On the Edge 1: Fred Hogan

The effect on an entire society that is pushing the edges of the possible in order to get a competitive edge at the cutting edge is to force everyone inside it to push themselves to their own edges.  The evacuation of the psychological centre gives everyone a common consciousness.  They are all ‘edgy’.  However, the experienced effects can be very different.

The industrial driver percentile is advantaged, challenged and energised.  They are the aggressively competitive, smart, tough, sometimes unscrupulous, hyper-active stress junkies, for whom the winning edge is survival.  There is always someone just like them, just behind, who badly wants to edge them out.  They love risk and will go to the edge to sharpen and cut it.  Even if hubris takes them over it, they are unafraid, for they are resilient, flexible and can use the cliff and others on it, to break their fall.  They will be back, for they love the edge too much to stay away for long.



Fred Hogan was born with a lot of nerve, a bloodhound nose for an opportunity and unerring instincts about how to mobilise others to help him get to it.  Even when he was a quite young, he was always trying to cut deals, take short cuts, bend the truth, bluff his way out of trouble, deflect blame for problems away from himself, pin point leveragable weakness in others, capitalise on an advantage and take undue credit for successes.

He raised self-promotion into an art form.  He was smart and impatient of petty restrictions and moral nostrums. His precept was, ‘always stay inside the elastically permissive boundaries of the arguable and the deniable.’  At school, he became expert at staying just out of the reach of the hand of authority.  He was also a natural leader, with the ability to draw people to himself, involve them in his enterprises and keep their loyalty if he needed them.

He was very focused on doing well for himself and was always, even in his dreams, scheming and plotting new ventures.  He never had much time for study because others could do that for him.  Although somewhat ugly, he was never without an attractive woman on his arm.  They found him irresistible.  They loved his careless generosity, confident swagger, quick wit and visceral charm.

His larger than life chutzpah and sharp mind made him a formidable businessman; never more so than when the chips were down.  On one occasion, when almost at the point of bankruptcy, he challenged a supplier to accept a cheque (which he knew he couldn’t cover) for the full amount demanded, on the understanding that if the supplier took it, it would be the last time they ever did business together.  The supplier buckled.  Fortunately, the next day the market turned in his favour.  He survived to fight another day.

Freddy was a great ally if one knew exactly where the common interest converged and diverged.  He always did. At the divergence point, he became as sly and cunning at appropriating the common profit as he was at sloughing off the common loss.  However, within the zone of interest convergence, he would protect your back as if it were his own.  You could rely on it.  He would facilitate the path of partners, but even the closest of them would need to be vigilant if they depended on him as a supplier or distributor. 

Notwithstanding his sharpness as a businessman, he was ever a sucker for a salesman with a good line and a nifty gadget.  Often, he loved a good sales patter to the point that he would buy something he didn’t really want just for the pleasure of hearing it through to the close.  Sales talk was his language and he revelled in its finer nuances.

His ego was in constant need of enhancement and replenishment.  He liked to impress and more, he liked to be liked. The trouble was that while he could be abundantly munificent, he was egoistically insensitive and thus likeable only in small doses.  Rather tiresomely, he couldn’t resist exaggeration in the pursuit of charisma.  He was expert in making a slight knowledge go a long way, co-opting other peoples ideas as his own, or repeating them back to the originators as if this represented a process of co-thinking. At his table you would have to shout to make yourself heard because conversational barging was always the order of the day.

He liked to collect and patronise art and artists.  They didn’t mind eating the gourmet food and drinking the collectable wine he wasted on them. Freddy didn’t have friends so much as hangers on, some of whom had real talent that needed support, but mostly, they were just agreeable, entertaining or ‘interesting’.

Freddy’s fortunes varied, for his self-confidence and appetite for risk were great.  However, while in the course of his life he did lose several fortunes, he always came back to make even more.  His motto in these matters was, ‘everyone has to share my lot’.  Creditors always shared his misfortunes to the fullest extent possible, enduring long delays for payment, negotiating debt discounts for immediate satisfaction and on the one occasion he did go bankrupt, getting lost in a maze of holding companies, Netherlands Antilles bank accounts and family/friend asset warehouses.  On the other side, he had a small core of extremely loyal employees who he always managed to look after, especially in good times and to a lesser but adequate extent in bad.

He died quite young from diabetes and heart disease.  He was too much of a lush to ever restrain his appetites and his waistline. At his passing, he left behind several ex wives, a long suffering mistress, a bevy of casuals, a fortune for his children to fritter away and a large group of orphaned dependants and hangers on who were now too old to find a new patron.