At the age of 16, I had my first summer job in a major electronics company. It was my first true experience with “the real world”. At school you are in a kind of protected area, as long as you learn, are smart and know how to satisfy the teachers, you have a quite easy life (as long as you are no loner, or strange in some special way). Of course you don’t know that then!
My boss in that summer was a man of great integrity and virtues, he believed in values like honesty, hard work, rationality and common sense. His position in the company was stable and he was respected by most people, but his career had been manoeuvred into a corner. For ten years he was the chief of his department not advancing a single step since then. Other people, who were in the company for much less years, were promoted and found themselves in higher positions.
Under the surface there was the frustration you could feel and that influenced the whole department and the people of my boss. For me there was no reason why my boss was not advancing. Other people who where in higher positions like him where much less intelligent and their working moral was not very high. They cared more for themselves then for the company and many of them did not even try to hide their attitude that the company would exists for their own personal good and not for the owners, the people that financed the firm. I thought about the Peter-principle: Everybody gets promoted as long as he finds himself in a position where he fails.
I started thinking a lot about the situation, about power and the way you get it and what so many people seem to do to avoid being promoted. I was fascinated by the dynamics of power and in all the years since then my fascination grew even bigger.
Power is something that is present all around us but in our political correct times people try to avoid the word power. We do not tolerate obvious craving for power like with active aggressive acts. So even more people smile and pretend to be uninterested in power, use feelings of guilt, make others feel ashamed and make massive use of passive aggression. The situation is not so much different form the royal courts in Europe during past centuries. The more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. In some way civilization is a fake and history has shown from time to time that even a very civilized nation, under a certain influence, can loose it’s thin layer of cultivation and show the substance that lies beneath.
Back to my job. One thing became very clear to me: I had a wrong idea about how human relationships work, what really counts in life and how the dynamics of movements can be controlled, even if you don`t control them. I came to the conclusion that moral is a human invention, it is nothing natural, nature would never have created such laws that very often irrationally limited the range of human behaviour. If I could look at things how they really are, and make a rational decision, independent of what people think and if they like me or not, I could get anything in life I wanted. In other words, if I could get independent of the crowd I could be in a position like a cowboy who controls the cows until they are brought to the slaughterhouse (as a specualtor in stock markets I know that it is not the crowd that makes the money – see my other blog http://samuraiofthemarket.blogspot.com). As a 16 year old I felt powerful and knew little about how much I still had to learn even if the basic principle was and is still right: “As a samurai (warrior) you have to have the ability to be cruel and unforgiving to do what is right and create the good in effect”. Or as Goethe wrote in his “Faust”: “I am the power that always wants the evil, but always creats what is good”.
After two months my work at the company was over. I made a few friends but no enemies. I learnt a lot (much more about human nature than about the technical abilities that were needed for my job). We have not created the world and its laws but every living being has to find his niche and go with the flow. You cannot resist the natural order – that is only human arrogance. If you want to make the ultimative victory in life, you defeat your enemies with intelligence and not with acts of violence or vengeance. It may sound very seductive to call the battle for power or war barbaric, but that is completely irrational – you are in danger to loose contact with reality. The truth is even more that war (in the widest sense of the word) is the father of all things – as Heracletus calls it – it cleans things and makes the necessary difference between people, companies and nations. It is neither good nor bad, it is just the human appearance of Darwin’s law.
