Is There Life After Bullshit?

In my many idle moments, one of the questions I occasionally ponder upon is bullshit or, more specifically, can we as individuals and as a society really be functioning normally living, as we do, in the face of such an unrelenting blizzard of bullshit.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about bullshit for about 40 years now, so I was a little ashamed to realize the other day that I had not even begun to get a handle on this important shaper of our lives. I barely even know what is or is not bullshit, or what distinguishes it from simple lying, let alone how it operates, how important it is, and at what levels of concentration does it actually drive you insane.

So I thought I’d start ordering my thoughts by looking to see what work other, cleverer, people had done on the subject. The answer is Amazingly Little: it basically adds up to two books - On Bullshit, by Harry J. Frankfurt, philosophy professor at Princeton, available from Princeton University on-line bookstore, and Your Call is Important to Us: the truth about bullshit, by Laura Penny (a rollicking good rant about corporate corruption in Washington, but hardly a ‘theory of bullshit’). There’s also a website The Bullshit Observer (http://toddanthonydirect.typepad.com/) which is worth a visit. So, my shame was greatly diminished when it dawned on me that Yukon Confidential was in fact well-placed to make a meaningful contribution to the discipline of bullshit studies. Yukon Confidential is now on the cutting edge of bullshit. Just by saying it is.

I offer up to our extensive and devoted readership, therefore, an article which proposes a categorization of bullshit which goes beyond a single definition of this subtle and multi-layered phenomenon, as a first step to articulating what, if anything, we Yukoners should do in the face of torrential bullshit streams in all walks of life, in order to avoid finally losing altogether our tenuous grip on reality.

But before pulling on my yellow rubber gloves and getting stuck in, I’d better address the unuttered question, “why bloody well bother?” I intend first to establish an operational categorization and shared language of bullshit, before moving on to examine Yukon politics with these tools. We know that bullshit is widely distributed, at varying concentrations, throughout the public and private domains:

Ø in the thousands of advertising messages we receive every day, from the sexually exciting shampoo to the fuel efficient SUV,

Ø in news reporting which, in the name of balance and objectivity, will undermine an overwhelmingly convincing case by giving equal air time to a sleezeball lobbyist paid to say the opposite,

Ø staff meetings, consultations or any setting where participants are not there to say what they think so much as to represent a position,

Ø wherever people gather together to drink (though both may be true, which, in your view is most frequently true: in vino veritas or in vino horseshit?)

Ø The CBC Radio 1 weather forecast (surely only the forces of bullshit could convert snow into “flurry activity”),

but why has bullshit, like mercury in tuna, become so highly concentrated in the tissue of the body politic? Finally, Yukon Confidential’s lofty aim is to envision what Yukon politics would like without the bullshit. This is as challenging (and possibly as daft) an endeavor as landing a chicken on the moon equipped only with household utensils found in the typical kitchen, but I count on you all to cheer me on.