The myth that problems of a society or an organization - corruption, bureaucracy, cruelty, unreasonableness - are the results of the intermediaries and the leader in question is not responsible for it. The king's intentions are good but the corrupted local lords are exploiting the peasants. Moreover, they are obscuring the good king from seeing the reality. Only if the king has known, he would have punished the local lords and restore justice. > [!quote] [[The Age of Revolution]] - [[The Age of Revolution#(8) Land]] > but the ideal of the just king who, if only he knew, would punish the transgressions of his underlings and lords ... ==For surely it was against the real wish of Christ and king that the peasants was poor and landless==. > [!quote] [[Beyond the Wall]] - on Stalin's purges > An even more powerful and enduring idea was that =='wise father Stalin' did not know anything about the excessive violence his underlings committed in his name==. This applies in tech companies too - the "god-emperor founder-CEO intends well, but it's the misaligned executives and middle managers who are introducing bureaucracy and BigCo cultures". In many cases, the frustration surfaces during a Q&A session of a company all-hands, where employees bring in their grievances. It's akin to a medieval court, belief that the king can undo the wrong singlehandedly while bypassing all the system.