The Orangutan Problem

Why competence gets taxed, hierarchy gets mistaken for worth, and the org chart never tells you what someone actually chose.

In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius recorded a curious story he had heard in Java: the Javanese, he wrote, said that orangutans could speak, but chose not to. His Latin account put it this way:

Loqui verò eos easque posse, Javani aiunt, sed non velle, nè ad labores cogerentur.

Roughly: the Javanese say they can speak, but do not wish to, lest they be compelled to work. Bontius did not seem impressed — he followed the story with a dismissive ridicule mehercules, essentially “ridiculous, by Hercules.”

As zoology, he was probably right to be skeptical. As workplace sociology, I am less certain — because four hundred years later, we turned his footnote into a comic strip franchise.

Swap the orangutan for Dilbert, or for the long-suffering cubicle-dwellers of Work Chronicles, and the joke barely needs rewriting. Half the workplace-comic genre runs on some version of the same premise: the competent employee, quietly doing the math on how much of what he can do he is willing to let anyone find out.