The Hustler Mindset

I’ve been talking with my friends and partner about this sort of thing. Often I’m not even the one to bring it up. There’s a preponderance of hustlers lately and it sucks seeing both suckers and bad-faith agents eating it up. These are some thoughts I’ve gathered from my conversations as well as from past experiences.

Personal Persecution

Hustlers often express paranoia that they are being personally persecuted by an institution, an abstract force, or some vague agent. It’s one thing if you’re fucking Fred Hampton and you’re doing work which materially (like, actually) threatens the order of things in a meaningful way. The feds aren’t coming for internet microcelebrities unless they were to post stupid shit which the feds always look into regardless of the poster’s online following. Usually the hustler’s apparent reaction doesn’t make sense given the stakes of the persecution. If the feds are actually coming for you, why post that online? Or if there was a knife-wielding psycho on campus, why didn’t you alert others (if not the school itself, then other likely targets of the attack if it were demographically motivated)? Notice that a sensible reaction depends on situational context. This means there’s really two tells in this case: one is the falsehood of the persecution itself, and the other is the falsehood expressed in the individual’s apparent reaction.

Self-Fulfilled Prophecies

Hustlers often give away the game by indirectly talking about their hustle to get ahead of accusations, or simply because they can’t help it. One of my friends has been talking to a guy lately, and he has a spiel about how the category of rape has become too broad when it includes things like drunk sex. Never mind the literal content of that statement. It didn’t occur to my friend that when someone says something like that, they’re often implicating themselves by talking as if (in combination with other factors) that’s a normal thing to just happen to someone. If someone says whisper networks and sexual assault allegations are government conspiracies to wreck mass political movements, they’re likely getting chased by some “allegations” of their own. If someone predicts that academia will start accusing a specific demographic of plagiarism, I don’t know, fucking think about it. Does that make sense? Has it happened to others? What’s the motive? Which brings us to—

Identity Scapegoating

Hustlers often frame their specific experiences as if they were typical for a group identity. Growing up, I thought it was weird how often pastors would frame freak behavior as if it were something Christians are systematically persecuted for / accused of. Like uh, pastor, the only people accused of diddling kids are you and your friends. Many such cases, baby. How about autistic academics apparently doing accidental plagiarism because they’re just trying to mask by copying verbiage from other texts? This next one especially bothers me: how often is it that a trans woman is personally accused of sexual assault? Obviously, the government would like to treat one’s mere presence in a public space as a sexual crime, or fearmonger about cis men masquerading as trans women to sexually assault cis women in public restrooms—but those pathologies center on the demographic as a whole with little evidence (to my own knowledge) of personally specific accusations on a systematic scale, despite this actually being a thing for other demographics (think of Jesse Washington and Emmett Till). So isn’t it a bit weird for there to be a “radical transfeminist” clique which not only fixates on there apparently being a barrage of accusations, but whose members have pledged to specifically combat such accusations against anyone in the clique? Until it later blew up and they all started accusing each other of shit.

Thought Leadership

Hustlers often develop and evangelize intellectual systems to form an exclusive in-group around themselves, and sometimes those intellectual systems are designed to justify the hustler’s narrative of choice. Think of it like a nation-state: when the European bourgeois got their shit together, they imposed linguistic and cultural standards on their populations to make the modern state seem as if it existed to maintain national solidarity rather than the economic interest of the ruling class (or of the economic system’s survival in general). Mormonism is another great example of this: if you ever wanted to fuck someone’s wife, just indoctrinate everyone into a bespoke religious framework, and once they’re nice and settled you can hit them with the “God told me to fuck your wife.” Other times, however, it’s not that deep. Just developing a compelling vocabulary (at least for a subset of people whom you intend to target) and inviting others to participate in it is enough to put you at the center of your own private Idaho.

Franchise Opportunity

Hustlers capitalize on their narrative to valorize themselves. I remember when Kim Davis (Kentucky county clerk) refused to marry a gay couple in 2015. I made a cynical comment at dinner that she was going to get talk shows and book deals, which frustrated my father even though (in my mind at the time) she was a heretical Christian with whom we should not have been empathizing in any case. But that is what happened until it all faded away, though she pops up every now and again when she discovers a new chance to be back on her bullshit—each time becoming quieter and quieter. I’m not qualifying this hustler factor because it is the fundamental quality of a hustler, around which the other factors revolve. Everything else is means, but this is motive and opportunity in one. You need one half of the equation to make sense of the other. Are they publishing work? Going on talk shows? Making a celebrity of themselves (or trying)? Most importantly: do they get money or sex out of it? These aren’t usually hard questions because the hustler usually looks like a kid with their hand stuck in the cookie jar, except in as much as we allow our in-group biases to rationalize otherwise antisocial behavior.

Conclusion

The interesting thing about hustling is that it requires antisocial behavior to tip one over the edge of deciding to do shit like this, but that’s its own Achilles’ heel because hustlers don’t realize when their narrative falls apart for their poor understanding of social signals and common sense. That’s why suckers fall for hustlers: the same bad signals don’t occur to them as faulty either. Just always think about people’s motives, and how their actions or expressions may (or may not) line up with them. It’s not that hard.