What Makes Toxic People Charismatic
We love certainty, and bullies are certainty in human form
The only bosses you hear about right now are the charismatic bullies. Earlier this month, former employees of The Ellen Show accused Ellen DeGeneres of creating an abusive work environment. In June, Bon Appetit editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport resigned after a photo surfaced of him in brownface, prompting the magazine’s staff to publish an apology for a “toxic, top-down culture” of racism. This past December, Steph Korey, CEO of the luggage startup Away, stepped down amid reports of what the Verge described as “culture of intimidation and constant surveillance.”
The biggest bully of them all may be on TV. For those who didn’t spend the back half of 2019 talking nonstop about the HBO series Succession, let me fill you in: The show follows a family of media moguls vying to replace their arrogant but physically feeble patriarch, Logan Roy. Roy is a cunning leader, charming when he wants to be, and seemingly unshakably confident in his ability to helm Waystar Royco despite concerns about his health, but most of his power is derived from verbally, physically, and emotionally abusing everyone around him — a pattern that his children repeat, to varying lesser extents, in their own professional and personal relationships. The Roy family dynamic is often cringe-inducing…
