The Asymmetric Cycle: Why Those With Power Never See What They've Started

There’s a particular pattern of human interaction that plays out thousands of times daily, in apartments and offices, in families and institutions, yet remains curiously unnamed despite its ubiquity. Someone with power treats others poorly. Those others retaliate in small, often petty ways. The person with power, genuinely baffled, concludes that people are simply bad and continues their poor treatment, which generates more retaliation. The cycle deepens, and everyone involved feels justified in their behavior.

What makes this pattern fascinating isn’t just its prevalence, but its asymmetry. One party has the power to break the cycle. The other does not. And the party with power never realizes this.

The Invisible First Domino

Consider a landlord who, to save money, refuses to run the air conditioning adequately and provides barely functional cooking gas. When his tenants respond by leaving lights on unnecessarily, running water longer than needed, or otherwise failing to be mindful of utilities, he’s genuinely confused and irritated. From his perspective, he’s just being reasonable about costs. Why are his tenants so thoughtless?

What he cannot see, or will not see, is the first domino. He pushed it when he decided his tenants should suffer in the heat. He pushed it when he made cooking a frustrating ordeal. But in his mental map of causation, these facts don’t exist as causes. They’re just the situation. The baseline. The way things are.

The tenants’ behavior, by contrast, appears in his mind as a choice, an act of character, a moral failing. He has committed the fundamental attribution error in its purest form: his own actions are invisible to him as actions, while others’ reactions appear as free-standing decisions that reveal their essential nature.

Why Goodness Doesn’t Work as Leverage

The asymmetry becomes clearer when we ask: what if the tenants decided to be good anyway? What if, despite the heat and the broken gas, they meticulously conserved electricity?

The answer is: nothing would change. The landlord already has what he wants from this scenario, which is lower utility bills. The tenants’ cooperation doesn’t create pressure for improvement. It might even reinforce his view that the current conditions are acceptable, that people can manage just fine.

The landlord, however, holds different cards. If he improved conditions (reliable AC, functional appliances) he would likely see a shift in tenant behavior. Not because tenants are more moral, but because the structure of incentives would change. When your basic needs are met and someone treats you with dignity, reciprocity becomes possible. The social contract, which had dissolved, can reform.

The Corporate Theater

This dynamic reaches its fullest expression in employment. A company underpays, overworks, ignores safety concerns, and treats workers as interchangeable units. Workers respond predictably: they do the minimum, they stop innovating, they “quiet quit.”

Management, observing this, concludes: “Nobody wants to work anymore. This generation has no work ethic.”

The causal chain, from their perspective, begins with worker deficiency. Their own policies, the wages that haven’t kept pace with inflation or the eliminated pensions, these aren’t causes. These are just business realities, constraints, the way things have to be.

What makes the corporate version particularly insidious is the mechanism of turnover. A new employee arrives hopeful. The company’s systems grind them down. Eventually they leave, and management’s narrative is confirmed: “See? Nobody stays. Nobody’s committed.” The company never has to confront the pattern because the evidence keeps walking out the door.

The Self-Sustaining Nature of Blindness

Why does the person with power remain blind to their role? Several mechanisms sustain this blindness:

• Insulation from consequences: The landlord doesn’t experience the heat. The executive doesn’t work the understaffed shift.
• Confirmation through turnover: Each person who leaves can be dismissed as an individual failure rather than a data point in a pattern.
• Lack of structural pressure: Most importantly, they don’t have to see it because they don’t have to change. Power insulates them from the need to learn.
• Narrative coherence: It’s psychologically easier to believe “people are lazy” than to believe “I am creating the conditions that make people behave this way.”

The Question of Leverage

This brings us to the most uncomfortable question: what should the powerless party do?

The moral advice is clear: be the bigger person, take the high road. But this advice ignores the reality of leverage. When someone has power over your daily conditions and uses it to make your life worse, voluntary kindness isn’t nobility; it is just subsidizing their bad behavior at your own expense.

The only leverage available to the powerless is often exactly what they’re doing: making the power-holder’s cost-cutting backfire. It’s not the high road. It’s not even particularly satisfying. But it’s the only tool available when asking nicely has been tried and failed, when good behavior has been interpreted as acceptance rather than as a gift that might be reciprocated.

Why This Matters

The party with structural power imagines they’re in a symmetrical relationship where both sides could choose to be better. But the relationship isn’t symmetrical. One party controls the baseline conditions. The other party can only react to those conditions.

The tragedy is that breaking the cycle is usually simple. Treat people with dignity. Meet their basic needs. Create conditions where cooperation benefits everyone rather than just you. But this simplicity requires something difficult: the recognition that you were wrong, that you caused this, that the first domino was yours.

The cycle continues, sustained not by complexity but by a blindness that power makes comfortable to maintain.