Say you’re a ne’er-do-well with a need or desire to pass yourself off as a bleeding heart. Say you don’t have enough time on your hands to do the actual work of a bleeding heart. Perhaps you’re too busy on account of maintaining a cocaine habit, or just sleeping in, or some-such.
Only, you’ve got a start-up, or a spokesperson gig that brings you work, fame and/or fortune, and it all rises or falls based on your standing.
Do not worry. Other people do this work all the time; capitalise on their labour. You just have to find a way to take credit, without appearing to take credit, all while minimising the expenditure of your resources.
This is where compliments come in, and they work at all scales.
Example 1
“Wow. Those cancer researchers do a great job. People really need to be more aware of how cancer effects people!”
Sounds twee, doesn’t it? Likeably twee though, and lets face it, it’s easy to portray anyone criticising such sentiment as being cruel. It’s also a bit of a non-sequitur; it doesn’t follow from the great job cancer researchers really are doing, that people need to be more aware of the social impact of cancer.
Hell, everyone knows someone who’s been “touched by cancer”.
But people don’t pay attention to this kind of detail. You can even put it in the same paragraph and people won’t notice.
“Wow. Those cancer researchers do a great job. People really need to be more aware of how cancer effects people! Everyone knows someone who’s been touched by cancer! Did you know that?”
Being a layabout spokesperson for cancerishness stuff is as easy as that. If someone points out the flaws in the argument, then simply call them cruel and fall back on the crowd to defend you.
It’s vitally important that you place these details well beyond reproach, because these details actually relate to what you’re going to do, and you don’t want your actions being scrutinised.
“Cancer researchers work hard. To draw attention to how bad cancer is, we’re having an iced-genital challenge. Just record yourself icing your genitals, nominate someone else with warmer genitals than yourself, maybe send some money to our cancer awareness campaign, and all will be good!”
Place genitals here, and send me your cancer dollars…
(Photo Source CC: Nautical9)
Thing is, after getting your not-for-profit up and running, you’re not going to send that money on to fund cancer research. Oh no, you only send those boffins compliments. You? You fund cancer awareness. Who is doing the cancer awareness work that you will be funding? Why that would be you!
Compliment cancer research + patronise cancer-induced suffering with “awareness” shite = profit.
Well, not literally. By “profit” I mean “expenses” like business lunches (that you like to eat), travel (to where you want to go), employing people (such as yourself and your fuck buddies), and so on. All to make people aware of cancer, the effects of which have been experienced in at least some capacity by… everyone.
If exploiting people’s gullibility makes you feel poorly, just remember that thanks to this, you can probably afford to buy yourself a pony. If you still feel poorly after buying a pony, then you’re shark bait – use the pony as a decoy when predators arrive and then harden the fuck up.
Example 2
Okay, so maybe your career as a spokesperson or thingy-thing-doer or whatnot isn’t at the kind of level where you can just up and establish a not-for-profit and market the shit out of yourself The Cause. Do not worry; I said this was doable at all scales.
Don’t ever let it be said that Ayn Rand didn’t collect social security. Also, if government money is available for a cause, fucking aim for it. (Depending on where you live, this trick may instead mean taking money from corporate PR departments – the point is, never think of where the money comes from or what it’s supposed to be for).
Whatever your situation may be, if you’re at least worth spit, there are always organisations with money floating around, looking for spokespersons for causes. The most sincere (and hence the most exploitable) of these look to outsiders, rather than their founders, to do the awareness-making and speaky-speak.
Often, they want someone to look as if they’re from outside the establishment because it gives a (false) appearance of independence. Tiny Tim can sell Scrooge’s good intentions better than Scrooge can.
The best place to prowl for these lush gigs is around performance artists. These needn’t be major recording artists, although they could be – you could work your way up to that if you’re evil enough. Again, this is doable at all scales.
As with the first example, you want to compliment others while minimising your workload. Essentially, this just means being a part of the crowd, while nominally, also being on stage.
Open mic sessions, spread between more established performers, are great for this. Become a regular at such gigs!
Write super-sanctimonious shit. It doesn’t have to be good, just be earnest. Nobody notices your artifice, or at least, if they do, they don’t want to be the only one who’s calling you on your shit – that’s a one way trip to lonely-town. You’ll get away with it – this is the easy bit.
The two important things that you do not want to fuck up, are; being louder in your praise of other artists than everyone else is, and not praising the wrong kind of shit.
If you want a gig as an anti-racism spokesperson, it doesn’t matter if on some level, your own performance is implicitly racist or patronising because most people at stage performances do not do deep thinking, and the ones that do don’t get listened to because they’re too quiet. It will matter however, if you give a huge fucking applause to a KKK slam poet; you’ll be the one sad fuck in the crowd who’s cheering them on. You’ll be the one pathetic twonk in the scene who cheered on that bonehead that one time.
Don’t be that twonk.
No, what you want to do is wait until that exploitable Social Justice Warrior who’s been fighting racism all their life, comes on to stage to slam, rhyme and free-verse about it, and then hit them with a “YES! YES! YES!”
Pick some affirmations that are short, abrupt, preferably monosyllabic, infinitely repeatable, don’t require thought, and then blast them out. Stand up while you’re hollering if you can.
Do not be bothered with any of that foot-rumbling crap, or that clicky-shit they do at slams in Melbourne. You’ll just blend-in if you resort to that. SEIZE PEOPLE’S ATTENTION! Take attention from the artist who has fought against racism all their life, and focus it on you, but don’t appear to be greedy while you are doing it; “YOU ARE BRILLIANT! I LOVE IT! SO TRUE! YOUR WORDS! SO WISE! INSPIRATIONAL!”
Be careful with “inspirational” though – the audience surely won’t know, but artists may cotton on to your motives when you use this word. If that happens, and the artist criticises you, take advantage; you can just feign innocence to make them look both bad, and bad to work with. Eliminate the competition with a smile.
All of this will work even better, if you’re looking for an anti-racism gig, if the artist you are exploiting is a person of colour and if you are white. Seriously.
Why? Because you’ll probably have a mostly white audience who on some level want the continued comfort of white people being in charge of any and all discussions of racism; people recruiting speakers from the arts use the audience as barometer. The disposition of the audience is also likely true of any number of advocacy bodies looking to recruit anti-racist spokespersons as well, or at least, this is mostly true of most of the well funded ones.
And if you fail, so what? You’re just some person who doesn’t like racism. You can’t be faulted for that, right? Again – feign innocence.
It’s not like this takes much effort anyway. If you don’t win the first time around, you may as well safely sit back, relax and have a beer, and maybe buy one for the new POC friend you’re mooching cred from.
You can go back to hating Jews and feminists after you’re done, which nobody is going to call you on unless you’re silly enough to make it an integral part of your shtick.
The thing with a low-investment, high-payoff scam like this, is that you can effortlessly repeat it over and over and over again. It’s mutable as well; it works just as well for disability advocacy, asylum-seeker advocacy, victims-of-crime advocacy…
If you’re a high functioning sociopath, all advocacy is potential self-advocacy, and don’t you go forgetting that, John Galt!
Observations
Go and attend some free public events centred around do-gooders and artsy types. Make observations. Particularly, watch the people who give the most compliments.
What labour do they actually perform?
What do they get out of the event?
How do they hide their exploits, if any, from being detected?
What values are they affirming through their compliments, and what signs do they actually show of living up to these values (Google is your friend)?
~ Bruce
Circling The Abyss 