No, I just live in this reality. If the friends you have are not high enough on the food chain to get what you need done, then it's time to make friends in higher places.

… which makes you sound precisely like the people living in a communist dictatorship.

That's not unique to dictatorships, and communist ones least of all.

Some of the most evil people have been super friendly. That's how they lure you in. It's kind of like The Firm. They lure you in with all of that glorious salary, all of those perks like free food, they let you work on projects that seem quite cool and almost decent at the beginning. Then, once you're accustomed to everything and are pretty locked in, they hit you with the shady stuff.

So you kind of have to be friendly, otherwise, no new recruits would join up unless they were just sadists already.

That’s just acting friendly, which is not what I meant. Maybe I should have written “helpful” instead of “friendly”.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence in these threads about how friendly Googlers used to assist with these issues before management prevented it.

Exactly. People who work at Google can’t be friendly, whether they want to or not.