Political prediction always exudes a whiff of astrology.
| Anton Jäger
…
Election day seems the perfect time for the quote above from Anton Jäger, the most recent source of the concept of hyperpolitics, here summarized by Nick French:
These episodes [Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and No Kings, for example], Jäger argues, are characteristic of the era of what he calls hyperpolitics. Everyday life in the United States and other Western democracies is increasingly politicized: our political ideologies, as curated on social media, have become central to our identities and have even increasingly come to structure our closest personal relationships. Yet this heightened politicization has not translated into meaningful policy change. Instead, the public’s dissatisfaction with traditional parties of both the Left and the Right continues to grow, while a panoply of new right-populist formations has managed to win over disaffected voters in ever larger numbers across the developed world. Meanwhile, the core elements of the neoliberal economic program — low taxes, public disinvestment, and corporate handouts — remain the order of the day.
How did we get here? For Jäger, the United States and European countries find themselves at the end of a process of evolution — or, more accurately, devolution — that started with the era of “mass politics” stretching from the late nineteenth century to roughly the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since then, these societies have stumbled through two unstable new orientations toward politics — post-politics and antipolitics — before landing in our current hyperpolitical era.
Today is Election Day in the US. Let’s see what tomorrow brings. It can only get better, right?
HR Distortion Field
Laurel Kalser wrote early last year that employee engagement surveys don’t accurately reflect employees’ perspectives, with ‘6% rarely or never answer honestly’:
HR teams may be relying on misleading employee engagement surveys to develop initiatives and make critical decisions about productivity and agility, according to a February report by people analytics firm Visier.
Nearly half (47%) of 1,000 U.S.-based employees surveyed in October 2024 said they often or occasionally feel pressured to withhold feedback, and another 6% rarely or never answer honestly, the responses showed.
Trust — or rather, a lack of it — in their organization’s data management system is the main culprit: 37% of employees said they don’t believe engagement surveys are ever really anonymous. They also said managers don’t get how they feel; 44% believe their manager would rate their emotional state differently than they would, while 21% said their manager would inflate it.
I haven’t checked, but I bet that these numbers haven’t improved, and I’d wager they’ve gotten worse.
Trilemma
I read a great explanation of what a trilemma is, by Paul Morland, Philip Pilkington from Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation: Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma:
More interesting [than the dilemma] is the trilemma, where the choice is two out of three perceived goods. You can have any two, but you cannot have all three. An example of a trilemma was neatly formulated by the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek. Living in a Communist country, you could be any two, but not all three, of honest, loyal, and intelligent. If you were honestly loyal to the regime, you were not intelligent (you might call it the “dense option”). If you were honest and intelligent, you could not be loyal (the “dissident option”). If you were loyal and intelligent, you could not be honest (the “dissembler option”). By being dense, a dissident, or a dissembler, you were choosing two and foregoing one of the virtues of honesty, intelligence, and loyalty.
This description recalls the corporate conundrum of exit, voice, and loyalty laid out by Albert O. Hirschman, and here explained1 by James O’Toole and Warren Bennis:
In the early 1970s, Albert O. Hirschman posited that employees who disagree with company policy have only three options: exit, voice, or loyalty. That is, they can offer a principled resignation (exit), try to change the policy (voice truth to power), or remain team players despite their opposition (loyalty). Most people choose option three, the path of least resistance. They swallow whatever objections they may have to questionable dictates from above, concluding that they lack the power to change things or, worse, will be punished if they try. Most executives expect their people to be good soldiers and not question company policy, but a great leader will welcome alternative viewpoints.
To use Žižek’s terms, employees face a trilemma. As the HR survey results above show, nearly half of workers are dissemblers (and 6% nearly always lie). Most dissenters exit, or are pushed out for raising their voices. And in this economy, a large proportion of workers might embrace loyalty, either honestly (or ‘dense’ly) or as dissemblers.
O’Toole and Bennis suggest that executives should seek to create a culture of candor to break this trilemma, but, honestly, executives generally aren’t wired for it.
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