Lies, Manipulation, and the Silent Cult

The elephant in the office.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Before my awakening, I spent over 20 years in America’s corporate world. I worked for business firms, start-ups, law firms, a medical school, medical practices, and finally fintech. I spent years in each sector, worked my way up, and then left, always for the same reasons. The C-suite executive office is a gated community for the elite, and if I wanted in, I would have had to sell my soul. What I found most interesting is that instead of corporations building relationships with their employees because they need their talent, loyalty and creativity to exceed, they build momentum around fear. It is the ultimate gaslighting experience in existence today.

Our entire corporate model of boosting the economy is hanging by a thread because we rely on trauma to keep employees from leaving instead of building resilience. Fear of instability, burnout, debt, and loss of healthcare are used as invisible chains, conditioning people to stay in systems that drain them. Rather than investing in human sustainability, purpose, well-being, and growth, we reward overwork and silence dissent. An economy built on survival mode cannot innovate, heal, or endure. Resilience creates loyalty; trauma only creates compliance.

It wasn’t always like this, though. There was pride in working for the same company for over 30 years and retiring with a work family. Today employees are jumping from one job to another chasing the invisible carrot stick and fumbling their entire existence on a “what if.”

How did we get here? Let’s go back a bit.

Once upon a time, there lived Katharine Cook Briggs, who in the late 1940s decided to study personalities. In her infinite wisdom, she became a dedicated learner of Carl Jung’s “theory” of personality. Her focus was to place personality traits within psychology and deliver career-oriented, simple, and deployable personality types in order to help place people in job markets after WWII.

As the rise of feminism burst at every seam, around 1962 the first Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) emerged what I call corporate indoctrination. The MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is a personality assessment that categorizes people into 16 types based on four preference pairs, Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving, claiming to describe how they perceive the world and make decisions. Interestingly enough, Katharine’s daughter, Isabel, took over her mother’s work in later years and introduced the MBTI to corporations and colleges to help build momentum in leadership, support the rise of corporate structures, and advance communication training, executive coaching, and team dynamics.

Neither of the women ever earned a degree in psychology or behavioral health. Katharine did attend college, but she dropped out. Not so ironically, her daughter Isabel earned a degree in political science. The MBTI was developed by a mother and daughter without any formal education in psychology, reviewed research, or clinical deliverables. How did they do it? They delivered it as a cognitive tool designed to help corporations grow. Companies were hungry for economic stability after WWII, and the MBTI was packaged as a tool for success simple, scalable, and non-threatening.

It did not challenge power structures or demand accountability. Instead, it offered order, predictability, and a language that translated human complexity into something manageable. In a time of rebuilding, that was exactly what corporations were willing to buy, and boy did they buy it all.

Around the same time in the 1970s companies were suddenly facing shifts in gender dynamics, workforce participation, and social expectations. More women began to join the work force. The MBTI became a tool to translate these fears into “personality management”, allowing corporations to subtly fear-monger and control employees under the guise of understanding differences. By labeling traits and types, management could frame behaviors as fixed, predictable, or even problematic, all while appearing progressive and “aware” of workers’ changing roles.

Today’s Corporate Hoax

Personality has been studied since long before ancient Greece. It is an evolving, living experience, it cannot be boxed, measured, or put in a category, ever. Personality is highly dependent on unpredictable, real-time variables. There isn’t a single personality test in existence today that can accurately capture the complexity of a human being. Personality is a mystery wrapped in free will.

Yet, over 80% of human resource certifications and degree programs require the teachings of the MBTI. Most of today’s AI recruitment programs and personality assessments are built on a false premise, and nobody wants to address the elephant in the room: corporations are making life-altering decisions about people using tools that cannot and do not measure reality.

When was the last time you finished a corporate meeting, or heard a friend or family member complain that they work for idiots? You can thank your human resources department for that one. Why is it that managers are often less experienced and seem to have weaker critical thinking skills than the employees they are supposed to lead? Human resource systems prioritize compliance, labels, and “fit” over real talent, promoting people based on tenure, politicking, or arbitrary assessments rather than skill or judgment.

The result is a corporate culture where knowledgeable, creative employees are managed by people who don’t understand their work, where decision-making is slow and uninspired, and where leadership is more about checking boxes and following protocols than solving real problems. Meanwhile, the very people capable of driving innovation are forced to adapt to inept systems and hollow hierarchies. This is not a coincidence, it is a systemic failure baked into corporate HR and management training, often reinforced by personality tests like MBTI, generic leadership workshops, and AI-driven hiring tools that prioritize conformity over capability.

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator Scam

In recent years, more and more people are sharing their experiences in needing to take personality tests as part of their interview process. My answer is always not to take it if they can help it. They are not accurate, they are manipulative and they give away any future an employee can have organically. You’ve been clocked, positioned and stationed. You’re done. The most painful part of today’s corporate weather is that, because of these completely demented personality tests, so many executive officers seem to have personality disorders. They are selected and promoted not for wisdom or competence, but for how well they fit a corporate-approved mold, a mold created by HR, leadership programs, and tools like MBTI.

Just because someone looks like a high-achieving alpha doesn’t mean they are capable, ethical, or emotionally intelligent. In fact, the corporate system rewards egoism and performative confidence over real skill and judgment. We mistake charisma, aggression, or conformity for leadership, and in doing so, we fill boardrooms with people who are toxic, impulsive, or dangerously shortsighted. Meanwhile, employees with real vision, empathy, and problem-solving ability are often ignored, sidelined, or forced to adapt to the whims of the “molded” executives. This isn’t just bad management, it’s a structural flaw baked into how corporations identify, groom, and promote leaders, creating an ecosystem where personality pathology thrives at the top while competence and creativity are penalized at the bottom.

Today, roughly 90% of Fortune 500 companies use personality tests for hiring, development, and team building. Have you noticed how low the critical thinking bar has dropped over the last 25 years? How are your calls to customer service? How about efficiency? How about your superiors? How often do you think to yourself that you work for people who have no business managing others?

The “personality” culture is infused in every single corporate industry. Yet all of them suffer from the same symptoms: people are miserable, scared, underpaid, and misunderstood. The MBTI and similar tools aren’t just failures; they actively undermine innovation, critical thinking, and creativity. By labeling employees, corporations train people to fit boxes rather than challenge systems, reward conformity over insight, and encourage leaders to manage by assumption rather than by understanding reality.

Personality is our soul’s DNA and not a single human can measure its value, clock it or box it.

My 2 cents.

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Resources:

https://www.hbomax.com/movies/persona-the-dark-truth-behind-personality-tests/4539be20-94fa-49c8-b1de-874b1ffd0e76

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/credit-and-blame-at-work/200806/the-use-and-misuse-of-personality-tests-for-coaching

https://leaders.com/articles/leadership/corporate-culture/