The Unbearable Whiteness of Bullshit

Bullshit -- a form of disingenuousness -- is having another maybe brief moment since the man who wrote the book has died. On this topic I've always trusted black people. Because they've been subjected to an inconceivable amount of bullshit. Saying something not true is lying. Bullshit asserts the irrelevance of truth in its application and is not necessarily the assertion of untruth. 

Rather, it's the fog of fraud. The liar says it isn't raining when it is. The bullshitter says it isn't raining so much and flooding everything because of climate change. Whatever. Where, the whatever is somehow convenient on the bullshitter's part, making money or defending group-think or simply the good feeling of getting away with it, honing one's skills for use when it really matters. 

But notice how corrupting bullshit is. There's no good v. evil. Evil and good are made obscure. So a larger existential kind of untruth underlies bullshit. That the distinction is a matter of spin. Or marketing or persuasion. Intelligibility is on the block and up for grabs. And intelligibility is everything. Because it relates to accountability, for one thing. And where there's none of that life is shit. 

Bullshit is a luxury good. A rich man's game. A liberal art. A leisure class activity among the unaccountably rich or aspirants to leisure among those unburdened by conscience. Persecuted people understand the stakes. That it's not a game. That lives are lost and ruined in the rubble of its confusion. And nothing is learned. Learning can even be lost. Lessons abandoned. Think of the sobering outcomes of so many wars.

And then we forget and do it again. And all the meaning is lost, though there's plenty of meaning while it's going on. Lots of effort and courage and nobility and decency and so on in the microcosm of it. Real goodness at one level. Insanity at another. Perfection is an attribute of the macrocosm. The macro-macrocosm. A place of which we have only speculative and suppositional knowledge. 

The realm of religion and myth. Those are the good lies. Stories that can make us whole. If they're good stories. Because even those can be bullshit.