The Bullsh*t Manifesto, Part I—Everything You Need To Know About BS
New York almost drowned in horse manure. That crisis was averted, but many more will follow.
New York Almost Drowned in Horse Manure
Let me take you back to the late 1890’s.
The main mode of transport is horse and cart. Each horse produces 15 to 30 pounds of manure per day which piles up in the street, so much that a whole market exists for sweepers you pay to clear this all up. With population growth to come, you think ahead to the number of horses required to get everyone around, and you’re worried. After crunching a few numbers, you realise London and New York won’t be able to keep up with the rate of horse shit being produced. Unless something is done, both cities will be buried. Buried in horse shit.
Welcome back to ‘The Doorman’. This week I build on last week’s reemergence article, ‘Next Stop, Enlightenment,’ with something of a renewed personal manifesto-slash-expose centered around the motif of BS (Bullshit). What do I mean by bullshit? Not literal cow faeces. This term is used to refer to that which is baloney—vacuous—wrong—counterintuitive—absurd—self-defeating. Through this central idea of BS, I will unpack a whole new level of meaning and understanding of society and the importance of all our lives.
This is the first ever manifesto where the writer does not present himself as hero. As you’ll see below and in Part II, one of my points is that anyone writing something like this couldn’t possibly be the hero. This is hopefully an upgrade on the last manifesto I wrote five years ago, which, now that I look back, reads like plans for a beautiful cult. Time will tell if I have learnt my lesson.
I digress.
The problems with waste build up are obvious: Smell infiltrating the streets and choking people up, disease, the spread of bacteria. Then there’s the second order effects—insects, flies—creating more disease. All living things, from microscopic cells to humpback whales produce waste. Nature usually deals with it, but waste becomes more of a problem when we change the pattern of nature and start living all on top of each other. This is why we need waste management—without it, things descend into chaos.
Society itself produces waste. Not just the physical garbage, food waste or sewage, but all types of residuals, such as an old building without use or outdated technologies. Society develops in a kind of two steps forward, X steps back kind of way. Not every advancement is a net positive, but even the good experiments and promising changes to our lives come with their layer of fat. For example:
Some types of BS
Bureaucracy and red-tape (common in large corporations and public sector departments)
Pointless rituals (not necessarily religious)
Best-practices which are actually more like worst-practices
Things we do ‘for the sake of it’
Counter-intuitive behaviour—behaviour that is meant to lead us towards a certain goal, but actually gets in the way.
Poor Imitations of Reality, masquerading as reality—Reality TV is ironically unrealistic. See also The Matrix.
Ideological BS—in my opinion, usually the worst kind of BS
While BS can be obvious or subtle, and it’s subjective to say what is or isn’t BS, we cannot stop BS entering society any more than we can stop ourselves producing waste. Everything we produce, from the physical (e.g. cars, factories) to the organisational, conceptual and abstract, produces waste. The way I see it, our challenge is coping with the BS, and these are the main means available to us:
Your Options—Ways Of Coping With BS
We talk more about these next week.
Submit to the BS—You might laugh but this is obviously common. One way of dealing with BS is to pretend it’s not BS. The most convincing way to do this is to go all-in—to lather ourselves in BS while calling it something else. This is a sort of ‘burn the boats’ approach to stop oneself going back and changing our mind. It’s also a bit of a, ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach.
Downplay the BS—‘It’s not so bad.’
Conform outwardly, but not inwardly—‘They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom.’ I call these people Silent Observers.
Call out the BS—BS Spotters, more on them later.
Try removing the BS—BS Removalists. Dangerous job.
BS, Social Complexity & Conformity
The Marvelous Mind & Its Love Of Hierarchies
I argue the number one waste-producing device in the world lives somewhere in our heads. We refer to it as ‘the mind.’ While our species’ most unique property is how social we are, operating at this complex social level comes with trade offs.
Think about it—to belong in a group you need to behave by certain standards and must therefore understand if you’re adhering to them or not. The knock-on effect of this capability is it allows us to feel pressured into ‘normal’ behaviour. Our mind needs to generate hypotheses for what will enable us to succeed, function, be accepted and get along with others. It needs to notice the nuances of hierarchies e.g. financial wealth, be sensitive to where we rank in a hierarchy, and motivated to care about that position.
Basically, our mind needs to have some sort of impression of and sensitivity to what others think. You can see how this opens up the capacity for BS. To me, all the positives associated with group membership, community and belonging are the very functions that enable all the negative and annoying stuff—excessive comparison to others, gossip, competition, even things as small as sibling rivalry. Most of these things are surface level expressions of insecurity—it’s hard to imagine birds, donkeys or even dogs having this sort of insecurity. This is a trade-off of the higher consciousness package we are forcefully opted into.
Thus our dilemma—how to access the benefits of society, community, group membership, family and friends, while mitigating the downsides. The tension we normally endure is the desire to fit in to the group versus the desire to be ourselves.
Group Narratives
The other thing every group or society has is a narrative—about who they are, why they are and how to live—answers for that age old question, ‘what makes a good life?’ This is true for old ritualistic and tribal societies as it is for modern civilisations, usually built around the American Dream-esque picture of nuclear family, education, career, mortgage and retirement, with many obvious variants impacted by religious beliefs, career type and so forth.
These narratives are the default setting for conducting our lives, the template if you will. Again, there’s a trade-off when these narratives become over-reinforced—they exacerbate the tension I just mentioned (desire to fit in to the group versus the desire to be ourselves). Most of us are happy to subscribe to the template, but there can be a pressure to it, largely psychological, which is counter-intuitive to the narrative’s supposed aims (quality of life).
One example is when proving adherence to group behaviours or ticking off life milestones becomes more important than enjoying or freely performing them. We become more interested in showing off our muscles than being healthy, Instagraming the wedding than loving the person on the isle, focused more on building an impressive house than enjoying the life inside it. Like the horse manure fiasco, the narrative can threaten to overwhelm, and the surest warning sign of this is when the facade becomes the focus while the inside turns hollow—when we become more interested in signaling—not just to others, but ourselves—the quality of our lives, than experiencing the substance of it. This, I believe, is how one comes to feel ‘empty,’ ‘without meaning,’ or ‘hollow.’
Crucially, the mind doesn’t care if a hierarchy or group narrative is trivial, arbitrary or completely made up—the mind is just trying to understand what people are buying into, and how it can play along to enable us to belong. I’d argue our psychological orientation towards ‘fitting in’ is strong enough to do this, to generate a whole pseudo-reality—and that’s okay, so long as we remember it’s pseudo. My theory is that the hyperactivity of the mind will be proportionate to this desire to fit in, keep-up, not be left behind or even outdo the group.
The mind’s primary interest is not reality—it’s foremost interest is understanding and adhering to the reality propagated by others.
But hang on, isn’t everyone’s mind doing this? Then who, or what, is at the epicentre? If everyone’s chasing everyone, what’s going on?
We are eaten up by nothing—Charles Bukowski
That’ll do for one day. Next week, we’ll pick this back up to discuss the Challenge of Conformity, and the different ways of dealing with BS, unpacking the different characters this creates in society.
Joe Wehbe, author of Holy Sh!t, It’s Only… Tuesday? and 18 & Lost? So Were We is amongst many things a people-watcher and stern critic of our species. He has recently left his saintly home atop a cloud to return to earth with the explicit purpose of Enlightening others.