When Does A Group Of People Become Evil?

First, a child is born. Then, it grows, develops, and eventually, it becomes a grown-up. Whenever the kid is small, we can forgive them for almost any disobedience or mistake. But once they grow up, we expect them to exhibit more and more responsibility.

Finally, once they reach the magic age of 18, they reach legal responsibility for their actions. And, misbehavior can result in public ostracism and have legal consequences.

We often develop a similar attitude to businesses. Whenever we see a fresh sole proprietor sweating around their little infant business, we use to cheer and support them — even when they make mistakes and shame themselves for poor planning and customer service, they apologize for the lack of experience in business and operations, and we rush to say, “No problem, brother. Keep on going!”

But when it comes to growing a business, namely hiring first employees, increasing the revenue, and building the structure inside the company, we start looking at the same person in a much more demanding and critical way.

Once they slowly increase their revenue and become tycoons, they are no longer perceived as humans. All of a sudden, we lose all the trust and sympathy in the very person whom we use to cheer so dearly just a few years before.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Case.

One prominent example of such a once-loved now-hated individual is the one and only Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook (recently rebranded into Meta). Just 15 years ago, he used to be a talented teen working hard on his innovative platform.

In 2011, at the time the award-winning movie “The Social Network” was released, Zuckerberg was still a pop-culture icon, as a nerdy, insecure teen who outwitted and outsmarted his competitors, and grew into a successful entrepreneur and a tough businessman through specific career management.

Today, just a decade later, he is a subject of public hate more than ever before. Partially, it is due to the mistakes he made in the past, including multiple counts of trading his users’ data, the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal in the presidential elections 2016, and manipulative PR decisions such as “donating” part of his wealth which was, in fact, a strategic move to reduce his family’s tax burden.

And partially, it is due to the general sentiment. On the one hand, young people today dream about financial independence even though they have the motivation to work harder.

On the other hand though, the wealthy are constantly put in a bad light in the mass media, ostracized for the bare fact of being wealthy, turned into memes (with special attention to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk), and laughed at on a regular basis.

When Facebook’s stock price recently dropped by 26% in one day, the whole internet celebrated. What happened over the past decade? From a role model, Zuckerberg slowly sledges into a massive joke.

How Companies and Employers Are Perceived.

Similar to a sole proprietor, whenever a group of young people starts a startup, they are just a bunch of dreamers whom we would like to see succeed. But just a decade or two decades later, once they become shareholders and board members of a corporation, they turn into evil in the eyes of public opinion. Why does this happen?

In the eyes of public opinion, every growing organization sooner or later becomes evil. This is partially due to the fact that organizations, or faceless groups of people, are harder to identify with than individuals.

Anonymity always decreases the sense of responsibility and provokes more aggressive behaviors towards the other party (which also causes lots of trouble in online communication today). Hence, since the board of the company is no longer perceived as humans, but rather, as anonymous “them,” it is easier to throw stones at them — or rather, as we should say, at “it.”

What The Media Won’t Tell You: Most Entrepreneurs Are Good, Hard-Working People.

As a matter of fact, most startups fail on the first go (about a 90% failure rate, according to research). To make it as an entrepreneur in the long term, you need to put your basic human sense of security at risk and grind for many, many years before you can eventually reach career management goals and life stability.

This is a long and painful process — and many people never make it, eventually, despite multiple attempts. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the sense of safety is the second most fundamental human need after physiological needs. And, entrepreneurs need to give that one up.

This is not possible without proper motivation or answering how to find the motivation to work. Therefore, most company founders have high goals, not just material goals.

The mission-driven approach is the only way to get through the years of grind without burnout. Besides, there are better — safer and more comfortable — ways to get wealthy.

As recent research has demonstrated, the majority of American millionaires are employees who understand the concept of compound interest rather than entrepreneurs or high-paid executives (the study was described in detail in the blog post “Will Your Boss Ever Make You Happy? On Salary Versus Wealth”).

And of course, the media — often sponsored by the government — don’t have any interest in inducing good feelings about other people, especially the wealthy and people with high social status. We are programmed to be poor.

And of course, your manager or the founder of the company you are working for might not be a naturally gifted manager. They might be flawed and make a lot of mistakes at work. But most likely, they are not nearly as evil as they are pictured in the media.