Page 159 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Epilogue

siphoning off money into their own accounts for years. Magnus
either was ignorant of that embezzlement or chose to ignore it in
order to maintain his belief in the Personnelyzer. I wonder what his
response was when I defaulted on my agreement and not only gave
up the final payment I desperately needed, but turned in his intended
recipient to the FBI.
An important flaw in his theory was that people don’t change.
Somehow his background in the physical sciences distorted his vision
of human nature. From his perspective, once an adult had settled into
more or less fixed ways of being, that personality could be sampled as
a constant constellation of variables more or less fitting a set of job
requirements. I was reminded of Isaac Asimov’s series of science
fiction novels presenting the idea that a group of scientists, sensing
that their high civilization was about to collapse into a millennium of
barbarism, set up a secret organization following a plan which would,
after a thousand years of secretly managing events, be able with one
final manipulation to usher in a renaissance; that outrageous triumph
of algorithmic predictability over the truly unforeseeable outcome of
myriad events was a conceit of those books that somehow succeeded,
owing to the author’s skill, in maintaining the reader’s suspension of
disbelief in such a possibility.
Al Magnus’s inability to turn his discovery over to the cold
scrutiny of trained social scientists left him in a fool’s paradise. He
missed three crucial things. First, as I mentioned, the very
circumstances of a position might alter its tenant’s personality enough
to make him unsuitable for the task; second, also mentioned,
Magnus’s status as immediate and ongoing evaluator of his personnel
decisions was subject to his own personal whims and fantasies—had
he ever given himself the test?—and finally, it dawned on me, the
very fact that he told his choices that they had been “scientifically”
vetted would have an effect on them, for better or worse.
In my case, it pumped me up enough to start the work and keep at
it; the same must have been true for his executives. But they had
been picked to some extent for their accounting skills; none having
had such high-paying jobs in the past, temptation overcame whatever
self-restraint the Personnelyzer had measured in them prior to being
hired. I had a need to refresh my coffers regularly owing to my
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