I hope this is not my legacy

This gem popped up in my Google Reader feed today- it is a covering letter by Hunter S Thompson applying for a job at a newspaper.

TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN
October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City
Sir,
I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.
Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.
By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
Nothing beats having good references.
Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers.
If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.
I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.
I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.
It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.
If you think you can use me, drop me a line.
If not, good luck anyway.
Sincerely, Hunter S. Thompson

The letter is great- witty, ballsy, and honest as hell. It is almost shocking to read. It sounds to me like something out of a Hollywood film, like something from a novel, but it is a real letter. It is a genuine letter from a real person looking for a job. At this stage, in 1958, Hunter S Thompson was a nobody, just a broke wannabe journalist looking for work.

When I was at university, the careers department taught us to make our covering letter as boring as possible and to follow the provided ‘secret formula’ closely. When I was taught English at school I remember one year before an incredibly important exam we were all given a piece of creative writing to ‘read, remember and personalize’. I’m pretty sure I got an A in that exam, and unfortunately it was probably because I am exactly the kind of person who can read remember and recite text word for word. (Although I do detest the idea of being forced to do anything creative in exam conditions, it seems quite a lot like cheating. Luckily as an engineer it has seldom been required of me.)

At work today I overheard someone tell someone else that they had recently seen an episode of Californication and loved a section where Hank Moody comes to blows with a guy in the cinema (s01 e2) who is rather rudely talking on the phone. I said to this person, “if you think that was cool, why don’t you make the same stand when you see someone do that?” to which he answered “because they might have a knife”. Now I don’t believe for a second that the reason this person wouldn’t reproach a hypothetical phone user is because he is scared. I don’t think he knows exactly why he wouldn’t do it, but he felt like he needed to say something for whatever reason (or maybe the area he lives in is more dangerous than I realize).

The problem, I think, is the herd mentality. People doing what they think they should, rather than doing what they want. People blindly following beliefs they hold without questioning them. People never looking outside of their own experiences to find new ideas.

Hunter S Thompson was clearly an outlier, a free thinker- someone outside of the system of conventional thought. Reading his letter reminded me of the value of this. The ideas and methods he presented to the world during his life (gonzo journalism anyone?) may not be the most useful or important, but the fact that he did something completely different really is interesting and inspirational. I’m not about to write a covering letter to Larry and Sergey in the aforementioned style, but I am going to be less worried about following meaningless conventions (fuck the 300 word job application form boxes).

I think that broadly speaking we are brought up into a system which teaches us to follow orders, rewards obedience and ostracizes uniqueness. This is not a new or particularly clever observation. In “Beyond Good and Evil”, published first in 1886, Nietzsche explains that this is an inevitable situation in classic western societies- “Indeed, with the help of a religion which has humoured and flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this [herding-animal] morality even in political and social arrangements: the democratic movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement.” This view is described in more sociopolitical terms in “Understanding Power” by Noam Chomsky, who also explains the dangerous implications- that free thought and expression threatens the ruling class (with the “will to power” to use Nietzsche’s term).

Because this is really an incredibly complex discussion rather than an off-the-cuff blog post topic, I must apologise for treating it with such brevity. I may follow this up in the future. But in conclusion, I would like to state that I don’t want to be one of the herd. I will leave you with my personal motto, which I try and keep in mind every day.

“Do what you want”.

Footnote:
I’m guessing Chris didn’t imagine that by answering my facetious-ish question about being more like Hank Moody he would feature alongside Friedrich Nietzsche in a blog post, but as Hank would say, “I handled that fuck out of that shit!”.