The Good Guys of Legal and Professional Publishing

• Author: Robert McKay
• Date: January 13, 2015

I wonder if many others, like me, find almost all those uplifting messages posted and spread on social and business media sites, intensely nauseating? Mostly they instruct, or rather order us to have some kind of simplistic emotional feeling surrounding “do something awesome”, “life is like a (any noun will do)”, “17 things that mentally strong people do” or, maybe even more shallow, the command that we “keep calm” followed by something really tedious. However, I could probably live with “keep calm and stop getting childishly over-excited about next to nothing”. Equally absurd is that the people who write or repeat the nonsense, when you actually know them personally, you are reminded that they rarely are true proponents of the supposedly high moral ground they espouse but are as likely to be even worse than the rest of us.

It makes me despair about such people or rather just the lack of real life experience of those who would create or pay any attention to this often deceitful drivel. Few in number I hope, but those unquestioning, never cynical or sceptical enthusiasts exist, ready to parrot whatever lies, myths and breakable promises that are handed down to them. I notice that they rarely are “experienced”, “trained”, “educated”, “knowledgeable” or “interested” in their field or necessarily good at it but almost inevitably “passionate” about what they do, an emotion that, entirely subjectively, I normally tend to associate either with romantic endeavours or uncontrolled criminality, sometimes both. Nothing is described in measured and comparative ways but only in terms of “awesome” and “amazing”, which it rarely appears to be. With, as I perceive it, their beliefs in the authority of whomever is in position, impossible magic, mysticism, myth and acceptance of the correctness of whatever status quo they encounter, while wishing them no harm nor intending to cause offence, I try to keep my distance from them. They just aren’t normally my kind of person. Probably no harm done; life’s rich tapestry and all that.

I haven’t come across an enormous number of such types working in legal and professional publishing, I’m pleased to report, yet I wonder why? Probably having something to do with the relative sanity and comparative rationality of the law is not irrelevant. More than this, it tends to attract somewhat “less is more” kinds of people who value statement of fact over hysteria and dishonesty, and opinion that is informed, maybe objective, even expert...