Hostage syndrome

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

The sense you get when someone senior is being broadcast around the telescreens in Airstrip one, with a glazed expression reciting the firm's mission, supporting its diversity initiatives — you know, the ones that weren’t in place to prevent him getting to be chief personnel officer — where you know there is someone from branding standing off-camera with a rifle trained between his eyes. There’s an almost unbearably bathetic ironic tinge of sadness in his tone — it is like he’s sending a message, to God, or the hereafter, or whoever it is that keeps cosmic account of karma and is noting the present dissonance for the purpose of future allocations — as if to say, “HELP I AM IMPRISONED HERE. THIS IS NOT MY IDEA THEY ARE MAKING ME SAY THIS.”

The revolution is coming, and the wall we will all be lined up against has a coat-peg with our name on it. We cannot escape this fate.