A king is murdered by his son. The chronicler does not write Ajatasatru killed his father. The chronicler writes Ajatasatru killed an impersonal king who should give way to a more capable one. That single grammatical move — father to king, person to office — is the move on which the entire transformation runs. The father had a face. The king has a function. You can kill a function.
This is the mechanism R.G.H. Siu names with an Acton-riff so compressed it tends to scan past the reader before the second clause registers: "To gain power over people, depersonalize; to gain absolute power, depersonalize absolutely."1 He is not making a moral judgment. He is describing the operational gradient. Power scales with how thoroughly the operator can stop seeing the persons on the other end of the operation as persons. It begins, in Siu's own description, "subtly with a separation of 'we' from 'they.' 'We' are persons; 'they' are impersons. 'They' becomes the most important impersonal pronoun in the transformation equation of power."2
Then he quotes Franz Alexander, and the page hinges on the quote: "Conscience may be regarded as that portion of the human personality by which we identify ourselves with other people."3 Conscience is not a separate faculty installed somewhere in the psyche. Conscience is the continuation, into action, of the recognition this is a person. Where the recognition stops, conscience stops too. Depersonalization is not, in this framing, the suppression of conscience. It is the upstream withdrawal of the recognition on which conscience runs. Once they are them, there is nothing to suppress. Conscience never had jurisdiction over impersons in the first place.
Siu insists the work is done at the level of grammar before it is done at the level of decision. "The so-called 'tough' decisions come much easier when thinking in terms of impersonalities than personalities. Management is no longer viewed as exploitation of flesh and blood but as efficient use of materiel and resources."4 The hard decision was never hard in the first place. The hard decision became hard the moment someone in the room let flesh and blood back into the frame. Block that re-entry and the hardness does not appear.
Siu compresses the resulting principle into a single line that should be lifted verbatim and held in front of any operator who claims they are simply being practical: "The engines of power always run smoother when built of impersonal modules than of personal beings."4 The engineer-philosopher reaches for a mechanical metaphor because the mechanical metaphor is exactly the phenomenon. Modules are interchangeable. Modules do not bleed. Modules do not have children. An engine of power that is built of modules can be tuned for output without registering inputs of pain.
The cases Siu reaches for are arranged on a deliberate spectrum, ancient to bureaucratic. Ajatasatru in the fifth century BCE: he murdered his father by murdering an impersonal office.5 A twelfth-century religious leader writes to his bishops to "cause the princes and people to suppress them with the sword" — and the them is heretics, not human beings tied to stakes.6 A 1974 director of budget and management explains proposed welfare cuts: "these are the old, sick, handicapped, children and veterans — you can think of the politics of it."7 Different millennia, different costumes, identical move. The personal pronoun has been replaced with the impersonal noun, and the operation runs.
Siu's deepest point in Op#77 is not that depersonalization is an old technique. It is that the modern setting is structurally conducive to it. Two engines drive the acceleration.
The first is the country-store-to-department-store collapse, which Siu lifts from Erich Fromm and quotes at length. The independent retail store treated each customer as somebody who mattered: "his individual purchase was important to the owner of the store; he was received like somebody who mattered, his wishes were studied; the very act of buying gave him a feeling of importance and dignity." The big-town department store has overwritten that. "The customer is of no importance as an individual. He is merely 'a' customer... As an abstract customer he is important; as a concrete customer he is utterly unimportant. There is nobody who is glad about his coming, nobody who is particularly concerned about his wishes."8 The transaction now runs between an abstraction and an abstraction. The face has dropped out of the exchange.
C. Wright Mills follows by extending the same point upward to the institution itself. The store has become "the biggest bazaar in the world" and "it is hard to say who owns it." Ownership has dissolved across thousands of fractional shareholders, no single human consciousness contains the operation: "There are managers of this and managers of that, and there are managers of managers, but when any of them dies or disappears, it doesn't make any difference. The store goes on."9 Even the we on the operator side has dissolved. There is no person at the top. The operation runs between they and they, with no we anywhere in the system.
The second engine is the man-machine system. Siu's example is Apollo 11. The lunar landing required "an extremely complex system — not of men with men — but of men with machines." Compatibility is the operational requirement. "Since the machine is not able to behave like a human being, the human being must then behave like a machine. He must adopt many of its characteristics. The most important ones for man-machine purposes are standardization, mass-producibility, and replaceability."10 Then comes the line that is the page's hidden punchline: "These very characteristics constitute the essential elements of depersonalization as well." The technical requirements of operating modern systems are the same requirements as operating modern power. The human being has been made compatible with the machine, which means the human being has been made compatible with the operator's frame. The depersonalization is not added on top of the system. It is the system.
The most quietly devastating sentence in Op#77 sits between paragraphs and reads as throwaway: "Yet depersonalization is rarely reciprocal in social affairs. Herein lies the nagging asymmetry in our depersonalized system of social equity."11 Then Siu walks the asymmetry through three cases.
A million French and German soldiers personally suffer and die at Verdun. "They" at government headquarters respond impersonally — adjusting casualty lists, shaking "their" heads at the inability to make a breach in the impersonal enemy's lines. A plant manager personally suffers a heart attack from his driving work for the company. "They" in the executive suite respond impersonally, transferring funds from the salaries account to the sick payments account. Rioters spit at the policeman as an impersonal representative of the Establishment — but the policeman personally feels the slimy sputum; the policeman clubs the rioters as impersonal breakers of the law — but the rioters personally bleed.11
The asymmetry is the whole point. Power flows toward the side of the encounter that is operating in the impersonal frame. The side that experiences the encounter personally — the bleeding rioter, the dying soldier, the ill manager — bears the cost. The side that experiences the encounter impersonally — they, the executive suite, the headquarters — extracts the gain. They never bleed. We always do. The depersonalization is not an aesthetic preference. It is the seat of the extraction.
Siu closes Op#77 with a parable that the reader should not miss. From Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata: the hero Tancred kills an enemy in armor, tears off the mask, and finds the face of his beloved Clorinda underneath. He grieves, buries her, wanders into a magic forest. He slashes wildly at a tall tree. Blood gushes from it. Clorinda's voice cries from inside the wood that he has wounded his beloved yet again.12
The image is doing two things at once. It is naming what the operator does — strikes at impersonal categories and discovers the personal too late, every time. And it is naming the recoil — that the personal does not stay buried, that the forest has the beloved imprisoned in it, that every subsequent impersonal blow lands again on the person the operator loves. The depersonalization protocol works on the target. It does not work on the operator's psyche. The operator's psyche is the magic forest in which everything keeps turning out to have been the beloved.
This is why Siu, the engineer-philosopher, mostly writes in flat operational prose and then suddenly reaches for a sixteenth-century romantic epic to land the moral. The mechanism is real. The engines of power do run smoother on impersonal modules. And the operator who runs them carries Clorinda in the forest. Both are true. The taxonomy of power-craft has to hold both or it lies.
Siu, Franz Alexander, Erich Fromm, and C. Wright Mills are all working the same phenomenon from different professional vantage points, and the way the four sit together is itself the argument.
Franz Alexander, the psychoanalyst, is doing the micro-level work: conscience is identification with other persons, full stop. The mechanism of moral action runs through the recognition of personhood. Strip the recognition and you have not damaged conscience, you have removed its substrate. Fromm, the humanistic psychologist, is doing the cultural-critique work: modern commercial life has industrialized the stripping. The country-store-to-department-store collapse is not a side-effect of economic scale; it is the experience of being commodified into an abstract customer whose concrete face is operationally irrelevant. Mills, the sociologist, is doing the institutional-architecture work: the same collapse runs all the way up to corporate ownership, where no person owns the bazaar and the bazaar runs without anyone in particular at the top.
What Siu adds — and where the convergence breaks productively — is the operational reading. Where Fromm and Mills are diagnosing alienation as a problem to be solved, and Alexander is diagnosing the prerequisite condition for moral action, Siu reads the same phenomenon as a power-amplification mechanism that competent operators should recognize and use. The convergence is the description: all four agree the depersonalization is real, it is structural to modernity, and it operates by reducing flesh-and-blood persons to abstract categories. The split is in what to do about it. Fromm wants to recover the country store. Mills wants to expose the bazaar. Alexander wants to restore the recognition. Siu wants to deploy the bazaar against rivals.
The split reveals something none of them states alone: depersonalization is simultaneously a humanistic catastrophe and a power-craft instrument, and the same modernity that the humanists are trying to reverse is the modernity that hands the operators their most powerful tool. The four-way author convergence is therefore not a chorus. It is a stuck argument over a single mechanism that everyone sees and only Siu is willing to recommend using. Reading them together is reading the disagreement that defines twentieth-century writing on power.
Op#77 sits at a seam in the vault because the mechanism cannot be understood through either constituent domain alone. The psychological literature describes the we/they split as a neurobiological default that operates before conscious thought; the behavioral-mechanics literature describes the operational deployment that scales the same default into industrial-grade power. Cannot be understood without both the psychological mechanism of we/they identity-collapse AND the BM lens explaining how it scales to absolute power.
Psychology: In-Group/Out-Group Mechanisms — How the Brain Draws the Us/Them Line — Sapolsky's neuroscience completes Siu's grammatical observation by giving it a measurable substrate. The amygdala has tagged a face as us or them within fifty milliseconds, before consciousness has registered the person exists. Tajfel's minimal group paradigm shows that the categorization fires on essentially nothing — assign people to groups by an arbitrary dot-counting task and within minutes they begin allocating resources to their fictitious group. The brain categorizes first, evaluates second, rationalizes third. Siu's we/they is not a propaganda construct overlaid on a neutral substrate; it is the cognitive default the operator has merely not interrupted. What this reveals when you read both pages together: depersonalization is not work the operator does to the target. It is work the operator declines to do on himself. The neurobiology will categorize automatically; conscience requires the slower prefrontal regulation that re-personalizes the they before action. Siu's "absolute depersonalization" is the operator who has stopped doing the regulation. That is not a moral failure committed at the moment of the tough decision; it is a developmental refusal made long upstream.
Behavioral Mechanics: Dehumanization Granularity — The Necessity of Each Sequential Step and Enemy as Abstraction — Sam Keen's seven-step progression (Stranger → Aggressor → Barbarian → Animal → Insect → Germ → Statistic) is the operational unfolding of Siu's gradient. Where Siu states "to gain power over people, depersonalize; to gain absolute power, depersonalize absolutely," Keen specifies the seven distinct moves the operator must walk through to get from the first clause to the second. Each step is psychologically necessary before the next; each makes a corresponding scale of action permissible. Enemy as Abstraction is the terminal step — 5,000 casualties with no face attached — which is precisely the OMB-director frame from Siu's 1974 example, applied to a different domain. What this convergence reveals: Siu's gradient is not continuous but step-wise, and the BM literature has done the work of naming the steps. The Tasso forest is the recoil of having walked the steps too far without the operator noticing he was doing so. The granularity is the operator's permission structure. Depersonalize once and you can manage; depersonalize seven times and you can bomb. Reading the three pages together produces what neither does alone — Siu names the gradient, Keen names the steps on the gradient, and the synthesis tells the operator exactly which step he is on right now.
For practitioners who must operate within institutional power without losing sight of what they are doing:
1. Audit your own pronouns. When you describe a coming decision, do you say the people who will be affected or do you say the affected segment / the user base / the stakeholder population / the casualty estimate? The pronoun audit is the cheapest diagnostic available. The grammatical move precedes the action. You can catch yourself at the level of grammar before you catch yourself at the level of action, and grammar is reversible at zero cost.
2. Reinsert the face at the moment of the tough decision. Siu's exact diagnostic: the so-called "tough" decisions come much easier when thinking in terms of impersonalities. The inverse is the intervention. When a decision feels easier than it should, ask whether the ease came from a sound argument or from a pronoun-substitution. If the ease evaporates when you put a single named person at the bottom of the spreadsheet, the ease was depersonalization, not analysis.
3. Check whether the asymmetry is running. Siu's Verdun triad: they respond impersonally, we feel personally. Ask which side of the asymmetry your role places you on for this specific decision. If you are on the impersonal side and the cost falls on the personal side, you are the headquarters in the case. The question is not whether to act — sometimes the headquarters has to act — the question is whether to act while pretending the asymmetry is symmetric. The pretense is the corruption.
4. Notice the modern accelerants in your own environment. The man-machine compatibility requirements — standardization, mass-producibility, replaceability — install themselves into job descriptions and performance metrics quietly. When you find yourself behaving like a module rather than a person toward your subordinates, the operator's frame has gotten into your interior and depersonalized your own conduct. The recovery is the country-store move at small scale: name one subordinate, study one wish, treat one transaction as if it mattered to a specific human face.
5. Do not skip the Tasso step. The forest is real. Operators who run the protocol successfully accumulate Clorinda in the trees. The operator who refuses to acknowledge the recoil eventually pays the recoil at scale, often as a late-career collapse or a private psychological breakdown. The protocol's longevity in any single life depends on a private practice of re-personalization that the public role does not perform. Siu does not say this directly; the parable says it for him.
If conscience is, as Franz Alexander wrote, that portion of the human personality by which we identify ourselves with other people, then the entire architecture of modern impersonal life — corporate ownership without owners, customer service without service, casualty arithmetic without bodies — is structurally engineered to disable conscience without ever asking it for permission. The operator does not have to override his conscience to run the protocol. The protocol has been pre-installed by the surrounding system. What Siu is telling competent operators is that the work has already been done for them; what he is telling everyone else is that conscience is not something one has and then optionally listens to. Conscience is something one practices, against a structural pull toward the impersonal frame that has been built into the world. Stop practicing and the conscience is gone. The depersonalization protocol reaches absolute completion not because the operator is monstrous but because nothing in his daily life requires him to keep re-personalizing the others. The most dangerous operator is therefore not the unusual sociopath. The most dangerous operator is the ordinary executive whose institutional environment has done the depersonalization for him, leaving him only the residual technical decisions.
*PP Op#79 names an inverse: "The less of the world you crave to dominate, the more personal your human relations can be. You then perceive how dripping wet are human tears, how infectiously delightful the laughter."14 If the inverse is real, then ambition and the capacity for personal relation move on opposite axes. Where does this place the person who has both ambition and a desire for personal relation, and what is the actual decision they are making by the choices they make on each axis?*
The Tasso forest is the operator's psychological cost for running the protocol. If the cost is real and accumulates, then the protocol has a structural sustainability problem at the level of any individual operator's life. What does it look like to run the protocol with a deliberate Clorinda-management practice — a private discipline of re-personalization that prevents the forest from becoming uninhabitable? Has any historical operator of scale demonstrated this, or do they all eventually walk into the forest?
Siu's most quietly subversive move is to recommend the protocol while including the Tasso parable as its closer. Read straight, the spec is operational; read with the parable, the spec is a warning that pretends to be operational. Which read does Siu intend, and does it matter — given that practitioners will read the spec and not the parable, and inherit the protocol without its embedded brake?