The Bad Guys

I. Three in the morning, I can’t sleep

The job went to Groban.

Claire has been replaying the scene for weeks: the meeting where he presented other people’s work as his own, the number he inflated, betting nobody would check in time. Everyone knew. It worked anyway.

They told her: you have nothing to blame yourself for. Yet she keeps thinking about the moment she let Groban speak in her place.

At three in the morning, she wonders whether she’s been living by the wrong method. Lying, taking, not letting what you put others through stop you: what if that was how you won? Is she afraid of winning? Is she incapable of it?

She wanted the job. For the money, for the work she could have done, for the pleasure of it. It would be too easy to explain to her that her failure is a hidden victory. No clever turn of phrase will get her the job.

Let’s grant Groban a happy, long, rich life, with no final downfall and no remorse. Suppose he got exactly what he wanted and knows exactly how.

He wins. That’s where we start.

II. The spoils are real

Groban allowed himself methods that others refused to use. He put Claire’s work under his name, stripped his critics of influence, collected the benefits.

The cost hasn’t disappeared. Claire did the work. Now she is the one who has to find the documents, establish their dates, demand what is hers. She will have to interrupt the congratulations, accuse a man who has just been promoted, risk becoming the person who is difficult to work with. Groban already has the job. The time she spends challenging what he has taken, he can spend using it.

The cost of harm does not necessarily fall on the one who causes it.

What he took serves him. He can lead, spend, be loved, grow old in peace. His method may never turn against him. The stolen work may even be excellent. An appropriated work can produce wealth; a stolen house can shelter a happy family. Their happiness gives nothing back to those driven out. The spoils are still desirable.

Sometimes we need to believe that the bad guy punishes himself: he must end up alone, unhappy, blind; deep down he must know he cheated. I don’t know. And you, are you sure? He can have people around him, see his actions clearly, and be satisfied with the results.

Groban’s method got him this job. Claire is beginning to give it authority over an entire life. The bad guy wins a second time when he becomes the unit of measure.

What interests me is how he got this result. What did he make impossible in order to take and keep what serves him?

III. The response that no longer counts

Back to the meeting. Groban knows Claire did the work. He presents it as his own anyway. At that moment, anything she might say is an obstacle to neutralize.

He can hear her, of course. He can even listen closely. “You’re disappointed,” he says; “I understand how you feel.” He can use her anger to adjust his story, her arguments to improve the project, her objections to prepare a defense. He gets a great deal of information from her. Anything that might lead him to give her work back is treated as a problem to solve in order to keep it.

I call this operation capture: maintaining a contribution, a presence, or an agreement by neutralizing responses that could change its attribution, use, or conditions. The other person continues to produce effects; they can no longer change the terms on which what they bring is used.

A boss can hear an objection, recognize its force, and stand by a decision. The response counted in the deliberation; it wasn’t enough to change the outcome. Someone in authority can also be given the power to decide, with accountability and a decision that can be reviewed. Capture begins when what someone is holding on to is shielded from that scrutiny. Claire can choose the colors of the graphs, discuss the numbers, revise the presentation. The name under which her work circulates remains out of reach.

Her words could still count without getting her the job. Groban could acknowledge where the work came from, share leadership of the project, or stop using it. None of these paths is open as long as he takes in her response only to protect what he took.

This is how you can be very attentive to people while closing them off. Groban knows what they want, what they fear, how far they will go. His social intelligence is intact.

He can love risk enough to stake his fortune on it. The inflated number was a bet: someone might have checked in time. Groban could have lost the job. He knew these possible outcomes without knowing which would occur. This is what The Unknown calls the uncertain: the possibilities have taken enough shape for someone to bet on them.

Another way of working with Claire may not yet exist in either of their plans. It could take shape as they respond to each other, each finding in the other’s response something that shifts what they wanted. The unknown, here, is what they could bring into being. Claire can surprise Groban. He can learn from her, revise his calculations. As long as his use of her work remains beyond discussion, possibilities that would require calling that use into question cannot take shape between them.

The same man can steal someone’s work and really hear his child. What he closes off in this relationship does not describe his whole life.

IV. The interrupted sentence

A father has prepared his son’s future. A place in the company, a house nearby, years of work that can pass into his hands. He has succeeded. He wants his son to benefit.

At dinner, the son sits across from his father, a man who looks like him, only more worn. He begins: “What I’d like…”

His father interrupts. He lists the risks he is sparing him, the sacrifices he has made, the luck of inheriting something solid. The son tries to speak again. “After everything I’ve done for you, you’re not going to call it all into question.”

By the end of dinner, the son has said yes.

The father got his result. The succession is settled, the house is waiting, the years of effort have somewhere to go. He may be relieved, proud, happy. There is no reason to invent remorse for him.

He doesn’t know how that sentence ends. Perhaps his son wanted to leave. Perhaps he wanted to join the company on different terms. The son himself may not yet have known what he wanted. A response might have helped him find the words; the father would then have had to respond to what he had just heard. That conversation wasn’t waiting, already written, to be let through. They would have had to make it together.

If his son doesn’t need the future he is preparing for him, what will he do with everything he wanted to give him? The father has no other place ready to step into. He asked his son to remain the person he needed him to be so he could remain the father he knew how to be.

He could have defended his plan and let his son respond. He made that response an act of ingratitude. To speak, the son would now first have to defend himself against everything his sentence would put his father through.

The father could have kept his offer on the table, discovered another way of working with him, accepted a separation. Nothing guarantees that the conversation would have been happy. The possibility of finding their way forward together was there: the son had begun to speak. The father got his agreement by stopping that search. In the same move, he denied himself the possibility of learning, through that response, a way of being a father he did not yet know.

He won the yes. He didn’t hear what his son was going to say.

V. Holding on

The first closure is not always enough. What was taken can be challenged later; keeping it often means also controlling how the challenge will be received.

An employee points out an error. He knows how Groban treated the last person who contradicted him. He looks for wording that won’t accuse anyone, removes a sentence, then another. The report goes up. The director thanks him for the quality of his work. The error has disappeared from the report.

We would like this blindness to cost him a contract or his job. He might also sell before the crisis, delegate the repair, benefit from favorable conditions. The effects of capture are already there: information that could call his way of running things into question no longer reaches him in that form.

Groban may no longer even have to make a conscious effort. The team knows how he works; everyone adjusts what they say in advance. His hold is now built into the way things run. The meetings continue, the numbers circulate. A response that could put his position at stake has turned into something he already knows how to accommodate.

Fear is not necessary. Claire can speak without fear, be heard, see her ideas used. Her objections can improve the project while Groban’s name remains beyond discussion. She can say anything about the work; its attribution is never open to review.

The father may enjoy the same peace. Years later, someone else will remind his son how much he owes him. He won’t even have to interrupt. Others hold the door shut for him.

VI. Curiosity

“I want so badly to be a bad guy, but I’m too curious for that.”

For the person saying this, the desire to take may be immense, the advantage assured. A stronger appetite has him in its grip: what else might happen if the other person really had a say?

An interrogator can be very curious. A manipulator, fascinated by his victims’ thoughts. The father at dinner could know his son’s friends, his loves, his hesitations, and use that knowledge to get the yes. Everything he learned would help him secure the place he had prepared for the child.

The curiosity I mean begins when the response can reach that place. The father lets his son finish his sentence, at the risk of no longer being able to offer him the same life once he has heard him. He asks a question whose answer could undo his plan. He cares about it because he does not yet know what it might bring into being, including in himself.

The other person may be unfair, mediocre, unable to respond. Their freedom may displease us or take away what we wanted. We don’t keep the unknown open by accepting only favorable responses.

Some people care enough about this search to give it a place in what they decide. Groban may prefer the job.

VII. The man who understood

Groban can read this and shrug.

“I know exactly what I did. Claire had things to say; maybe we could have worked differently. I prefer the job. I like the money, the freedom it gives me, the team I run. I made my choice. What’s the problem?”

He understood. By his own criteria, he may have made an excellent deal. People free to contradict him can recognize his real achievements. Nothing warrants claiming that the future he closed off would have been worth more to him. Maybe he would have wanted none of it, even after discovering it.

His preference still gives him no access to what he prevents from happening. As long as Claire cannot challenge that hold, everything that would require that challenge remains impossible between them. He can learn a thousand things from her, take her advice about clients, help her with a personal difficulty. Their relationship changes in some places. Where it might make him give back or share what he took, he protects himself.

An industrialist can revise his plans in response to a failed test and stop his son from questioning the future prepared for him. His factories work. Their success proves nothing about his ability to hear his son.

What a response from Claire or the son might have brought into being remains unknown. Groban and the father cannot keep that hold and make that discovery within the same relationship at the same time. We can, however, follow how the search is stopped. The father cuts his son off; Groban reduces Claire’s challenge to her disappointment. They render ineffective the response that certain possibilities would have needed in order to take shape.

No one knows what possibilities would have emerged or what they would have been worth to them. They cannot be entered in a column opposite the gains. What is lost is access to those possibilities.

Groban can acknowledge Claire’s work; the father, return to that dinner. Giving up that hold leaves room for a response. Claire or the son may no longer want to talk to them. The work has changed hands, years have passed. Another conversation may begin. The one they prevented escapes them.

What Groban closes off in his own life gives Claire nothing back of what she lost.

The father may love the life they will have in the company. Groban can invent, play, be surprised elsewhere. None of this reopens the interrupted conversation.

Their loss lies in that closed access. They may never feel it. A desire that never arises is not missed by someone who has never known it.

Bearings

Capture maintains a contribution, a presence, or an agreement by neutralizing responses that could change its attribution, use, or conditions. The loss described concerns possibilities that would require those responses to be able to make a difference. It concerns a particular relationship, regardless of how happy the person who takes may be. Giving up that hold does not guarantee that a shared search can resume. Curiosity here names the appetite for seeking those possibilities with the other person, at the risk of seeing one’s own plan undone.

A maille is a place where a move can be received, leave a trace, and change what follows: a relationship, a team, an institution. The Maille defines this place of passage; Power distinguishes opening from captation; The Unknown concerns what a move makes newly practicable. The Just follows what a justified decision can nevertheless take away from the living. This essay examines what capture makes impracticable even in the life of the person who benefits from it.

Hegel analyzes one-sided and unequal recognition in the relation of lordship and bondage ( Phenomenology of Spirit, § 191). The premise here grants Groban recognition that satisfies him. The closure described persists without requiring us to assume that he lacks recognition.

Edmondson studies the safety that allows people to take interpersonal risks and its role in collective learning. The criterion here concerns what a response can call into question, including the attribution of work. Speaking without fear does not by itself establish that possibility.