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A Beginners Guide to Good Grovelment [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-08
The Very First Rule of Groveling:
Feel No Shame
Face it, grovelment is a shameful and humiliating activity. To succeed at it, you must take pride that you are embracing something greater, higher and better than you. Approach the work holeheartedly. (No sic.) It is not for amateurs and its craft cannot be learned on the job or after the fact. It is simple self-protection to remove all judgment about yourself and what you will come to accept. Note: “to accept” is an important concept because it will not be you who drives the terms of your ultimate grovelation.
One more thing: don’t believe your groveling will ever be over. You will have begun traveling down somebody else’s road, one with no foreseeable end to what could be expected of you.
Unless you are well enough positioned to sidestep the process, you will audition before a minion to assess your potential for self-abasement. Here, you demonstrate that you will be bringing to the grovel patch everything you have and then some.
The best practices of Good Grovelment cull out those who will be shuffled off to fawn and kowtow to lessers. (By the way, even at this preliminary stage, understand there will be no withdrawing. Departing the scene will only bring hazards.) What determines your acceptance as a grovelor worthy to be heard by the top has little to do with what you need, only what assets and urgencies you will be bringing to the bargain.
Toadies need not apply. Flatterings, blandishments, overt sycophancy — these can only go so far. What does work? Acknowledgment of the power differential, humility to accept a servile role, eager ingratiation. If you possess these attributes and thereby warranted access to the inner sanctum of patronage, effective tactics come next.
The term “grovel” originally meant abasements such as kneeling, bowing and scraping. Tactics such as these are insufficient today. What counts is a level of succumbing above mere abject physical deference — shared high ground. Your prostration will have to be psychic and on a plane of transcendent morality. Capped, of course, by unassailable fealty all the way to courtrooms if necessary and beyond them, if really necessary.
Some are fortunate to have honed groveling skills at institutions known for flexible standards. Law and accounting firms are exceptional examples, practiced at arranging and then dealing with ethical conundrums. Conflicts are rife because the interests of various clients are already not, ah, congruent. Wanting to have it both/all ways yet retaining clients by fencing them securely within its walled gardens, the firm erects walls of warnings writ bold. These are virtual barriers, true, paper-thin yet sustained by mutuality of obeisant trust. Gentlemen simply do not discuss matters on the other side(s) of the wall. The culture of these firms is what lends them, quite literally, to enable and perhaps enhance conflicting interests. This makes them ideal candidates from whom to require promiscuous grovelation of their own interests.
Other complex organizations engage and sustain flexibility with liberal high mindedness. Research institutions and intellectually sprawling encampments of allegedly higher learning are the best examples of these elite and mighty cultural multitudes. Some thing one of their appendages says or does will surely offend or undercut some one else somewhere, rendering the entire operation vulnerably to being leveraged for everything everywhere. There is no limit to the moving parts of rivalrous subdivisions and sponsorships, ego collisions and collusions. Opportunities abound to pit the priorities of one faction against those of others. The Chief of Grovelment needs merely to select winners and delight in others left behind.
Government agencies and departments are also ideal force multipliers subject to manipulation. Simply use techniques already prevalent in mainstream bureaucracies. Such as: Certainly, you can recoup funding for This Thing as soon as you have re-justified it and ceased doing that other thing. And so forth, again and again. The processes can be speeded up by starving budgets, redesigning mission statements, convening frequent evaluation sessions conducted by people from Elsewhere, constantly updating technology, relocating vital members of the group and reassigning them to new exigencies. The array of such tough-minded management techniques is endless.
As the early phases of grovelability approach a conclusion, how results are declared is of paramount importance: treat the appearance of the groveled-for actions as an inexorable fulfillment of greater goals. Goals which have been at once imperative and inevitable. And laudatory, as in taking these measures will allow us to achieve the most and highest good.
As you can see, this report is just the beginning. Surely, effective grovellors are reading this who have contributions to add!
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