Layoffs, Lizards, LinkedIn, Frank Williams Selling His Jet, And Aleister Crowley's Third Input

Believe it or not, there's a common thread here

room for a wheelchair, or a hundred third-rate leadership books

When Frank Williams dropped the ball, he sold his jet.

It was March of 2005, and based on early testing the Formula One team bearing Williams’ name did not look like it would improve on, or even retain, its disappointing fourth-place finish of 2004. Any possibility of closing the gap via the innovative and often controversial solutions that had propelled Williams to previous championships had been largely sabotaged by an ever-tightening web of FIA regulations. It seemed likely that future seasons would be won in the engine bay or the wind tunnel. As a customer for the BMW powerplant, Williams would have to make their advances via the latter instead of the former. So Sir Frank sold his jet and put the twenty million pounds into wind-tunnel research.

Mind you, the Williams F1 jet was more than the spoiled self-indulgence of a narcissist CEO. Prior to the start of the 1986 season, Frank Williams had been paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a rental car crash. (Peter Windsor, who was in the car with him, personally told me the rather harrowing story about twenty years ago.) Then as now, flying with a wheelchair is a miserable and sometimes just plain impossible proposition. (Ask me how I know.) The purchase of a Falcon 900 jet allowed Sir Frank to attend every race and personally manage the competitive effort, a task he could not physically manage otherwise.

So when the 2005 F1 season started at Melbourne, the Williams team was… short one Williams. Jackie Stewart said the sale of the jet “…proved what a racer Frank Williams is.” I also like to think that it demonstrated an admirable commitment. The man was asking his people for a Herculean effort in difficult times, so he shared their misery in as equal, and as productive, a fashion as he could manage. He was the chairman of the company, yes — but he was also a member of the team bearing his name. And that’s how he behaved.

CNBC told me yesterday that the “era of quiet quitting” is being followed by the era of “loud layoffs”. It’s all over the news. Facebook aka Meta. Amazon. DoorDash. Even CNN. Layoffs are this month’s most fashionable thing. They’ve even affected some close friends of mine recently. But none of the companies currently engaging in layoff-mania can boast of a Frank Williams leading them. Their bosses may drone on in lizard-person doublespeak about “challenges” and “resilience” — but when all is said and done, they’ll be climbing a set of roll-up stairs to their next destination via Gulfstream while the victims of their stupidity, cupidity, and malleability are thirty-five thousand feet below, walking out with cardboard boxes.

When I was much younger, I worked at a bagel store that had a pathological addiction to bad decisions. (Not, I hasten to add, Sammy’s Bagels on Lane Avenue in Upper Arlington. That was a different bagel store that also made bad decisions.) It was a long time ago, and my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I’ll try to recall how it all went down.

Their core business was very good, because there weren’t a lot of great bagel stores in the area and when all was said and done they cooked a pretty decent bagel. But the rest of it was a total mess. The Chief Bagel Officer, or CBO, had a pathological fondness for gurus, advisors, father figures, and male role models — each of whom took the opportunity to relieve him of staggering sums. His desire for fame and approval meant that the company bought every farmer’s market in the neighborhood, even the stupid ones; there was one farmer’s market strictly devoted to sriracha bagels and we paid the idiot founders huge money for it, even though it seemed obvious to any sane bagel-business expert that a few years later the fad would fade and those sriracha bagels would just be part of the regular farmers’ markets. The company even wasted uncountable amounts of money on a special AOL page for their bagels, (remember, this was a long time ago, at a bagel store) only to find out afterwards that their “AOL guy” was mostly just spending the money on curious office supplies.

It was long believed in the head office that no amount of bad decisions could offset the tremendous profits from the core bagel business — but as my father always tells me, it doesn’t do any good to earn $300 when you spend $600. So they needed to cut costs. They didn’t shuck off the unprofitable farmers’ markets, or call a halt to their weird sideline making VHS videos hosted by a complete moron. Instead, they laid people off. They didn’t lay off the leader, who had signed off on all these mistakes. They didn’t lay off the presidents of the bagel store, who had set new records for fecklessness, indecisiveness, and sullen behavior. They didn’t fire the vice-presidents who had made so many bad decisions. Instead, they used the layoffs to settle personal scores, not caring that in the process they would probably cripple the core bagel-baking business. Not a great idea, really. You can read a hundred of the worst business-leadership books ever written and still not come up with it.

I don’t remember what happened after that, because I went off to sell Fords or something along those lines. But I think they ended up having to do more layoffs, and more belt-tightening measures, until the investors took control and brought the stupidity to a halt before everybody involved lost the rest of their shirts. Or maybe it all worked out. For the people who didn’t get laid off, anyway.

For the ones who did… What do you do when you get laid off through no fault of your own? Chances are that “listening to well-intentioned advice” will fill up a nontrivial part of your first few days — and if you work in anything besides foodservice or the trades, some of that advice may include “Get your LinkedIn up to date, so you can find work.” It’s not bad advice, because a significant percentage of modern HR recruiters are almost unfathomably lazy and therefore do all of their “work” via LinkedIn. But there’s another, more sinister reason you’ll want to take that advice.

How many of my valued readers know who Aleister Crowley was? The usual sources, like Wikipedia, don’t tell all of the sordid story. Crowley was a pervert in the truest sense of the word. Born into the remarkably functional and ethical world of Victorian England, with all the money and resources one could desire, he set out to pervert the country’s moral compass through a variety of occultism, Satanic stupidity, and just plain weird kink. Crowley was widely considered to be in the service of the Devil, during a time in which it was still socially acceptable to believe in the Devil, or a Hell, or a Heaven.

(I am reminded of Antonin Scalia, who upset many applecarts by saying, in an interview:

You're looking at me as though I'm weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It's in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

Naturally, these statements were widely mocked. How ignorant would you have to be in order to believe in angels, a fallen angel, or, most credulous of all, a fallen angel who wished to destroy the world? Better to believe in real things, like SCIENCE!)

To be fair, Crowley actively encouraged the public to think of him as an ally to Satan. He formed a variety of secret societies devoted to deliberate perversion. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” he intoned, which is a frankly horrifying (or, perhaps, terrifying) proposition to sane people everywhere. Crowley was also eager to publicize his belief that there were universal human truths and knowledge that could only be acquired through degrading and unusual sex.

I’d guess that ninety-nine percent of what Crowley considered to be demonic, occult, and just plain evil is now openly advocated and explained in Teen Vogue, of course. In particular, Crowley is reported to have made receptive anal sex a mandatory requirement of entry into his various societies, with specific emphasis on what is called “messy” anal sex now, meaning deliberate contact with fecal matter. He called it “The Eye Of Horus”; I am pretty sure nobody bothered to bring Bruce Dickinson up to speed on that when he wrote “Powerslave”.

I would suggest to the reader that this requirement had less to do with pleasing a Devil who never actually showed up to the meets, and more to do with what is at least subconsciously known by every member of every exclusive organization from SEAL Team Six to Sigma Chi: humiliation and degradation is a hugely effective bonding method. When you are humiliated or forced to be submissive to an organization, particularly while in the company of others, it bonds you to those people and to the organization involved.

How? Well, the so-called sunk cost fallacy is one of humanity’s greatest cognitive defects. The more you put into something, whether that something is a project car, a relationship, or a novel, the more you are willing to put into it. Most people react to humiliation or degradation with a renewed affection for the person or institution that has degraded them. Why? Because it has to have meant something. Imagine joining Crowley’s crew, being kinda-sorta raped by every dude in the mansion as a condition for joining, being forced to rub your todger in the poo, and then quitting! Why, then it would all have been for nothing!

It follows, therefore, that if you really want to trust someone, you can only trust someone who has gone through the same humiliations as you have. They have “skin in the game”. They are committed. Should they leave your chosen activity/club/society, they must consider the double-whammy of

0. having submitted to all of the humiliation rituals for nothing;

1. having their participation in those rituals leaked to the outside world, without the context that could justify them. (See: “The Fappening”, widely considered to have been a hack of a single iCloud account belonging to… H. Weinstein.)

Over time, the victims of these humiliation rituals come to feel affection towards said rituals. I once read a story — in GQ, I think — about a fraternity that had “Boner Night”. All the pledges had to sit in the room naked while a gay porno was shown via projector. Pledges who became erect would be severely punished. I was recounting this at lunch to a fellow who had been a dorm mate of mine freshman year and he was like, “Uh, yeah, we do that at Delta Tau Delta. It’s not as bad as they make it sound.” Not as bad as they make it sound!

It doesn’t have to be sexual, mind you. My son is a Civil Air Patrol cadet airman, as I was; recently I found myself telling him about a drill exercise in which we had to stand on an asphalt lot in our dress blues during the summer until someone passed out, and I realized, all of a sudden: That was child abuse! I was twelve years old! I could have cracked my head on the ground and died! Yet I was openly nostalgic about it.

All of this was on my mind when I read a LinkedIn post by my former colleague, Patrick George. Patrick has occasionally come in for some criticism by yours truly, most of it related to a completely avoidable crash during a Camaro press event, but only a fool would think that he is anything other than an intelligent, resourceful, and capable man. He knows how to lead a media outlet, he knows how the business works, and he knows how to make the clickers click.

Patrick spent a year and a half at The Drive before the venture capitalists shitcanned him. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t do anything termination-worthy, such as accidentally predicting a compact sport-ute Equinox-ish Corvette EV via an April Fools’ article. They just let him go to pursue a “different direction”, presumably a direction towards keeping more of the cash for themselves.

I am certain that Patrick’s first thought after he got fired was: fuck those guys, I’m going to rub their noses in the ground. But his LinkedIn post was a model of decorum. He humbly complimented the people who had decided to shitcan him with zero notice, thanked them for the chance to work in their click-farm cubicle, and expressed limitless faith in the ownership of The Drive to do the very best things possible at all times.

How can a grown man make such a post? How can you be walked out of something to which you devoted your heart and soul, for no reason other than to grease some lizard person’s wheel of fortune, only to turn around, get on your knees, and thank them?

“Baruth, you idiot… Obviously, he wants another job.” Well, duh. So let me phrase the question differently. Why is this public humiliation ritual, which in LinkedIn’s case is accompanied by adding a green semi-circle proclaiming “#OPENTOWORK” to your profile photo, absolutely necessary for the finding of another job? We all know that it is necessary, but why is it necessary?

I’d suggest that it is as simple as: Corporate America does not recognize ridiculous moral concepts like “right” or “wrong”, at least not in this context. “Right” and “wrong” are saved for political activism, not for piddly shit like Apple turning off AirDrop for Chinese protestors in the vicinity of the Foxconn iPhone factory where the CHINESE MILITARY is LITERALLY COMPELLING people to work day and night in a “closed loop” system, BEATING AND ATTACKING workers who try to ESCAPE, all so Apple doesn’t miss its Q4 financial targets by twelve percent instead of nine percent.

The Drive may well have mistreated Patrick. I’d bet a thousand bucks that if I knew the whole story I would be personally horrified. (Or, perhaps, terrified.) But he is not allowed to feel mistreated. Not in public, anyway. Instead, he must humiliate himself before the Accepted Corporate Standards Of Behavior, administered and enforced anonymously by a thousand HR drones, in order to get another job. Had he posted

“Just got fired from The Drive for no reason… Christmas is going to be a nightmare for me and my family, fuck those people, I hope their office is swallowed by a sinkhole, ”

he would be as unemployable as your humble author, even though that is a perfectly normal human response! He would be the equivalent of the pledge who hears about “Boner Night” and packs his bags, or the would-be Crowley disciple who says, “You’re all going to do what to me? That’s where the poop comes out! I’m going to head back home to my family estate.” By declining the humiliation ritual, he would also forfeit the right to another job in the industry. Instead, he needs to demonstrate that he can accept abuse from a venture capitalist and thank him for it after the fact. Only then can he be trusted. If he dispensed praise or opprobrium depending on the actual facts of the matter, then he would be untrustworthy. Not servile enough. Not willing to perform the ritual without question.

Some wag on Twitter recently posted something to the effect of, “I’ve always been confused by the concept of cover letters on a resume… why do I have to write fan fiction about potentially working for you?” We laugh because it’s funny, but we also laugh because it’s true. I recently advised an ambitious young person who was about to take a call regarding a new job opportunity that he needed to put his question about “comp” between two other questions about how he could best serve the company in question — because in Corporate America you are not permitted to do a job just for the money, you have to pretend to be excited about the opportunity, you have to be motivated by the simply delightful prospect of making PowerPoint decks.

In other words, if you want to earn white-collar money, you have to be willing to do kink for a corporation. I saw a cartoon on Instagram a while back where a man tells his girlfriend, “I have a fantasy…”

“Go on,” she says.

“In my fantasy, you have a fantasy about butt stuff.” The girl replies,

“So you have a fantasy about butt stuff.” The man is indignant!

“No, my fantasy is that you really want to do this stuff, and I reluctantly agree.” It’s a bit Crowley-esque, but we are all in the position of that girlfriend now. Your potential employer has a fantasy that you have a fantasy about: making PowerPoint decks, leveraging synergies, attending meetings, being a champion ally for Diversity/Inclusion/Equity. Whether or not you are employable has less to do with your actual skill set and more to do with your ability to convincingly play to that fantasy.

I’d like to tell you that Williams F1 cruised to an astonishing surprise World Championship after Sir Frank sold his jet and agreed to sit at home in his lonely wheelchair. It didn’t happen. The team never finished higher than third again, placing tenth in four of the last five years. No team has ever fallen as far as Williams did in the decade after the jet was sold. Frank Williams died thirteen months ago, but not before he had to watch his daughter Claire lose both ownership and control of the team bearing their name. That’s how it goes sometimes. The wicked prosper on this earth and the best among us are consigned to eat dirt. If you’re man enough to decline the corporate humiliation ritual, you’d better be man enough to feed your family with the sweat of your brow.

And yet this morning I can’t help but think of those C-suite cowards in their jets, flying over the scapegoats they’ve forced to carry the burdens of their failure. And I have to think that at some level, in some prehistoric crevice of their backbrains, the C-creatures have to know. Who, and what, they are. That knowledge has to gnaw at them, somewhere and somehow. It’s an itch that you can’t scratch with a thousand forced clapping sessions or false protestations of gratitude. In the end, in the dead of night, in the lonely hospital bed, in the wheelchair of injury or age, we all know who we are. My advice to the lizard people: Confess, repent, and sin no more.

But if you don’t, or won’t, then consider this: one day some Morlock, some un-humiliated creature of the underworld, some man or woman who can’t be bought — well, he or she might wake up in the morning and decide to make you do it. When it happens, I suggest you… try being resilient.