The Violence Of Civility

In 'Civilization and Its Discontents' (1930), Sigmund Freud reminds his readers that 'homo homini lupus.’ Man is a wolf to man. Human beings are ‘creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.’

Civilization does not abolish that aggression. It demands its renunciation and sets up an agency within each individual to watch over it, 'like a garrison in a conquered city.'

Nearly three centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, identified three causes of quarrel in ‘Leviathan‘ (1651): competition, diffidence, and glory. ‘The first maketh men invade for gain, the second for safety, the third, for reputation.’ None of the three has gone out of fashion, as dramatized in the remarkably dark TV series ‘Mayor of Kingstown.’

War, Hobbes wrote, 'consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.' Peace, therefore, requires more than the absence of blows. It requires assurance against their return. Without it, every wolf must stand guard.

Hobbes leaves room for intervals without physical warfare, though not necessarily without war. Psychological warfare eliminates even those intervals. Its weapons cost nothing, leave no marks, and can be deployed at any time. The blows become continuous.

The arsenal is familiar: an orchestrated rumor, a betrayed confidence, deliberate exclusion, withheld information, a quietly destroyed reputation and, the most versatile of all, lies (see 'The Pinocchio Tax', 2026).

Attacks can be conducted in broad daylight: the meeting invitation that omits one name, the email copied to a superior, the 'quick thought' that quietly appropriates a colleague's earlier proposal, the call convened to assert influence when two lines of email would have done, the self-serving forwarding, the question asked to expose rather than to learn, the minutes that remember what suits their author. This is what ‘war’ looks like in the corporate world.

Civility is often described as a veneer over aggression. But to those who can decode the attacks, nothing is concealed. The aggression and its violence are in plain sight. Freud saw the limit of rules: the law 'is not able to lay hold of the more cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness.' Neither is a code of conduct in a business setting.

Where attacks are continuously expected, even the most decent people turn defensive and soon, pre-emptively offensive, which Hobbes called 'anticipation'. Colleagues turn combatants in a civil war. The garrison takes over the city.

'In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain.' Indeed, where the ownership of an outcome is diffuse and accountability is blurred, lupine energy shifts from producing results to allocating credit and blame. Maneuvering overtakes productivity.

Peace, Hobbes concludes, requires 'a common power to keep them all in awe.' In a firm, that power is called leadership. Where it exists, the wolves turn outward. After all, they hunt in packs.