Free Men by Laura Kipnis Page B

to sleep at night to be on top of your game tomorrow.
    So basically, when I look at the juicers, the boosters, and the fakers, moral relativist that I am, I see hopeful strugglers and stragglers just trying to get some love back from the world. Like me: I fake certainty and strong opinions, whipping myself into a high fury about every last thing, since if I didn’t, who’d want to read what I write, and going unread is not exactly going to get me any love from the world. Oh, maybe I’d get a crumb or two if I played clean, but for all of us whose ambitions exceed our present status in the world, it’s never not depressing that someone’s invariably getting more than you.
    Also, there’s another inequity to contend with that I’d like to mention. Why is “doing whatever it takes to win” excessive for an Armstrong competing in the Tour de France, but not for his former corporate sponsors when they do what it takes to win: outsourcing jobs to sweatshops abroad (thank you, Mike Daisey, for the reports) or whatever their insatiable drive for love—I mean, obscene profits—demands? Why are individuals supposed to uphold some antiquated pre-capitalist code of honor when their employers and industries honor nothing in return? They definitely don’t reward loyalty—it’s not exactly breaking news that players wreck their bodies to cultivate a 95-mph fastball, then get put on waivers when their value drops for owners. Or take everyone’s favorite liar, James Frey, who was apparently supposed to thrust aside commercial pressures in a grand romantic gesture, because it was up to him alone to singlehandedly contest the momentum of global capitalism and the corporatization of publishing.
    There’s a curious anti-capitalist romanticism in the finger-pointing at juicers, even from those who have no gripes at all with the market system otherwise. You find this sort of thing a lot at the movies, where turning down money is a sign of integrity (the “You can’t buy me” moment—always amusing to see the highest-paid stars playing heroes who can’t be bought). At the same time there’s quite some reverence for the superrich—the tech-bubble billionaires, the self-promoting real-estate magnates with strange hair—to whom we turn for life lessons and character tips. Our relationship to capitalism is rather schizophrenic, in other words, though it’s no mystery why. Apart from a few iconoclasts who live off the grid or the lucky few who live off inherited wealth, we’re all tailoring ourselves to marketplace logic in ways large and small: hoping to get an edge, find an angle, raise our games. Yet in the contemporary moral-monetary equation, market-driven behavior is coded as “selling out”—it makes you a whore. “He’s such a whore,” someone’s always proclaiming righteously about the coworker or friend who’s been a bit too visible about self-marketing, too much of a kiss-up to the boss. Frey: a major publishing whore, everyone said. Linguists call this “therapeutic slang”—a way of letting ourselves off the hook for our own weaknesses or hypocrisies. It’s the language of self-exoneration: denying awkward truths by tossing the ball to someone supposedly worse. (Also not very fair to actual prostitutes, who end up doing double duty, linguistically speaking—shouldering the burden for everyone’s self-hatred about peddling our wares in the marketplace too.) But no one ever said that negotiating the emotional fallout of life in a market society was an easy business.
    I’m all for anti-capitalist romanticism, though one doesn’t wish to become a moral poseur in its service. Poseurs have immutable principles and categorical imperatives at their disposal, coupled with vast certainty about their own capacities for integrity. They use other people’s public foibles as an