cross-posted from Progressive Junction
When the monkey rings the bell, it gets a pellet. It doesn't care how it got the pellet, it just enjoys the pellet.
Imagine you have a mental illness. Your illness convinces you that you are a John Galt or a Howard Roark, a Randian hero whose morality is so clear, whose proficiency is so divine that no amount of compensation could possibly be worthy of your effort. You have to be pleaded with, begged, and showered with gifts for merely doing your job. And despite the results of your work, whether you brought fame and success or shame and extinction to your company, you are entitled to riches for merely performing, and not necessarily for producing.
This disease exists, and it compels its bearer to deny their own or sometimes others' replaceablity. It compels them to believe, like Pavlovian monkeys, that the mere act of ringing the bell earns them the pellet, and we have been feeding them for decades.
It's time to shock the monkey.
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