The Therapeutic Corporation

James Burnham famously wrote about the new order of organization coming out of the Industrial Revolution in his work “The Managerial Revolution”. In this dissident classic, he specified how managers needed experts to manage their business empires, and how those experts took control of production away from the owners. This has spread through our entire society, to the extent we can no longer see any other way it should work. It has not stopped at the private sector either, as FDR’s revolutionizing of government during The New Deal has made it spread to the State itself. These managers are experts at efficiency and scaling, eventually running the system both a formal hierarchy as well as a mass of loosely organized nodes. They care not about profit per-se, or even the business owner’s objectives, but expanding their own power.

A lot of ink has been spilt as to the details of how this has happened, and several authors can give a more extensive deep dive into the subject, but what can’t be dismissed is the revolution was a resounding success. Just like any social project, one success just leads to further encroachment and further control. Like an algae that soon spreads to an entire pond, there is not limiting factor in a philosophy that emphasizes forever expansion and perfection.

While managers understand how to organize man for mass efficiency in his actions, that doesn’t mean they’re the only player in the game. Society has become more and more advanced and its laws more and more intrusive, necessitating arduous compliance to civil rights legislation. This has facilitated a new class of players in business, and as our general culture becomes more and more fragmented, there has been an unprecedented increase in mental health needs for the population as well. We’re starting to see these players wrestle control of the corporate bureaucracy, with even more insidious aims than the managers.

This isn’t even her final form…

Personal Reflections

My first experience with Corporations using Therapy Culture was in the mid-2000’s, though rest assured the embryonic stage started earlier than that. Sensitivity training and such in the 1990’s had whispers of what became modern therapy culture, but was largely a way to comply with federal regulation, with general managers still largely in control. That changed in my company in the mid-2000’s, as a mass of managers went through a week-long training session espousing a new, more empathetic management philosophy. It was clear some other group began pulling the strings. Most managers shook their heads, knowing it was nonsense, and kept their heads down in the training and went on with their usual methods when they returned. A few newly minted ones were true believers, though, and took the new teachings to heart.

As my career has progressed, I’ve seen changes, and the direction they are going.

The Clueless Boss

My buddy, a brilliant ASIC programmer, got the first taste of this when he found out he was grossly underpaid for his skill level. This was on top of not having enough autonomy to make decisions and other issues that made his job unbearable. He met with his manager, who listened to his concerns for several minutes, nodding the entire time. After my buddy stopped, the manager asked “And how does that make you feel?”

My buddy expressed to me how he wanted to answer “It makes me feel like beating you upside the head”. After a couple job offers he received outside the company his manager panicked and gave him a huge raise and promotion. The strategy they tried to use was clear though, he wasn’t your boss with clear expectations, he was your buddy you should try to get along with. He cared about you on a personal level. It was naive and ham-fisted, but a sign of things to come.

This wasn’t the worst case, as that belongs to an incident that is almost too insane to believe.

Finding Purpose

The company sent a massive appraisal of company morale to every employee and, surprisingly, everyone replied honestly. What they found was an avalanche of resentment at lack of agency, bad pay, and needless bureaucracy. They decided something has to be done. After many meetings, they decided the REAL problem was employees don’t have a sense of purpose. The job being too big to do internally, the company hired The Purpose Institute, to help hash out a purpose statement.

After a few months of research, the institute came out with our Purpose Statement, a long run-on sentence of banal nonsense. They had cake to celebrate, blasted it through every corporate email, and The Purpose Institute was paid more than I can fathom. No, it did not improve employee morale, but it did reinforce the notion the company was run either by morons or psychopaths.

H.R. Flexes its Muscle

A couple years later when I resigned from the company, I had an exit interview with H.R. Now most of the time you are asked why you are leaving, maybe make a last ditch effort to get you to stay, and make sure all your things are in order when you walk out the door. This H.R. rep started in a completely different footing, talking in a vulnerable, submissive voice and asking “Is there anything you’re feeling you want to tell me?” No, it wasn’t flirting, as underneath the veneer this woman was a stone-cold killer.

I was a flummoxed and just said “no”, to which she switched gears and quickly ended the exit interview. Just like the manager before, her job was to pretend to be a therapist and see if anyone would bite. In retrospect, I’m 90% sure she was fishing for issues with one of my managers, and there was a turf war over a new program that was sucking away a lot of engineers, with some accusing the new project of using strongarm tactics.

Don’t Mess with H.R.

Afterward, I was lucky to work in small companies who simply did not have large resources for new fads, but the silliness still slips through. In one instance, there was friction between the office in Seattle and our home office regarding general competency. The Seattle guys thought we were clueless Midwest rubes, and we thought the Seattle guys were high on their own supply. Instead of getting everyone together and hashing things out, and possibly causing conflict, they decided everyone needed a DISC Assessment to understand different personalities. After the first session, a large portion of people had their DISC profiles by their desk.

It was mandatory for employees to attend one of the two sessions, but I didn’t want to deal with it so I scheduled a doctor’s appointment I needed anyways during the second session. A week later during a one-on-one with my manager, he brought it up in the following way.

“I was told you didn’t attend the DISC training.”

“Yeah, I had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Well, Abigail (our HR Lady) was really upset you blew it off.”

Note he tried to frame guilt (I upset H.R.), before tangible losses in the company or simply not doing something required. Setting aside the session was a band-aid because everyone was scared of creating a forum where people could openly express grievances between the two locations, it was framed as: “you made H.R. mad.” In a way, he told me who I should really be fearing, and I didn’t understand until years later.

Even with these examples, I haven’t had to deal with the worst of it, but I’ve heard horror stories as this new paradigm has permeated corporate life. You think “team-building” exercises were bad? How about being expected to update your mental health assessment for the day. There are already several mental health tools available to employers to monitor as well as tools to assess the psychological profiles of the employees. This is for safety, you know, and they’re just looking out for you. The idea is mentally healthy employees are effective employees, but their means of assessing this can only be described as psychological terrorism.

The Psychology/Corporate Merger

I recommend everyone read this nightmare fuel I came across, as it gives a glimpse into the hell we will all soon be a part of. This is what I will quote for the remainder of this article.

As a response, many companies started relaxing their mental-health-leave policies, hiring in-house counselors, organizing seminars on burnout, and hanging more “fauxspirational” posters. A recent survey conducted by Fidelity Investments and the nonprofit Business Group on Health found that 35 percent of American organizations offered or were planning to offer on-site therapy or counseling this year—up from 18 percent in 2022. As the stigma of seeking therapy has fallen away, so has stigmatization of the language around it. “Talking about mental health at work has become more normalized, including trauma, when we factor in DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and workplace oppression,” says Minaa B., a mental-health educator based in New York City.

Bazaar: Doing the Work

One might think there’s nothing wrong with more mental health support. Wouldn’t it be better to have a sensitive boss who cares about you? The problem is the relationship dynamic is unbalanced at best, spread out to people who absolutely do not want it, way too vulnerable to abuse, and painfully tedious to maintain. In the past, when an employee loses the approval of his boss, he would fear getting fired. In the new environment, there is a new actor in the mix, the massive mental health industrial complex that is worth billions of dollars. With that industry is a new age of moral agents who ascertain what is a good work environment, what is not, and a way of weaponizing the corporate environment for their own expansion.

These loaded ideas aren’t coming from the managers either, but the incredibly lucrative merger of civil rights law and the psychology profession has created a perfect mine field for corporations to traverse, and H.R. departments are salivating at the idea of increasing their power. As the civil rights era reached fruition, down went the crude banter between colleagues, starting from the top and trickling down until men in an auto shop can’t have swimsuit calendars over their workbench. Like with any bureaucracy, they only seek to expand, and soon moved to making sure LGBT members felt “safe” to the extent that all gendered words are slowly being removed from corporate lexicon. All of this requires bureaucracy to track compliance, and therefore all of them required an extension of Human Resources’ power.

The mental health racket is just another notch in the ratchet, as mental health professionals, who for all intents and purposes are an extension of the government, have now been deemed experts of what is safe and conducive to mental health in a corporate environment. With that new power comes new threats if they fail to comply with the new empathy-based mandates. Companies are finding themselves in even murkier waters than the 60’s Civil Rights Era, and are requiring far more resources to ensure compliance.

Blizzard paid over 50 million for workplace harassment, and Tesla paid 15 million for similar allegations. Countless companies extoll that their new, empathetic views are looking at the bottom line and pontificating how happy employees are good employees, extolling wanting to avoid time off due to mental health issues and stress. The truth is they are looking at compliance and want to avoid bad publicity and lawsuits. Rest assured, anyone suing a company for a toxic work environment will have premiere psychologists on their side, and the corporation will need their own the prove their company is up to date with the ever-increasing scope of employment law.

Generational Changes

A March 2023 survey conducted by SHRM, a professional human-resources membership association, found that nearly half of American workers held higher expectations for their employers’ mental-health support compared with what they wanted last year. Amid the Great Resignation, companies learned that if they sought to attract and retain talent, they’d have to find ways to accommodate. “It’s clear to me that [younger workers] expect more in terms of overall employer attention to mental health and work-life balance,” says Dena DiNardo, a clinical psychologist based in Philadelphia.

Bazaar: Doing the Work

When I read this I was reminded of this skit. While it isn’t fair to Millennials and Gen-Z, it is hilarious.

I’m an old millennial, on the cusp of Gen X. People in my age bracket find the new culture weird and off-putting. The younger millennials and Gen Z are another story. I am blessed I have no issue with the skillset in the ones coming in from college, but one noticeable difference is their need for more validation, and expecting their superiors to give them it. The days of doing your job, getting a review occasionally, and letting your paycheck be your reward is over. They expect their colleagues to not just be co-workers, but trusted friends. They expect the company to cater to and listen to their emotional issues even outside of work.

For us older crusty guys it’s weird, but the educational system, especially in large schools, and therapy culture in upper class households has created a totally different set of expectations in young people. The number of kids I know who go to therapy is staggering, and even stranger is how the culture of the shrink has permeated into every aspect of young people’s lives. I know young teenage girls who have fifty-year-old men as therapists, and countless teenage boys who have feminist women as counselors, and parents see nothing wrong with it. After all, it doesn’t matter who they are, they’re “experts.” Young people are conditioned to respond to these hyper-moralist statements from experts in the field, and companies are more than happy to comply.

Abigail Shrier

in her book Bad Therapy (reviewed here), goes into this in detail. They have been inundated with therapy-talk from a very young age to the extent that visceral feelings are abstracted away. Worse, such talk encourages infantilization of the subject and removes a sense of agency, and in the hands of psychopaths creates rhetorical bombs to throw at their opponent. A new kind of bullying revolves around recording a statement between friends and using it as blackmail material, or conflating someone’s actions with “toxicity”. They are verbal nukes that young people are conditioned to accept at face value, many know how to unleash them for their own advantage, and corporations can ignore these nukes as their own peril.

Corporate culture started changing along the same time as the educational bureaucracy, and anyone who went to school under the old order is feeling like he is entering bizarro world. This isn’t new, as about every twenty years the shift takes place, and rest assured us the boomers saw the culture shock as GenX entered the workplace and GenX as the late millennials got out of college. It’s only gone one direction though, towards more stifling compliance and a restrictive atmosphere.

Three Hundred and Eighty Billion Dollar Rhetoric Machine

One-on-one therapy shows some effectiveness, though much more limited than people like to admit. There are therapists who do good work with clients, but what’s clear is there’s diminishing returns as it has spread. There’s next to no conclusive evidence that it impacts mental health as all when done on a mass scale, and of the limited evidence we do have, it’s negative. This hasn’t stopped the industry, however, and demanding something fact-based at this stage is akin to trying to stop a runaway train by standing in front of the tracks.

Indeed, the euphemistic corporatese that dominated office discourse a decade ago—“Let’s align on the mission,” “We’re not a company, we’re a community”—has fallen out of favor. Language that acknowledges an employee’s distinct humanity—“validating identities,” “holding space”—has poured in to replace it.

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But as with all specialized lingo, once the jargon moves out of an in-group and becomes recontextualized, the risk of misunderstanding increases. Wielding it in other environments can make room for both intentional and unintentional manipulation.

Bazaar: Doing the Work

Advocates lament how words like ‘toxic’ and ‘empathy’ are misused in a corporate environment and the need to put real “experts” in who really understand what these words mean and how they apply. The truth is, these words are subjective, even when told from the mouth of a therapist.

The new words entering corporate lexicon are as fact-devoid as the words that came before it, but there’s just more money, and power, associated with the new words. An employee saying how he has “boundaries” is essentially the same as saying he wants a good “work-life balance”, only with a far more loaded and confrontational vocabulary. Talk of empathy is the same as the “servant leadership” fad that occurred some years ago.

The money and power associated with this new paradigm is more than the biggest corporate huckster could ever dream of. Instead of expensive, useless consulting to “build teamwork” and “find purpose” for employees, there are an army of very, very expensive mental health professionals who want their piece of the pie, and a hyper-compliant generation coming in that takes their prognoses as face value. These mental health administrators have no evidence of betterment, and they have no history of the environment they are delving into, but none of that matters. What matters is people believe them in the same way a rural peasant will simply accept what the local priest told him. Fight as you want against the “experts”, you know whose side the courts are going to take.

The Therapeutic Revolution

Already in many organizations today, it isn’t a cabal of managers who run a company, but the massive Human Resources bureaucracy that steadily increases its scope and power. It’s no coincidence employees fear a meeting with H.R. far more than the manager, and in the future your manager, the one actually in charge of metrics and task performance will continue to take a backseat to the H.R. monolith. You will soon be talking to an in-house therapist every few weeks to get the lowdown on your mental health, how the workplace is treating you, and what issues you are having at home. This will all be confidential, of course.

The counselors employed by the corporation to ensure that workplace “safety” is paramount. Managers will have to show deference to Carl, who is having a really hard time, even though he’s wanted to fire him for years. They will have to scour all official documents for words that might be “toxic” to Susie, who experienced an abusive childhood. Those who succeed will be those who can master the new language for their own advantage while managing to at least be a little productive in what the corporation is actually supposed to do.

Through all this, the employees will find themselves inundated with ever increasing controls over how they act while mental health counselors will want unfettered access to their minds. The encroachment will come in phases, as it will start as voluntary before it becomes required in all but name. The mental load just to comply will be so cumbersome and the inability to have any sort of primal, acerbic, direct conflict will disappear and be replaced with dialogues that will make both parties feel like they are in a struggle session. The work actually accomplished will slow to a crawl, and everyone will pretend things are okay and their mental health has never been better with all these initiatives as the ability to accomplish their actual job has become non-existent and irrelevant.

In the future we won’t just have meaningless metrics to send to layers upon layers of management to deal with, but surveys, random health check-ins, and relentless documentation of interpersonal communications in the company. You’ll see the same metric-based cataloguing of company health that used to be for the product you created, but now dealing with the minds of its employees. The busywork will increase, the parasites will spread, and productivity will continue its dive down a cliff.

Where does this end? At a certain point all the technology in the world will not be able to mask the productivity collapse of the average corporation. No matter how much money flows to eat up successful small businesses that are still able to be limber and efficient, hard reality will make the money spigot stop. Our own prosperity has created the conditions that can maintain such stifling overhead, and only hard deprivation can end it.