Loyalty and pyramid schemes, unpacked
Jun. 6th, 2008 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkaySome examples which helped formed my thinking:
Military loyalty
Corporate loyalty
The Bush administration (often noted for valuing loyalty above competence)
The Mafia
In all these situations, the *theory* is that loyalty is a two-way street. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
But they are all also pyramidal hierarchies. And in many (most?) situations, "loyalty to the group" means, in practice, that those lower in the hierarchy sacrifice to benefit those higher up in the hierarchy. Hence, a pyramid scheme; a few at the top benefit at the expense of the many beneath them.
Sacrifices in the other direction, high sacrificing for low, seem rare to me. At the presidential level, a minion can often expect a pardon after they take the fall for a higher-up, but it's not clear that that costs the pardoner anything significant. In the Mafia, you are just expected to do the prison time.
One of the primary uses of the concept of loyalty, as expressed in the examples above, is that it is precisely a means for coercing behavior *beyond* that mandated by law or contractual agreement. It is used by powerful entities to convince less powerful entities to take certain actions, when the powerful entities have no means of legally enforcing those actions.
I note that there are other applications of the word/concept loyalty than the one I am focusing on. But the one I'm talking about seems to me to be the common usage of today.
Military loyalty
Corporate loyalty
The Bush administration (often noted for valuing loyalty above competence)
The Mafia
In all these situations, the *theory* is that loyalty is a two-way street. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
But they are all also pyramidal hierarchies. And in many (most?) situations, "loyalty to the group" means, in practice, that those lower in the hierarchy sacrifice to benefit those higher up in the hierarchy. Hence, a pyramid scheme; a few at the top benefit at the expense of the many beneath them.
Sacrifices in the other direction, high sacrificing for low, seem rare to me. At the presidential level, a minion can often expect a pardon after they take the fall for a higher-up, but it's not clear that that costs the pardoner anything significant. In the Mafia, you are just expected to do the prison time.
One of the primary uses of the concept of loyalty, as expressed in the examples above, is that it is precisely a means for coercing behavior *beyond* that mandated by law or contractual agreement. It is used by powerful entities to convince less powerful entities to take certain actions, when the powerful entities have no means of legally enforcing those actions.
I note that there are other applications of the word/concept loyalty than the one I am focusing on. But the one I'm talking about seems to me to be the common usage of today.