A coupla thoughts on master/slave dynamics

Here are some things I posted previously on the forum, which I’ll add to.

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The “boot on your neck” strategy reliably LOWERS performance in Thals.

I can now confirm that this is true for jobs as simple as taking things out of boxes and putting them on shelves. Applying social stress to thals (responsibilities, deadlines, goals, etc.) appears to increase the cognitive load with zero benefits, resulting in less production and a higher rate of mistakes. Apparently, we are not built for micromanagement and cognitive-behavioral social control. It seems that the highest rate of TT production occurs when the variable to be maximized is well-communicated (e.g. profit) and the “possibility space” is widest (e.g. “You can cook, clean, fix, organize, experiment, engineer, document, I don’t care as long as customers are happy.”). That is, if prosocial then allow counterfactual simulation to occur.

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On the subject of IT management,

It comes down to the difference between trusting employees and letting them get things done, versus treating them like burger flippers that need to be monitored and controlled every minute, lest they wander off and sabotage everything.

Slaves are monitored constantly because they understand at a fundamental level that working hard is against their personal interest, tantamount to suicide. The worst case is to be worked harder, burn out and/or get injured, and get thrown on the trash pile and replaced. The best case is to conserve energy and steal food when possible. Free men, on the other hand, enjoy seeking profit, prestige, etc. In such a case, the “manager” is also a free man who merely serves another specialized function: to communicate and expedite. The problems occur when mindset fails to match the situation (slaves cannot be programmers because creativity requires personal space). It’s really very simple if you get down to it.

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Taking this perspective, I have a couple of notes on sapiens heuristics. The first is inspired by this bit from Kipling, H/T Heaviside:

Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes
In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.

I don’t have to explain to aspies why this heuristic is useless, but normies will never let it go because it’s deeply wired. Then it behooves us to wonder where it comes from. Within the context of the dynamic above, it’s possible to simply ascribe this behavior to Alpha-Beta social interaction. Alphas gaslight Betas all the time (“serve my interests and you’ll be happy”), but they’re usually not called out for it because insubordination is always swiftly punished, whereas Beta-style lying tends to be more slippery (“nothing to see here sir, your happiness is my only concern in life”).

As an aside, I don’t have the typical aspie aversion to eye contact, but I also don’t have any dad issues because 1) I genuinely like the guy, and 2) his attempts to modify my social behavior (including his complaints about this) have always been so weak that they’re barely noticeable. Therefore I make eye contact for greeting and to emphasize key points when I’m talking, and look away while I’m thinking, which is pretty normal for Americans. My dad still complains because he’s strongly F-dominant in MBTI terms, and these types almost never break eye contact because all of their communication is emotional transfer. So the signal a listener gets when you look away is “I’m performing a mental calculation”, so in a master-slave interaction this is always suspect. “Why did you have to think about that? If you were really loyal (cucked) you’d be straightforward and relaxed about it!” /aside

Going a bit further back, I think the social aspects of allowable eye contact come from the existence of microexpressions-as-information, and the enforcement of asymmetrical information transfer. The master may look at the slave’s eyes in order to read their emotions (an extremely salient sort of information in a low-trust society), but the slave may not look at the master’s eyes for the same reason, enforcing their ignorance and therefore their impotence via uncertainty. It’s the same logic as starving the peasants of protein: protein makes muscles, and recent social science tells us muscles makes a person confident, assertive, and self-interested.

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On a somewhat different note, I’ve been wondering lately about where common sense ideas come from. This was inspired by my boss getting upset when I eat while I’m working. It won’t make any sense to those of you with office jobs (where working through lunch is apparently considered “dedicated”), but this is an extremely common idea in blue-collar serfdom, to the extent that even customers will help to enforce this proscription. If we actually had any customers at night, they would be upset to see me take a bite from an apple while putting boxes on shelves. Why? They might spin a few rationalizations, but what it comes down to is that this “seems sloppy”, i.e. it appears as if management has lost control of its employees. I think this goes back to the Ur-idea of well-managed slaves in the fields, where they must be constantly monitored so they don’t eat the stuff they’re harvesting. The association therefore is that taking liberties indicates laziness and bad management, and any nonconformity with the assumptions of Ur-organization is a crack in the edifice.