Michael O. Church believes that people are localistic:
We are altruistic to people we consider near to us in genetic, tribal, cultural, or emotional terms. We’re generally indifferent to those we regard at the periphery, favoring the needs of our tribe. Good and evil don’t escape from this localism; they just handle it differently. Good attempts to transcend this localism and (perhaps cautiously) grow the neighborhood of concern: expanding it to all citizens of a polity, then all humans, then all living beings. Evil, not always being egoistic, turns this localism into militancy. Both involve an outside-the-system comprehension of localism that is somewhat rare, leaving most people in an alignment considered neutral. Morally neutral people are best described as weakly good. Assuming they have a strong sense of what good and evil are, they’d prefer to be good, but this preference is not strong and they do not have a burning desire to seek good at personal or localistic risk.
The civility spectrum, between law and chaos, reflects peoples’ biases toward organizations and those who lead them. While lawful good people will oppose an evil society and chaotic good will support a good one, the truth about most societies and organizations is that they are themselves morally neutral, so a person’s civility (bias in favor or against establishment) will influence her tendency to oppose or support power more than the sign-comparison of her and its moral alignments. Lawful people think organizations tend to be better than the people who comprise them; chaotic people think they tend to be worse than the people who make them up. For my part, I’m chaotic, but just slightly. I think that individual people average a C+ on the moral scale (A being good, F being evil) and organizations tend to average a C-. Chaotic bias makes it natural to see corporations as “evil”; in reality, most of them are indifferent profit maximizers.
Interesting enough, software engineering is intrinsically chaotic. Because software requires exact precision, while human communication is inherently ambiguous, large software teams do not perform well. The per-person productivity of a large development team is substantially lower than that of an individual engineer. A team of 10 might be 2-2.5 times as productive as a single engineer. This leads us, as technologists, toward the (chaotic, possibly faulty) assumption that organizations are inherently less than the sum of their parts, because that is clearly true of software engineering teams.
Management theorists have questioned human nature, generating two opposite sets of assumptions about the typical employee of a corporation.
Theory X (presumed egoism): employees are intrinsically lazy, selfish, and amoral. If they are not watched, they will steal. If they are not prodded, they will slack. They are not to be trusted. The manager’s job is to intimidate people into getting their work done and not doing things that hurt the company.
Theory Y (presumed altruism): employees are intrinsically motivated and inclined to help the organization. If they are given appropriate work, they’ll do well. The manager’s job is to nurture talent and then get out of people’s way, so they can get work done.
Theory X is socially unacceptable, but a better representative than Y of how business executives actually think. Theory Y is how executives and organizations present their mentality, because it’s more socially acceptable. So which is right? Neither entirely. Theory X is ugly, but it has some virtues. First, it can be, perversely, more egalitarian than Theory Y. Theory X distrusts everyone, including the most talented and best positioned. Executives are no better than worker bees; everyone must be monitored and a bit scared. Theory Y, which is focused on talent and development, requires (non-egalitarian) decisions about whom to develop. Second, Theory X is more tolerant of scaling, because large-scale societies run (by necessity) on X-ish assumptions. To keep a Theory-Y organization intact, you cannot hire before you trust. Only in the technological era (where small groups can deliver massive returns) has it been possible for growth-oriented organizations to hire so selectively as to make Theory-Y organizational policies tenable.
My ideology (e.g. open allocation) might be seen as “extreme Theory Y”, but that’s not because I believe Theory Y is inerrant. It’s not. Reality is somewhere between X and Y. I believe that organizations ought to take the Y-ward direction largely (on this spectrum) for the same reason that archers aim slightly above their targets. With the actual leadership of most organizations tending toward egoism and X-ness, an organization that doesn’t set inflexible, constitutional Theory-Y pillars (for some concerns) is going to suffer a severe X-ward bias. X-ism is tolerable for concave industrial work, but in the convex world, organizations need to be somewhat Theory Y. How X (or Y) should an organization be? There’s actually a very simple and absolutely correct answer here: trust employees with their own time and energy, distrust those who want to control others’. It really is that simple — a rarity in human affairs — and to continue with anything else is moronic. Employees who volunteer to use their own energies toward something they believe will benefit the organization should be trusted to do so; those who exhibit a desire for dominance over others should be deeply distrusted.
(Hat tip to Clerestorian.)