| Point well taken about culture and great examples. I completely agree with your premise. However, tone is an extremely important part of cross-cultural training, and the tone of this article takes its premise from: _you may have a conflict of interest with group B_ to something between _group B is out to get you_ and _group B is evil_. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of this. > As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines. The original post has always had the exact paragraph that I derived my subtext from in it. Emphatic quotes are a bad habit of mine, so I removed those, but c'mon -- this is a pretty common grammar mistake and the sentence preceding it pretty clearly "implies" (emphatic quotes) that it's only my interpretation :) > That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here. Can you please explain how you would otherwise interpret the exact paragraph that I quoted? I'm usually pretty good at seeing the other side, but I genuinely can't see this one. Maybe it's because I've been in management too long (or maybe I'm too Canadian). Either way, I'm genuinely curious. I'll quote the paragraph again directly from the article for you: > Expert gaslighters, they are. What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs. Many of them are in the very classes that get abused by other people regularly. How can you honestly keep doing that job when you are just enabling the abusers? The only other interpretation I can think of is the author was referring to the people in the previous example. However, she switches from singular ("person A" / "person B") tense in the example to plural ("gaslighters" / "abusers") tense in this paragraph, so it's either an uncharacteristic grammar mistake or a generalization applied to a broader group. The generalization is that HR people are "gaslighters" and managers are "abusers". With that in mind, how would you interpret this sentence? "What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs." I can only see: _how can these people live with themselves_. How is that subtext not correct here? |
> How is that subtext not correct here?
The grammar is a little bit hard to parse in the original article, and I don't know the cultural context, so I don't so much have AN interpretation as a probabilistic cloud of possible interpretations.
The thing I would remember when reading anything like this is how much language means different things in different cultures:
1) Words like "racism," "white supremacy," "gaslighting," and "abuse" get tossed around a lot in younger, ultra-liberal circles. If I call someone conservative in their fifties a white supremacist, I won't be welcome back ever again. If I'm talking to a liberal 20-something, we're both expected to accept our white supremacy.
2) Positive / negative language varies between cultures. If an Eastern European says something is mediocre, they mean it's typical. If an American says the same, they mean it's bad. Some cultures use language in ways which are hyper-positive, and others, in ways which are hyper-negative. Acceptable degree of exaggeration varies too.
I recently had a "friendly" lawyer for an adversarial party provide me with some "friendly" legal advice (which was specifically that I had no case, and would be out both sides' legal fees if I went to court, and so on). They were lying. I knew that, and they knew that. This was an attorney for a megacorp, where I filed an arbitration complaint as a typical consumer (so they probably didn't know that I knew that they were lying).
With filters for how the author might be using language -- well within the norms of some cultures I've interacted with -- I didn't see this as going far beyond "If an opposing counsel tells you that you have no legal case, they might be lying to you."