A Resilient Freedom: Squashing Tyranny While We Still Can

First, what is tyranny?

It was over the course of a few years. My partner’s mother would come over to the house and rip out my gardens. Like she had dementia and didn’t remember that she had moved out decades ago.

I asked, “Why?”

“Because she’s a tyrant,” he said.

I’d always known the word. Yet I’d failed to recognize the patterns of behaviour, the choice of vocabulary, and the recurrent themes in the stories she told. Yes, I realized that fits.

A tyrant is “a cruel and oppressive ruler.” While a dictator also has absolute power, the tyrant is specifically unkind about it.

Such progress for both of us. Therapy was required to correct my perspective of my father on a pedestal.

Living on the orientation of my father’s praise had done me a world of hurt. I’m sure my father didn’t mean it, and I’d call him an authoritarian narcissist, not a tyrant.

In the first few months of dating, my partner said, “No one loves you like your mother.”

I had to tell him, “That’s not love.”

Stories poured out about how she had thrown out his valuable possessions. But they were on his property. If I was upset about my plants, he was finally able to be upset about his things.

As a pattern, she would overstep her authority and make irreversible decisions, to the detriment of the people affected. Moreover, she was aware of the damage and had never taken steps to rectify or repair it.

Waking Up Anger

Repressed anger does not do a body good. Like the gunk in your pores on your nose, it needs to come out.

Let someone else’s anger permit you to find your own. Label it accordingly, not how you’ve been trained to believe, lead to believe, or find more favourable to think.

I know that it takes courage and confidence to turn your world upside down. What if the headaches, nausea and discomfort you experience are from the warped perspective you are working so hard to sustain?

Oh, it takes time and effort, alright, and if you have no energy, maybe that’s where it’s being wasted.

Sadness and anger both stem from the same perspective. The difference is whether or not you feel you deserved what happened. Let me tell you that you did not. Turn sadness into anger because anger has the energy to take action. Sadness drains, anger ignites.

I was very sad about my inability to function in society. I failed to find love, attention, and appreciation. However, as I examined and dismantled each of those ideas and what they entailed, I realized that I was indeed at the end of a very dark tunnel. With the energy of anger, I found my way out of it.

After all, I’d experienced only a limited sample of society. What if there was one that matched what I needed? It was simply a matter of looking critically and honestly at what would help me thrive and what was a painful, hard slog.

Transitioning to a life where I thrive was a project. It had tasks, milestones, and an end in sight – a channel for my anger at being so far off course in my life.

Polishing Up Authenticity

Cities were never going to be my thing. I should never have launched into a career that would chain me to one.

Working alone was how I thrived. The mere prospect of having to communicate my ideas or work with other people was a disappointing prospect. I had immediate assumptions that I’d need to stand up to bullies, power-hungry zealots, or work-shy zombies.

Throughout my career, the size of the team I managed or was part of steadily increased. Finally, I had hundreds of people on a conference call. There’s one definition of progress in the corporate world, but it’s not mine.

I was never a cookie-cutter, so why was I in the corporate world at all? These days, they use personality tests to identify someone like me. At least, by the time I was taking personality tests, I was working in positions that catered to outcasts and whistleblowers.

However, even the managers of outcasts and whistleblowers want to keep a tight rein on what they do, say, and calculate. And finally, I decided that if this is what I have to do to make a living, you can have it back.

In the hospital, I got angry. Stunned, the doctors didn’t know how the “metamorphosis” had taken place, but with relief, they sent me home.
You can’t get where you want to go if you drift or are locked into a place.

I’m so happy that I didn’t become locked into a place, like the reality created by unions, seniority, or trade and certification boundaries. It worries me. People at sixty-five should be nothing like the people they were at twenty-five, but without the opportunity to diversify experience, growth can be avoided.

Calling Up Acceptance

I knew happiness required leaving the corporate world behind, but I wasn’t clear on how to do that. With all my spare time, I tried to learn about entrepreneurship and how to succeed at it.

With all I learned of the mechanics and strategies, the one thing that guarantees success is charisma. As an entrepreneur, you must sell. If people aren’t going to buy from you, it doesn’t matter what you are selling.

If you are socially isolated, you can’t even “tap your social network.” Had someone told me this truth a few decades ago, I would have stubbornly denied my limits. I believed that it’s what you know that matters, not who you know.

Over the years, I have come to realize that I was wrong. If you are awkward, alarming, or in any way unpleasant, you need far more than luck and hard work to succeed.

I don’t think it’s the best way for humanity to be, but I do know it’s the default way we are. We don’t dig in to understand; we judge at face value based on what we already assume to be true. We don’t like to be slowed down, rattled, or questioned.

The ability to handle the truth is the only way to finally be able to change what you don’t like about it.

I don’t like working with people who say, “I was just doing my job.” What if it were your job to kill me? You’d do it just as dispassionately, obediently, and swiftly as I’ve seen you do everything else.

To squash tyranny, we need a world where that phrase is deplorable. It may not be total, but accepting personal accountability is the start.

Weapons of Destruction

In her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil describes how models and algorithms have become unquestioned tools used by society to inflict damage, even when they are intended to serve a perceived benefit.

Two decades ago, I wrote an article for a human resources publication describing how to build a model to hire more accurately and precisely, rather than relying on gut instinct and outdated methods. Just as Moneyball applied statistics to baseball, areas previously ruled by gut instinct can be improved through the application of modelling.

When I entered the insurance industry at the tail end of my career, I had a meltdown one day because we were using human analysis instead of modelling the data. My meltdown became complete when it was clear they’d no clue what I was talking about, and I’d become so familiar and instinctual with the process that I couldn’t communicate what had become ingrained.

Models have the potential to remove bias, speed up analysis, improve pattern recognition, and serve the business world well when used by teams to expose and enhance. However, as O’Neil describes, they can be easily misused.

In my career, I’ve spun lies, darn lies and statistics in the name of doing my job. It’s not so much that the lie would be literal, but a graph intended to imply something positive while concealing all the negative.

In Excel, you could eliminate downtime by using a line graph instead of an X-Y graph, and the leaders wouldn’t know that productivity took a massive hit for hours or even days, especially if you chose a small enough font for the axis.

When Minitab came out, and we discovered you could move the dots, it was a liar’s paradise.

Gaming the Result

When the method of evaluation is known, let that serve to inform the fundamental strategy. In the corporate world, regardless of how performance is measured, employees often find ways to game the system, doing the least work for the most pay.

For many years, this game was invisible to me. Finally, during my performance appraisal, my manager asked me to rate myself for the year.

“All fives, I did a perfect job this year, there’s no way I could have done any better, no one could have,” I said, mimicking the narcissist’s self-assessment. Out with honesty, in with doing what people do to protect their raises from their colleagues’ grubby fists.

“I see you’ve learned how to play the game,” was his sly reply.
As someone who has developed systems to direct behaviour and eliminate game-playing, this was a corporate game I hadn’t had to play before in my career. Prior, things were concrete and measurable, but in the service industry, it’s what you say, because nothing is tangible, permanent, or concrete, meaning you can’t measure or prove anything.

When you can’t measure or prove anything, it’s game on. In that environment, the truth has no chance of being heard. What wins is what is more palpable, powerful, or promising, and that’s a game of competition.

Let the best win? No, the best doesn’t win; the one that wins is the one with the early advantage.

As Timothy Snyder says in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance.”

It’s always your choice to play the game, change the game, or leave the arena.

Freeing the Constraints

Realizing that I’d made many decisions based on my father’s response of, “That makes me happy,” only to have made myself very unhappy was a confusing liberation.

If a parent’s happiness was related at all to a child’s happiness, why did my strategy deliver such failure? If such a seemingly sensical strategy was a failure, what was the right one?

The Roxy t-shirt that I wore said, “Follow your heart.” Your heart, not your father’s.

I had to disappoint my father and live with his negative judgment to find joy. I loved my father, and still do, yet my paradise is a world without him in it.

In one of our last conversations, I’d asked him why he wasn’t awarded custody during the divorce. He’d told me because the counsellor thought he was controlling. That pronouncement was decades before my counsellor would lead me to the same conclusion, and it would have been good to know sooner.

Moreover, it’d have been better if he’d set to work improving those behaviours, motivations, and tendencies. But he didn’t attempt to change.

Some people believe they are born that way, and others are born knowing that they can learn, grow, and improve. Steve Martin is one of the latter, and his multiple successes at the game of mastery are told with Adam Gopnik in So Many Steves. My dad, however, seemed to have a fixed mindset.

His mindset and how he treats me are constraints. It’s something I cannot change, and therefore, I must fully and completely accept it to find a workable solution. When you can identify constraints for what they are, you can finally be free of them. Until then, they will be like bars on a jail cell, but invisible to your perception.

Mainstreaming the Ordinary

When I realized that my life depended on following my heart, I had no idea what made me happy.

I was supposed to play with other girls, but I didn’t understand the game of Barbie. When I turned to leave, the other girl almost clawed my eye out. What kind of game was that? Still, my mom shoved me out the door every afternoon to play with so-called friends.

I filed the notion of friends under things I didn’t want, but I’d have to wait to live life my way. Similarly, I didn’t want to be a mother, a wife, or frankly, an aunt, although I knew I’d have no choice over the latter.

When society favours one way of living over another, you have to question why. We should be free to choose or lean toward the lifestyle that works for us, as long as we don’t hurt anyone else. However, instead, we are pushed into decisions by people who let others do the same. So why shouldn’t we?

Generation after generation, life opens up. Children create new vocabulary, either by introducing new definitions or inventing new words entirely.

Inevitably, children grow to change laws, perhaps toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, while maintaining freedom, democracy, and accountability.

What if it were ordinary to live and let live? We’d need a lot of space for that, because where we must share, negotiations must be had, lines must be drawn, and grand bargains must be made.

What if it were normal for everyone to prosper? Evading taxes means a company does not contribute to roads, schools, and other essential services, even as it depends on them. When businesspeople with a history of tax evasion lead the government, the laws that enabled them to become rich and powerful won’t change.

By Snyder’s suggestions, I will need to become a friend of the library in some capacity. I’ve relied on this institution to find my freedom, and I believe books can do the same, if you follow your questions and ask these experts who have articulated their answers and the reasons behind them.

Years ago, I realized that being an author would be a dream, yet book contracts are awarded based on the size of your social media following. Today, a social media following is something that can be purchased or achieved through illusion, lies, and malicious intent. Books themselves may be disappearing, as they did in dystopian tales like Fahrenheit 451, but the hallowed nature of authorship has long since gone.

Still, going on a tour to talk to small audiences would be delightful. I’d relish the one-on-one talks I’d get to have with people and the amount of pure listening I could do, since they’d already heard my side. No one said I had to do it as a business, fund-raising effort, or within any other pre-defined framework.

I can do it my way. I always could. Click your red heels together now, Dorothy!

What fun! Joy, bliss and a whole heart toward other people. A simple vision for a future that helps me spring out of bed in the morning and do things that might be challenging when there’s no need to do anything.

Now, why was that so long and difficult to achieve?