Comment by HEmanZ
4 days ago
All loyalty is a risk. Even loyalty to your spouse is a risk. Just like how all love and human trust is a risk.
To feel human you have to take these emotional risks. You shouldn’t bet your life that a mega-corp has absolute and utter loyalty to you. You shouldn’t bet your entire life that your spouse has absolute loyalty to you (we have divorce, pre-nups, and post-nups for a reason). But it strikes me as a pretty soulless existence to have no loyalty to your place of work, in the same way it would be a pretty soulless existence to never form loyalty with the people in your life, even if it isn’t absolute loyalty.
Things don't deserve loyalty. Your company is a "thing".
People - people can absolutely deserve loyalty, and those people can be managers, coworkers, spouses, family, etc.
But don't mix the two up in your mind.
>Things don't deserve loyalty. Your company is a "thing".
A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism". A sports-team or TV show or band is a thing, loyalty to it is called "fandom". Loyalty to an idea or philosophy is called "being principled" or "idealism". Do you believe that things don't deserve loyalty, such that all of these are errors? Or do these examples not capture the sense of your statement?
Yes, all of these things do not deserve loyalty. There are values i hold dear, if a philosophy or state holds on to the same values, i support them. If they turn away from them, no reason to be loyal.
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That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.
Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.
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"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country."
--EM Forster, "What I Believe"
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> A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism".
That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself. People often see their “external tribes” as an extension of their self much likely they do family/friends, rather than them being part of it like a company. I am a Spillett. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English, I am UKian, I am European, I work for TL. Notice the difference in language in that last one.
This is part of why some get so offended when you poke fun at their town/county/country: if they see it as an extension of their identity more than just somewhere they live then your disrespect is a personal attack. They would not likely defend their employer nearly as passionately.
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Patriotism is as we know a loyalty to real estate. Borders do change all the time if history is viewed from few steps back. In fact, everything changes - languages, culture, traditions and so on.
Where I come from in Europe - they say we have proud history going back some 1500 years. Well before that, there were other tribes, we are same type of immigrants as current waves. We either mingled with them, killed them or drove them away. I am pretty sure genetic tracing would favor the mingling for the most part.
What makes more sense is really what all others say - pick up a specific set of people, philosophy, moral imperative etc. and be loyal to them. Higher concepts muddy the waters with slippery slopes and are unnecessary, just opening surfaces to manipulation.
Perhaps it should be refined to say that "profit-oriented things" that view existence as purely transactions don't deserve loyalty.
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Patriotism is mostly just propaganda to make people willing to kill and die for some old cynical geezers' delusions of grandeur. The guy said it right, countries don't deserve loyalty either. Lots of Russians are figuring this out firsthand these days.
What about your boss, then.
It depends. I posted why in more detail in a different reply to this thread.
not that binary lmao
Unfortunately all managers focus on push rank, so why loyalty to them?
This is an overly broad generalisation - there are many cases of managers that do their best to primarily look after those under them, not just focus on getting higher up.
This soullessness wasn't always the case. Prior to the cost-cutting minmaxing of Jack Welch's industries-influential tenure as CEO of General Electric, corporate America wasn't quite so brazen about layoffs, because they weren't viewed as a way to maximize shareholder returns- and shareholder value wasn't viewed as the only priority for corporate leaders. (He also introduced what would later become stack ranking at Microsoft and other tech companies.)
On the other side, certainly a fluid labor market such as tech was a couple of years ago would foster a lack of loyalty, as employees hop from employer to employer for rapid career growth.
None of this necessarily contradicts with your point. It's just labor relations don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes a lot needs to be done to earn trust in a low-trust cultural environment.
But also there were actual benefits to loyalty that don’t exist anymore. Labor union participation was huge in the post WWII, pre-Welch time frame. They used that leverage to negotiate benefits, many of which rewarded loyalty. Pension plans vs 401ks, significant pay raises based on seniority, clear paths to promotion, job security prioritizing senior workers, etc. Those things permeated through job markets and companies without unions as well, given the labor force competition. People were loyal because they had real tangible compensation and benefits for it.
I think another shift around Welch was that companies used to focus more on long term value, which would result in stock price increases in the long term, even if not in any given short term. That if a company was healthy and valuable, one of the many benefits would be rising stocks. The shift to focus on short term stock increases as almost the only goal, means companies will pull the copper piping out the walls and destroy the house if it means a juicy bump in the Q3 earnings call.
Yeah, there's certainly been a steady erosion of labor benefits in the postwar. To dial back my own great man theory a bit, Welch was active in the '80s when Reagan and Thatcher were in power, and those "great men" were also operating in a milieu where the Chicago Boys were very influential, and they had the political mandate to institute management-favoring policies thanks to economic crises of the '70s.
I think I agree with both perspectives. And it makes me realize that in the past when I've tried to draw hardcore no-loyalty / emotional attachment boundaries teammates / employers pick up in the vibe and it slowly becomes mildly but chronically toxic.
It's 100% an emergence scam behavior of corporate entities to trick their employees into developing loyalty and tricking managers / founders etc into thinking its not just a way of scamming lower-end employees imo... I never got the feeling that managers were consciously trying to trick us into developing loyalty, felt more like they were then ones drinking the most coolaid on it...
Also agree with the base human need to feel at least some loyalty in any relationship to feel like it's healthy.
I think my hack has been to develop loyalty to people on my team laterally. Seems to work but sometimes leadership / management still seems like they catch a whiff that I dont have a deep emotional need to respond to their frantic 8pm or Sunday afternoon Teams messages...
But if they fire me for not being loyal who cares, the economies doing great right?
In addition to what others have said about loyalty to the people who happen to work at a company, which I agree with entirely:
I think it's good to have admiration for the company (or any organization) you work for. If you can't find anything you admire, it might be better to find another place to work where you can.
This implies having the privilege of having options. For me, it's probably the primary reason I try to direct my career toward having skills or connections that give me options.
Being able to take pride in your work also helps a lot. In academia, my work may not be the most well compensated (it's perfectly reasonable for the area but I'm not going to be retiring early), but it is modern software that meaningfully helps others at my institution and doesn't actively make society worse.
Yes. This is very closely tied into the ability to admire the organization, at least for me. It's very hard for me to take pride in my work for an organization I think is bad.
>You shouldn’t bet your life that a mega-corp has absolute and utter loyalty to you.
But your mega corp doesn't have loyalty to you. They have loyalty to their shareholders, and you are a means to that end. The shareholders are the spouse, and you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present. If a little flattery gets them a better price, then they flatter. If their spouse's interests change, you'll never see them again.
> you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present
Equally, if you presenting yourself well and negotiating well gets you a better wage to make that birthday present, then you should do those things. It's a two-way street.
But that isn’t loyalty, that is just transactional, which is exactly what people are advocating for when dealing with a corporate employer.
> loyalty for a company is concept to make you work harder without asking anything in return. And the moment the company shifts focus and you are out of it, then suddenly you understand that this loyalty wasn't kind of a credits account which you've been saving all this time. It's simply nothing.
This is what you were responding to, which is not transactional. You are loyal to your spouse (to a point) because you trust her to have your best interests in mind and be aligned in the common goal of improving life for you both. A corporation’s spouse is the shareholder and has their best interests in mind, not the employee.
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i think we can draw a distinction between loyalty to the company, either as an abstract entity or its concrete leadership, and human relationships with people who may also be employed there. there are two companies here, one has a stock ticker and the other is an organic collection of people. i dont owe either of them loyalty, but the second company might easily earn it.
It's not about feelings. It's about making human life possible, as we are social animals. We develop through relationships.
Loyalty is a commitment to the objective good of the other, of skin in the game. Loyalty is hierarchical and the particular variety and its entailed commitments depends on the particular nature of the relationship.
In a hyperindividualist liberal society, the presumption is basically Hobbesian; life is taken to be intrinsically and thoroughly adversarial and exploitative, and relationships are taken to be basically instrumental and transactional. (This even informs scientific interpretation, as science is downstream of culture.) Society is taken to be intrinsically a matter of "contract" or a kind of Mexican standoff. Loyalty is a quaint and anachronistic notion, a passing emotion that expires the moment the landscape of opportunities shifts. Provisional and temporary.
Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.
There's no point in asking first, whether employers should be loyal to their employers or vice versa. The important question is whether they are good to one another. If they are, you might also find loyalty among them, but that's not where the focus should be.
Someone who gets obsessed with loyalty too much, I think, is likely to have sinister intentions. They probably want you to be loyal to them but don't plan on being good to you.
We must be more precise here. You should be wary of allowing a hermeneutic of suspicion to take you from naivete to outright cynicism. There is a middle path.
If we narrow the scope to employment, there is a variety of loyalty to the common good of the company at work, in due proportion and priority, when you join the company. Each employee is bound in this manner, including the guy deciding your salary or your termination. Otherwise, what are you doing there?
Now, loyalty isn't stupidity. Perhaps this is what people associate with the word when they hear it. They perhaps imagine some poor, gullible, childish pushover. It should be obvious that this is stupid. No, loyalty to a company is a commitment to the common good of the company within the scope of your responsibilities. That's it.
Now, given the nature of at-will employment, that commitment is contingent on actual employment. When you leave the company, your commitment ends. But while you work at that company, you must be committed to the common good of that company. Again, why else are you there? The nature of employment makes this a kind of elective loyalty of utility.
The fact that employers might try to manipulate employees emotionally by misusing and abusing words like "loyalty" in order to exploit them is a different matter. In that case, the employer is being disloyal to the company and its employees. How you should respond to that kind of disloyalty is contingent on the particulars of that disloyalty and the particulars of your personal circumstances.
We have got to get away from this relativist, subjectivist battle of wills. What matters is the objective good.
> Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.
I'm not sure what to make of this. The scope is also too broad to say anything useful here. In friendship, loyalty is a prerequisite for it being a good relationship. Loyalty to a friend is commitment to their objective good. A disloyal friend harms the friendship. How can there be friendship without loyalty?
I suppose a good question to ask is: what does it mean to be disloyal? It is every okay to be disloyal? Disloyalty presumes loyalty is normative and owed. But loyalty is not always normative, because it would be a category mistake. If I work for Boeing, I am not being disloyal toward Airbus, because I have no commitments toward Airbus. But I would be disloyal to Boeing if I were to illicitly funnel work done at Boeing to Airbus, harming Boeing. In the context of friendship, loyalty may grow with the friendship, but being more loyal to friend A than to friend B doesn't mean I am disloyal to B. A smaller glass full of water simply holds less water, but it is no less full than a larger glass full of water. It is simply that there is an order and priority of loyalty in due proportion with the nature of the friendship. I owe more loyalty to my family than I do to my community, but it's not an either/or proposition. It simply means that my commitment to and prioritization of the good of my family is higher (this relates to the ordo amoris that made a splash in the news recently).
Loyalty is worth it if you can reasonably assume it will be repaid in kind. Assuming you didn't make a huge mistake in partner selection, that assumption is valid for your spouse. It emphatically does NOT hold for your employer, who will drop you the instant you become a problem. Therefore, it makes no sense to be loyal to your employer beyond the bare minimum.
Your soulful loyalty should be all for personal and family relationships like a spouse, zero for any corporation.
Employer employee relationships are completely financial. Almost legally required to be that way on the employer’s side.
Yes, all loyalty is a risk. But the expectation in interpersonal relationships is typically that if you are loyal to someone they are loyal to you. There are literal rituals for people to swear that to each other in front of witnesses. Most people also intuitively understand that an unilateral breach of loyalty is a legitimate reason for ending this agreement.
With hypercapitalist corporations loyalty is a one-way street. The employee is expected to be loyal, while corporations drop them casually if it benefits them. Loyalty is realized when one of the sides endure some downsides in thr expectations that these will be resolved in the long term. So if you dump someone the minute that downside appears, you aren't and never have been loyal.