I think the employer-employee relationship, especially when it comes to salary, is inherently antagonistic because our interests are basically 100% oppositely aligned. An employee always wants to be paid more; an employer always wants to pay less.
Your dark triad mentality is showing through:
An employer doesn’t have an inherent reason to pay less — they have an inherent reason to increase value of the company.
That people conflate the two goals of the company is purely a result of unchecked dark triad thinking in HR — and the preference of exploitation over growth.
This is a Day 2 failure mode because the substitution of your real goal (“make more money”) for a dark triad goal (“maximally exploit my workers”) leads to self-defeating behavior on the primary goal: you make less money by exploiting your workers.
However, as it satisfies the desire to abuse from unhealthy people, we tend towards that defective behavior when dark triad behavior isn’t regulated appropriately.
Not sure I really understand how this position relates to the Dark Triad concept. I thought that these days DT was really only bandied about by people in the pick-up community with something to sell to frustrated men.
You can interact in modalities besides trying to maximally exploit your partner — and game theoretically, those cooperative modalities are dominant.
The mistake you’re making, due to viewing the world through a Machiavellian lens, is supposing that’s the only or even optimal strategy — when empirically and theoretically it’s not.
That you closed out with a lame insult (“muh incels!”) shows perhaps my comment struck closer to home than you’re comfortable with.
These "dark triad" corporate failure modes you describe I've always suspected are a distinctly US-American phenomenon and I have always avoided companies headquartered in the US because of this. We do have exploitative companies founded here as well of course but their practices pale in comparison to what I've seen people go through at the American counterparts.