The psychology of black holes
IN his interviews with people who seemed to be living very fulfilled and successful lives, psychologist Abraham Maslow noticed something peculiar. Certainly these people were determined, principled, open-minded, packed full of purpose and glutenfree granola. But Maslow also used more disturbing words to describe some of them: “surgical coldness,” “ruthlessness,” “[ seems] heartless.”
This is certainly interesting, but not surprising. I had seen more or less the same pattern associated with creativity, even among Filipinos. Now don’t get me wrong, many highly creative people live relatively virtuous lives, but among them you tend - ters, more than you would expect by chance. By and large, these are not evil people or even criminals, just the kind of person who might be very hard to get along with. - ing and even well-meaning, but semi-horrible to live with.
That factoid by itself is worth a think or two. But wait, the story gets better (or worse, up to you).
In certain areas that are now called knowledge-driven or creative industries, a small minority of the workforce is responsible for a large proportion of the productivity and innovation. This is true for sales, computer programming, university research, songwriting, architecture, etc. Often, in these situations, the success of a company becomes dependent on having a critical mass of these “star performers.”
So here’s the set-up: you have a structure where highly productive creative people, a substantial proportion of whom are tempera- mentally prone to iffy-behavior, become virtually indispensable to their companies. The management people know, correctly, that crisis could ensue if these people go. Think 2010 post-James Cleveland Cavaliers. We end up in a situation where there are enormous incentives for institutions to hide any misconduct by elite employees. Which, of course, makes misconduct more likely. If you’ve been following the news recently, you know this is true. Once again, capitalism turns scarcity into perversity.
Depressing yes, but I don’t think this is inevitable. Many
creative people, even though they have socially disruptive tendencies, can and do stick to shared ethical principles and are able to treat others decently. Good management can help encourage this. But creative people are also masters of the possible, so if a company has a habit of keeping quiet about wrongdoing, star performers are probably among - portunities. The hard problem is that if badly behaved stars simply their ilk, competition kills-off all of the ethical businesses. I don’t like blacklists, but I also don’t have an easy answer.
Black holes are massive stars that die and then collapse in on themselves and begin sucking in everything, including light. People aren’t really stars (meaning, not giant balls of hot exploding gas), before they burst.