Knitbone manifesto

Design, Star

Part 1: The Hidden Costs of Carrot and Stick Management

Most organizations, as mechanically efficient as they aspire to be, motivate people very wastefully.

Instead of understanding people’s natural intrinsic motivations — their sources of meaning, fulfillment, inspiration, resilience and endurance — they rely on artificial extrinsic motivations. These positive and negative external motivations are often referred to as “carrots and sticks”.

No organization can entirely dispense with external motivations, for the simple fact that many employees are largely externally motivated. But some are not, and when employees who are internally motivated cannot find an outlet for them, and are managed as if they must be externally motivated, bad things happen, which we will discuss.

Let us call the habitual overuse of external motivations “carrot and stick management”.

Instead of creating conditions where people have opportunities to do the kind of work they feel called to do, carrot and stick management prefers bribes, blackmail and psychological manipulation to extract behaviors from their human resources.

Here are some downsides to carrot and stick management:

First, there is the expense of the carrots and sticks themselves. When work is a labor of love, people naturally work tirelessly just for the reward of doing it. When work is a labor of getting paid and not suffering consequences of noncompliance, pay must increase accordingly. Penalizing noncompliance also is not cheap; it requires documented processes. Carrot and stick management squanders cash on artificial motivations required to make folks do what they don’t want to do because natural motivations are lacking.

Second, carrot and stick requires considerable bureaucratic overhead, which is costly to create and maintain. In order to properly reward the desired behaviors and to correct or punish undesirable ones, managers must monitor those behaviors. They must build expensive technologies, establish reporting processes and enforce compliance, because these are dull activities people avoid if they can. Carrot and stick management squanders money and time on artificial motivation technologies and processes.

Third, carrot and stick management wastes an organization’s deepest and best resources — passions that, if channeled into the work, could infuse energy and vibrancy into the organization. Instead these passions are channeled into evenings, weekends, vacations and hopes for a better career elsewhere, where they are valued. The organization, instead of benefitting from these gifts, is resented for rejecting, undermining and obstructing them. And people are left feeling coerced, dehumanized, devalued and unfulfilled, which, for obvious reasons, is corrosive to an organization’s culture and contributes to turnover. Carrot and stick management squanders employees’ and partners’ morale, energy and desire to give.

Finally, demoralized people are demoralizing to interact with. Even if they stay at a job they don’t like and try with all their might to hide their feelings or numbness, they’ll behave in a spiritless, artificial and slightly phony, scripted way. They feel “corporate” in the worst sense of the word, and even the most perfectly executed corporateness is impossible to like. Brands that feel corporate do not inspire positive feelings or personal connection, and undermine brand relationship. Carrot and stick management squanders brand equity.

Part 2: Lessons of the Knitbone

Knitbone is the folk name for the comfrey plant (Symphytum officinale), a plant prized for a great many useful properties.

Traditionally, it has been used medicinally, especially to make poultices which help a wounded body heal itself. A knitbone poultice applied to a broken bone helps it knit itself back together. When my wife gave birth to our first daughter, our midwife prepared a poultice from knitbone we grew in our own back yard garden to help her recover.

But the knitbone used in the poultice had been planted for an entirely different purpose. We planted it in order to improve the soil in our herb garden.

The leaves of the knitbone are extraordinarily rich in minerals, and when they shed and fall onto the ground, they enrich the soil. They create a sort of fertile poultice for the plants around it. A knitbone ripples rings of vitality into all neighboring plants, which is why gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Why does the knitbone have this effect on living things? The secret is its roots. When a knitbone is planted, it drops a taproot into the ground, which burrows into the earth, deeper and deeper, sometimes ten feet or more into layers of earth otherwise unreachable, drawing obscure, buried resources up to the sunny surface, where they can be accessed by other plants, animals and human healers.

Part 3: Restart with Whys

My essential service is understanding other people’s driving Why — those natural intrinsic motivations that give a person a sense of fulfillment and life purpose.

Before we can understand what a driving Why is we need to understand what it means to ask a why question.

Because most of us suffer a kind of philosophical color-blindness. Just as the retina of a color-blind person is missing a color receptor, our vision of work is missing a whole category of understanding.

We lack a Why receptor. We have only What and How receptors.

So when we ask Why, we perceive only a What-How answer. We expect an in-order-to response.

Why do you go to work? In order to get paid. Why do you need to get paid? In order to pay my bills and build savings. Why do you need to pay your bills? Why do you need to save money?

Of course, most of what we normally do all day is stuff we do in order to do other stuff, in order to… in order to…

And that is fine, as long as one condition is met: the in-order-to chain is grounded in something that is done for its own sake. It is done for no other reason except its own value.

Here there is no in-order-to. The answer to Why is “I cannot say why.” It is what I do. It is what gives my life purpose. I do it because I love it.

This is what the question Why seeks, and the response cannot be given in language. It is given in feeling and action. Words, at best indicate it, but when they are expected to give that Why, the meaning is lost entirely.

But if a person’s chain of in-order-to is plugged into Why it is all charged with significance. A person feels motivated to do x in order to do y, and z when the connection with Why is felt.

Further, an organization where Why is felt by enough people also enjoys a purposeful culture. Meaning is in the air and infuses the work, even for people who are largely externally motivated. The activities, expressions and outputs of internally motivated people enrich the soil of the organization, and the culture of the organization is nourishing.

People are not motivated by the slogans or mission statements or strategies or justifications of strategies. They are motivated by the energy, the sense of purpose, of importance, the atmosphere of intrinsic motivation.

To achieve this, it is of the highest importance for organizations to start accounting for their stores of intrinsic motivations, and ensure they aren’t wasting or blocking them.

It must understand where these driving Whys may naturally be designed into its operations, so they drive the organization in the direction it is trying to go. And so these driving Whys animate its interactions with customers, who feel and appreciate its charismatic sincerity.

It also must understand where people need these gifts from others — where someone who needs to be needed in a particular way — who wants to give their essential service — can serve another person who needs it. Whether this happens externally — for example when a customer who needs technical assistance is helped by someone who feels personal fulfillment using their expertise — or internally — for example a junior employee is mentored by a senior leader who wants to share her hard-earned wisdom — an internal exchange of value is a win-win.

These win-win points are the energy generators in an organization. This is where the organization provides opportunities for people to give what they need to give, and receive what they need to receive. This is where people feel gratitude and loyalty to one another and to the organization that mediated the exchange.

The choreography of these win-win value exchanges, and all the other value exchanges that power the human interactions that constitute the organization is the very heart of the work service design does.

Service design shapes, as its material, everything that makes up an organization, so it can mediate value exchanges among those who participate in it, whether receiving its products and services (as a customer) or delivering or supporting it. Whatever various materials are used, what sets the whole system in motion — what animates it and gives it vitality — is the exchange of value.

The material of service design is organizations; its medium is exchange of value, and the most vivifying value, the lifeblood that makes the system a living organic system and not a soulless mechanical system, is the driving Whys, the essential services that come from people who have found purpose serving within the organization.

Ratshit

Shit theory

My sister said that ratshit was missing from my taxonomy. I agreed there was some sort of gap, but I didn’t know what ratshit would be.

But then I was complaining to my friend Fish about the overeagerness of left and center-left Jews to keep the peace with progressivist antizionists. They are caught between loyalty to the Jewish people and to their political tribe. So they compromise by vocally hating Netanyahu and blaming him entirely for the rise in animosity toward Israel and Jews, instead of blaming their own political tribe for tolerating extremists, and blaming themselves for normalizing and legitimizing it by being token Jews who also hate Netanyahu and the allegedly horrible things he has made Israel do.

Fish said “They’re Judenrat.” The judenrat were all those rabbis and Jewish community leaders who, before and during the Holocaust, thought that cooperating with the Nazis might soften the abuse and reduce the danger, at least for themselves and maybe their own community.

Judenrat. Juden… rat! Ratshit!

But ratshit isn’t only for or about Jews.

Any nervous non-loyal coward can puke ratshit to try to win tolerance or even approval despite who they really are. During the moral panics of the early 2020, most of the identity renunciation we witnessed, which at first glance might look like bullshit, was actually ratshit. Because that shit was not meant to inspire anyone. It was meant to deflect hostility to someone else, usually someone not paying enough attention who slips up and attracts attention.

Ratshit — cowardly nonsense — the equivocal, half-true, semi-sincere things semi-loyal people say and leave unsaid when they think knuckling under and selling out their own people will appease the people who despise them.

Devekut

Kabbalah

Scholem, from Major Trends:

Nothing seems to me to express better this sense of the distance between God and man, than the Hebrew term which in our literature is generally used for what is otherwise called unio mystica. I mean the word devekuth, which signifies “adhesion,” or “being joined,” viz., to God. This is regarded as the ultimate goal of religious perfection. Devekuth can be estasy, but its meaning is far more comprehensive. It is a perpetual being-with-God, an intimate union and conformity of the human and the divine will.

Yes, except for the word “distance”. One cannot have distance from infinity. And for a panentheist, this is everything.

If we understand the panentheism and infinitude we must understand also that there cannot be any question of belonging to the infinite One. The necessarily all-inclusive infinite One necessarily includes each of us, whether we intuit or acknowledge it or not. We cannot avoid this metaphysical belonging.

The only real questions concern our own finite understanding of and relationship to the infinite One: First, do we recognize our metaphysical situation — that we are situated within and belong to the Infinite One, who transcends but includes us? Can we suprehend the comprehending, incomprehensible truth that our own finite notion of “infinity” is necessarily bounded by nihilitude, which bestows upon us one-within-One identity — belonging to, but absolutely not identical to One’s own infinitude, of which at best we can participate?

This is why Jewish mystics, for as long as they live, teach and write, pursue devekut, not unio mystica.

Devekut is angelic, willing participation in the all-inclusive infinite One.

Note: A while back I finally understood that there is absolute truth, but that truth cannot be comprehended objectively. It is everted objectivity, which, when finite is subjective, but if infinite, is something a friend of mine calls “superjective” (not in a Whiteheadian sense). Absolute truth is that by which finite truths not only pragmatically work, but harmonize with devekut, and transmit divine light of our one-within-Oneness.

Another note:

In comprehension the given is a What.

In apprehension the given is a That.

In suprehendsion the given is a Whom.

In comprehension, we can reach out and grip some of reality; the hand of thought closes around an objective truth.

In apprehension, our reach exceeds our grasp; our fingertips touch something real, but we cannot close the hand of thought around any objective truth. The mysterious resistance makes us feel apprehensive. It is a perplexity, an aporia.

In suprehension, we intuit the reality that we cannot grip a reality in whose grip we are gripped. We cannot comprehend comprehension. No subject is an object of thought. And the superjective is itself the ground of our own thinking, the Being of our own being, the One in whom we are one.

Another note: I have been contemplating letterpress printing another hermetic tract, and? in the spirit of my own designerly kabbalah, receiving it as a design brief for some more accessible, less sacred books.

These prenatal books have had a kaleidoscope of shifting titles, including “Enworldment”, “Exnihilist Manifesto”, “Everso”, “The Ten-Thousand Everythings”, “Pearls and Shells”, “Second-Natural”, “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy” and “Hermetic Design”.

Today, writing about one and One and one-within-One, the ironic prankster in me — (who, in the most solemn moments, not only refuses to exercise quiet pious resoect, but goes into full-on boy-in-a-pew mode, and gets even louder, sillier and more fidgety) — suggests that the correct form for my esoteric tract might not actually be a chapbook, but rather a label on a castile soap bottle.

I really might do this.

Nihilitude:

Dilute! Dilute! Ok!

Another note on “Creation redescription”

Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Another note on “Creation redescription”:

Start with a blank sheet of paper.

Draw lines across the paper, from one side to the other, vertically, horizontally, diagonally. This is division without separation.

Cut the paper along all the lines, but keep the pieces touching like pieces of a puzzle. This is separation without exclusion.

Now remove one section of paper from the others. This is exclusion.

On that removed section of paper, draw horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

Cut the paper into bits. Arrange them how you like. If you wish, you can make little duplicates of the cut bits. If you wish you can exclude what doesn’t fit, and remove them from the other scraps, because they are irrelevant.

We can if, we wish, take all the original cut up bits, including those we removed and reconstruct the section like a puzzle. We can restore the section to a state of defined finitude.

We can, if we wish, continue by placing that restored section back with the others, and restore the paper. Imagine a great puzzle made of pieces which are themselves little puzzles.

Alternatively, we can keep our little construction made of cut up bits of the removed section of paper. We can say one of the bits is the ultimate bit and forget all the others. Or we can say the section of paper is not a section of anything, but the whole sheet of paper.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Letterpress magic trick

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Star, Symbols and diagrams

As promised, I letterpress printed my ASCII Mercury sigil.

Good thing, too! — because after writing “Creation redescription” I was startled to discover that my divine Boolean operations map with uncanny barnumite neatness to this configuration: Plus, divine Andness. Zero, divine Notness. Open parenthesis, divine Orness.

I decided to print the sigil as the oblivion object in a blind spot demonstration, which exemplifies nihilitude (a present nothing which leaves nothing missing, showing very clearly how blindness is the furthest thing from darkness.) It is by nihilitude that the Trickster tricks, so I cannot imagine a better vanishing-appearing figure than Mercury, the trickster angel, for this vanishing act transpiring on my little magic paper strip.

Instructions.

  1. Orient the strip so the asterisk is on the left, and the Mercury sigil is on the right.
  2. Hold the strip arm’s length from your face.
  3. Close your left eye, and keep your right eye open.
  4. Focus your eye on the asterisk, while focusing your attention on the sigil.
  5. Maintaining this dual focus, slowly move the strip closer and closer to your open right eye.
  6. Notice when the sigil is no longer there, absent, while leaving no trace of absence.
  7. Say: “Nihilitude: Nothing is present so nothing is missing.”
  8. Remember that all but the tiniest sliver of reality is submerged in nihilitude. (“Exnihilated”)
  9. Thank God for the shelter of nihilitude, which is the precious gift of moral existence.
  10. Seal it with “Amen.”

There comes a perilous point in a person’s life when the decision can no longer be evaded or postponed:

Either seem sane, or be sane.

Creation redescription

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Symbols and diagrams

From Absolute One

…

Pure Infinitude to Articulate Infinitude (through definitude, divine Withness)

Articulate Infinitude to Defined Finitude (through nihilitude, divine Orness)

Defined Finitude to Formational Beings (through finitude, divine Notness)

Formational Beings to Material Actualization (through combination, divine Andness)

…

From Unformed Matter,

Inarticulate, undefined, unformed, at one with

Absolute One

The passage above is not translation. It describes in pure English what I have been shown in Hebrew.

+0(

Jacob’s Lattice

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Postperennialism

Autobiography, Esoterism, Religion

Perennialism (also known as Traditionalism and Sophia Perennis) compares traditional religions to paths up a mountain. At the foot of the mountain, the paths are separated by many miles. They converge with altitude, and eventually they meet at the summit. The lower divergent understandings of the tradition are exoteric. The higher, convergent understandings are esoteric. The higher the esoteric understanding, the more one understands the depths of one’s own tradition and its transcendent unity with the others.

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, so this one summit with universally valid paths to it from diverse points of departure resonates. It harmonizes with both U’s of my childhood brainwashing and with the tolerance gospel it preached. But Perennialism provides a depth, seriousness and respect for religiosity that I felt was lacking among the UUs I’ve known, and leftists in general, including religious leftists.

But Perennialism also had some ideas that I found hard to accept. One, I believe, was an artifact of Islam, which claimed that no new traditions were possible after Mohammad. According to Guenon and Schuon, Mohammad was the last prophet who founded what was necessarily the last valid tradition, an idea I reject for multiple reasons. Another is an eschatology of the Fall, which accounts for why no new traditions are possible. Another is that only strict enduring adherence to a traditional religion is a path to esoteric realization. And I dislike the authoritarian politics that normally follow from these beliefs.

Today I realized that what I reject is Perennialism’s exoteric doctrine. The eschatology, historiosophy and practical prescriptions are not essential or even necessary extensions to the esoteric doctrine, and I do not find them to have the same overwhelming persuasive force. I do not reject any of them entirely, and I might find them more persuasive later. But from where I stand, these ideas seem like a connecting belt across converging but as-yet-unconverged exoteric paths, not to be confused with the convergence at the crown.

Shit index

Shit theory

So here we are. Shit theory’s growing taxonomy is up to eight shits:

  • Chickenshit — “tedious nonsense — all the formalities, procedures, reports, busywork and minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does.”
  • Bullshit — “meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.”
  • Horseshit — “malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question ‘who can we blame for this shitshow?’”
  • Birdshit — “meta nonsense — the little condescending golden turds of pseudowisdom dropped from above by high-flying assholes, soaring on the conceit that abstract theorizing somehow raises us above the stubborn concreteness of the human condition..”
  • Dogshit — “incompetent nonsense — the result of nondesigners who think they are designers trying to design and bungling it, and then repeating the bungling as rapidly and randomly as possible.”
  • Apeshit — “weaponized nonsense — any lump of ideas picked up and hurled as a projectile.”
  • Batshit — “crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane”
  • Ratshit — “cowardly nonsense —  the equivocal, half-true, semi-sincere things semi-loyal people say and leave unsaid when they think knuckling under and selling out their own people will appease the people who despise them.”

What else is there, even? Catshit? I don’t even know if they’re needed. I think this might be a complete list. If so shit studies reached its apex within 72 hours of its founding. That’s a pretty squat shitheap, given the overwhelming quantity of shit out there.

Batshit

Philosophy, Shit theory

Another extremely important shit species that deserves analysis is batshit.

When someone believes things beyond belief, and believes them elaborately, intricately, extravagantly and urgently, we call that person batshit crazy.

Often, these beyond-belief beliefs are literally about the beyond. They are speculative. But the speculation has taken on a life of its own, and is no longer obviously speculation about reality. The speculations have detached and become a standalone batshit world, which feels way more real and interesting than whatever that other world was.

Batshit is sometimes confused with bullshit, because batshit is nonsense that never touches ground and has no practical effectiveness. But unlike bullshit, batshit is believed, intensely and sincerely. And while both bullshit and batshit fail to translate ideas into effective practices, bullshit never tries, whereas batshit ideas lead directly to batshit practices.

And it is also easy to confuse batshit with birdshit, in that it flies around in the sky. But where birdshit flies into the sky to get a better, loftier, critical look at the ground in order to shit all over it, batshit is trying to fly further than the sky, and the batshit produced in the effort is innocent byproduct, forgotten as soon as it falls into that nowhere known as solid ground.

“Batshit” is crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane” people.

Apeshit

Shit theory

I mentioned apeshit in passing in an earlier shit theory installment. But it deserves its own definition.

When we human primates get really super-fucking angry, something horrible and funny happens to us. We lose access to the newfangled lobes of our hypertrophied brains, we begin to resemble our animal kingdom relatives.

We do what they do. We grab whatever is closest at hand and fling at whoever has infuriated us. We go apeshit.

Shit studies scholars call whatever is flung in this state apeshit. Whatever kind of shit it started out as, once it is picked up and hurled, it is now classified as apeshit.

“Apeshit” is weaponized nonsense — any lump of ideas picked up and hurled as a projectile. The point of it is not truth, or ideas, or anything resembling communication. It is pure animal speech act.

Apeshit is not about content. Blunt force impact is the message. It is about impact, and a disgusting, degrading mess to clean up.

Dogshit

Shit theory

I was shooting the shit with my brother Scott, and he raised a crucial question. When would I address the issue of dogshit?

How about now?

I am a designer by profession, which is why I am angry nearly all the time.

One of the worst things about this being a designer, besides the usual chickenshit, is one particularly noxious bit of bullshit, that I’m pretty sure nobody else has to deal with.

That bullshit is the deeply untrue insistence that “everyone is a designer.”

I don’t see other professionals running around assuring everyone that they can do their job.

And this bullshit invites people to do our jobs instead of us. Tragically, thanks to the maleficent magic of metacognitive incompetence, aka Dunning-Kruger, aka double-ignorance, they are unable to notice how much worse at design they are than designers.

This happened with “design thinking” when business executives actually believed designers and decided that learning a bunch of chickenshit techniques would help them solve a bunch of bullshit problems. “HMW we waste our time leveraging methods we have no business messing with, on problems nobody really cares about?” Design Thinking, that’s how!

And it happened again with product management. A bunch of clever, incompetent jacks-of-all-trades with MBAs who learned to talk like engineers decided to reinvent strategic design from scratch as if design never existed because this was a job far too important to let designers do.

The result of these efforts is pure dogshit.

“Dogshit” is incompetent nonsense — the result of nondesigners who think they are designers trying to design and bungling it, and then repeating the bungling as rapidly and randomly as possible. They call the repetition “iteration” and their bungling “failing fast” or “moving fast and breaking things” or “discovery”, missing the point that things are supposed to move steadily toward improvement, not just spasm every which way in perpetual brokenness.

I suppose we could expand the definition of dogshit to cover more takeovers of professions by hordes of incompetents. We could discuss how ideologues have invaded the humanities, or activists have taken over journalism, education and entertainment media, professional marketers have displaced artists, ?and just about everybody and their cousin cranking out vibecoded dogshit apps… ?and so on.

But I am the author of Shit Theory, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m nailing the shit out of it.

Birdshit

Shit theory

My friend Jim graciously read my post on Shit Theory.

But it left him with a question: “Do you really believe Shit Theory can carry us over this rising flood of shit?”

I answered, “Of course not. That claim is total bullshit.”

“Nothing will save us,” I added. “We are all going to die.”

But then it hit me: My claim was not bullshit. It was something else entirely.

Jim had identified an entire new species of shit: birdshit.

My claim that understanding Shit Theory will somehow save us from drowning in shit is not only untrue, it dumps an entirely new ocean of shit into the already unfathomably shitty depths of bullshit, chickenshit and horseshit.

Here is the truth: No theoretical understanding of a shitty practical situation does shit to help us fix it. And believing that it does only makes things worse.

We are in deep shit, and Shit Theory’s birdshit claim of making it all better through the power of understanding only deepens the deep shit we are in.

The only way Shit Theory makes anything better is the feeble, overrated medicine of laughter. Any claims to value beyond cheap laffs is birdshit.

Let’s get scientific and define birdshit.

“Birdshit” is meta nonsense — the little condescending golden turds of pseudowisdom dropped from above by high-flying assholes, soaring on the conceit that abstract theorizing somehow raises us above the stubborn concreteness of the human condition.

On the contrary, assholes: nothing could be more essential to the human condition than the notion that our own high-flying notions have enlightened us and elevated us to transcendent heights above the shitshow below.

That shitshow is largely a shitheap of precisely this kind of birdshit, yours and everyone else’s.

You are the furthest thing from above it — you and your critiques, insights and true truth are just more birdshit on the shitheap you survey from your aerial view. And then your wings get weary and you have to return to your shitshow roost to be observed and birdshit on by other high-flying know-it-alls.

And notice how useless your birdshit is on the concrete, practical ground, even to yourself.

Birdshitting is self-indulgent condescension, the pleasure of unclenching your sphincter, releasing the pressure and watching your lofty wisdom rain down and splatter upon the stooped heads of those stuck on the ground below. When you return to the ground, though, you go right back to participating in the whole shitshow. You belong to it, seek your fortune in it, endure swoop-n-poops from your superiors and mutter petty complaints about the unfairness of it all, just like every other asshole. And your golden birdshit insights serve only as souvenirs of superiority. But it isn’t even a consolation prize. Everyone’s got their little pile.

When we are full of birdshit, we think our high-flying insights resolve our problems, which disarms our critical vigilance and liberates us to make things exponentially stupider and worse.

Birdshit belongs to a grand old tradition of salvific magical beliefs, according to which believing some set of extra-true facts automatically purifies a believer’s heart, and qualifies them for perks and benefits of pureness-of-heart, including admission to paradise and subscription to prayer-answering services. Present your handful of priceless birdshit at the Heavenly Gates and St. Peter will let you in.

The birdshit belief-in-belief tradition lives on — thrives, even — in the allegedly secular world of psychotherapy, which is really just a belief in salvific scientististic beliefs. If you figure out why you are neurotic, that cures your neurosis, despite the manifest fact that you are even more neurotic, now, because, in addition to your original neurosis, which continues unabated, now you cannot stop compulsively talking about your neurosis and what caused it. Your autobiographical logorrhea is birdshit.

And since psychotherapy entered politics as social justice, we’re seeing an explosion of political social-scientistic birdshit.

A depressingly excellent example of birdshit is “the work” silly racist white ladies have loved doing for the last ten years. They sit around meditating, theorizing about how racist they are. They fixate on it, talk about it, lament it and resolve to micromanage all their behaviors — to take each and every racist obsessive-compulsion and correct it, usually by reversing it from what they really think and feel.

This, they believe, is an effective corrective to racism.

All this, so far, is birdshit.

But the inner work of birdshit never stays inner for long.

Industrial volumes of birdshit, in fact, are produced by all this inner work — valuable expert knowledge everyone needs to know, and agree with!

Because if birdshit is as extra-true as it needs to be to have its magical salvific effects, it must be so overwhelmingly true that it is self-evidently undeniable to all. Otherwise, it’s just an extra-strong opinion.

Unanimous belief is required. To accomplish this unanimity, cognitive-behavioral micromanagement is expanded beyond the sphere in inwardness to the inwardness of everyone else. And this cognitive-behavioral micromanagement is accomplished, of course through human resource chickenshit.

The justification for the chickenshit is bullshit. Everyone must ostentatiously recite the same bullshit, perform bullshit ritual acts, pretend to agree with bullshit. To prove all this bullshit was actually said and done — and not just bullshit — everyone is required to keep chickenshit records, file chickenshit reports and make chickenshit measurements proving it all worked, which it won’t because bullshit cannot be accomplished and chickenshit never accomplishes anything. Which means more chickenshit controls and measurements are needed to make the bullshit a reality.

And everyone hates this. They cannot understand how things could become this thoroughly, intricately, elaborately shitty purely by accident. Surely it must have been ingeniously engineered for maximum shittiness. And they resent the hell out of being controlled, hectored, bullied, henpecked, lied to and forced to lie. They want to defy it, fight it, destroy this bullshitty, chickenshitty system, and whatever shithead was responsible for engineering it. And now we have horseshit. And the horseshit confirms the birdshit which claimed it was there all along. And this justifies yet more chickenshit and bullshit, and counter-horseshit, and produces a real shitstorm.

This is what could be called the birdshit-to-bullshit-to-chickenshit-to-horseshit-to-more-chickenshit-and-bullshit-to-counter-horseshit-to-counter-horseshit-to-shitstorm pipeline.

Birdshit that claims to be above it all is what feeds the pipeline. It is the rainfall that quenches the earth, refreshes the springs and flows forth in a great river of utter shit. This is why we are in a world of shit, and why knowing where it all comes from is the first step in a long journey leading directly up our own assholes.

Shittheory.com

Autobiography, Philosophy, Shit theory

There was absolutely no chance that shittheory.com could be available, but I decided to check, anyway.

I am now the owner of shittheory.com.

Clearly, this is a sign from heaven.

Update: shitstudies.com is also available.

Destiny speaks.

Another update: blowjobstobedone.com is available, too?

My cup runneth over.

Precisely what it runneth over with is questionable, but it is certainly overflowing with something.