Modern work is like a theater play.
People are expected to wear masks and play characters, seem happy when they are not, socialize with people they hate, etc… This form of behavior is called “professionalism” and a true professional is someone who can separate his own personality from his “character”.This in theory also helps, for example, a “patient” cope with embarrassing situations, a doctor is not seen as a human being but rather as a character, who is not supposed to have human thoughts about his patient.
This psychological phenomenon is reinforced by the brain's nature to dissociate from prolonged or sudden forms of trauma. It might create a separate personality to cope and allow that person to seemingly not think about life outside of work. This of course doesn't work and will manifest itself as depression, and was biologically designed as a short-term survival strategy.
Power-tripping is so common nowadays partly because people subconsciously excuse their evil with this character pretense of “he/she is a worker”, so abusing a character is not the same as abusing a human. Also, a human that is paid for playing a character and isn't playing is breaking his obligation. In the modern company, there are no people, there are only resources to manage.
Most people play the character for so long that they forget they are even playing, they tie their own identity and self-worth to their job. The paradox is that in every kind of position they are treated badly by people who think the same way, so they think they are worth nothing and those below in the company structure are worth even less, so they get upset when someone is not thinking of themselves as less than someone else because this is how they think, and this is how they think it should be.
Another creepy thing are statements like “we are family”. A family is a unit based on authority from dad/mum over children, a supervisor should never ever be seen as somebody's mum or dad. Humans evolved to live in tribes, this is why this psychological merge can happen easily and why companies try to abuse it. This is shown in companies psychologically treating employees like children. This brainwashes employees to accept “punishment” and “guilt. It also gives them a false sense of security and makes it very hard to leave, because who would not stay longer to help their family? Or who would abandon their tribe in hard times?
People often wonder why they want workers back in the office when productivity went up. Some things that don't make sense on a rational level are tools of manipulation. The army BootCamp is full of useless stuff. In Russia, they even cut grass with scissors, it's not about any tangible result it is rather a form of brainwashing. Even if short-term productivity goes up they would rather have brainwashed easily to manipulate workers aka slaves.
If you made it that far, I am honored somebody read all of it, stay positive God bless 🙂