According to the post by Dr. John Roth, the Roman Emperor Tiberius was a good person when he was young, but he ended up “a debauched, dissolute, and cruel recluse.”

In Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Touchstone, New York, 1994), the author, Dr Jonathan Shay concludes that Achilles suffered from a ruinous moral injury that destroys the character of once good men.^∇

According to these authors, Achilles and Tiberius suffered from a basic distrust of their environment because of a trauma, like multiple betrayals, and their behavior reflected the kind of pain that goes under the label of PTSD.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is,

Not everyone develops PTSD from the same event. Two people can be in the same car accident and one will walk away temporarily shaken, and another may never want to get into a car again. An additional aspect of PTSD is chronic stress, like the amount of vigilance a soldier may have to undergo day in and day out. They may not experience one specific terrifying event, but many smaller calls to worry about survival may induce damage.

Digging the Past

Dr Shay and Dr. Roth reached into the past and concluded that what are normally portrayed as bad people are people suffering from trauma.

Back in the present, the questions are,

• How many people today are walking around with work-induced trauma?
• Is society suffering from PTSD?

After all, workplaces are where people spend most of their waking hours. Workplaces are where drama happens, oftentimes harmful drama that causes trauma.

I am reminded of a friend’s recent story about layoffs. He had survived layoffs, where a third of his team disappeared. This was sad enough because some of those people were not just his friends, but in his view, competent and undeserving of a layoff. Plus there was also survivor’s guilt. There were rumors of another layoffs: the Sword of Damocles had been dangling over his head for months, taking its toll. Would he be fired? Would he, again, see people he had strong bonds with suffer?

We have learned to man up and don’t say anything when hurt. After all, it’s not personal, it’s just business. We try to put away or ignore the pain, instead of facing it and dealing with the very personal harm that just happened to us.

Trauma

Here is our starting point: Business encourages competition, and competition leads to trauma. Ans some of this trauma ends up as PTSD.

The Fiat (because I say so) system encourages competition and domination. It also encourages helplessness, another key component of PTSD. A terrifying event is even more harmful when you can do nothing to stop or diminish it. And Fiat is the very definition of helplessness. This is built into the structure of Fiat businesses. Top bosses compete. Lesser bosses compete. Wanna-be bosses compete. People compete for resources to do their jobs.

The winners end on top and get to dominate the losers. They get not only higher status, they also get to extract more money for themselves. Their voice becomes more dominant as their place in the Fiat hierarchy goes up. The whole Fiat hierarchy works that way.

And, as it turns out, that is not natural.

The Right to Deny

Capital can be seen as the right to deny access or control. Capital comes from, capita, capa, the head of a cow. A cow in a herd that you have control over, that you can decide how it is used, when it is sold, etc. It is your herd, your property, and you can deny others the use of it.

This is the essence of Fiat capital: the right to deny.

The Fiat system capitalizes people. A boss acquires the right to deny the use of his team, his human capital. Another boss can not just step in and tell the team what to do unless they are higher up in the pyramid. And it is not just about resource denial across teams.

Compete-win-dominate works on them people, those dissimilar to us. Once upon a time we could have been excused to think and act that way, but not anymore. Now we know that people the world over are similar. What separates us is the rationalized prejudices, the stories in our minds.

The same resource denial points inward to the team itself. A boss can tell you how to do your job; he has the right to impose his views, even if it invalidates your judgment.

That Fiat power that capitalizes your time is theoretically limited to your work. We, fortunately, do not capitalize humans in total anymore. But we still capitalize much of it: where do you spend the majority of your day? Does your worry about your work end when you leave your workplace or does it follow you home and through your cell phone? Does it gnaw at you that looming changes can come at a moment’s notice?

Motivation

Where once the owner was the source of punishment, today the Fiat system itself does the dirty job by encouraging competition. Collaboration is what happens when a boss is not watching.

The Fiat system parcels out motivation in the form of money, primarily. But, money is a form of force. And when coupled with other stories, it gets a grip on people: the dream car, the perfect house, at the perfect location, the bottomless bank account. Combined with these stories, money may not be as direct as corporal punishments, but it is a very effective force, indeed.

PTSD

Businesses encourage the money-focused mindset and people-as-employees give up a lot in the process. Employees stop taking care of themselves, they give up dignity, they surrender their relationships.

My father, and co-author, took his work well beyond the office in order to succeed in the corporate Fiat structure. He was promoted many times and controlled important territories within the company. But he also brought home to his family the refusal to listen of his boss training. As with boss to employee, the relationship of father to child was mainly one way, with occasional lucky interactions of two way communication. And when I refused to listen to my fathers will and tried to go my own way, I was met with terrifying screaming or physical punishment that would set me back in line. It was no coincidence of this mixing of behavior between family and work life. When he stopped working at that company and experienced a period of rest, a lot of that behavior tapered off.

Both bosses and employees swallow a lot and become unrecognizable to themselves and their social circle. In countless cases, the pain transforms into the pathology we call PTSD.

Trust

Trust people and don’t be seduced by the system. That’s the cure. That’s what we are doing with Radical.

As much as anything else, Radical is an alternative to finding ways to erode the imbalances that cause us to act in ways that truly hurt our resilience and personality.

ENDNOTES

• John Roth. Uncancelling Tiberius. February 2023. <https://antigonejournal.com/2023/02/uncancelling-tiberius/>

• Jonathan Shay. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Shay>