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 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 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 conceit that abstract theorizing can somehow elevates us above the stubbornly concrete human condition. On the contrary, nothing is more essential to the human condition than the notion that our notions allow us to transcend this whole shitshow we produce — precisely with this kind of notion, which is birdshit.
Birdshit might even be the spring from which all other shit flows forth.
When we are full of birdshit, we think our 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.
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 unbated, now you cannot stop compulsively talking about your neurosis and what caused it.
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, unusually by reversing it from what they really thing 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.
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.
So unanimous belief is required.
To accomplish this unanimity, cognitive-behavioral micromanagement is expanded beyond the sphere in inwardness to the inwardness of everyone else.
The 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 do 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 throughly, 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.
And this is why we are in a world of shit, and why knowing this is the first step in a long journey leading up our own assholes.