Living As If

I've recently finished reading Stephen Covey's The seven habits of highly effective people, mostly in the hopes that I could write an interesting review of it. That was successful, and a full review will be published in the weeks to come (unsurprisingly for any of you who know me, I was not impressed). That said, I want to touch on one particularly disquieting aspect of Covey's book here: his view on principles.

One might think from a superficial reading that Covey is in favour of principles: he talks an awful lot about natural law and basic principles of behaviour that lead to given outcomes. Covey consequently stresses that decisions need to come from a centre of basic principles rather than external sources or influences. And so far as we go, this is somewhat true. The issue comes with Covey's focus on effectiveness. In Covey's book, you stick to principles because they help you succeed in business, in your relationships and in life in general: they make you rich and happy.

Now, maybe this is Iris the Catholic butting heads with the very Mormon Stephen Covey, but this isn't what principles or values are. Principles have sweet-fuck-all to do with success, effectiveness or living a good life. They're the things that you live by because you believe they're important, whatever the world does to you, because you'd hate the person you'd become if you gave them up. They're the things you fight for and the things you die for. If you're trying to act from principles and natural law in order to succeed, you've got the whole thing ass-backwards. Whether it's Seneca being forced to kill himself by Nero for refusing to flatter the emperor as much as Nero might have desired, Sophie Scholl fighting against the Nazis at the cost of her life, or a hundred other stories of people living rightly at extreme cost to themselves. Covey is half-right when he says that principles give life meaning, but even then he somehow misunderstands the point of that: principles don't let you get good things, they're the very basis of what you understand as being good.

Consequently, it's no surprise that, rather like Lencioni and Simons, Covey very carefully sidesteps the issue of where he's getting his principles from. There are some mentions of God, so we aren't flying completely blind, but once more, the issue of where you get your principles from, how you construct them and what kind of behaviours those principles might induce is completely ignored. This is a massive vulnerability: if you don't carefully consider and examine your principles and where you got them from, it's easy for people to implant principles that you don't want to follow. The best-case scenario without considered principles is that you wind up going with the herd, doing what everyone else does, not really caring. In the worst case, someone can quite easily persuade you that doing a genocide is the correct, principled thing to do: the Nazis themselves phrased the holocaust as an unpleasant duty that the SS had to do for reasons of principle after all.

So, why's this an issue, and why am I talking about this here and now? It is, of course, in the context of the workplace. The modern workplace is precisely what you get when you follow Covey-style "principles": a hellhole of dishonesty, cowardice and stupidity, where lying and crumbling before even slight pressure are moral duties. Even before we begin a job or a contract, we're tacitly expected to lie on our CVs and in our marketing material. We're then expected to grovel before clueless, stupid hiring managers, HR departments and other decision-makers, stroking their egos and disrespecting our expertise in the process. Once (if we're lucky) we get the job, we're consistently expected to work ourselves to the bone to achieve things that are both stupid and impossible, make up numbers for our bosses to make them look good (lying about the systems we're working with if it's necessary) and go along with whatever stupid idea has gotten into the managers' heads, whether it's the crypto grift, LLM grift or simply wittering on about "synergy" and "innovation". There is no space in the modern workplace for people with values that they aren't willing to give up on, and with what's happening in the USA, it increasingly feels as though there's no space in the world for people like that.

The majority of people, don't have the kind of principled centre that it takes to push back against a world where lies and cowardice are the order of the day: they keep their heads down, do their jobs, say what they're expected to say and don't make waves. This won't save them in the long run, but in the short term, a sacrifice of dignity, self-respect and the basic human faculty of forming your own values and view of the world might lessen the pain a little. The people who are the most effective grifters and who lack self-respect entirely become rich and powerful. In general, these people will go with the principles given to them rather than thinking about their own, and this, alas, makes capitulation to the awful people inevitable.

Unfortunately, there are those of us who, through a lucky upbringing, hard work in their early adulthood or just being born that way, have developed values that we're unable to give up. We have that small, very persistent voice in our heads that tells us that if we do certain things we'll never be able to forgive ourselves. Compromising with the people I've described above, however vital it is at the time, leaves us feeling dirty. And as much as compromise might be the wise thing to do in the moment, and sometimes even in the long term... well, I personally seem to have a weird kind of mental wall that just stops me from doing the thing. I will literally shut down and have a mental breakdown before I do the thing, and I've found myself having to resign from jobs before I do something that violates my values. The point is, this isn't even really a question of morality or choice as we might phrase it: it's quite simply the fact that there's something in us that rebels against it with every fibre of our being.

Being this kind of person in our times and our workplaces really bloody sucks. For a start, making a living is genuinely hard without compromising some fundamental things right now. This isn't even just a question of ignoring small imperfections or whatever, it means that to get and maintain a job or have a decent number of contracts coming in, you have to pretend that LLM technology and AI in general is amazing, when the technology was literally created and foisted on us by fascists and fascist sympathisers. You must pretend to be apolitical, or at the very least not too outspoken, about the consistent rollback of DEI programs and anything aiming to address inequities in employment and seniority. You have to significantly misrepresent almost everything you've done on your CV (which honestly, I find it difficult to distinguish from outright lying), and you have to actively signal submission to some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet (this goes double if you're a woman, triple if you're a person of color and probably quadruple if you're trans). The worst thing is that with the current US regime and the recent wave of tariffs designed deliberately to crash the world economy, there's no sign of this getting better any time soon.

So how are those of us who have strong values to live in a situation where we're likely to be marginal and out in the cold for quite some time? In his wonderful little book Letters to a young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens suggests the tactic of many dissidents in Mitteleuropa during the Cold War of living "as if". The basic idea is that while the situation we find ourselves in might make dissent impossible or risky, actually forcing people to proactively agree with you is impossible and makes you look stupid. The best example of this in the modern day is Elon Musk and the Tesla situation. Elon Musk carries a distressing amount of power and is fucking up everything that he can get his hands on. For all his power, however, he can't force people to buy his cars or to vote for the candidate that he bankrolled in an election, and it's quite obviously killing him. He's desperate to use state power to force people to buy and love his shitty cars, but it's just not working, and as he sinks deeper and deeper into his ket-fuelled rage, everyone can see exactly the kind of person that he is. By acting "as if" we have the freedoms that we believe we do and that people are trying to take from us, we make them seem crass, we make them act crassly and we throw into bare relief exactly what kind of people they are. These are some of the most powerful people in the world, and even they are badly affected by people simply acting as though they aren't all-powerful.

My life, at least inasmuch as I've tried to live it this way, has been an exercise in acting "as if." I act as if hiring processes and the way in which people decide whom to do business with aren't deeply, deeply bigoted and transphobic. I act as if I can write what I like on my personal blog without it negatively affecting my employment prospects in many places. I act as though people care about craft, skill and artistry in tech, and as if becoming technically brilliant is an important determinant of how well you do in your career. Finally, I act as though proper CI/CD practices and proper data engineering can be expected at any reasonable company and are a basic standard at software engineering shops. And while it's a marginal and often somewhat fraught existence (I have about six to eight weeks of runway in which to land some extra contracts before I start seriously suffering again, and I rely heavily on the goodwill of others through my Liberapay and Patreon to make ends meet. The traditional Polish way of staying afloat was to sell blue jeans on the black market, but that unfortunately doesn't work so well in Aotearoa), I can recommend this attitude to life. It's dignified, it comes with calm and a certain degree of inner peace, and should I die or be fucked up so badly that I have to retreat into the forest and live off possums, I can do so head held high and in the knowledge that I've lived a life I can mostly be proud of. I encourage all of you to join me in this way of living and being in the workplace.

If Elon Musk is vulnerable to this, the executives and managers complicit in him taking power and responsible for making your workplace prefigure the USA in microcosm are even more so. When you're involved in hiring processes, act as though they're fair and unbiased, and consequently point it out when people do anything that would compromise it. Act as though it's the serious misconduct that it is. At stand-up every morning, act as though the lack of proper CI/CD or working tests is the company-ending liability that it is. When your company asks you to be complicit in something awful that the US government does, point it out. Point out that having all your infrastructure sitting on US clouds is the massive risk that it transparently is, and ask that it be moved out. And if a SCRUM Master or a project manager speaks over an engineer on a technical matter, make it clear that this is profoundly not how things should work. It's a risk, certainly, but if you're sufficiently literal and earnest about it in a way that aligns with the company's professed values, it's surprisingly hard to get rid of you without the company making themselves look deeply idiotic and hypocritical. It can take a very long time, and be very hard to keep the posture up, but it's also a remarkably powerful and effective technique.

Now is the time to be loud, stubborn, closed-minded and unreasonable. Now is the time to fight, take risks and make a better world. After all, if not now, when?