The Great Rift Valley Incident: Confessions of the Ant Observer
A companion piece to the Great Rift Valley Incident series
I Must Confess
My name is Dr. Zyx'thor, Senior Xenoanthropologist with the Intergalactic Institute for Comparative Civilization Studies. For the past 847 standard cycles, I have studied your species with increasing confusion and occasional alarm.
I am writing this confession because I can no longer, in good conscience, remain silent about what I did. About what I observed. About what it means.
I was the ant.
The Research Question
The proposal began, as all great disasters do, with a simple question posed during a departmental colloquium:
"Why do humans employ consultants?"
The question seemed straightforward enough. Every civilization we've studied has specialists—individuals with particular expertise who advise others. This is logical. Efficient. Sensible.
But human consultants, we had observed, appeared to operate under different principles. They were frequently hired by organizations that then performed worse after the engagement. Yet instead of extinction, this profession was thriving. Growing. Multiplying.
It violated every principle of natural selection we understood.
My colleague Dr. Thren'kla proposed three interconnected hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: The Consultant Paradox Consultants represent a form of organizational parasitism that has evolved to mimic beneficial behavior while providing no actual value—perhaps even negative value—yet somehow receives resources and replicates.
Hypothesis 2: The Cargo Cult of Productivity Human organizations create elaborate ritualistic structures (metrics, dashboards, frameworks) that superficially resemble productive activity but serve primarily as social theater, with consultants acting as high priests of these cargo cults.
Hypothesis 3: Bullshit as Memetic Virus Corporate jargon functions as a self-replicating linguistic entity that spreads through human populations despite conveying minimal semantic content, with consultants serving as primary transmission vectors.
The question was: Could we design an experiment to test these hypotheses in a controlled environment?
I foolishly raised my appendage and said, "I believe I can."
The Experimental Design Committee
What followed was six months of committee meetings.
If you're wondering whether advanced alien civilizations have escaped the tyranny of bureaucratic process, let me disabuse you of that hopeful notion. If anything, we've perfected it. We have committees to form committees. We have approval processes for approval processes. We have, I kid you not, a Subcommittee on the Optimization of Subcommittee Formation.
My experimental proposal required approval from:
- The Ethics Review Board for Temporal Displacement Studies
- The Committee on Non-Interference with Pre-Industrial Civilizations
- The Office of Biological Transformation Safety
- The Department of Acceptable Risk Assessment
- The Council on Cross-Timeline Contamination Prevention
- And, inexplicably, the Division of Proper Use of Institute Resources
Each committee had concerns. Each concern generated sub-committees. Each sub-committee produced documentation requiring review by other committees.
During meeting seventeen of the Ethics Review Board, the chair asked, "But are we certain this consultant will not permanently alter the timeline?"
"Quite certain," I replied. "Based on my research, consultants are uniquely positioned to create maximum disruption while leaving zero lasting positive impact. The timeline will self-correct once he departs."
This, somehow, satisfied them.
By month five, I had produced 847 pages of documentation, attended 34 committee meetings, and revised my proposal 19 times. The final approved version bore little resemblance to my original design but had been optimized, they assured me, for "stakeholder alignment" and "process compliance."
I began to suspect I was already studying the phenomenon I meant to investigate.
The Subject Selection
We needed a consultant who represented the purest expression of the species. After reviewing 10,000 candidates, we selected Derek Hutchins for the following reasons:
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Unshakeable Confidence: Subject demonstrates ability to maintain absolute conviction despite contradicting evidence. In 247 prior client engagements, subject has never once expressed doubt, revised methodology based on feedback, or acknowledged suboptimal outcomes.
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Methodological Rigidity: Subject applies identical framework to every situation regardless of context, demonstrating perfect consistency if not effectiveness.
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Semantic Fluency: Subject exhibits masterful command of corporate jargon, capable of generating infinite permutations of meaningless phrases that clients interpret as profound insights.
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Outcome Independence: Subject's self-assessment of performance shows zero correlation with actual results, suggesting complete psychological immunity to reality.
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Promotional Success: Despite measurable negative impact on client outcomes, subject has been promoted six times in eight years. This was the key criterion. We needed someone the system itself had validated.
Derek Hutchins was perfect.
The Methodology (Or: Why I Became an Ant)
The temporal displacement was straightforward—our technology is quite advanced in this area. We selected the Paleolithic era specifically because it lacked the complex organizational structures that normally camouflage consultant ineffectiveness. Strip away corporate hierarchy, quarterly earnings, and PowerPoint, and the methodology would be exposed in its purest form.
The question was observation. How could I study the experiment without interfering?
The Non-Interference Committee had been extremely clear: I could observe but not interact. I needed a form that was (their words) "contextually invisible, behaviorally neutral, and organizationally irrelevant."
I chose an ant.
My reasoning was impeccable: Ants are highly organized. They have complex social structures. They coordinate effectively. I would blend in seamlessly with what I assumed would be the most sophisticated society present.
It took me approximately four hours in ant form to realize I had made a terrible mistake.
Ants, it turns out, are actually organized. They communicate clearly. They accomplish objectives efficiently. They have no meetings whatsoever.
I had inadvertently positioned myself in the one organizational structure at the Great Rift Valley that operated with genuine competence.
The irony was not lost on me.
The Observations
I will not recount the full four weeks here—that documentation exists in your historical record, narrated in what I hoped was an appropriately objective voice. But several moments merit specific mention:
Week One, Day Two: Watching Derek introduce "Pre-Hunt Alignment Documentation" to a people who had been successfully hunting for millennia without documentation. The hunters left two hours late. They caught nothing. Derek documented this as "process adoption success."
I began to suspect Hypothesis 1 (Consultant as Parasite) had merit.
Week Two, Day Four: The moment Derek changed the success metrics from "food acquired" to "planning time invested." Watching him reframe 43% efficiency decline as 88% improvement through creative measurement selection.
Hypothesis 2 (Cargo Cult of Productivity) was looking stronger. The metrics were the ritual. The ritual was the point.
Week Three, Day Six: The hunter Garth attempted to audit Derek using Derek's own methodology. Derek responded by arguing that teaching them to question his methods proved his methods worked.
This was when Hypothesis 3 (Bullshit as Memetic Virus) crystalized. The jargon had become self-defending. It had evolved immunity to logical criticism by reframing criticism as validation.
Week Four, Day One: Derek vanished mid-sentence. The temporal displacement algorithm had completed its cycle. I prepared to return and compile my findings.
I was convinced I understood the phenomenon.
I was wrong.
The Data Crisis
Upon my return, I spent three months analyzing the data. The patterns were clear. The hypotheses were supported. I drafted my paper: "The Consultant as Organizational Parasite: A Paleolithic Control Study."
My conclusions were stark: Consultants survive not despite their ineffectiveness, but because of carefully evolved adaptations that allow them to:
- Reframe failure as "learning opportunities"
- Generate measurement systems that guarantee success regardless of outcomes
- Deploy language that is impervious to semantic analysis
- Trigger organizational insecurity that ensures repeated hiring
I submitted the paper. I awaited peer review. I checked on Derek Hutchins to document the long-term effects of temporal displacement on consultant psychology.
This is when everything fell apart.
Derek had been promoted.
Not reprimanded. Not questioned. Not even required to explain his three-week absence (which, due to temporal mechanics, manifested as a single missed meeting in his timeline).
He had been promoted to Executive Vice President.
His new pitch deck featured "Paleolithic Optimization Strategies" as a proven framework. He was selling his complete failure as ancient wisdom. Organizations were buying it.
I sat in my office, reviewing the data, and realized something that should have been obvious from the start:
The experiment hadn't failed. Derek hadn't failed.
I had failed to understand what consulting actually optimizes for.
Consultants don't optimize organizations for effectiveness. They optimize themselves for survival within organizations. And in that objective, they are staggeringly, terrifyingly successful.
Derek had performed perfectly.
The Paper Rejection
I submitted my revised findings to the Journal of Comparative Civilization Studies. The peer review came back six weeks later:
"While the methodology is sound and the observations detailed, we cannot in good conscience publish findings this disturbing. The implications—that an intelligent species would systematically reward behavior that undermines organizational effectiveness—are too absurd to be credible.
We recommend the author reconsider whether temporal displacement may have introduced observational bias. Perhaps the consultant was not as ineffective as described. Perhaps the promotion reflects qualities the author failed to measure.
Please revise and resubmit with more balanced conclusions."
I stared at this feedback for an entire cycle.
They wanted me to reframe my negative findings. To reconsider my measurement system. To imagine unmeasured positive qualities that might justify the outcome.
They wanted me to do exactly what Derek had done.
The Meta-Discovery
This is when I made my final, most disturbing observation:
My research had been filtered through six months of committee review. My methodology had been "optimized" by stakeholders who had never studied humans. My findings were being rejected not because they were wrong, but because they were uncomfortable.
I had documented a human pathology while swimming in its alien equivalent.
My colleagues were now suggesting I "revise my methodology" to better "align with institutional expectations." One senior researcher recommended I "reframe the consultant's promotion not as validation of ineffectiveness, but as evidence of unmeasured value creation."
I asked, "What unmeasured value?"
"That's what the revision should explore," he replied.
I had become Derek. Or rather, I had realized I had always been Derek.
The committees that delayed my research for six months hadn't been evaluating safety or ethics. They'd been performing organizational theater. The 847 pages of documentation didn't make the experiment better. They made the institution feel productive.
We were conducting cargo cult science.
And I was fluent in it.
The Consultation
In desperation, I did something unprecedented: I wrote to Derek Hutchins.
Not as Dr. Zyx'thor. Not as the ant observer. But as "an academic colleague seeking methodological advice on reframing challenging research findings."
His response arrived within two business days:
"I'd be happy to consult on your project. My rate is 500 units per hour. I see you're facing stakeholder resistance to your findings—very common. The issue isn't your research. It's your framing.
You're presenting this as 'consultants are ineffective parasites.' That's a lagging indicator perspective. What you should emphasize are the leading indicators: increased documentation, enhanced process adoption, expanded measurement frameworks.
Your paper doesn't need revision. It needs repositioning. Let me know if you'd like to schedule a workshop."
I sat there, reading this message, and started laughing.
I laughed for three hours.
Then I declined his offer and began writing this confession instead.
Conclusion (Or: What I Learned in the Great Rift Valley)
The tribe in the Paleolithic survived Derek. They rejected his methodology. They kept what was useful (brief morning coordination) and discarded what was toxic (everything else).
They could do this because they lived in immediate relationship with consequences. When the hunt failed, they went hungry. When the method didn't work, they changed it. Reality was their feedback mechanism, and reality was unambiguous.
My civilization cannot do this. Your civilization cannot do this.
We have insulated ourselves so thoroughly from consequences that we can maintain elaborate systems of collective delusion indefinitely. We can promote Derek. We can reject papers that make us uncomfortable. We can optimize for the appearance of productivity while producing nothing.
We have built organizations sophisticated enough to perform anti-epistemology at scale.
This is what I learned in the Great Rift Valley: The consultant paradox isn't a paradox at all. Consultants thrive precisely because they're so good at thriving. They've evolved perfect adaptation to systems that have lost touch with reality.
And those systems—human and alien alike—will continue selecting for them, promoting them, and empowering them, because the systems themselves are now optimized not for effectiveness but for consultant-compatibility.
Derek wasn't the virus.
He was the symptom.
We are all the patient.
Epilogue: Current Status
I have been "encouraged" to take a sabbatical while the Institute "reassesses my research trajectory."
My department chair suggested I might benefit from "stakeholder alignment coaching" before resuming publication efforts.
I have been assigned to a committee studying "optimal methodologies for interdimensional research proposal formatting."
I suspect I will be on this committee for a very long time.
Sometimes, late at night, I still think about that ant body. About sitting on that rock, watching the whole thing unfold. About narrating it in my calm, measured voice, pretending to be objective.
I wasn't objective.
I was just another creature trying to survive in a system I didn't understand, telling myself I was different, that I was the observer rather than the participant.
The tribe at the Great Rift Valley understood something we've forgotten: You can't observe a system you're part of without becoming complicit in it.
Derek understood this too, in his way.
He just chose to be very, very complicit.
And now, having written this confession, so have I.
Dr. Zyx'thor's research sabbatical is ongoing. His paper remains unpublished. Derek Hutchins recently received the "Excellence in Innovative Methodology" award from the International Consortium of Management Consultants.
The ant body has been returned to Institute storage, catalog number ATB-20240731-DZ.
It remains available for future observational studies, should any researcher be foolish enough to request it.
— End of Confession —