Mistake: what business graduates who lack a refined
vocabulary call an act of vice.
When you pull your underwear on backwards, add a quarter
rather than the needed half of a teaspoon of sugar to your sauce, or make a
left turn instead of the needed one on the right, you make a mistake. That is,
you absentmindedly fail, usually in some minor way for which there’s little or no
culpability. But when you’re a politician, a businessperson, or a lawyer, for
example, and you naturally lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top, you don’t
err at all but knowingly play the social games that require perverse excellence
in vice, that is, great demonstrations of selfishness, deceitfulness,
cold-heartedness, brazenness, short-sightedness, and so forth.
When a Machiavellian power-player gets caught practicing those
dark arts, he invariably seeks to avoid responsibility for his choices by
labeling them mere mistakes. For example, western CEOs are notorious for
pretending to be dunces or ignorant figureheads when they’re caught trying to
pull off billion dollar frauds and their companies blow up in their faces. They
then act like they never even deserved the hundreds of millions they were raking
in thanks to their hand-picked board members who rubberstamp their pay
packages, like they had no knowledge that their company was engaging in the
very frauds that have become standard operating procedure in so-called
post-industrial, financialized societies. Instead, they humbly concede, before
senators who are equipped only to “grill” and never to roast, boil, or skin--so
says the mass media’s meme--that they’re guilty of a mistake or two, albeit a
mistake with disastrous consequences, but nevertheless an innocent moment of
absentmindedness. To be sure, a power player never publicly owns up to her year after year of accrued experience at honing the vices that’s a prerequisite for advancing
any politician or free market businessperson within her hierarchy. Moreover,
because few people want to admit that most sectors of their society consist of
just such practically amoral hierarchies, a nihilistic or sociopathic
Machiavellian is quickly forgiven for his or her “mistake.” After all, as the
saying goes, anyone can make a mistake (i.e. everyone sins in a declining,
corrupt society).
The first such mistake was committed by Satan, the Prince of
Evil, and I happen to have the transcript. “Verily, Lord,” said Satan to God,
“I’ve jealously watched you waste your divine powers on this petty Creation, on
these beasts you call humans. I’ve burned with ambition at the thought of what
I would do instead were I seated on your throne, and I relished the prospects
of waging an angelic war on your hosts and then either of unseating you and
becoming master of all or of losing my station in a blaze of glory and then of
marshaling all the demonic forces of Hell to sabotage every one of your foolish
endeavours. Nevertheless, I say to you now with respect to all of that, on this
Judgment Day at the end of all things, with the blood of trillions of your
humans dripping from my claws and fangs, that I merely made a mistake.”
No comments:
Post a Comment