I started to think about ‘power worship’ a couple of years ago, after having read a few essays by George Orwell on the subject. Orwell thought that an unhealthy subservience to power was infecting British cultural and political life. ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’ was no longer the fundamental Western myth, instead something ugly and fawning had taken its place… the fairytale of the supreme leader.
The fairytale of the supreme leader teaches children to identify with following one leader who is ‘good’– for modern readers, think Harry Potter, He-Man etc. The story doesn’t change much when it’s repackaged for adults, except there’s more carnality thrown into the mix: consider the pantry-erotica of Nigella Lawson; the submissive longings of Fifty Shades of Grey’s Ana; or James Bond’s slavishness to the organization of his master ‘M’. Whether child or adult, the reader is encouraged to believe validation of one’s own worth comes from being accepted by a powerful master.
That’s the story. In reality, of course, both Nigella and Ana get older, less attractive and they lose whatever prestige being owned gave them. James Bond outlives his usefulness and is denied a pension because he was never officially on Her Majesty’s books, was he? If you think I’m joking, keep reading…
This post isn’t about abusive husbands or lovers, it’s about how bad organizations use people. I’m going to take my favorite group, ‘the intelligence community’, as an example because their ethical problems are aggravated by the fact that their leadership is not really held accountable to anyone. The finance community could serve as an equally good example, however.
How is an institution abusive toward a person?
Any abuser will try to convince their target that the target ‘needs’ them to be happy, that the abuser provides some special validation to the victim. In reality, the victim’s healthy needs are not being met and that’s a painful problem for them. Instead of dealing with the source of the problem– the abuser and the unhealthy need– the victim tries to deal with their pain in other ways, not all of them helpful. Consider the propensity for military drone operators to self-destruct, for example: US version and UK version.
Institutional abuse won’t be something dramatic like bodily harm: it might be working employees in a way that makes having a healthy family life impossible; or making the ‘clearance’ process such a black box that it scares employees out of political engagement; or exploiting existing mental illness. In return, the employee is told that they’re special, unique, a ‘cut above’ the rest and part of a ‘secret team’.
This type of positive reinforcement is particularly effective against people with low self-esteem, or the character weaknesses which used to be described as ‘narcissism’. (‘Narcissism’ is exceptionally prevalent in the military community, which is the community most spooks are drawn from.) Perhaps worst of all, these abusive practices can trick weak-minded people into doing things that run against their own conscience; things that poison the soul and may also trap the individual later. Ex-intelligence agents don’t exist. Welcome to human resources in the spy business!
A critical reader may look at what I’ve written and say: “That’s just a.nolen’s opinion.” It is my opinion, but I encourage you to read the opinions of a few intelligence pros who were brave enough to be candid about their profession. Consider this anecdote about Klop Ustinov, a valuable war-time spy for the British, which is taken from Peter Wright’s bestseller Spycatcher:
(Peter Wright worked in MI5 for most of his life and his father was Engineer in Chief for the Marconi Company, so intelligence was a family business- a.nolen.)
Klop Ustinov was German by descent, but he had strong connections in the Russian diplomatic community and was a frequent visitor to the Embassy… Ustinov was recruited by MI5, and began to obtain high-grade intelligence from zu Putlitz about the true state of German rearmament. It was priceless intelligence, possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar period. After meeting zu Putlitz, Ustinov and he used to dine with Vansittart and Churchill, then in the wilderness, to brief them on the intelligence they had gained. Zu Putlitz became something of a second son to the urbane English diplomat. Even after the outbreak of war Ustinov continued meeing zu Putlitz, by now working in Holland as an air attaché. Finally in 1940 zu Putlitz learned that the Gestapo were closing in and he decided to defect. Once more Ustinov traveled into Holland and, at great personal risk, led zu Putlitz to safety.
I [Peter Wright] took a taxi over to Ustinov’s flat in Kensington, expecting to meet a hero of the secret world living in honorable retirement. In fact, Ustinov and his wife were sitting in a dingy flat surrounded by piles of ancient, leather-bound books. He was making ends meet by selling off his fast-diminishing library…
“I do these things, Peter, and they leave me here. My wife and I… penniless.”
“But what about your pension?” I asked.
“Pension? I have no pension,” he flashed back bitterly. “When you work for them you never think about the future, about old age. You do it for love. And when it comes time to die, they abandon you.”
Wright wrapped up the incident this way: “But I learned a lesson I never forgot: that MI5 expects its officers to remain loyal unto the grave, without necessarily offering loyalty in return.”
Peter Wright’s disappointment with ‘the intelligence community’ doesn’t end with MI5:
The profession of intelligence is a solitary one. There is camaraderie, of course, but in the end you are alone with your secrets. You live and work at a feverish pitch of excitement, dependent always on the help of your colleagues. But you always move on, whether to a new branch or department, or to a new operation. And when you move on, you inherit new secrets which subtly divorce you from those you have worked with before. Contacts, especially with the outside world, are casual, since the largest part of yourself cannot be shared. For this reason, intelligence services are great users of people.
I share Peter Wright’s opinion that to persist in the intelligence business, you need to be comfortable using and being used. Emotionally healthy people aren’t comfortable with all this using, which brings me back to ‘narcissism’.
Mental health pros no longer consider ‘narcissism’ a mental illness; the symptoms that defined it appear to have been absorbed into the definitions of other conditions. I think one could make a strong case that ‘narcissism’ was always as much about values and choices as it was about illness, but from the point of view of society, narcissism’s cause isn’t as important as identifying narcissistic characteristics. The Mayo clinic provides a list of what these characteristics were, which includes things like “fantasizing about power” and “taking advantage of others”. Other researchers reported that ‘narcissists’ had a propensity towards pathological lying. Bearing these ‘symptoms’ in mind, consider another professional spook’s opinion– that of Philippe de Vosjoli, James Angleton’s working ally and French intelligence agent. Tom Mangold reports this conversation with de Vosjoli in Cold Warrior:
It is late, and the little Frenchman climbs into his Renault Five in the old quarter of Geneva. “Listen, I’ll tell you something. In the world of intelligence you have a lot of sick people. They cannot tell the truth. Now I’m talking to you, but what do I know about you? You may be a spy yourself, you may be working for the KGB or MI6. In this business you trust no one. You know, I stayed in that job too long. Twelve years is too long.”
De Vosjoli came to the conclusion that many other spooks were pathological liars with hidden agendas who couldn’t be trusted: “sick” people. Could that ‘sickness’ be something like the condition which used to be described as ‘narcissism’? Consider this study of narcissism in the military by J.A. Bourgeois, M.J. Hall, R.M. Crosby and K.G. Drexler of the Air Force Medical Center (SGHAE) at Wright-Patterson Air Force base:
Various studies examining the prevalence of personality disorders in civilian inpatient and outpatient populations have consistently found narcissistic personality disorder to be one of the least common. In striking contrast to this, a recently published study showed narcissistic personality features to be among the most common personality features in a military outpatient clinic population. This paper examines several possible explanations for this finding. This surprisingly high relative incidence of narcissistic personality features may be related to a self-selection bias on the part of persons choosing a military career. Narcissistic personality traits may confer adaptive advantage in certain military professional roles. Kohut’s theory of specific transference requirements in individuals with narcissistic character structure serves as a useful explanatory model for these findings.
What is Kohut’s theory of specific transference requirements? In a nutshell:
The narcissistic adult, according to Kohut’s concepts, vacillates between an irrational overestimation of the self and irrational feelings of inferiority, and relies on others to regulate his self esteem and give him a sense of value.
If Kohut’s theory is correct, then it must be very comforting for a narcissistic person to know that the best person to “give him a sense of value” is the next guy up the food chain… Of course, Bourgeois et alia don’t discuss the preponderance of military narcissists in terms of an intentional recruiting and control strategy.
Finally, I’m going to share the observations of one friend who had far more experience dealing with the intelligence community than I have had. They explained the CIA’s institutional culture to me in this way:
“Imagine that it’s 1940 and you’re a well-connected rich kid who hears that the president is starting up a secret society which is going to do exciting things to win the war. That type of opportunity appeals to people who are 1) patriotic and/or 2) want approval from the powerful and/or 3) want in on government-sponsored organized crime.”
“Once the war was over, many of the patriotic ones dropped out. The organization was left with a large group of people whose motivations were not noble. Now imagine that organization persisting over generations, each generation self-selecting for more and more recruits who think like them; for recruits who are motivated by 2) and 3). That’s what the CIA is now.”
Generations of self-selected, damaged people are how we ended up with institutions that think drag-net spying on their fellow citizens is ‘okay’ or even ‘a necessary evil’. Only generations of self-selected, damaged people could be so sheltered and brain-washed as to not understand the mortal danger in our current situation.
I find it easy to write about General Patton, Walt Disney and Leonid Andreyev because their fates make the danger of unaccountable government crystal clear. I tend to overlook the fact that organizations like the CIA, NSA, etc. are just as poisonous to their rank-and-file as they are to my country’s intellectual health. When ‘ex-intelligence agent’ Quinn Norton wrote about the intelligence community existing to preserve itself, she left out an important fact: the intelligence community doesn’t preserve itself, it preserves a small group of people ‘on floor seven’ who decide how to implement decisions which, frankly, are probably made by the people who get them appointed. Now isn’t James Bond sexy?
