Humans are Liars
coderbyheart.com
coderbyheart.com
I've got a handful of close friends that I used to work with. Including a couple of former managers. But that friendship and trust didn't really start until after we parted ways.
It works the other way too. I recruited one of those friends for my team at my last job. I've known this guy seems like forever. I was at his wedding 12 years ago and took care of his dog during his honeymoon. Threw his divorce party. Started a business with him. Let him stay with me when he was feeling down about the divorce. Celebrated his new wedding with him and play with their daughter while we watch football and eat pizza. We've loaned each other cash when we were having rough times.
But when he walked in the door on my team a few months ago, nothing needed to be said. Total professionalism. Just people trying to solve problems. We hang out and be friends on our own time. And work is just work.
But the risk is still there in non-tenured situations. There was a situation at the company we started together when things were not going super well. And he had to let me go. I wouldn't want to do that anymore than he did at the time, but if I had to for <reasons> it's a thing that could be done without destroying the friendship.
I'm also hoping to go back to a company I used to work for with a manager I really liked. We've stayed friends since I worked there before, and I'm excited to go back for a number of reasons. But the bottom line is that once I sign that piece of paper that says "at will employee", I have to treat it the same as any other job that has no guarantees. And I can't rely on any past friendship with that person.
Work is work. In a culture that awards tenure only to a certain select group of people, work is always--as you put it--transactional. Trust really doesn't enter the equation.
More precisely, humans are interested in preserving themselves, including their ego and social standing. One example of this is when we say "humans are liars" we are not thinking of ourselves, but projecting it to Others. And when I say "we" I'm distancing myself from the Others as well, because otherwise there would be negative focus on me. And when you read "I" you are being distanced from your own guilt, because I'm an Other to you. I don't benefit from calling myself a liar (which isn't always true, anyway, for anyone), and neither does anyone else profit from calling themselves liars. It's rational to preserve yourself given the circumstances.
Should we change humanity or change the systems? Which side you consider the problem is political.
>Transparency enables to uncover defects, if information and data is available without restriction, there is no use in lying about it or covering it up.
This sounds like it should be true, but it's not. People can not accept certain revelations, and "increased transparency" about people's flaws just makes everyone dislike, hate or despise each other. This, too, is a human flaw.
Society converged onto the idea of different degrees of honesty. Probably for a reason.
The irony is that this is someone who claims to pride themselves on their higher moral values.
From now on, I'm going to be extremely cautious with people who present themselves as idealistic. Maybe it's also the sign of a manipulative psychopath.
Our society is littered with psychopaths these days. So much so that even those who aren't psychopaths are forced to pretend to be psychopaths just so that they can fit in.
For example in elite colleges/fraternities, they have some pretty twisted initiation rites... This is essentially institutionalized psychopathy. You have to prove yourself to be devoid of moral fibre just to fit in.
Part of the book's setting is that most people lack an inner monologue, a fair amount of people are psychopaths, and few people are "normal" non-psychopaths with inner monologues by a ratio of 4:2:1.
Even if you don't enjoy science fiction, it's an interesting read.
I would recommend "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" if you're interested in this stuff. It's non-fiction but it's basically a story.
It may well be a good book, but it's an abuse of terminology to suggest that p-zombies are distinguishable from normal people by external characteristics and behavior.
In 1757, the British admiral John Byng was executed for failing to sail his ships into a storm. The enemy was besieging a fort, and although Byng engage the enemy fleet he didn't pursue and annihilate them - heedless of the danger - and thereby the relief troops were unable to reach the fort before it fell. This was considered a capital offensive despite being sound strategy (the loss of the fort was bad, the loss of Byng's fleet would've been crippling) - making the right call got a man shot by firing squad.
These two incidents are always in my head when people discuss morality or honor or any such topics. The truth is "moral" for most people means nothing so much as "Did a thing I like" and immoral means "Did a thing I didn't like". That B-24 crew attacks the enemy, which is good and therefore moral - that it was a supremely cowardly and bloodthirsty thing is irrelevant.
It's just how people are, I suppose. Well, most people. Some are genuinely good eggs, and those are the ones to befriend.
Note that they were ordered to attack despite that they reported survivors on board. Attribute the cowardice and bloodthirst appropriately in the command chain.
The reason it's not accepted is because it's too difficult to discern if it's a lie in order to (attempt to) avoid punishment.
Following an order to attack an enemy in time of war, when you'll probably die for not attacking them ... if you knew for certain the enemy wasn't trying to trick you, and were genuinely saving civilians, then of course you should disobey, ... maybe ...
Even if that particular captain was saving civilians, it may still ultimately save lives to sink the enemy ship; that's the "glory" of war. Taking a pragmatic approach then, sinkng the ship can be considered "moral".
Indeed taking such an a priori callous action could require a degree of bravery.
You use the benefit of perfect hindsight, then adopting a particular consequentialist utilitarian framework and saying 'this is all there is to morality', but morality has multiple (often conflicting) objectives. I think denying that any conflict exists is really the essence of evil.
In the theatre of war, soldiers do not have perfect information or context. People who purposefully disobey orders generally put the lives of their own comrades and countrymen at risk.
Loyalty to your fellow soldiers and putting a measure of trust in them is moral. So is courage in the face of danger (in the case of admiral captain).
Even if we adopt your utilitarian framework, in the case of the U-boat attack, you are presupposing that the lives saved by allowing the rescue to continue will outweigh all the future damage and people killed in the future if that U-boat is allowed to continue to operate unimpeded. How do you know that's true? How would the pilot know in that situation?
In the case of the admiral, how we know his strategic choice was superior to the Admiralty's? It seems like you're assuming that he made the clear right move and was punished for it.
Almost every so-called idealist I've worked with is something close to a cultish sociopath. The non-profit world is full of these people where only true believers can fit in.
It's toxic. And the non-profits get a special status for their pathology that helps drive their insanity.
I remember doing a market research study for an orchestra that will remain nameless. The point of the study was to do an honest assessment of optimum price points. How to maximize either revenue or attendance.
I was serving on the board of this orchestra and did the study at my own expense. When I delivered the numbers, they didn't align with conventional wisdom.
And numbers weren't crazy. The bottom line was that people who buy season tickets are more hard-core supporters. They aren't looking for the cheap deal. They are looking for more opportunities to support the orchestra. The one-off people who just buy tickets at the door on a lark are much more price-sensitive.
So the solution is to ignore the bulk deal appeal that season-ticket buyers are getting offered. Raise the prices on those. And lower the at-door ticket prices. Lower the barrier to entry for casual users and raise the price for people who are going to pay whatever anyway. It's kind of obvious.
That's the math of the situation. Merely talking about these results and presenting them to the board got me kicked out. The orchestra did the exact opposite of that, and suffered the fate that the distribution said it would.
A few years later, they decided to try my idea. It worked. Who would've thunk?
Liberal, artsy, idealistic brats are no worse than conservative, religious, idealistic brats. They are all immune to logic and science, and just want to keep doing things that don't work because they sound good.
I think you should be cautious. People claiming to have a handle on all the world's problems are usually a part of the world's problems.
That's not to say that I never lie, but I keep my lies relatively harmless. 90% of the few lies I tell are really lies by omission, and the remaining are just exaggerations around true stories. People just enjoy a good story, and it's my job to make those stories entertaining.
There is a healthy balance between full conformity and full renegade. Rejection is a social signal. You shouldn’t automatically accept it. But it shouldn’t be automatically thrown out, either. “Who you are” is fluid.
This hasn't been my experience, the opposite in fact. How we act is entirely changeable, however.
But as I've gotten older, I've decided that there is real value in these rituals, particularly in the workplace. And the value is that these kinds of interactions set a tone and a minimum viable behavior both in public and at work.
Performing that little lie when you walk into work forces you to leave a certain amount of your personal life at the door. And this is a good thing. Environments I've worked in (notably, not in the South. NYC is awful about this) that do not adhere to these little ritualistic dishonesties empower the most negative people in the room to do the most damage to morale and productivity. Negativity is absolutely toxic and infectious.
And I guarantee you, the person in the room who replies, "Oh, well, you know, it's not going so great right now. My kid is having problems at school, and I don't understand it. S/he is a great kid and really smart, but just isn't getting along well with other kids and not doing well on tests. I just don't get it." when you ask, "Hey, how's it going?" is going to be a problem down the line. (Or something like that. Doesn't have to literally be about a kid. Just anything that breaks the ritual.)
It seems innocuous at first. Because we want to care about the people we work with. But this person is also going to gripe about the management and company leadership and bring up politics in ways that make people either angry or uncomfortable. And not in a healthy way in a 1:1 with the management. It will be at lunch, in small meetings, in code reviews, planning sessions, etc.
On the coworker side, the idea of total honesty is not a good one. The people who either consciously refuse to engage in these rituals (or are just unaware of them) are guaranteed to cause problems for the entire team over time. If you bring it up as a talking point in, say a 1:1, the person will just say, "What's the problem? I'm just being honest. What do you want me to do? Lie?"
I can't think of any reasonable way to create a policy around this. Teams just need to police themselves. When I hear someone invading the workplace with this kind of "honest" negativity, I have two responses depending on what's going on. If it's personal life stuff or politics, I'll offer to take them out for a bite to eat or a drink or something and listen to everything. If it's griping about management or leadership, I'll just say that they really need to have a conversation with <manager> about that because we really can't accomplish anything by brooding over it. And I'll do this even if I 100% agree with what the person is saying about management or politics. Because I guarantee you someone within a hundred feet of us doesn't agree about it.
On the management side, I'd argue that total honesty is also a terrible idea. In my experience, the people in management roles who advocate for total honesty/total transparency come in two flavors: the first is the person who says he promotes these ideas but lies constantly anyway. The second is an absolute jackass who uses honesty as an excuse to act like a bag of dicks to people.
It is possible do deliver hard criticisms without being a jerk. It just takes a little bit of time and a little bit of effort. Telling someone, "This sucks. You've got to stop being so terrible at your job." is not only lazy and asinine, but also completely unproductive. If someone on your team is performing that badly, it is your job to invest time in that person. Whether it's some coaching earlier in the dev process or extra time in code reviews or providing some educational material or designing a pip, that's your job. Being harshly critical because "honesty" is garbage. Grow up. And take the time to actually do your job.
I don't need to say much about the "total honesty" liar category. They are either sociopaths or utterly incompetent (often both, but competent sociopaths are the worst) and can only get by through manipulating people and playing political games.
The two best managers I've ever had as an individual contributor are what I would call transparently dishonest. Yes, sometimes they had to either be silent about a situation or whitewash certain organizational details, but they also let you know when that was happening. Their criticism was direct and effective, but not cruel. They focused on three key things: providing clearly defined tasks, guarding our time, and protecting the team from organizational politics. They were sometimes (often?) less than totally honest about what was going on, but we knew it and trusted them to know that it was okay to not know.
My best manager as a manager is . . . well, I haven't had a good one yet. So I'll let you know when that happens.
So, I'm going to go out and say it. A certain amount of dishonesty is a good thing. Social structures depend on it to function in a healthy and productive way. Go too far in the honesty direction, and you end up with a culture like NYC, which, as much as I like many things about the city here, it's only a barely functional society. Go too far on the dishonest side, and everyone is stilted and uncomfortable, and no one feels like they can say anything to anyone because we're all Stepford Wives at work, and it's all pretty on the outside but awful on the inside. Like in much of the South and Texas in particular.
It's a balancing act. The Dilbert strip in the article is good because it's useful for us to remember that we are actually selfish and dishonest. But solving that isn't the real problem, and being totally unselfish and honest isn't the solution. That's like reading an article about how bad waterfall is and then moving to a 1-day sprint Agile system. (You laugh, but I've seen it. Seriously. 1-day sprints with 5 standups a day. Sprint planning in the morning, scrum coding sessions in the afternoon, retro just before end of day. You can guess what happened: every day every task ended up blocked. This went on for over a year. Literally nothing got done. But, wow, that team looked busy.)
Apologies if I've offended anyone who is perfectly honest all the time, a coworker, a manager, an Agile practitioner, a Waterfall advocate, a sociopath, an incompetent, a New Yorker, a Texan, or even human. I'm just being . . . totally honest.
I've found southerners to be very genuine people.
Perhaps I was not totally clear in my rant above, but I see both sides of the issue. It's categorically not an honest question. You can call it whatever you like. I happen to be really interested in weather, and I think it's fascinating. If I'm talking to you about weather it's because I've been reading something interesting about it.
One person's nonce can be another person's passion.
And the way I respond to a close friend asking me how I'm doing at his house is way different from how I respond to that same person at work.
And there are also cultures where people emphatically refuse to acknowledge each other at all (NYC) unless absolutely necessary.
You can classify the words however you want. But the form of it is a question. It's not totally honest by definition because a real answer is not expected. And giving a real answer is probably a mistake unless you are talking to a close friend outside of work.
I think this:
> The two best managers I've ever had as an individual contributor are what I would call transparently dishonest.
Highlights an important fact: genuine, warranted trust is not cultivated in the absence of dishonesty. Instead, it's the result of the presence of certain kinds of honesty, and many other things/behaviors as well.
Basically: Honesty:Trust !:: Dishonesty:Distrust.
Like you said, it's a balancing act. But one aspect you left out – and one of the things I took away from their research – is that honesty has big benefits if everyone is on the same page about it. If one person is being "honest", and the rest of the team isn't on board, there's going to be the sort of friction you describe. Or if the honesty is only negative, rather than constructive, that's obviously not healthy. On the other hand, if the whole team is on board about honesty – including being critical – and if there are structures in place that make sure the honesty/transparency/criticism is a constructive force, then it can pay big dividends.
Frankly, I think that honesty/transparency are buzzwords that have little to no meaning. So the authors will have to convince me.
But the whole approach seems cynically disingenuous in most of the places where it's applied.
I also think that criticism doesn't deserve a place in the honesty/transparency group. Criticism is an inevitable fact of life that will happen to you at some point, and you will have to deliver it at some point, if you are a functional adult. Honesty and transparency are entirely optional. They are not in the same category at all, in my opinion.
I encountered different types of criticism and management when I was around 10 years old at one of these things people call music festivals. They are practice gulags. You practice for 10 hours a day, and you work with a bunch of different teachers. It's every 11-year-old's definition of "festival."
But one of the nice things is that you get to work with a lot of different teachers. I remember working very hard on a particular bow stroke called Martele. The hammer stroke. I was really bad at it. And one of my teachers was quite honest with me about how much I sucked at it. And to be fair, I did suck at it. It didn't work. At all. So he told me that it sucked, and that I wasn't trying hard enough and I should practice more, and he was going to spend his lesson smoking a cigarette while I tried to perform 100 martele strokes in a row on the same pitch.
You can call that honesty. But you can also call that a number of other things. I had a different teacher a few weeks later who listened to me trying to do this, and his response was, "Well, this really isn't working out very well for us, now is it? What should we do when things aren't working out well no matter how hard we try? Well, we need to try something different, don't we? Let's try something different."
The reason I'm bringing that up as an example is because this is actually not uncommon in the tech world.
The first guy was being honest. Totally honest. I sounded like garbage. No doubt about that. The second guy was slightly dishonest, but he was more to the point of solving the problem. And, in fact, I got a lot better at that particular stroke of the bow rather quickly.
I'll have to read the book, and I definitely will. And I don't like to leave unread books around. Especially ones backed by research. I hope I was clear to qualify my statements by being based on my own personal experience, rather than pretending that I've done any scientific studies.
I would also argue that there's no such thing as constructive "honesty". Construction inside a team setting is always assumed to be honest. No one goes around telling people they did a great job when they sucked at it. Unless that person is a really bad manager. But teammates don't do this in reality. So I can't see how this really makes sense.
Like I said, I'll read it. But I think it's questionable on the face of it.
Maybe we are living in some sort of crazy place where honesty/transparency/criticism and just a healthy trusting relationship with your boss are all the same thing. But I don't think so, and pushing things in that direction is bad for all of us.
On the other hand, I'm willing to be wrong.
There is a lot of truth in what the first guy was saying in the sense that this is how a lot of the music world works. And there was honesty in treating me that way because that's how people get treated. Even little kids. Some people will argue that this is important for people to understand right from the beginning. And that shielding people from that is dishonest.
All of these things are true, to a certain extent. And all of them are things that need to be talked about. I've struggled with this as a teacher with my own students. People in teacher roles do need to talk about hard truths. Pretending that every student is going to be amazing and going to have a great career is a lie.
For better or worse, I've decided that context matters, and I don't bring big picture truth into lessons that are focused on execution. I set up regular sessions with my students that are totally separate from an actual lesson about the violin or even music. We just sit down and talk for a while about what the student wants and expects, what it's like to work in the field professionally, and what the expectations are going to be from other people.
I don't know for a fact that this is superior to the hard-ass jerk approach, but it's the approach that I think is the right mix of honesty and kindness and productivity. You can't only take the second approach and focus on what is or isn't working with someone and completely shield them from the reality of the world. That's being dishonest about the world.
But what you can do is separate the issues and deal with them straightforwardly. You don't want to hammer a kid with, "HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO COMPETE IN THIS WORLD WHEN YOU PLAY LIKE THAT!" while they are actually trying to play something. That's unproductive garbage. But not having a serious conversation about their expectations vs. the reality of the business and the life is also dishonest.
I operate the same way when I'm managing/mentoring people in technology. There is absolutely a time, place, and sometimes a need for tough criticism and hard talks about the way the world works re: their current capabilities. But that time isn't when we are trying to get a release out the door and their code doesn't work. Because, frankly, if someone is so bad that it's affecting release deadlines, that's on me as a manager. I'm the person who should be getting yelled at.
And if I'm communicating effectively with my team and having the right kinds of 1:1s, these conversations happen naturally as a part of the progression plan for each person on the team. The 1:1 is actually one thing I've taken from my technology experience back into my music world. It's a great idea if it's done well.
Anyway, long story short, it's possible to lie by omitting information. And people can and do argue that not being a complete dickhead is a lie of omission. Like almost all of this conversation, I think it's mostly a grey area. But also like almost all of this conversation, reasonable people can disagree.
The radically honest school of thought has produced some amazing technology, technologists, and musicians. I'm just not convinced it's worth the price, and that there might be a better way. But my argument is humanist, anecdotal, and weak.
All the data we have suggests that the "Be a total prick" method of teaching and management produces the best results. I just happen to think that life is long enough to try something different and see if it works.
Honesty and telling things in insulting way that just makes speaker feel above or powerful are two different things. Emotionally charged version (e.g. calling you garbage) is not necessary more honest nor more true. There is no reason to assume that.
The system in which honesty wins the day, would also contain people who told the first dude that he is not helping as much as the other.
The result was, that you knew whether you was alone or not when you talked w th management, you had it through over and already had feedback from collegues when you talked to management etc. The result was that when you brought yur case, you had much better chance to express yourself and problems you see.
The supposed "healthy" limits on what employees can day about actual processes and day to day problems companies face are what prevents those problems to be solved.
And you know what? If management tend to have bias towards some mistake (toward cheap, toward inaction, toward action, etc), as all humam managements do, ability to talk about it during planning enables employees to mitigate future problems. In some odd way, "we speak what we mean" in tech often actually means "higher people can unleash themselves on anyone lower on chain - but people with lower social status should speak very carefully.
And people feeling uncofortable legitimate criticism of management is not something that should stop such criticism. I can understand why you should not insult people, but this is not nearly the same situation.
Kind of a mini-union. But a big part of the reason I did that was because there were some pervasively negative people on the team who were dragging the rest of us down.
We needed a solution to the legitimate concerns that were actually doing something good for us. But what we needed even more than that was a way to shut down people who were turning every code review into a critique of the CEO and how much better of a job that person could do if s/he were in charge of everything. Having that little mini-union made it really easy to shut that down by just saying, "Good point. Let's make sure to talk about it on Tuesday at our weekly." and those people didn't feel sidelined or ignored.
My point wasn't that all negativity is bad or unhealthy. It's that there's a certain type of person that can have bad effects on a team, and that you can identify that person based on certain characteristics. And being a true believer in "Total Honesty" is one of them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/bridgewaters-ray-dalio-the-l...
If you enjoy crying at your desk anyway.
It works a little bit. People are still very protective of their position, but I'd like to think people on my team are a little more open about things than when I started. I don't have a way to measure that, though. I can say for sure that we're much more trust-based than when I joined.
The truth is a funny thing, literally. I'm not a naturally funny person, and the jokes that I make are often one that only I seem to understand. But it's when I'm honest about things that I get the most laughs. I remember one time when the conversation I was having lead me to say "Some of Charles Manson's music is pretty good" to this one woman, and she laughed at that but I don't think she realized that I meant what I said.
> It should be safe to be vulnerable
The number one cause of stress for me is that management did not protect me enough. When I changed something, it would have some minor knock on impact that upset someone (sometimes someone very junior), who would go and see a director, who would go and see the MD and then I would get career threatening back room deals going on that I was not party to. If you are going to get someone to come and push the company forward at sub-boardroom level, make sure your directors are 100% committed to the changes.'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs', make sure you are ready to accept broken eggs. Make sure when petty stuff is brought to senior people they divert it straight back to the project sponsor (or whoever). Make sure individual managers know this change is happening, and it is their job to allow it and make their staff happy with it.
There is nothing worse than when you are in the heart of a technical change, than to find out you are in trouble with the boss because a secretary in another dept is sad that you changed their UI.
Worse still when you are passed over for a promotion because the MD is concerned that you upset a few people, when it wasn't your job to manage the people side in the first place.
Transparency is part of the answer, but in the situation I describe it actually becomes a matter of giving people far too much info, so they can't claim they were not consulted! This is counter-productive too.
Senior managers need to take a very firm line with passive-aggressive behavior that is trying to stop change, or not start the change off to begin with.
The lawyer is the only one motivated to keep secrets because they have skin in the game.
You will find dishonesty between executives and shareholders. This is because executives are paid to lie about performance, and share holders exist to punish them.
But this is just as systematic as it is human.
Dishonesty is rarer among workers. Their gossip is honest, and hence cathartic.
Dishonesty is also rarer among the executive team. For running a company can only be done with facts, and in almost all cases of corporate scams, the executives were all in on it. And even the whistle blower would have had to known the truth.
Lying may be common, but it isn't universal. I never understood why you would want to make a habit of having to waste memory and mental effort to remember the map of what lies have been told to which people. It's hard enough to remember one version of reality.
Regarding social consequences: I'm not sure. I was already a socially awkward nerd, which makes makes it very hard to isolate any lying/not-lying consequences. Politely declining to answer when a lie is socially expected (or, when possible, finding a way to respond that doesn't require lying) has worked out reasonably well so far.
This is a really good alternative, when giving a completely frank answer would cause undesirable results.
In practice, this is not a problem. People who lie very much, in my experience, have a couple of strong narratives they build their lies on. Because they follow some vague set of rules (which is easier to remember, especially if you use them repeatedly), it's possible for them to re-invent the same lie for the same situation, every time. On top of that, they are prepared to cover any minor differences that can occur one way or another - mostly by diverting the attention of others to something else. As long as they stay consistent with their lies and manage to stay within the bounds of what others consider plausible, it's very hard to recognize their lies. It's even harder, in practice, because what we consider probable is greatly affected by the flow of conversation and what's happening around it, so with a proper preparation, it's possible to sell almost any bullshit to almost anyone.
Well, that's the deep end of conmen and people who use lies - one way or another - for work. However, many people are able to lie easily and they are almost never challenged, at least if they don't exaggerate too much. Our brains are great at filling the holes in the narratives, which has both a good side - art - and dark side - lies.
Good managers don't particularly appreciate people who don't understand basic social dynamics (why lying has to be done to some extent to keep things moving) but they will never show it, leaving people like you, blissfully ignorant and happily moving along :)
While nobody disagrees that this kind of culture would be worth striving for, the majority's opinion seems to be that it is impossible to achieve.
But we all share the desire for living/working in an environment like this and this gives me hope! Anybody who start the discussion in their team or company about the way they interact, will quickly and most certainly find allies and can grow a team of change agents from that.
Everyone culture was already mentioned and I would also recommend books like Unboss https://coderbyheart.com/unboss-a-compendium-for-future-orga... or Joy, Inc. https://coderbyheart.com/joy-inc/
I love to complain about sales people, but good luck getting the really good ones to work at a company like this without the usual compensation structure.
Then he uses the same techniques to promote Trump. Which is fine. People can support whichever candidate. But Adams adamantly denied his support.
I've learnt a lot reading his articles about the way the current crop of republican politicians are operating. He is one of the few people making sense and understanding the zeitgeist of half the American people. I'm not a trump fan fwiw, you can take this more in the Sun Zu sense:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I'd like to point out that this is wildly overstated.
~59.7% of eligible voters voters cast a ballot in 2016.[0]
Of those votes cast, Donald Trump received ~46.1% of those votes or 62,979,879 votes.[1] So Donald Trump represents at the least the zeitgeist of ~27.5% of eligible voters.
It's hard to determine how he represents the zeitgeist of non-voting-eligible inhabitants of the US but when you compare his popular vote total to the total population of the country, or ~323,100,000 in 2016, one can claim with certainty that Trump represents the zeitgeist of at least ~19.5% of the country.
I point this out because it is often said that Donald Trump represents half the country, likely because he was the candidate of one of the two major political parties in this country and 1/2 is 50%.
However repeating this falsehood of Trump representing the beliefs of half the country lends legitimacy to Trump and his agenda that is unearned and provides cover to people who would like to believe that the beliefs they share with Donald Trump enjoy some sort of popularity that is more widespread than can be justified.
The same is true of course for Hillary Clinton and those Americans that cast their ballot for her, though of course the breakdown would be very slightly larger in her favor given her winning of the popular vote by some ~3,000,000 votes.
[0]http://www.electproject.org/2016g
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-...
I'm half joking, btw. So no offense intended.
It's a funny comic and it doesn't need to be taken literally. That is it exaggerates to tell a story. You do know what Dilbert is, right? How did we end up going from that to maybe "Scot Adams" is a dirty, rotten liar? Do you know some extra info about him to support it.
As an author one doesn't necessarily have identify with all the characters and ideas in the story. For example I might not like or enjoy potty humor but my kids like it, so I'll tell them jokes to amuse them because I enjoy seeing them laugh. Doesn't mean I am a dirty liar.
Radical truth tellers forget about the sin of omission, and happily lean back and watch others bang themselves.