The Gervais Principle Quotes

“Reflection is a dangerous pastime. It can lead you to rewrite your past, alter how you see your present, and tempt you down paths you never imagined you would explore.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“you don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“At the heart of all tragedy, the Greeks saw a phenomenon they called hamartia: a fatal error born of unavoidable ignorance. Combined with a fundamental moral flaw, hamartia inevitably led on to destruction. For the Greeks, humans were cursed not just with mortality of the flesh, but also hamartia-driven mortality of the spirit. Hamartia was the Gods being Divine Jerks, randomly toying with human lives for their own pleasure, through cat-and-mouse games the latter could not hope to win.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“Most people recognize that many blue-collar jobs pay more than white-collar jobs. Few act on that recognition.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“The Clueless are the ones who lack the competence to circulate freely through the economy (unlike Sociopaths and Losers), and build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when events make it abundantly clear that the firm is not loyal to them. To sustain themselves, they must be capable of fashioning elaborate delusions based on idealized notions of the firm -- the perfectly pathological entities we mentioned. Unless squeezed out by forces they cannot resist, they hang on as long as possible, long after both Sociopaths and Losers have left (in Douglas Adams' vicious history of our planet, humanity was founded by a spaceship full of the Clueless, sent here by scheming Sociopaths). When cast adrift in the open ocean, they are the ones most likely to be utterly destroyed.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“The Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization's life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are also the ones capable of equally impersonally exploiting a young idea for growth in the beginning, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“They are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain. They've given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. Traded freedom for a paycheck in short. They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create (since their compensation is set by Sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard). They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space