this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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This is so much more true than I think most people believe.
My husband and I have a small engine business, and I took a free "community entrepreneur bootcamp" class through the local university this spring in the hope that we might learn something helpful. Instead, I learned fun things like leaning on your customers' fears as a marketing tactic (?? 😔🤦) and that the most prominent local accountant - brought in as an expert speaker by the university! - advises his clients to pay as little as possible as late as possible, and most appallingly, I'm not exaggerating, these are the actual words I heard this man say in front of a room full of people: "if one of your employees gets hurt at your business, it's better for you to stand on their neck until they stop breathing than to call for help, because it's so much easier and cheaper to settle a death claim then an injury." And he actually said that it sounds like he's joking but he's not, this is his understanding of the situation.
I genuinely want to see the best in everyone, and I have never before had the experience of fantasizing about a person's death while they were talking in front of me, and it was abhorrent and awful but also... Wtf? How do we even help someone who sees other people as expendable tools the way this person does?
What can we even do about people who not only don't want to live up to their agreements and commitments, but are just straight up out to fuck everyone else over? How do we help/fix that?
It sounds very similar to when I was in seminary. They literally had classes on how to manipulate your audience. How to “use vocal patterns and body language to make yourself appear more sincere.”
People severely underestimate how many shitty people there are in this world (and even those who appear trustworthy) that would eat your firstborn to increase their net worth if it wasn’t illegal.
I read an article years ago that explained why so many people get "religious" feelings at big revival-type events at Six Flags, Carowinds, etc, even if they're not particularly devout.
There's a thing called respiratory alkalosis (essentially hyperventilation) which makes you light-headed and confused. At it's really easy to trigger by making people stand up quickly, sing really hard, sit back down, stand up and cheer, etc.
That sounds interesting! Do you remember where you found it? I would love to read it.
I'm back! I couldn't find the specific thing I read, but I found something probably better, an actual study published in Pubmed:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871314/
Thanks! You made my day, my good lemming.
The conclusion fits what you said earlier, and it is easy to see how this is probably used cynically for these cult bro events:
You're welcome! I had a personal experience with this, too.
When I was a kid, my parents used to make me go to church and youth group stuff. We went to one of those "hip" events at Carowinds (like a Six Flags, Disney type amusement park). Before it started our youth leader said - to his credit - "No matter what you feel, DO NOT go down to the front when they call people up."
Sure enough towards the end, I start feeling "the spirit", and I'm the most skeptical, atheist/agnostic in the whole group. But I stayed in my seat. And when we got back to the hotel I was thinking "what the hell happened there?"
I'll try to look for it. It was a loooong time ago though.
This sounds like an unfortunate consequence of the evolutionary pressure that has been allowed to take place within humanity for the past ~150 years. Profit is more important than anything else. So of course you'll have sociopathic "profit-above-all-else" mindsets among influential business figures.
From a business standpoint I would never want to hire that accountant. If he openly talks about employees that way and being a bad customers to others he would probably also be a very bad supplier.
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That is because of regulations that pass the buck. If the US had public health care, and fines for negligence and OSHA violations, this wouldn't be true. Public health care would be the best thing for small businesses because it removes the health insurance benefits and workers' compensation issues completely. One big problem with the GOP is they are half right a lot, regulations are problematic, but not in the way they think. They take this half rightness and use it to do the wrong thing.
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