I used to be a middle manager at Google, and I observed mazedom manifesting there in two main ways:
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If you try to make your organization productive by focusing your time on intensively coaching the people under you to be better at their jobs, this will make your org productive but will not result in your career advancement. This is because nobody at the level above you will be able to tell that the productivity increase is due to your efforts—your reports’ testimony to this effect will not provide appropriate social proof because they are by definition less senior than you. To advance your career you must instead give priority to activities which call you to the attention of those who can provide that social proof. This is called “managing up and across.”
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In order to ensure that the organization works in consistent, fair, legal, ethical, and legible ways, corporate policy in a multilayer organization tends to put more guardrails around the behavior of middle managers than on those either above or below them. This strips those middle managers of the feeling of agency and autonomy which might otherwise provide a non-ladder-climbing intrinsic motivation to do the work. Thus it strengthens the selection pressure for those whose main motivation is ladder-climbing.
Trump’s appointed SCOTUS judges are indeed willing to rule against him and to uphold a coherent legal theory of democracy under the rule of law, which agree or disagree is clearly not equivalent to “whatever my side wants it gets”. The same sadly cannot be said of his lower court judges, notably Aileen Cannon, whose presence on the bench in his home district drastically decreases the otherwise high likelihood of his being convicted and imprisoned for having obviously, self-confessedly committed serious crimes. Cannon is exactly the sort of lawless, toadying party hack that fascist dictators-in-making around the world love to appoint to the judiciary, and we should expect lots more of them to be appointed if Trump wins in 2024. This may prove to be the biggest single piece of damage to US democracy in the next decade.