Three species of sycophancy relate to the loose Shakespearean adage, ‘Methinks he doth protest too much’. When sycophancy becomes the basis of rationale for action, large scale disasters are the result. The net cost of fervent wokeism and social skepticism during the Covid-19 Pandemic? 580,000 young citizen lives and rising fast.
The future death tally from such maliciously-motivated thinking could stand to be on the order of 20 million lives or more – a divergent function which is very difficult to predict, save for its inordinately large reality.
The cost of political wokeism and fake science – The cost in terms of human lives (set aside suffering), will exceed the total cost in Covid-19 Pandemic lives, around late October 2023. At that time, more people will have died at the hands of our political left and poor public health policy decisions, than from the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.
Most American citizens today perceive that there exists in our society pernicious forms of socialized religion, politics, and science. Indeed the purpose of this site, The Ethical Skeptic, has always been to point out both the flaws in thinking and know-them-by-their-fruits handiwork of such social skeptics. Our mission has been to help prepare minds, and equip them in spotting the darkened philosophies of those who pretend to represent rationality, critical thinking, virtue, and science itself.
Theirs has always been an intolerant club of royalty-wannbe self-appointed elites, seeking to impress their way to membership or status therein. How best to achieve such lofty status? Become the most uber of the uber themselves. As Admiral William F (Bull) Halsey is known to have quipped regarding war, “Hit hard, hit fast, and hit often.” Indeed, such poseurs view their conquest of society as a form of warfare – with their only option to impress, to escalate therein. One of my favorite comedy artists elicits this in her monologues.
You know it’s funny the difference between joining a conservative group and a liberal one. When you approach a group of conservatives and say “I’d like to join, I’m a conservative as well”, their response will be “Cool, welcome.” When you approach a group of liberals and say “I’d like to join the effort. I’m as liberal as they come”, their response will be more along the lines of “We’ll see about that.”
~ Taylor Tomlinson, Comedienne
Three types of sycophancy relate to the adage “The lady doth protest toomuch, methinks.” from William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. This familiar phrase often refers to a person who overacts inside very visible matters of virtue, in order to enhance or exonerate their personal position inside that group, or to allay a secret doubt on their or other members’ behalf.
These three species of deceptive behavior serve to contrast as much as anything the distinction between the opposites, ethics and virtue.
Religious Sycophancy – embodied in a principle called Neuhaus’s Law (Richard Neuhaus, Christian cleric and Catholic priest)1 : Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. In other words, setting faithfulness aside, ‘God favors the edgy and self-perceived artiste’. Such thinking devolves into a kind of extremist cult inside a cult, a religion of negative reactance. The club of edgy atheists is an example of such religious sycophancy. One does not have to intellectually believe in God, in order to effect the practice of such philosophy inside their life.
Political Sycophancy – embodied in the brainless one-upsmanship of modern progressive liberalism, wherein each player perceives themself to reside in a contest to see who can out-woke all the others. Their habitual defense often involves accusations of straw man, bucket characterization of opponents, and/or ‘racism’.2 The net result of this is a kind of irrational and irreversible fervency on the part of people who seek social control.
Science Sycophancy – embodied by social skeptics : Social skepticism is kabuki, the activist-minded abuse of science by means of its underlying philosophical vulnerability, skepticism. An imperious agency which has politicized and enslaved science through teaching weaponized fake skepticism to useful idiots. The social skeptic is a ‘communicator’ who seeks to squelch scientific dissent, as well as foment and exploit enmity between the lay public and science.3
Such errant thinking rules our universities, media, and politics – much to the injury of the majority of American citizens.
The Cost of Sycophancy
The cost of sycophancy usually involves suffering on the part of the majority of the population, and the enrichment of a very small membership of Royalty, those who profit from the mantle of the fake virtue they have pushed. One should take note that the symbolic group behind such virtue, never actually benefits.4 As often turns out, the cost of this kind of irrationality exploits or functions critically around a principle of human foible I call quod fieri.
quod fieri – (Latin: (lit.) ‘(the fact) that (now a specific thing is) to be done’) – a form of intervention bias action, in which the action is not taken from sound evidence or a history of effectiveness, but rather simply because something must be done. This type of decision or action usually is executed in a panic situation, in the face of a slow moving disaster, or a theater of cataclysmic mirage. Ironically its feckless or inane basis is compensated for, by a religious, political, or social fanaticism as to its claimed (but usually false) effectiveness. Those who raise questions regarding the action are typically cast as deplorable and anti-virtue.
The tyranny of the sycophant forces decision makers into taking symbolic or virtuous action before all factors are known and before the question is even defined. This bears the greater chance of resulting in disaster.
Even worse than The Peter Principle, when you hire and promote only persons who look correct to sycophancy, you inherit their lack of skill, their shortfalls in integrity and experience, and their propensity to hire only persons who are exactly like themselves.
There are times during which, because of a lack of intelligence on the matter at hand, taking limited, parsimonious, or even no action – is the right course of action. One should stay the hand of righteous swift justice until such time as one fully comprehends that they are not God, and indeed bear not the least idea as to what is righteous in the first place. Ethics eschews righteousness, virtue claims it.
The net cost of such human depravity today? Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives in the future, at the hands of fake science, political, and social virtue proponents. To wit (click on images to expand them):
Exhibit A – Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality with Pull Forward Effect
Exhibits A and B: The Cost – 581,490 lives and rising over the next decade. Fervent sycophancy on the part of the religious, both woke and social skeptic, has cost us dearly. Lives lost to medical mistake, vaccine injury, accident, murder, drug abuse/overdose, and social despair alone during the Covid-19 pandemic. We acted in accordance with lockdown and virtue-words (eg. ‘vaccine’, ‘flatten the curve’, ‘mask up’) policies of magical thinking, before we could define the danger we actually faced and before we knew which action we should be rationally taking. Such quod fieri was egged on by progressives from the left side of the political aisle.
As one can see from the two charts in Exhibits A and B, the net cost of such sycophancy as of 17 December 2022, is on the order of 580,000 lives. This death tally is growing by a ratio of 5 to 1 (9,115 versus 1,928 lives) each and every week now, fast overtaking total Covid-19 pandemic deaths at 903,000. The future death tally from such maliciously-motivated thinking could stand to be on the order of 20 million lives or more – a divergent function which is very difficult to predict, save for its inordinately large reality.
American citizens were recently coerced into being part of the test or control groups of a medical experiment, without adequate knowledge and without their consent. Hundreds of thousands of Americans likely died from the resulting denial of timely and adequate treatment of Covid-19 and more importantly, its preventable secondary conditions.
This was an egregious violation of The Nuremberg Code on human rights. The time has come for jurisprudence and restitution to those harmed.
“In consultation with the legal community, indications are that ‘failure to [early/timely] treat’ will now be considered ‘wanton disregard.’ As such, any perceived statutory immunity will be rendered invalid.”
~ Senator Mark B. Steffen, M.D., 31 Mar 2022
The EUA Mandate – A Pandemic of the Untreated
During my initial diagnosis with the Delta variant of Covid-19 back in August 2021, I reasonably inquired of the attending physician as to any candidate or approved therapies and treatments for the condition. In his response, the diagnosing clinician admonished me with the following well-rehearsed quip:
There is no treatment. Go home and sleep it off. You should have gotten the vaccine.
~ Diagnosing Physician at Clinic, Aug 18 2021
As it turned out, this was absolutely the worst advice I have ever received in my life, and from a medical professional no less. This apothegm is what I call a Höchste Mechanism, a fraudulent notion arrogantly passed off as official science – a notion that has become so important to protect, that ignorance is now mandated in defense of its ‘truth’. This misinformation was spun by the clinician as if it were ‘the standard of care’ (both a medical and legal definition)1 for Covid-19, when in fact this was far from the truth. What I have found in researching this ‘there are no treatments’ false claim, can be framed inside the legal provisions surrounding issuance of an Emergency Use Authorization for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Specifically,2
(c) The Secretary may issue an [EUA] authorization under this section with respect to the emergency use of a product only if …the Secretary concludes—
(3) that there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating such disease or condition;
~ 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3(c) – Authorization for medical products for use in emergencies
Since the EUA cannot sustain if an ‘alternative for treating’ Covid-19 exists, then there is no alternative treatment for Covid-19, quod erat demonstrandum. This is how modern science works, circular imperative (the Höchste), or the answer you bring to the problem in the first place, before solving for it. This mandate to not allow for any treatment use, development, or research, presented an ethical quandary to public health leaders, who in the end opted to serve monetary-power advantage rather than ethics. However, it gets worse. Once this bifurcation is established, between the vaccinated and ‘no treatment (allowed)’ cohorts, one has introduced a controlled experiment or what is known under The Nuremberg Code of 1947 as ‘medical experimentation’. This is the point at which an unethical choice transitions into a full-blown crime against humanity.
Covid-19 treatment research, testing, evaluation, authorization, promulgation, conditions of use, timely employment, and advisement, were not only blocked by the US FDA and medical authorities, but communications regarding effective treatment were censored by US media (just as this article is being censored by those same media now).
These illegal/unconstitutional restraints to trade were enacted to protect the Covid-19 vaccine Emergency Use Authorization, which could not legally exist without them.
These illegal/unconstitutional restraints to trade were further employed to establish control/test cohorts inside a mandatory experiment on the entire US population; an immoral experiment which resulted in the majority of US Covid-19 related deaths (see Exhibit 1 below).
History’s Commentary on Mandatory Experimentation
The notion that one need withhold any and all forms of putative treatment or therapy as the EUA-stipulated approach in addressing Covid-19 or its symptoms, is a principle which functions under the philosophy of a ‘controlled experiment’ (i.e. medical experimentation to confirm an approach as sound/unsound). We now know too late, that there exist a variety of viable treatments for Covid-19 and in particular, its dangerous secondary conditions.3456 Treatment not for everyone who tests positive certainly, but rather for those experiencing heavy cytokine storm or who bear a stark risk-compounding factor (dysbiosis, metabolic disorder, age, dementia, etc.). The antithesis, refusing any and all outpatient treatment or ‘doing nothing’, as it turns out was an unsound approach to the majority of moderate to severe Covid-19 cases. ‘Long Covid’ for instance, is a set of thromboembolic injuries which resulted from exactly this illegitimate ‘there are no treatments – you should have been vaccinated’ control-oriented philosophy.78 The reader should note that we reject the term ‘Long Covid’ for these deaths, and instead cite the actual etiology, EUA Shadow Deaths, outlined below.
The Nuremberg Code of 1947 addresses the context of circumstance wherein the standard of care has not been identified for a medical or therapeutic condition, and various approaches to treatment (including the action of withholding treatment so as to provide for a ‘control group’) are under consideration or testing (aka ‘experimentation’ in 1947).9 In the real life scenario above, I was involuntarily coerced into becoming part of an experimental protocol of withholding all treatment (the control), in favor of testing a vaccine purported to offer certain benefits against Covid-19 infection or severity. The various arguments made as to the efficacy of that vaccine are moot. A decision was made to coerce me, without sufficient knowledge on my part nor my consent, into participating as a control-group member in an experiment evaluating test-group vaccines versus the action of withholding any and all treatment. Much as a healthy beagle might be terminated after starvation for comparative autopsy in a pesticide toxicity study. All this of course as part of various vaccines’ completion of Phase III and IV testing now underway.10
A controlled experiment is one in which every factor is held constant except for one variable per test group.11 In this case, that one variable is the introduction of a particular vaccine (say the Pfizer-BioNTech version) to a test group. The fact that the vaccine was not held to standard against ‘the best alternative medical treatments or therapies’, means that denying me access to those available remedies, constituted indeed a control-test experiment exposing me to a potential of harm through contrived inaction. An experiment which risked my person, well being, health, and life without my knowledge or consent – and nothing else. My diagnosing clinician even stated as much, without fully realizing it.
In other words, I was allowed to choose whether I would be a member of the ‘no treatment allowed’ control group or alternately one of the vaccine test groups; however, through denying me timely treatment in order to protect the vaccine EUA, I was not offered the ethical choice of not participating in the experiment altogether.
Neither was I informed as to the nature of this experiment, nor was I made aware that other treatments or therapies were at my avail, should I decline participation.
Nor was I allowed to be made aware of the comparative strength of natural immunity versus the vaccine, nor to see critical cohort testing data indicating the adverse effects risk quotients of the vaccine itself (both very basic ethical information sets), so that I could make an informed choice.
I was fraudulently coerced by medical professionals (and by advising health officials) into the belief that I had no choice, I had to participate. My life was endangered and I was exposed to unnecessary amounts of suffering and expense as a result of this coerced experiment. I was not offered the remedies or recourse to address the situation in the instance where the experiment failed or failed to ensure my safety (the experiment failed in both these regards), nor was I given the opportunity to bring the experiment to an end.
This set of actions constituted a violation of my human rights, subject to The Nuremberg Code of 1947. The following excerpts from that Code apply to the specific offenses outlined in my circumstance.12
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur;
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
~ The Nuremberg Code of 1947 (see footnote 12)
A seven-count violation of my human rights. I lost loved ones to this experiment. My family suffered extensive career and financial losses, we all suffered physically and mentally beyond reason, and any member could have died inside this experiment.
One elder family member who underwent a severe cytokine storm, very nearly died of blood clots in her lungs and other organs twelve days later (right on time as per Exhibit 1 below), solely because she was actively refused treatment by her general physician until she was actually dying – a tortiously late intervention in an otherwise foreseeable and treatable condition.
Each of us fell victim to contrived ignorance, fully unaware that our lives were being exploited for experiment, experimental use money flow, and political purposes. Millions of American citizens each bore a similar drama inside this crime against humanity.
The time has come for jurisprudence and restitution regarding this crime.
How Many Persons Were Impacted by this Unethical Experiment/EUA Exclusion?
But how can we even begin to quantify just how large a crime it was? In researching the mechanisms of death involved in either Covid-19 itself, or its even more dangerous secondary effects, I sought out medical publications and studies which would serve to parse Covid deaths into their actual root physiological cause. What I found disturbed me greatly. Covid-19 itself, comprising the indicators and symptoms of fever, cytokine storm, cough, and diarrhea, was rarely the cause of actual death in most Covid mortality. Most mortality occurred a good eight days after all these maladies were well over. Instead, the primary cause of death was ‘venous and arterial thromoembolic events’ (see the black arrow in Exhibit 1 below). That is to say, that 50 to 75% of all Covid deaths came from blood clots.131415 Blood clots (as well as endothelial dysfunction) are conditions which are eminently treatable, provided they are addressed in a timely manner. If they are left untreated for long, myriad systems and organs within the human body will be negatively impacted.
This circumstance was akin to telling potential cancer patients to ‘Check back in with us next year and we’ll take a look at your growing lump then. In the meantime, if you find yourself starting to die, go to the emergency room’.
Covid Did Not Kill Them – We Killed Them
This set of events constituted a highly unethical, nay monstrous, set of decisions on the part of American health officials. One which has resulted in death and immeasurable harm, from delayed treatment which was administered only under the extreme condition wherein the sufferer was dying. A dying person literally had to force their way into an ER or hospital’s care, just to get access to Heparin or a simple lifesaving novel oral anticoagulant (NOAC) pill16 which could have prevented the entire tragedy (as well as offset hospital/ICU overloading) if it had been administered twelve to fifteen days earlier as an outpatient instead.
50 to 75% of all Covid-19 deaths were a result of endothelial dysfunction and blood clotting. Conditions that would not have been fatal if timely out-patient treatment had been made available to the victims.17181920
Such readily available treatments were denied to patients, under a contrived ignorance and the unethical protocol of an involuntary experiment that placed them at risk of harm and death. These treatable secondary effects/risks, which were not addressed until a person showed up at the ER dying included
blood clots/coagulopathy/circulatory deaths
sepsis/bacteremia
endothelial inflammation/major organ/heart damage
related physical pneumonia/dyspnea
dysbiosis (coprobacillus, clostridium ramosum and clostridium hathewayi)21
MTHFR homocysteine clearing issues
macrocytic anemia
metabolic disorder.
Of course, I am not even going to venture a guess as to the financial losses incurred by American citizens under this barbaric method of managing a pandemic. The restitution numbers will be staggering. More appropriate for this analysis however, is a quantification of the human loss in terms of injury, suffering, and life. In particular, we estimate that
19+ million citizens experienced negative life-impacts/injuries/long-Covid aside from the mere pandemic virus itself (see chart here),22
5+ million citizens experienced excessive suffering, hospitalization, injury, and expense, and
450,000+ citizens died from being denied early and timely treatment of endothelial and thromboembolic conditions (click on the image to expand Exhibit 1 below).
Exhibit 1 – Most hospitalization is too late to prevent otherwise treatable etiology.
Covid EUA-Shadow Injury and Death
Most death associated with Covid-19 occurred after the cessation of primary symptomology (Days 1 – 12 in Exhibit 1), and rather was due to secondary and imminently treatable conditions (Median Day 18.5 in Exhibit 1). These constituted conditions which were neither looked for, detected, nor treated in a timely manner outside a hospital setting, due to the vaccine emergency use authorization (EUA) 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3 stipulation that no alternative treatment could exist.
(c) The Secretary may issue an [EUA] authorization under this section with respect to the emergency use of a product only if …the Secretary concludes—
(3) that there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating such disease or condition;
~ 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3(c) – Authorization for medical products for use in emergencies
This false standard of care was enforced upon medical professionals (by the Federation of State Medical Boards, healthcare officials, and medical insurance companies) in order to keep the vaccine EUA in place, both before and after the introduction of the vaccine into the population. This error and malfeasance resulted in the majority of deaths and delayed deaths from Covid-related organ injury, from thromboembolitic, endothelial inflammation, and coagulopathy related causes. Causes which killed Covid patients anywhere from thirteen days to several years after infection.
As one may observe in Exhibit 1 above, the median day of Covid mortality (day 18.5) falls right in the middle of the disease progression timeframe in which venous and arterial thromboembolic events were almost exclusively occurring on average. In fact, the majority of hospitalization, morbidity, and mortality events associated with Covid-19, were a direct result of otherwise treatable endothelial dysfunction and blood clots.232425
Also take note, that the majority of this knowledge shown in Exhibit 1 was held by April 2020. Medical authorities had ample time to distribute, control, and monitor treatments for endothelial and thromboembolitic conditions.They simply chose not to.
An action which resulted in the USA holding a #1 ranking in national deaths, a full 37% higher than even the #2 ranked nation (Brazil) in terms of total deaths.26
Most people did not die of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, nor even its primary Covid-19 symptoms. They died at the hands of obdurate-minded and unaccountable public health officials. They died as the result of a horrendous experiment in humanity on the part of The Party – one conducted gleefully on their political opponents. While at the same time rubbing their noses in the destruction of their children’s lives, shuttering of their small and medium-sized businesses, and overall impingement upon their quality of life.
We, the American citizens, seek remedy for this crime against humanity.
The Ethical Skeptic, “Denial of Early Covid-19 Treatment – A Crime Against Humanity”; The Ethical Skeptic, WordPress, 30 Dec 2021; Web, https://theethicalskeptic.com/?p=59250
The perdocent exploits the claim of not having been given the necessary resources or taught how to do something, as a means of ‘not understanding’, of taking control, or to avoid doing any actual work. They offer intimidating critique as to how it ‘really should be done’, but somehow just never seem to risk actually doing it themselves.
As a management professional, no matter their appeal to credential, never let a perdocent take control. Always seek to maintain familiarity with the perdocent’s gaslighting tactics of control, ego, laziness, and passive-aggressive dishonesty.
During my career as head of both a research lab and systems development and engineering firm, I have run into the circumstance several times wherein a fully educated and trained professional could not learn, nor apply their skills inside new challenges, unless inside the context of a formal course of instruction. For instance, I once asked a two-years out of school systems engineer to apply random sampling analysis in order to ascertain a critical figure from United States International Trade Association consumer good imports data. The team was then going to use the results of this to determine specific value chain node-loading required in our client’s requested project. Instead of seeking more information to help understand and formulate the scope of the question, he retorted, “I have not been trained how to do that”. I responded, “All I am asking of you is to conduct some textbook random sampling to detect failure rates in this class of goods. The data you need in order to accomplish this is already in our data mart. The rest of the team will develop the value chain inputs from there.”
Without telling me, he shirked his assignment, subsequently appealing to his mentor (my peer) in order to plead his case to be excused from the three-hour task. This was very basic sample analysis, second year in undergraduate school type stuff for his major degree.1 Moreover, the reality was that through his surprise appeal to my peer, the individual was pretending to tender expert commentary as to the viability and methodology of a value chain analysis – just not in so many words. A practice I and the team were well recognized for, through over a decade of hard client work up to that point. Despite his B-average, he did not learn in school how the skills were actually applied, nor did he want to do any work now, but he damn well thought that he should also be in charge of the work.
Without rubric, the perdocent is lost.
I ended up having to run the sampling analysis myself. Thereafter, the team went on to lead a very successful and industry-celebrated project. Needless to say, that individual’s tenure with the company was cut short subsequent to this incident. This was a case of the Peter Principle in action. The person had been exposed as to their inability to perform outside the context of an academic environment, or in a slightly more complex context than the one inside of which they had learned. He had developed a skill in memorizing a procedure for an exam, but did not really understand what he had ‘learned’ – in the end spinning this as my fault. Such are the familiar tactics of negative Peters, and as well the script-following perdocent.
What therefore is (a) perdocent?
Perdocent
/PER-dŭ-sĕnt; from Latin perdoceo – teach, educate, drill, train/ – the state of pretense, lack in diligence, or intellectual compromise wherein one bears an inability to learn and apply, outside the context of a course of instruction. One who follows a rubric or procedure well and can pass an exam, however lacks true erudition or ability to recall or apply their learning outside such context. The belief that legitimate learning can only occur in an academic structured environment. The opposite of an autodidact or antonym of autodidactic. Also a method of rhetorical grandstanding, in that one may claim that they have not been given access to or been taught something, so therefore it is invalid or does not exist.
The Warning Flags of Perdocense
The means of detecting a perdocent may involve one or more of the following warning flags.
A professional whose greatest actual accomplishment over time was obtaining a degree.
A ginormous and well-concealed ego.
Rarely either an A or C student. Exploited the cheat or easier way to getting an acceptable grade.
Hides behind complex-looking equations/functions (usually representing simple relationships), employed to intimidate or as substitute for competence.
Has an oft-spoken-of hobby of an extremely lofty or time-engulfing nature (skydiving, tour surfing, motorcycle racing, band member, etc.) which often takes their attentions away from work. You could not fully understand their hobby.
Never misses a social event for this same hobby.
A pattern of avoidance of work tasks. Can’t do the work because you have not given him what he needs. It’s your fault really.
Well-honed subtle tactics in backstabbing peers/outsiders.
Attempts to recreate in the work environment their old high school or college fraternity/sorority atmosphere, or the last context in which they were in control.
A habit of pointing fingers, rather than circumspection.
Only applies ‘skepticism’ or doubt to that with which he disagrees.
A skill in manipulating organizational superiors into conflict, especially as a means to divert accountability from self.
Amazing skill in timing conflicts with required work tasks.
Fixated on how to punctuate the sentence correctly; fails to understand the sentence itself.
Abject fear of being seen as making a mistake. Joins the correct clique.
Makes or implies the syllogism, “If __________ existed, I would know about it.”
Is happy to review others’ work, but never to create their own.
Appeals to science, or lofty institutions of which you are not part.
Senses which beliefs the most powerful group is invested in, and adopts those same beliefs.
Little sincere work or ability inside inquiry or critical questions.
Perpetually in critique mode, as opposed to ‘how can I help?’
Does not know what value is, not great at budgeting or purchasing decisions.
Meticulously avoids circumstances which expose their lack of ability.
Maintains an air of ‘I know how it really should be done’. But never seems to actually do it.
Always and intentionally the outsider to a project team. Habitually diverted from task by something you are not privy to or do not understand.
Sick or facing a personal disaster/injury all throughout the workday, miraculously healed for dinner/entertaining of clients.
Gossips, not for epicariacy, but rather as a weapon and for control.
Is vengeance-minded, unless vengeance activity means extra work.
Is intolerant and loud about the one thing they do understand.
Fails to ‘understand’ any time they do not want to understand.
Their past accomplishments are always greater than the now at hand.
Uses humor as an artifice of attack, or at inappropriate times when seriousness and focus are called for.
Rarely holds a job more than two years.
Habitual employment of intimidating buzzwords as opposed to precision of language.
Grammar and logic are often non-sequitur, replete with subject/object confusion.
References are from far back in time, as opposed to recent.
Always signing up for training courses, never applies one to actual work.
Frequently appeals to authority and credential.
Succeeds on how he wears a suit, or on his perceived potential alone.
Regards those around him as culturally inferior – especially those who might ask him to do work or be held accountable.
The perdocent can be both the B-student who fails to replicate or apply such academic success into real life; or as well can be that person who exploits the unstructured nature of a challenge, as a means to avoid doing any hard work inside it. Both foibles fall under the guise of ‘not having been trained how to do this’.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
~ James Joyce, Author
I would rather work with someone who failed three or four times and then got it right, than either the person who knew the right answer from the beginning or regarded the task as beneath them.
~ The Ethical Skeptic
Which serves to then introduce a character very familiar to those who undertake the risk of research and inference.
The High & Low Poseur
If you select A, then B was the right choice. If you select B, then A was the right choice. If you select for A and B, then you are over-complicating. They have a counter for every answer, in their memorized quiver. This style of poseur is afraid to risk being wrong and/or lacks the skill to create their own work. They always know ‘how it should really be done’, but never can seem to actually do it themself – and rather, only bear the ability to critique ideas they disdain or the work of others they dislike.
An ethical skeptic in contrast, makes many mistakes in the process of creative hard work and skills applied inside of novel asymmetric challenge. But she actually learns the subject as well through this process. She will be made fun-of or treated as an outsider by the perdocent. Her mistakes however, become occult trophies earned along a pathway to true success, one which the perdocent will never realize.
