Announcing a new shit: Horseshit. Horseshit is whatever horrible shit the far left and the far right can find to agree on. It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

So now, with horseshit, we have three shits. There is also bullshit and chickenshit, in quantities sufficient to drown the world. Now we aren’t limited to giving two shits about anything.

But writing this, I just realized that I have never recorded the august ancestry of bullshit and chickenshit.

First some background so everyone can keep their shit straight: I call meaningless formalities and procedures that seem like they ought to add up to something important but never do “chickenshit”. And I call “bullshit” notions that seem overflowing with meaning, promise and high-flying intentions that can never be achieved, or even put into practice.

The best use of bullshit and chickenshit is diagnosing the corporate shittiness of organizations. Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. This kind of integration involves commitment to a difficult and nonlinear process called “design”. Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type tends to lean soulless, and is numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency and productivity and measuring things. But they have to make human resources produce things. Inspiring them to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to force each resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system. Then they patch the bits together the best they can to get it to function. Then it is sent it off to creatives who apply a shiny coat of glitz. Then marketing puts phony meaning onto it, and then it is loaded onto trucks and off it goes for consumption.

Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.

My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

So there we have it. Bullshit. Chickenshit. Horseshit.

Isn’t it funny, too, that the latest deluge of horseshit is a reaction to institutional bullshit and chickenshit? Fight fire with fire, I guess.

All this shit flinging is decisive proof that we are descended from apes.