Hyper Self-Promotion

We want to be liked. Maybe not by everybody, but we want to be liked by the people around us, and we also want those people to be likable. I believe this is one of the foundations of our evolution as social creatures as well as the foundation of the omnipresent recognition and adoption of the Golden Rule. This short post is about how capitalism and corporatism are eroding these pillars of our societies.

If you've ever had a job interview in the corporate business market, you are well aware of the importance of self-promotion. Getting the job, or the promotion, depends for a good part on your ability to sell yourself. You have to show yourself to be competent, to not give up in the face of adversity, to be (or at least come across as being) talented and intelligent. You enter this arena of employability knowing that there's a lot of competition, so you embellish your strong points and cover up as much as you can your weak points. We become the product to sell, the focal point in our own self-advertisement.

If you've ever worked in a business environment within a large corporation, you know the types that get promoted to become floor managers or any other function in middle- and higher management; they're the ones that have completely sold their souls to the company-Bible, put on the agenda of weekly meetings tips and tricks that don't benefit workers but benefit the company and its management, and are always willing to put in that extra hour without extra pay. They're the boss's favorite, especially if they show the ability to put numbers, margins and targets before anything else, including their own and their direct colleagues' well being; that's clearly "management material."

When it comes to self-promotion, some people don't just blow their own trumpet - they're the entire wind and brass section!
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Hearing these people talk, seeing them going about their promotion-hungry business, sucking up to management, talking down to colleagues who just want to do their job and go home to what's really important in life and feeling important, is sickening. But understandable as well. At its core, self-promotion is part of a general yet extremely pervasive human motivation: to be perceived favorably by others. People want to be perceived by others as being competent. This means that self-promotion only ever happens in public, around other people we want to impress, such as our superiors at work.

We now have several very public platforms on which we self-promote, the best known and most used of which is LinkedIn. Of all the professional boasting existing in this world, LinkedIn provides the widest and wildest collection to be found. When looking for a job, a LinkedIn profile as expected, sometimes demanded even. Among the profiles there with the biggest following we find our billionaires and millionaires of course, and some of the responses to their posts are not only hilarious, but also exemplify the amount of sucking up some of us are capable of in our quest to self-promote in the system that made their role-models so insanely rich. Just watch the below linked video for some great examples of that.

What I'd like to point out however, is this late stage capitalist development of the commodification of everything, including ourselves; not only are we treated as commodities to be bought and sold, not in the last place by the very social media platforms of which LinkedIn is just one, but we even treat ourselves as such, necessarily so in this system of absolute winners and absolute losers. This is not good, it's not healthy, and it further atomizes us, creating a mentality of "every man for himself, and God for us all." Anyhow, just wanted to get that of my chest, so enjoy the video!

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