Over on a list for freelancers, a woman wrote in, as periodically happens, to talk about how hard it was to struggle through. See, contrary to popular belief, not everyone freelances or starts a business out of free choice. Often, it comes about through a combination of circumstances that hardly position the freelancer as free agent in command of her circumstances. Of course, those who are positioned otherwise, Alpha Assholes, generally quickly assume that their experiences apply to the lives of others. So, they fly off into a hailstorm of advice dispensing that takes nothing into consideration with regard to the person’s email to the discussion list. Generally, the Alpha Assholes tell said freelancer to butch up. She’d made a choice and, as such, she could live with it. If she was unsucessful that was because she wasn’t like the Alpha Assholes on the list.
What does an Alpha Asshole do to be successful? Answer: view every interaction as a means to the end of finding work. Every time you volunteer for an organization, the advice books say, you are doing so, not because it bothers you that there are hungry people, but because you might meet someone who can land you a gig. One must attend meetings of writing professionals where you engage in various social activities, not becuase you like them as people, but because said social activities might put you in touch with someone who can help you get a gig. You join every group, befriend every person, turn every casual encounter into an opportunity that might connect one with a gig.
Hence, the highest form of being as a “good freelancer” — Alpha Asshole — is the person who embodies what is called instrumental reason. You do not do things because they are good, in and of themselves. You do not cultivate friendships and the like because you enjoy those friends, in and of themselves. Rather, every move you make is made toward the ulterior end of making a living. The whole game is, thus, crafted to mask over that basic fact so we can get up every day, look at ourselves in the mirror, and manage not to vomit bile all over our bunny slippers. Now, that simple feat, managing to gaze back at the reflection in the mirror, is the lot of most folks. The Alpha Assholes? When they look in the mirror, they not only manage to avoid vomiting bile, the actually grin back and fancy that they are not mobile lumps of “mechanized petrification”. Oh no! Not at all. The Alpha Assholes tell themselves — convulsively — how important they are.
Alpha Assholes and Alpha Assholes in training spend their lives telling themselves and everyone else elaborate lies designed to shore up their belief that surviving is actually living, that living in a world where using other people is celebrated and, if the message is canned in the form of a ‘book’ then it will dominate the best-seller lists. It is all an elaborate way to deny that they live in the iron cage Max Weber once described:
“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
This Bitch has decided that being a Mormon Cricket is not for me. Now, there is no choice but to live in a swarm that operates something like the Mormon Crickets. Too true. But it is possible to live in a swarm that doesn’t fancy itself the pinnacle of civlization.
