Protocol 10: Psychopathic Operations Organizations Can Fall Into

Organizations that host artists at risk are not immune to pathological behavior. Under reputational, financial, political, or internal pressure, some institutions drift into what psychology and organizational studies identify as psychopathic operational patterns. These patterns are not necessarily driven by clinically psychopathic individuals, but by systems that display emotional detachment, manipulation, instrumentalization of people, moral disengagement, and the systematic prioritization of image and power over human integrity.

This phenomenon is best understood as organizational psychopathy: a condition in which the institution maintains an ethical façade while internally normalizing coercion, deception, and harm. Care becomes a performance, ethics become language rather than practice, and people become expendable variables.

One of the most dangerous manifestations of these operations is the instrumental use of other artists. Organizations may consciously or unconsciously recruit artists into internal power games, drawing them into dynamics of triangulation, pressure, or reputational warfare. Artists are positioned as validators, messengers, or silencers of other artists. At this point, protection collapses into predation.

Artists are not chess pieces. No artist enters a protection organization to be sacrificed for institutional stability, reputational management, or internal cohesion.

The following are psychopathic operational tactics that organizations must actively recognize and avoid, as their presence signals severe ethical and psychological risk.

Scapegoating a single artist by concentrating blame, dysfunction, or institutional tension onto one individual in order to protect the organization or diffuse responsibility.

Triangulation through other artists, using peers to relay messages, validate accusations, exert pressure, or monitor a targeted artist instead of addressing issues directly and transparently.

Recruiting artists into reputational attacks by encouraging, rewarding, or tolerating their participation in the discrediting of another artist, whether through speech, silence, or alignment.

Moral outsourcing, whereby “community concern” or “peer discomfort” is used to execute actions the institution refuses to take openly or accountably. Character assassination replaces conduct review, shifting focus from actions and policies to personality, motives, or psychological traits.

Gaslighting at scale, in which harm is denied, minimized, reframed, or presented as misunderstanding or oversensitivity. Weaponizing mental health language by labeling resistance as instability, illness, or lack of self-awareness in order to neutralize credibility.

Isolation as punishment through reduced communication, exclusion from events, or social withdrawal is engineered to enforce compliance. Silent administrative violence, including the withdrawal of opportunities, access, or resources without explanation, documentation, or due process.

Rewarding compliance and punishing integrity by elevating those who submit while marginalizing those who set boundaries or speak critically. Prioritizing image management over human safety, especially when donors, branding, or public narratives are protected at the expense of individual well-being.

Selective empathy, where care is displayed publicly but withheld or reversed privately. Double-bind communication that punishes the artist both for speaking and for remaining silent, making any response dangerous.

Institutional paranoia projection, reframing critique as threat, disloyalty, or danger to justify control. Rule manipulation, applying policies rigidly to targets and flexibly to allies. Narrative monopolization controls the story internally and externally while denying the artist the right to speak for themselves. Forced dependency through housing, income, visibility, or legal precarity that makes resistance materially risky.

Divide-and-rule dynamics that encourage competition, mistrust, or fear among artists to prevent solidarity. Pseudo-consultation, where listening is simulated, but decisions are already made. Punishing whistleblowing through retaliation, exclusion, or reputational harm against those who report abuse.

Normalization of cruelty by treating humiliation, pressure, or exclusion as “how things work.” Ethical laundering, using social justice or human rights language to mask coercive or abusive practices.

Disposability logic, treating artists as replaceable units rather than human beings with continuity and dignity. Escalation through provocation, deliberately pushing an artist toward emotional reaction and then using that reaction to justify further harm. Moral inversion, recasting the harmed artist as the aggressor and the institution as the victim.

When an organization uses artists against one another, turns community into a weapon, replaces dialogue with manipulation, and substitutes ethics with optics, it has crossed into psychopathic operational territory, regardless of its stated mission or public image. These behaviors are fundamentally incompatible with trauma-informed practice, mental health awareness, human rights principles, or any credible framework of protection.

An organization that survives by sacrificing individuals does not protect artists; it consumes them. The moment artists are recruited into the diminishment, silencing, or moral destruction of another artist, the institution ceases to be a refuge and becomes a system of harm.

This protocol exists to make these patterns visible, nameable, and stoppable. Naming the operation is the first act of resistance.