A thought by me.
A nod to Hannah Arendt
The philosopher Hannah Arendt is famous for her analysis of “evil” as a social phenomenon, whereby most people don’t actively intend to be evil but cause evil anyway because they’re just going about their lives without critical analysis. Having attended the trial of the Nazi administrator and war criminal Adolf Eichmann, she was surprised to realise at the trial that the man who had actively administrated the holocaust didn’t really think about what he was doing, but simply cared that he was following a good job, getting praise from his bosses and being promoted. She referred to this as “the banality of evil”.
The point was that evil isn’t dragons conquering your ancestral home, Der Führer’s grand plan for an Aryan utopia, or space wizards choking their subordinates over camera for coming out of lightspeed too close to the Hoth system.
Those are all evil, but they’re not your typical everyday evil. I guess that’s specialised, creative evil. Sexy evil, maybe. You need to have a great deal of charisma, leverage and leadership skill to pull most of that off, or be a really big fire-breathing death machine. Most evil is just banal.
“Banal” isn’t a word that gets used much anymore. I’ve never heard it used in normal conversation anyway! So in case you’re wondering (like I did): banal is pretty much the same in this context as mediocre, tedious, or boring.
Smaug isn’t coming to destroy your home. A bunch of white guys at the Bank of England are going to decide that there’s too much money and indirectly increase your mortgage payments £200 a month by a pencil stroke. Evil, but not exciting sexy evil. Tedious evil.
Instead, I’d like to put out there that the reason so many of us are looking for financial independence is that most of us now work in offices and that office culture makes it really easy for people to inflict low-level evils.
Types of banal corporate evils
Some companies are actively aware that they are doing things like destroying habitats for oil, or squeezing patients for the costs of medication. That’s arguably our sexy evil. Someone is thinking, “I can make an immoral profit”, and they’re very much aware that they’re making a dick move. It’s considered, determined evil. If you’re that guy, you know you’re a baddie.
This thought is that if you’re not in that kind of company, the corporate environment is so unbearable because the environment itself makes banal, trivial evils occur.
I reckon there are the following categories of banal corporate evils:
- Office evils, caused by the nature of working inside an office.
- Bureaucratic evils, that reward banality and prevent anything meaningful getting done.
- Cultural evils, whereby the corporate culture robs value from the human experience.
Office evils
Unless you’re working in a very specific political regime, your average office worker isn’t arranging for the transportation of millions of people to death camps, Eichmann-style.
Your average office worker instead writes policies, sends e-mails to ask other people to do things, compiles statistics on things that other people are doing, and generally pushes digital paper around at the whims of other people who confuse paperwork with productivity.
Working in an office environment doesn’t have to be bad, but despite the environment being specifically designed for comfort and optimised for a smooth, gentle typing experience in a temperature-controlled setting shared with other people to provide a “social” atmosphere, the office environment lends itself to poor health.
- A 2022 Microsoft survey – so presumably a survey of office workers – identified that 48% of employees and 53% of managers reported that they were burned out at work. So much for the easy life.
- A 2017 research article concluded that “Burnout was a significant predictor of the following physical consequences: hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalization due to cardiovascular disorder, musculoskeletal pain, changes in pain experiences, prolonged fatigue, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems, severe injuries and mortality below the age of 45 years.” The office environment could be killing you.
- Oh, yeah. Even if you’re happy at your office job, the effects of sedentary work are still, amongst other things, increasing your chances of obesity, a fun-looking suite of cancers (colorectal, ovarian, prostate and endometrial), and your classic musculoskeletal disorders. Check out this article for a better summary.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if you could manage it. You know, by having walking meetings or just not being in the chair all the time. Maybe even by working fewer hours if you got your daily tasks done. Imagine that! Being paid by results and not by time! More on this below.
Yet, anecdotally, the average office worker will be treated with outright suspicion if they’re not sat at their desks for a full 8-12 hour shift.
If this (somewhat dubious) web article is to be believed, half of UK office workers don’t even have anywhere to eat their lunch that isn’t their desk.
So, yes, a society whereby most work takes place in offices is one of the banal corporate evils. You and others like you are literally being killed by the office, and it’s not even seriously considered by the bosses who really want you in this week.
Bureaucratic evils
I don’t have much evidence for this apart from my own experience, so if this doesn’t resonate with you then call me out on it.
Corporate work tends to reward petty bureaucracy. When I was in the military, a civil servant was rewarded with a shopping voucher because she’d saved money on the adventurous training budget. Yup, that budget that we had assigned to take soldiers out to do some punchy adventurous keep-fit activities and thereby keep them motivated and fit to fight.
How had she managed this mighty feat? Had she found cheaper transport options, made a list of all the in-house personnel who could lead this training and plot their availability on a calendar so that we could use them?
Nope. She’d put in a paperwork process that ensured it was impossible to draw from the central budget without five high-ranking signatories across three different MOD establishments. We just couldn’t get approvals.
There’s a similar thing in the finance industry, and probably other industries, called “compliance”. If you haven’t experienced “compliance” from behind the scenes, it’s the reason why when you go to your bank they won’t let you open a new account without two utility bills, a passport, an application form and a big description of how you make your money.
The idea started as a way to stop money laundering, because if a cleaner is investing £200,000 per month it’s a clearly not coming from their salary. It’s a crime to handle the proceeds of crime without reporting it to the police, so realistically you should do some digging to check that you’re not helping out criminals. That’s just good risk management.
What this evolves into though is the Compliance Team putting themselves into every possible workflow and demanding the world’s supply of signatures, putting in road blocks and generally messing you, the regular worker, around. Which would be fine, except that invariably they write their own policies and those policies always put the responsibility back onto you.
This is an inconvenience on the face of it, but the sinister part is that workers are then disincentivised from doing any business that doesn’t come from a white Christian family based in Northern Europe who worked in banking or property management, because any other person will trigger “high risk” flags and add ten hours to the working week.
Both of these examples are bureaucratic evils. The actual purpose of the organisation – to keep troops fit and motivated, to sell financial services to people who need them – is brushed aside because bureaucrats who make that business difficult are being rewarded.
Cultural evils
For me the biggest and baddest corporate evils are caused by the way the corporate world takes from the things that make us human.
Things like self-expression, community, and finding one’s own purpose. Joy, even.
It shouldn’t be weird that someone wants to use one of their maybe 70 years on the planet to go and pursue something that they want. Maybe they should go and learn ballet, maybe they should canoe across the Atlantic, maybe a silent yoga retreat, whatever. It’s their life. However, most people are heavily disincentivised from that because, well, they’re going to need to earn money on their return. Probably from a corporate job. But with that gap in their CV…? I don’t know man, doesn’t seem committed. We’re a family here and this one’s not going to fit in…
How is that even a thing?
So, of course, you don’t go. You put your plans off until retirement. Then, at the age of 68, you realise that your office-broken bones aren’t going to survive that ballet class, your aching back won’t move that paddle, and the last thing you want to do is sit down for any meditation.
As a committed employee, you obviously go above and beyond. Which, of course, you have to, because every job advert ever specifies that they want an employee who does that. So you work an extra hour or two each day, and now you don’t have time to do a hobby and cook dinner tonight and go to the gym to undo the damage caused by your desk. So you’re not contributing to your community, and nor are you growing as a person. Your stats look good, though! Maybe you’ll get an inflationary pay rise this year..?
Ok, we get. We, your corporate masters, hear your plea for community and change. I heard you were gay, female and/or some other persuasion that isn’t represented by the board of directors or the shareholders, so we’re going to let you take on the extra duty of setting up a diversity network within the firm. Don’t you feel loved? Oh, but can you wear the company logo at Pride this year? Thank you so much. Smile for the LinkedIn post!
Actually, we’ve been meaning to chat to you about that.
We’ve decided it would be in everyone’s interest if you could post some articles on LinkedIn. Oh, and Jenny from Accounts has published a post saying how proud and humbled she is to have completed her Cycling Proficiency, so if you could like that and comment on the post that would be terrific. Actually, hold it one second, our Media and Comms team want you to put this corporate branding on your profile. You know, so that we all look the same.
This is an example of corporate culture creeping into privately-held values, such as identity politics. I don’t think it’s a huge deal – although it’s annoying – that companies try to brand socio-political movements. I’m not LGBTQI+ and I have no real stake in that movement or any subdivision of it, but it seems wrong that corporate sponsors exist for a campaign that started out as a march against injustice. Does anyone really believe that companies would care about the struggles of the gay community if that didn’t give them an opportunity to sell to potential customers?
Because if they did, they’d just give their employees time off to attend the Pride march and wouldn’t need to brand it. Instead, the marches happen on Saturdays, when most people don’t work, but with employees attending and essentially giving up their time for free.
That’s insidious.
And now there’s a trend for companies wanting employees to brand their personal profiles on social media. I’ve picked on LinkedIn, but if Facebook was still culturally relevant I’d bet it was on there, too. That’s almost certainly going to be a turn-off for would-be recruiters, so you would be actively devalued in the employment market if you accepted this kind of request.
Then there’s one final question: what are we all doing this for?
The cultural evils would make sense if you were a business owner. It’s your baby, of course you’d want it to participate in your life.
But if you’re Admin Assistant No.3, why would you want to tell the world you’re proud and honoured to be employee of the month out of a team of fewer than 12 people? If the biggest qualification for your job is that you’re good enough at Microsoft Excel, why does it matter that you took a two-year hiatus to backpack around Asia? Why do you need to be obsessively loyal?
Why do you need to be passionate about customer service if all the customer wants is a quick fix to a short-term problem?
That’s how we know this is banal corporate evil rather than design. If there was a sexy evil plan, this would all be automated for you. You’d be subscribed to a diversity network automatically, HR would take your social media accounts and passwords at onboarding so that the Media and Comms team or the AI Assistant could generate your content for you, and there would be entirely new socio-political movements created solely for the purpose of marching around with your company’s logo on a banner. No-one is intending to do that. Instead, some bright spark in HR or Media or even your line management suddenly decides “hey, it would be great if we could…” so that they look like they’re a Team Player Who Deserves A Raise/Promotion/Ego Stroke.
This is why financial independence is important.
I don’t believe that most people will cease work altogether if and when they become financially independent. However, if you have more resources, you have more options.
Like the option not to work in an office for an 8-12 hour shift.
Like the option not to comply with more bureaucratic nonsense that rewards tedium while preventing action.
Like not complying with requests to work “above and beyond” the commercial arrangement you’re contracted to do unless you actually want to and choose to.
Like not entertaining any requests to do some kind of performative social media shitshow like LinkedIn for anyone but yourself.
Intermediate steps
You can’t get to financial independence overnight. I’m years away, and I’m working hard at it. But you can push back against these banal corporate evils with minor protests that make a point.
Fight office evils
You may not have a more lucrative option than office work. For whatever reason, society values bullshit office jobs more than actually useful work or fulfilling work. That’s fine. But you can still fight against the office evils.
Push for hybrid working wherever you can, whether you actually take it or not. Every office survey, every HR chat, every line management meeting – “Yes, hybrid working is important to me in an employer”.
Leave the office for lunch breaks. There’s a rooftop garden on top of a car park near me that some developer fitted to an otherwise utilitarian air vent space to “beautify” it and pass planning. Well, screw you. There’s a bench up there and I’m going to sit in the sun with my packed lunch for forty minutes.
Normalise taking a longer lunch break to go to the gym. Sure, you’ll have to make that time up at the end of the day, but if you’re going to work until 1800hrs anyway…
Beat bureaucratic evils
You should make it your personal mission to promote the cutting of red tape at every opportunity.
Where you can’t do that, work around it. Deliberately.
I make a point to actively tell my management that I’m not doing certain things because I can’t possibly get them through company bureaucracy. It’s surprisingly effective.
Crush cultural evils
I have taken to actively telling my boss that I’m not willing to sell my social media branding to my company. This actually came up this week. I don’t think they were expecting a written “No”.
Don’t participate in company floats and parade banners.
Politely decline to wear company-issued branded items outside of working hours. In fact, make a point not to bring company-branded stuff with you unless you’re on the clock.
Give yourself a project that has nothing to do with work and prioritise it. I have guitar lessons on Wednesdays and once a month I do writing club. I always attend. They’re even in my work diary. I think I’ve been asked to move guitar once, and when I refused it didn’t get brought up again. The only times I’ve ever postponed these were for overseas travel, but I really enjoy that so it was my call.
Don’t get depressed about it
The great thing about the banality of corporate evil is that you can just defeat, avoid and work around it without any real opposition. Sure, one or two people (especially the kind that benefit from bureaucracy) will feel out of place, but the act of calling this stuff out usually wins more people to your side than sets enemies against you.
It’s banal because people don’t realise it’s happening. As soon as you call this stuff out or stand against it, someone has to be intentional about enforcing it. That brings it into intentional, sexy evil, and suddenly you know that you need to make a choice about your employment options.
My financial independence campaign continues!
