Setting up to fail is a psychological manipulation performed on a target in which the target is given a task which is designed to fail as it has an unrealistic objective - "the setting of impossible objectives... set up to fail".[1] The target will become stressed trying to achieve the impossible, particularly if under pressure. Once the task attempt has failed, the outcome can then be used as ammunition to discredit and blame the target. A variation on this is that an otherwise achievable objective is covertly sabotaged and undermined to make it unachievable.
The same result may result unintentionally by way of a "negative spiral of expectations... the 'set-up-to-fail' syndrome".[2]
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The prototype of the set-up-to-fail syndrome is the figure of Sisyphus, eternally doomed to roll the same rock up to the top of the hill. "But every time, as he was going to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned it back, and the misbegotten rock came bounding down again".[3]
Eric Berne has described how what he calls a latter-day "Sisyphus works very hard and gets right to the brink of success. At that point he gives up, and loses everything he has gained. Then he has to start over from the bottom."[4] Berne linked the pattern to his upbringing as an orphan encouraged to be a star athlete by his (covertly) destructive uncle Homer: "What Homer really wanted was for [him] to try to be an athletic hero and fail."[5]
Setting up to fail is in particular a well established workplace bullying tactic.[6][7][8] One technique is to "overload a person with work...accompanied with little or no authority, and frequently by its removal or denial" - something which readily "falls into the category of being set up to fail".[9] Again, "the withholding of information is a tool of control" for the workplace bully: "the victim is set up to fail... through not having the requisite knowledge or information to hand".[10]
"Going through the motions" is another application of setting up to fail, for example a sham investigation in which the findings conveniently fail to find any evidence of wrong doing by the authorities involved with setting up the investigation: thus it has been argued that the 9/11 Commission was set up to fail - see criticism of the 9/11 Commission (set up to fail).[11]
With the French Panama Canal Company, by contrast, it has been suggested that "attempts to excavate a Suez-type canal without locks in the mountainous terrain of Panama... may have been set up to fail" from the inside, rather than the outside: certainly the founder "made a fortune at the expense of thousands of small French investors" at the project's failure.[12]
Minorities seeking acceptance into the mainstream are often concerned about being set up to fail: thus the first black US naval officers had been "concerned that they had been set up to fail... as a result of what [one] would call institutional racism".[13]
Within parents, "unrealistic expectations can set up a child for certain failure", if for example the new baby is somehow expected to provide a magical solution to the parents' problems as a couple: "a sure-fire setup for failure in the first major job of the child's whole life. He naturally turns out to be a normal child, not a saviour".[14] In such a situation, "the child is co-opted into an arrangement whereby he or she is to provide the parents with a certain magic" - something which may leave the child in later life "acting out impulses of rage, hostility, and self-destruction...the pathological residue of a Divine Child complex".[15]
In a similar way, "a child is also set up to fail when a parent perceives that her child will somehow make her whole or make her a more worthwhile person... fantasizes about the perfect child"[16] - an impossible demand which may boomerang in those who subsequently "arrange their lives so that they suffer one reverse after another in miserable 'neuroses of destiny'"[17] Sacrificed to "the mother's hidden desire for power... is the development of the child's autonomy - that source of action and self-knowledge that permits us to become self-determining adults".[18]
"People are set up to fail" by themselves "if they envision what they want to do before they figure out what kind of person they should be".[19]
The motives of such self-defeating may be complex, however. Adam Phillips has highlighted the way that "anyone who is failing at one thing is always succeeding at another... If I fail my exams I successfully maintain myself as someone who is not ready for the next stage".[20]
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