You've got to be Cruel to be Kind

A friend recently asked me to explore this old maxim using my sophisticated analytical philosophical mind techniques and lots of fucking swearing.

Although I generally find myself much more in the “you’ve got to be cruel to cruel” camp I can kind of see where people are coming from when they say this kind of thing.

It’s a bit like the time my friend Dave fell into an open sewer in my back garden whilst carrying a heavy rock. He hurt himself and wanted me to help him get out but I just started laughing uncontrollably. I think he learned a lot more from that than if I had just helped him out, I really do.

I also like to explore the “You’ve got to be kind to be cruel” approach, although it is a bit sick and perverted and speaks volumes about the fucked up mess between my ears.

I do it at work when you get those keen little fuckers coming in straight from university with all kinds of ideas and ambitions. I hate them, with their happy little smiles and their tales of their zany student days.

However, rather than just stomp on this kind of individuality immediately so they get all ground down and institutionalised and do what I fucking tell them I like to encourage them to come up with all kinds of new ideas and ways of doing things. I tell them to “go for it!!” when they see an opportunity and they get all fired up and run around like happy little monkey children with their shiny new laptops.

Then they find out of course that anyone with any new ideas in a large company who tries to implement them is immediately stifled and restricted by (at best) a complete blank wall of disinterested apathy and office politics, or (at worst) by a viscous and concerted rumour campaign (often coordinated by me), marking them out as pariahs, potential trouble makers or paedophiles.

Almost overnight their little shoulders sag and their postures stoop and they go strangely quiet and withdrawn forever. Suddenly they're not so damn chirpy anymore and they rarely come up with those fucking zippy little ideas anymore.

And I congratulate myself, because I have just created a perfect new soulless middle management cretin.

It’s a bit like taking a little baby bird with a broken wing, then nursing and tending it back to health, then just when it’s ready to fly away happily to freedom, shooting it down with the grim sense of a job well done.

I am available and am taking bookings for any corporate team building events you may be planning.