From Collective Illusions (Todd Rose, 2022) pp174-7
Paternalism has been woven into American history since the day the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock. Though we typically think of it in the context of sexism and religious repression, it’s also been used to justify slavery, control immigrants, and persecute Native Americans.
In 1911, American paternalism reached new heights with the help of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Named “the most influential book on management ever published” by the Academy of Management in 2001, the book established Taylor as the father of white-collar management practices. In a single stroke, it also industrialized paternalism and systematized distrust. Taylor believed that businesses should be run on the basis of science and knowledge rather than tradition, an innovation he called “scientific management.” In more humane hands, such a shift might have been positive. But Taylor promoted scientific management for all the wrong reasons. An elitist to his core, he used his powerful position to shape popular perceptions of industry and reframe workers, whom he loathed, as the weakest link.
In his youth, Taylor was set to attend Harvard when declining eyesight derailed his plans. Unable to continue his studies after graduating from the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, he turned his attention to learning a trade. Signing on as an apprentice at a steel company whose owners were friends of his wealthy Philadelphia parents, he quickly climbed the ranks to become chief engineer at a different company.’ His knack for innovation drove a series of key changes, and by the time he left, he had doubled the company’s productivity.
Taylor leveraged what he learned to further his ambitions and solidify his sense of superiority over the people he had come to know at the factory. He based his new theory of management on a hard line between “educated” owners (who sought to squeeze “maximum productivity and maximum profit” from their businesses) and “stupid” factory workers. Thus the essential issue, he argued, was that “what the worker wants and what the employer wants are fundamentally at odds.
“I Taylor’s own words drip with scorn in his assessment of workers: “One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type… He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.”
Believing that animalistic factory workers were intrinsically worthless unless they could be tightly controlled, Taylor devised a system that made them as machine-like as possible, limiting their every movement based on “scientific” calculations. Conveyor belts moved at a speed set by factory managers and strategized for maximum production, rather than what worked best or was most sustainable for the laborers. Everything was measured and meticulously timed.
In his 1936 movie Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin satirized this new system of production. In one scene, the Little Tramp finds himself working in a factory assembly line, where he is reprimanded by his boss for not going fast enough. But he struggles to keep pace with the rapidly moving conveyor belt. When a bee buzzes in his face, the manager helpfully swats at it with a meaty hand, smacking Charlie’s forehead instead. Unable to keep up, Charlie hops aboard the conveyor belt and disappears into the machine itself, where he is rolled and pressed among the cogs. He becomes an actual part of the machine. He emerges a crazed man who runs around tweaking the noses of coworkers and managers with his two wrenches. Immune to social norms, he harasses ladies and violates personal space in his blind pursuit of more nuts to tighten. His transformation to an automaton is complete, but the result is disastrous.
Since Taylor’s book came out more than a century ago, institutions around the world have embraced, internalized, and incorporated his paternalistic approach to managing people. Taylor’s method filled not just his pockets but those of business owners and the scientifically trained managers who occupied the upper reaches of organizational charts. Thus the organization man (and later woman) was born, along with droves of management consultants, business schools, and the Harvard Business Review (whose founding mission is to “improve the practice of management”).
Thanks to its assimilation by the business world, Taylorism has also seeped into the workings of modern society as a whole.
Today, just about every manager-run American organization and institution – schools, law courts, prisons, businesses, government programs, you name it – operates on the assumption that the managed cannot be trusted to make good decisions for themselves.
Top-down Taylorism is so pervasive that we don’t even notice it; it’s the water we’re all swimming in. And as we know, what we believe defines what we perceive as reality. Thus, in little more than a hundred years, Mr. Taylor’s “scientific” approach toward our work, our lives, and our attitudes toward others has become as self-evident and unquestionable as the law of gravity.
Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University, has studied the fallout caused by Taylorism, including economic damage and massive social distrust. Paternalists, he argues, are more likely to be corrupt. Among other things, they are inclined to false zero-sum thinking (i.e., “There is only so much pie. The more I get, the less there is for you”). This makes them greedy, selfish, and prone to investments that are hard for other groups to share in. They are also more likely to redistribute wealth in their favor, which lowers trust among the general population and harms the overall economy I Harvard researchers studying this problem found that what Tabarrok calls the “distrust trap” is self-reinforcing, as civil servants and business owners alike become more likely to treat people badly.
Thus, because our Taylor-inspired institutional overlords tell us we are untrustworthy, we tend to incorporate that belief into our own self-images. And our subscription to this paternalist lie spawns a distrust bias that snowballs: since we feel like we shouldn’t be trusted, we assume other people can’t be trusted either. We become suspicious of them and resist trusting because we think they don’t care about being trustworthy; but this, in turn, means they’ll distrust us too. Thus our mutual wariness, cycled and recycled like a poison through all our interactions with others, becomes a destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy.
At an individual scale, the distrust bias also accelerates the splintering of the self. Our suspicion of others makes us more likely to fall into the traps of copying, belonging, and silence. We become more susceptible to peer pressure and conspiracy thinking, and congruence becomes extremely difficult. Distrust hurts our relationships and intensifies anxiety and stress. It also makes it harder for us to think clearly, driving us to become more cautious, inflexible, and angry.”? Compounded across an entire society, these characteristics become truly damaging.
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