Bullshit for Beginners, Part 2.

OK, I said I would offer some insights on bullshit, so I’d better start coming up with the goods. Here goes.

First of all, I’d like to apologize to the gentler folk among our readership for the frequent repetition of this vulgar word – the fact is that no word in the more formal English vocabulary does such a fine job. Wikipedia says it appeared in popular speech in the US during WWII, while the OED suggests its root is in the Old French word boul, meaning fraud or deceit. All this roughly aligns with my own recollection that bull was an old soldier word for all the pointless tasks the rank and file used to have to do for no reason at all, except to keep them busy, such as paint rows of rocks white, shine their toe caps until you could see passing clouds reflected in them, fold their blankets in very difficult ways, and all that… bull.

Because it’s vulgar, we polite Canadians sometimes bowdlerize bullshit as BS but as far as I’m concerned that is worse than being direct: it retains all the vulgarity of bullshit without providing the satisfaction of swearing and, let’s face it, when bullshit strikes one does have to swear, because it REALLY PISSES ONE OFF. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go back to the source and use the word bull when I can, except when I have to blow off some steam.

What types of iniquity tend to provoke the “That’s Bullshit” response among those who are not so habituated that only the shrugged shoulder response remains?

1. Lies: You the reader can fill in some blanks here. The inside of my skull is so thickly wallpapered with examples since my first conscious thought, I don’t know where to start.

2. Obvious Injustice: see above.

3. Spin: the willful invention, distortion or misrepresentation of purportedly factual evidence in support of an argument known to be false. This includes simple exaggeration but is differentiated from it by the intention to deceive for gain. Spin is often closely allied to type 4 bull: claiming or imputing false motivation. The realm of the PR slough shark.

4. Claiming or imputing false motivation: e.g. pharmaceutical companies claim that their motive is primarily the relief of suffering, while the vast majority of their R&D funding goes toward the development of high-cost palliative drugs for treatment of chronic conditions most prevalent in wealthy countries, with little or no investment into cures for life-threatening conditions common in poor countries, for the simple reason that the former will generate greater profits for longer than the latter. The Japanese government claiming that they are going to kill over 1,000 whales this year for science is another shining example of this category of bull.

An example of imputing false motives would be that asserting that the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has invented or hyped climate change to justify its own existence and keep their cushy jobs and their seats at numerous junkets around the world – I know that is bull not because I think that the IPCC is made up entirely of selfless saints but because I know that a) they are so highly qualified that they would be able to get well-paid and stimulating jobs wherever they wanted, that b) travelling to strings of international conferences is a truly unpleasant way to spend one’s time, and that c) the people making this assertion are either paid to make it or are bottom feeders dependent on fat cats higher up the food chain… who are paid to make it.

5. Obfuscation: making the truth of a matter as complex and mystifying as possible, so that only the person who has come prepared to make the desired point can comment (and, of course, that person is you)… a.k.a. blinding with science.

6. Bombast: the use of pompous and extravagant rhetoric to intimidate and exclude the less articulate, and generally look important.

7. Hot air: similar to the above, but with a hint of menace. Denis the Fentie’s specialty.

8. Absurd bureaucracy or redundant procedural rigmarole. Again, I’ll leave it to the gentle reader to amuse him/herself on these dark nights by listing some examples from their own experience. Perhaps an after-dinner parlor game for the Christmas season…

This is not a comprehensive list and, in truth, once you begin to think a bit more closely about the anatomy of bull, new categories begin to leap out at you. You were always aware that there was a good deal of bull built into public discourse, but you lived with it, but only when you apply a magnifying glass do you realize that it is not just a sprinkling but a seething mass of maggot-ridden crap.

Having established this preliminary classification, I went through the Hansard record of the last day of this past sitting of the Yukon legislature and assessed each passage for bull content. I expected it to be around 10-25% bull. Bearing in mind that any given piece of schpiel can be (and often is) more than one type of bull at the same time (e.g. lies, spin and bombast), the total bull score for the day’s proceedings turned out to be over 300% bull, with only 20% having any use whatsoever, in terms of governance. This is like being told that 60% of your own body’s cells are parasites (they are, by the way, but that is natural, if creepy).

Like the parasitic colonies that live on and in our own bodies, much of this bull is not really harmful. Some of it may even play a useful part in the ecology of truth, (phew – that’s a term I’ve just made up all on my own. Check it out for obfuscation and bombast). I have come up with three proposed factors that differentiate harmless bull from the more sinister bull that is crippling our individual and collective minds. I call them twist, superstructure and constituency. I will be explaining these terms in YC’s next posting.

For now though, I’ve got a bottle of Single Malt, bought as a special festive treat, and I think I hear it calling to me. Happy Christmas, everyone.

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.

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