The intern comes in. They are twenty-two, or twenty, or younger. They hold their badge like it might be revoked. They ask questions that reveal they don't know things, because they don't know things. They are new, and newness in most workplaces is a kind of low-grade embarrassment—for them, not for the institution that put them in this position of maximum exposure.
What the organization receives is a temporary unit of low-cost labor with learning as the nominal exchange. What actually arrives is a person in an early chapter of a life that will go somewhere you cannot see from here. They are forming an understanding of what work is, what authority is, what they are worth, whether they are welcome in rooms like this one. They will carry that formation for decades. You will not remember most of what you do or don't do in their presence. They will.
Law 1 says that position shapes experience. The intern's position is one of maximum visibility and minimum power. Everyone can see their incompetence. They can see almost nothing about how the institution actually works. The knowledge is asymmetric in exactly the wrong direction for the person who needs it most. They perform confidence they don't have because showing uncertainty costs them in a way it doesn't cost the people above them, who have already earned the right to not know something.
The dehumanization of interns is ordinary and rarely conscious. It takes the form of forgetting their name in conversations where it would matter, explaining things to them that don't require explanation while leaving unexplained the things they actually need to understand, treating their time as infinitely available because their time is not yet priced. It takes the form of the task assigned to kill an afternoon. The errand given because someone more valuable shouldn't have to do it. The meeting they weren't invited to attend, where the real work got done.
None of this requires malice. It requires only that the intern's personhood be something you haven't actively chosen to hold.
The intern who is treated as a person—whose questions are answered as though the questions matter, whose early wrong attempts are met with something other than performance of patience—receives a different formation. They learn that work can be entered without permanent damage to their sense of themselves. That is a significant gift. Its cost to the giver is small.