Friday 2 February 2018

Dogs and canaries

The "canary in the coal mine" is a tired old phrase, but it describes something that was real. Although it's a long, long time since caged birds represented the cutting edge of mine safety equipment, the metaphor itself still makes sense. A gassed bird falling off its perch was an early warning of danger. That was a real thing that happened. But you can't really say the same for another clichéd animal metaphor, the one about this being a dog-eat-dog world. I mean, seriously?
Life is dog-eat-dog. Business is dog-eat-dog. Society apparently, is dog-eat-dog and of course the workplace, well, that’s dog-eat-dog. But here’s a question: When was the last time you saw a dog, eating a dog? Dogs, like humans, are social, pack animals that are predisposed to cooperation, but a certain type of indoctrination has led humans to the cynical belief that we are hardwired to cannibalise each other in a vain attempt to gain an advantage.
It's not that a dog would never eat another dog, but it's not the sort of thing that normally happens. If you see a documentary about a pack of wild dogs, the pack will probably be working together to hunt down other animals. If they start eating one another, you know something has gone very wrong (like an extreme drought wiping out most of the dogs' prey, leaving the starving predators with nothing to eat but each other).

A literal dog-eat-dog world isn't a thing, or at least not a normal one. It's more like a doggie dystopia, an extreme aberration that might happen in the aftermath of some terrible catastrophe.

If you catch someone claiming that it's a dog-eat-dog world, the phrase should put you on alert (like a canary dropping off its perch) that something's gone badly wrong, either with the situation, or with the speaker's assessment of the situation:
They survived by eating their dead. This probably shouldn't be your go-to example of standard human resources practice, or an acceptable metaphor for how a properly functioning organisation, or society, should look.
Of course, in most "dog-eat-dog worlds", people don't actually get as far as eating one another. The zero-sum war of all against all is fought over jobs, promotions, resources and status. But it's still a poor metaphor and a poorer philosophy of life. We don't yet live in a post-apocalyptic society, not that you'd know it from the abnormal behaviour of the people who fought like rats in a sack to secure a few reasonably-priced jars of branded chocolate spread in the Great Nutella Riots of 2018.

It truly was a dog-eat-dog world to the people elbowing one another aside to pillage the last sticky treats from the shelves of the Intermarché supermarket chain, but that wasn't because the people involved were clear-eyed pragmatists who'd leaned some tough lessons, courtesy of the University of Life. It was because they were idiots who needed to calm down and get a grip.

I'll say it again - if you think it's a dog-eat-dog world, there's something wrong either with your world, or with you.

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