Scoundrels and Pirates
(Nosara, 1999, reprinted in Laissez Faire Law, 2007)
It's a great privilege to work for a scoundrel. If you ever get a chance to assist one, I congratulate you for showing some initiative and a dab of courage. But helping a pirate is twice as good.
To keep this discussion on a sensible basis, let's define our terms. Bill Clinton is not a scoundrel. He's an assistant floorwalker employed by Hillary Inc. to smile and look harmless on television — a job that Clinton does reasonably well, since it doesn't require any personal initiative whatsoever. Bubba is an obedient Boy Scout who's too dense to work in the pirate sector and enjoys snoring through prayer breakfasts six days a week, singing the national anthem instead of thinking.
Trust me, he ain't qualified to hold a conversation about skullduggery. He can't even spell it. I know this contradicts received wisdom about power. Sorry. I don't think Bill Clinton is man enough to be powerful. He's about as dangerous as Bill Cosby, who would have been an equally confused Commander In Chief and certainly could have done a better job of entertaining the American people, which is the career ambition of most politicians. Heavyweight graft and a little luck can make any apple cheeked Boy Scout into a president.
Not so, for scoundrels and pirates. They are, by definition, unmanageable and luck resistant. The road to skullduggery is strewn with ill fortune.
The reason I'm talking about this subject is to celebrate our potential for change. Scoundrels and pirates were at the forefront of every historic battle, including the American Revolutionary War, when loyalty to royalty hiccoughed and against the odds justice prevailed. Scoundrels and pirates were the high rollers who spit in the eye of George III and staked their lives on the outcome. People don't do this if they are intimidated by a twelve point, servile Boy Scout oath. Pirates have a much simpler code of moral conduct. They're allergic to liars.
When Pretty Boy Clinton got caught in a lie, he sobbed painfully dumb remorse at a prayer breakfast and got away with it. But if a pirate is ever caught in a fib, his pirate pals are honor bound to throw the lying bastard to the sharks, and sharks don't give a shit about due process of prayer breakfast. That's why scoundrels like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson never hanged together. It was much safer to hang separately, waging war against George III, and they outsourced some pretty nasty pirates to do the actual work of combat.
Pirates are permanently at war with officialdom, a commendable policy in my opinion. Their latest wheeze is encryption, to keep government sailing in circles on the internet, but nothing is fundamentally new. Pirates have always loved privacy. Scoundrels aren't quite as fussy about privacy, which distinguishes them as a trainee grade of skulldugger. That's why scoundrels are a dime a dozen. There are so many working in show business that Beverly Hills suffered an acute housing shortage in 1993 and there's an impressive waiting list for PO boxes in 90210 and 90028. If it weren't for all the new construction in Vegas and Orange County, we'd have thousands of scoundrels piled up in dingy West Hollywood condos, arguing about whose turn it is to wash the dishes.
The Bordello Threat
Scoundrelling and piracy are pretty much a male phenomenon, although pirate warrior babes have been known to exact revenge by emptying the community property bordello for cause. It's the same beef and identical consequences. Tell a lie and die, mister.
Withholding an important truth is no different than lying. The essence of piracy is to look your comrade straight in the eye and fess up. If you think he's an asshole, you better tell him so and get the truth out in the open, where it can do some good. For a very long time, intimate friends have been telling me (and selected colleagues, on a need to know basis) that I can be a difficult bastard to work for. Most bosses end up being assholes on the job, because they're trying to get something accomplished, instead of playing nice nice patty cake with spoiled brats. Work is called work for a
reason.
If you're familiar with my essay 'How To Be a Bum', you will perhaps recognize a common theme — a psychological leitmotif — that connects piracy, scoundrelling, and bumming around. Whereas artistic bums refuse to sell out for thirty pieces of silver, scoundrels counterfeit their cash flow, and pirates punch holes in the public purse, taking loot away from the looters by main force. It's a hierarchy of intelligent action. Bums have little to bring to the party except their innocent courage and a commitment to speak the truth. Scoundrels double down on every trick, playing the percentages. Pirates don't have time to fuck around for the fun of it. They're at war, with a price on their heads.
Bums, scoundrels, and pirates (i.e., all skullduggers) have one thing in common: an iron fisted commitment to the truth. This does not mean that they always know the answer to every question, but rather that they always know the limits of their knowledge and the appropriate means of probing the Unknown. For instance, they read books. They verify hypotheses by experimentation and careful observation. They seek peer review and outside experts. They delegate and divide the work of discovery, employing specialized investigators to attack the Unknown. In certain areas of speculative inquiry, they use Occam's Razor and a laissez faire tradition of tolerance, especially in regard to cosmology and sexual preference.
Alert readers will no doubt understand that most entrepreneurs fall into one or another category of skullduggery. Bums aim at artistic achievement. Scoundrels want wealth. Pirates crave something else, typically revenge or retribution. To avenge a wrong is the whole purpose of law. In this respect, skullduggery has no limp wristed substitute. You can't defeat tyranny by whining about it.
Another thing that bums, scoundrels, and pirates have in common is their lack of compassion. If you earn their respect, they will watch your back and defend you in every conceivable way, like blood brothers in spirit. Lie to them once and you're toast. Skullduggery is too dangerous an enterprise to indulge much compassion or welfare state nannying. Children are expected to sink or swim like everybody else, when they are old enough to think and biologically no longer children.
Pirate Competition
Since I've mentioned it repeatedly, perhaps it's time to define skullduggery. I initially addressed this topic philosophically in 'Human Goodness Proved Beyond Doubt'. There is no intrinsic merit in life. Men routinely kill, because our lives are continually at risk. That's the whole point of insecticide. Cockroaches, ticks, mosquitoes, and flies may have tiny little skulls, but no sane individual feels much compassion in the act of crushing them. It's us or them. Artistic bums are no less heartless than pirates in this respect. If it is certain that a mob of gangsters or democrats pose a clear and present danger to the innocent, then war is inevitable. I am not speaking in metaphors.
Oddly, skullduggers are the only people who deeply respect the notion that all men are created equal — i.e., that every man is entitled by right to choose his path in life, to seek and express the truth or to obscure it by willful deceit. Skullduggery is the art and science of bullshit detection in defense of human innocence. We view humanity as fundamentally good. We are proud to be men and women, and we are prepared to live or die for justice.
We also accept the notion of competition. Pirates understand that they are outnumbered by gendarmes and other, less honorable players on the high seas of finance. Scoundrels move from place to place, one step ahead of the cops and sorehead chumps who lost a buck or two in bed with a scoundrel. Bums are in competition with all of history, fighting every first class writer and artist and minstrel, every conqueror and lawgiver, from Pliny to Paul McCartney. The odds of success are
slim, because skullduggery is an act of insurrection — the refusal to knuckle under and behave like obedient taxpayers, students, or cannon fodder.
No one is born a pirate. Many come into this world as taxpayers, and certainly we start life as innocent, helpless infants. The question is what to do about it? Some kids opt for the status quo, becoming replacement ants in the anonymous majoritarian anthill. That's fine. I have no quarrel with people who decide to swim with the game show of history already in progress, doing nothing else, adding or subtracting zilch. That's the meaning of liberty. You get to choose. Pirates and scoundrels choose to wield power. They add to or subtract from civilization, instead of rowing meekly in the wake of tradition.
It is sometimes asserted that politicians and scholars exercise such powers. Complete crap. The only way you can change anything is to reject established institutions and build something new. Of necessity, this disqualifies politicians, scholars, bureaucrats, priests, and corporate cheerleaders plus much of the Boy Scout working class who stupidly agree to keep Establishment taskmasters in office for no reason other than inertia. Anyone who supports existing social arrangements is unlikely to launch much creation or destruction.
It is sometimes asserted that the free market is a dynamic force for change. This is complete crap, too. A handful of bootleggers and gunrunners have more power than a corps of "legitimate" small businessmen, all of whom are licensed and regulated up the yingyang, unable to tie their shoelaces without checking with a local school board. The bourgeoisie are inept, when shit comes to holler. If you want a life of frustration and victimhood, open a liquor store or an insurance agency in Des Moines. The slightest shift of political balance — something as trivial as the election of a hungry Democrat instead of a fat Republican can wipe out the nonexistent safety that all "legitimate" players foolishly crave.
In fact, it's too late to crave anything as stupid as safety, because America is on a collision course with destiny. The multicultural Love Boat is about to discover that her final destination won't be Disney World, as advertised. Pirates have something else planned for you.
Quest for Technical Treasure
It is sometimes asserted that technology is a dynamic force for change. Worse than crap, this is a deadly trap, set by Marxists. Technology flows from great laboratories and industrial enterprises, all of which are tightly controlled by statists. The best we can do as pirates is to steal some of their code and use it against them, and perhaps infiltrate a few scoundrels into their corporate bedrooms for the purpose of intelligence gathering. This is the moral meaning of a college education, to spy on the enemy and crack his technical treasure house. Pirates fight with old weapons, discarded and stolen junk, most of which is obsolete. Our supremacy in battle arises from truth telling, not technical infrastructure, guerrilla tactics deployed against overwhelming force, and heroism rather than gas guzzling multiagency overheads.
Scoundrels are clean and decent men. I've worked for a bunch of them, and I respected them all. I prefer not to name names. But ask yourself how many black and hispanic filmmakers are currently working in Hollywood? You'd be on the right track if you said none. They exist. They are superbly talented. But they aren't working in any capacity other than that of pure scoundrel, desperate to scam enough loot to make a movie. Nor is this problem unique to U.S. racial minorities. Brilliant men and women in Scotland, Holland, Russia, Italy, and Canada face the same dilemma, to starve or to scoundrel, because film is a harsh mistress.
Having been a scoundrel for much of my life, and a bum before that, the moral superiority of pirates is obvious to me. It is my great good fortune and privilege to be working for one now, and I hope the trend continues. In the not too distant future, when similar opportunities arise, I will always answer the call to action, to drop what I'm doing and sail into the Unknown, where free men undertake the greatest challenge of all — to deploy their relatively feeble individual powers against overwhelming force and punch a hole in the status quo.
It is by such random acts of rebellion that the world is moved forward, from the darkness of institutionalized deceit and compulsion, to an open society based on freedom and candor, me hearties.