When the head dick's a dickhead

It was great to read Michael Lewis’s book Liar’s Poker. 

Michael Lewis: Liars Poker  is a great read, if slightly mystifying to me

The book tells the story of Lewis’s brief passage through the world of the financial markets, and describes the ludicrous amounts of money to be made there (even by him, and he was at the bottom of the pile). The trouble is that the financial transactions he talks about are so opaque to me that I remember almost nothing about them. That means that the book has left me with a sense of having half grasped the story as I read and enjoyed it, though today I have little understanding of the strange transactions it described. 

One thing, however, that has stuck with me was the term Lewis popularised in this book, “big swinging dick”. He used it for the most successful traders. These were the men who found people prepared to sell bonds or shares at a little below what they were worth, and then sell them on to others who paid a little more, so that from marginal differences, over huge volumes, a “big swinging dick” could make a fortune, for his firm and for himself.

Note that at each end of the transaction, was someone who had lost out, by accepting too little or paying too much. In between, a dick who made a lot of money by doing absolutely nothing valuable at all.

What attracted me about the “big swinging dick” idea was firstly that it perfectly expressed the almost wholly male nature of this world. Not just male but assertively so, revealed in its highest accolade being a metaphor based on genitalia.

Next, it felt exactly right because if there’s one things you can be sure of with a dick, it’s that it isn’t the seat of man’s intellect. That doesn’t mean that men don’t think with their dicks. On the contrary, they certainly do, as Bill Clinton can testify and Donald Trump can deny.

I’ve never worked in the world of finance. I’d like to claim that this is for moral reasons, that I refuse to play those particular and profoundly unethical games. Sadly, that’s not the case. I don’t think I would every even have been considered for a position in that exalted world of high earnings and low morals. In any case, I found the environment nothing short of scary.

On the other hand, even in my somewhat gentler world, I’ve worked with plenty of dicks. In fact, some of them seemed to have adopted forms of behaviour which I could only describe as being designed to make them feel better about their dicks. In some cases, it was a matter of the cars they drove (the most spectacular was, in fact, driven by a woman, but she was just as dick-oriented, in my mind as most of the men).

One of the most striking aspects of the behaviour of these men was that they seemed to measure their significance in business by their behaviour towards subordinates. They would treat them as heroes until things turned bitter, at which point they would become the objects of their wrath. Sometimes, it would be disciplinary action – minor offences would be dealt with final warnings of dismissals – sometimes it would be actual dismissals, in the form of redundancies, for failures which ought much more properly to be put at the doors of the dicks themselves.

A common feature of these characters is that they would always say how dismissing employees in these circumstances was the most difficult decision a businessman could take. They suffered at letting these fine people go. Not quite as much as the people who been let go. Nor quite as much as if they were to admit that they’d screwed up themselves. But still, they suffered.

Or so they claimed. Because the way they told me about the pain they underwent over firing people always left me unconvinced. It sounded much more to me as though, in truth, their suffering was considerably mitigated by the sense it gave them of their power over others.

And power is what turns these people on. A big swinging dick wants above all to get his way. Indeed, even the money he makes is about being able to do what he chooses – to get the restaurant tables he likes, buy the wine off the bottom right-hand side of the list where the prices are highest, wear the suits that aspiring dicks can only envy him for.

That’s why it isn’t just in business that you find dicks at the top of organisations. They’re right up there at the top of politics too. Exercising power to make themselves feel that they have huger dicks than anyone else.

Although, as Trump and Boris show, the reality is that they’re just huger dickheads.

Big swinging dickhead. And our Prime Minister now...