded versus Openminded.

"No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other." Samuel Johnson.

I, personally, was thinking it doesn't take half an hour. And so Richard Conniff (author of The Ape in the Corner Office) says in the very next line. 'It doesn't take half an hour.'

Oh how I hate that this is the case. I think maybe the understanding that it's the case and endless similar stuff in this book is why I find myself so much wanting to be a hermit.

The ideal is that people simply recognize that they're all equal, but just with different strengths and weaknesses. And usually the person who appears inferior just has strengths which are not as apparent.

The biggest thing here for me is the case where one person is clearly more intelligent generally speaking than the other. Better at math, way more well read, etc, etc. In such a case though, such people often are awful at actually enjoying their lives. They are much like the title of this blog. Too caught up in minutiae to have the sense to enjoy their really quite short life... Lacking in a sort of wisdom. Working too long hours, worrying too much, etc.

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Related to specialization of tasks: Women are better at smiling then men. They literally have stronger smile muscles. It's not known if it's genetic or the result of lives spent making simpering smiles to show their nonthreatening subordination.

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"Individuals with power (even randomly assigned power) tend to talk more, interrupt others, speak out of turn, and engage more readily in conflict. They use more expansive body language and smile less (subordinates specialize in smiles of submission or appeasement). They're more likely to enter the social space of others, stand too close, initiate physical contact, and flirt in less inhibited ways." Richard Conniff pg 110. The Ape in the Corner Office

I don't smile so much in appeasement/submission. Not as much as I should. I guess I need to work on that more.

I also disagree more than I should. I think when I add in other extenuating circumstances I ought to be more careful than the usual about ever disagreeing. The other day someone commented on some old picture of a colleague that she looked much younger now with her new haircut. I thought the opposite and said so. This first person took great offense. I would like to think such a disagreement as this would be a trivial thing but no, even disagreeing about something like that I have to be careful.

The problem is that in my egalitarian mindset a disagreement is a chance for me to change my mind and I love to change my mind. I love to find out I'm wrong and learn new things. But for so many others me disagreeing with them is instead me putting them down, me expressing my dominance over them (in their monkey worldview), etc.

So evolution comes up one day in the breakroom. And guess what? We've a number of nurses who don't believe in evolution. (Exactly the ones a person would guess BTW). They ask me if I believe in it and I admit that I do. But I'm smart enough to not even talk about it further. It's dangerous to disagree with a creationist. And in general it's dangerous to disagree with dumb people. As they are viewing the world through a monkey worldview and by disagreeing period you are challenging some hierarchy in their mind.

Go around and disagree with such a person and suddenly you're an arrogant elitist. Just by being intelligent and disagreeing with them they jump to that. Somehow with the quality of being openminded (unlike them) they make the jump to labeling you the opposite quality (arrogant). And then, hmmm, perhaps you're too arrogant to be trained as a nurse? Hmm, they'll have to keep a really close eye on you. Perhaps thanks to your arrogance you sadly just aren't going to make it in this profession...

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"So the dominance hierarchy "just sort of plays out, and the submissive sorts don't get to say anything, or their ideas get squashed," according to Jeff Johnson, a former software engineer at Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems, who now runs a consulting firm called UI Wizards. Technical writers tend to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, and if one of them actually says something, people exchanged puzzled looks. Then the conversation resumes without a ripple, often on a completely different topic. It's as if the wallboard has spoken, and everybody has tacitly agreed to pretend it didn't happen.

Johnson adds: "If a technical writer says something interesting, I'll stop and say, "I think what she said was interesting." And because I said it, and I'm an engineer and higher in the hierarchy, it will then be discussed."
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(Through his Institute for Better Meetings, DeKoven tried for more than 15 years to make meetings "collaborative and fun." But he finally concluded that "meetings are ceremonies to reinforce the hierarchy, to remind people who's boss, and to praise or chastise anyone who isn't." If people would just admit it, he says, meetings could be shorter and cheaper.)