Where to start with a series about control, scarcity, change and the strange ways people affect the environments around them
I didn’t really set out to write a five-part series about human behaviour.
I was trying to make sense of something much narrower, behaviour I had encountered in relationships and at work that seemed contradictory when I looked at individual incidents, but considerably less contradictory once I stopped looking at them individually.
That first piece led into another, then into scarcity and abundance, then into the way environments alter what we think we can see, and eventually into a question I had not expected to end up asking at all: what does the opposite look like? If scarcity produces one set of behaviours, what happens when somebody appears not to be operating from scarcity in the first place?
By then I had five pieces which clearly belonged together, although they approach the same territory from quite different directions.
They can be read in order, and there is a progression through them, but I am not sure that is necessarily the best way for everybody to read them. One of the advantages of writing them separately is that there are now several different ways into the same argument.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Hiding in Plain Sight is where the whole thing started.
I had spent years assuming that if somebody knew their behaviour was unacceptable, the obvious thing to do would be to hide it. What bothered me was repeatedly encountering something almost opposite to that. People could apparently tell you quite a lot about what they were doing while simultaneously creating enough confusion around it that the obvious interpretation became difficult to accept.
That took me into manipulation, gaslighting, arbitrary information control and the problems with trying to reduce something as complicated as narcissistic behaviour to a checklist.
The more useful idea became the cluster. A single strange interaction does not tell you very much, but patterns accumulate, and history begins to matter more than presentation.
So this is probably where I would start if the thing troubling you is recognition itself. Something feels wrong, perhaps several things feel wrong, but every individual incident still seems explainable.
The Parasite and the Host
The Parasite and the Host came from trying to understand what happens once those behaviours become a relationship rather than a collection of incidents.
This was where my earlier thinking about scarcity suddenly became useful in a way I had not expected. Behaviour that can look like enormous confidence from outside starts to look quite different if attention, reassurance, status, money, influence and even another person’s independence are experienced as things of which there can never quite be enough.
It also changed how I thought about vulnerability. We tend to picture manipulative or abusive people looking for weakness, whereas my experience has often suggested something less obvious. Strong, capable people contain useful resources: stability, money, reassurance, connections, practical competence, loyalty.
Their strength may be part of the attraction.
That creates a different question. Not simply whether somebody supports you, but what their support leaves you able to do afterwards. Are you becoming stronger and more independent, or merely well enough to continue sustaining the relationship?
If Hiding in Plain Sight is about recognising the pattern, this is about why the attachment can remain so difficult to understand even after you have begun to see it.
The Ecology of Scarcity
The Ecology of Scarcity was where the argument escaped from relationships and became organisational.
It began with two memories from school and something I had never properly connected to work before: how much of what we think we see in another person is actually supplied by the environment around them.
Organisations manufacture stories constantly. Someone is difficult. Someone isn’t commercial. A team never delivers. A supplier is unreliable. An idea has already been tried. Sometimes those judgements are entirely correct, but repetition does something strange to them. An interpretation slowly acquires the weight of fact, and eventually nobody is particularly incentivised to look again.
Scarcity makes that more interesting because established stories can protect established arrangements. Reconsidering somebody’s value might also mean reconsidering who gets authority, who gets credit, who controls information or whether something apparently worthless has been mispriced all along.
This sits closest to my earlier piece on lean as a stabiliser between scarcity and abundance, but the emphasis is different. It is less about scarcity as a constraint and more about what scarcity does to perception.
If your interest is organisational politics, reputation, overlooked capability or why successful businesses can become strangely bad at recognising new value, this is probably the most direct way in.
Punctuated Change
By the time I got to Punctuated Change, I had started wondering whether I was making another assumption without really noticing it.
We tend to assume that something which took decades to form must also take decades to change. I am increasingly unsure about that.
The analogy that helped me think about it came from evolution and the idea of punctuated equilibrium: long periods of relative stability can be interrupted by much faster periods of visible change. Nothing magical has happened. The system simply stopped being as stable as it looked.
Psychological adaptations may sometimes behave in much the same way. A way of understanding the world can survive for years, not necessarily because it is healthy, but because it continues doing whatever job it originally evolved to do. Then something happens that it cannot absorb.
The question that interested me was not really whether crisis causes change. Clearly it does, sometimes catastrophically. It was what happens in the period immediately afterwards, when an old assumption has become unstable but whatever replaces it has not quite settled yet.
That piece is probably the furthest from where the series began, but I think it matters because otherwise scarcity risks sounding like a permanent characteristic of somebody rather than an adaptation that may itself have conditions.
Social Gravity
Social Gravity came almost as a relief after four pieces spent looking at control, scarcity, hierarchy and defensive behaviour.
I started noticing people who seemed to acquire influence without spending very much energy asserting it.
That is surprisingly difficult to describe because dominance is much easier to see. The person controlling the meeting, guarding information or constantly demonstrating their expertise gives us visible signs of power. Someone who does not need to do those things is much harder to measure.
The phrase social gravity came from watching people who seemed to alter a social environment without visibly pushing against it. Other people made room for them, listened to them or adjusted around them, but there was very little sense that authority was being imposed.
I do not know whether social gravity is a useful psychological construct, and the article does not pretend that it is. What interests me is the contrast.
Scarcity seems to make power expensive because it has to be continuously maintained. Somebody else gaining attention, status or credit creates a threat which then has to be managed. Abundance appears to make more of those interactions cheap.
That is where the series ends, not because it provides an answer to the earlier pieces, but because it suggests another direction to look.
Where they join
I only realised fairly late that these pieces were turning into a series. They started with narcissistic behaviour, moved through relationships and organisations, then into crisis, adaptation and authority. I would not have planned that route in advance, but looking back there is a fairly obvious thread running through all of them.
They are all, in different ways, about the models people build of themselves, other people and the world around them, and what happens once those models start shaping behaviour. Scarcity seems to narrow those models quite aggressively. Information becomes leverage, status becomes territory, existing explanations become things worth protecting, and other capable people can start to look more like threats than opportunities.
What interests me now is what happens in the other direction. If scarcity narrows the field, abundance seems to create more room inside it: more room to reconsider somebody, to share information, to give away credit, to tolerate somebody else being capable, or simply to notice something that does not fit the story you already had.
I do not think these five pieces answer that particularly neatly, and I am not sure I would trust them if they did.
What they have done is give me several different ways of looking at the same problem, and made the question itself considerably more interesting.
