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.
With horseshit, we are now up to three kinds of shit, because there is also bullshit and chickenshit.
We are no longer limited to giving two shits about anything.
This post, which began as a rant appears to be developing into a textbook.
To catch everyone up, here’s some foundational Shit Theory, to help everyone keep their shit straight:
According to Shit Theory, “chickenshit” is 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.
In contrast, “bullshit” is meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.
And now “horseshit”. Let us formulate a provisional technical definition.
“Horseshit” is malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question “who can we blame for this shitshow?” This question drives ignorant but urgently inquiring minds to extremes of left- and right-wing politics. But by some diabolical antimiracle these theories all converge in a negative common ground of suspicion and hate. And, 100% of the time, as if by cosmic law, smack in the middle of this common ground is always and inevitably The Jews.
Now, let us explore practical applications of Shit Theory.
The origins of the discipline were practical, which is why Shit Theory is not, like most theory, pure bullshit.
It was developed to diagnose and treat a common and deadly strain of shittiness found in most organizations. This shittiness is known as “corporate”.
Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. Integrating meaning and practice means committing to a difficult, qualitative, nonlinear and not-entirely-predictable process called “design”.
Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type generally leans soulless, and is reliably numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency, productivity, measuring things and evading blame. But their whole job is to make human resources produce maximum productivity. But for temperamental reasons, inspiring people to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to coercively micromanage each isolated resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system.
These bits, once built, can be bolted and hacked together to more or less function, or at least to check a box and evade blame for any larger scale systemic malfunction or dysfunction. The hacked-together lump is then sent off to creative, who try to repair, patch and sand the lump to inoffensiveness, before applying several coats of artificial charm to its surface. Then marketing pumps phony meaning onto it. Then the inoffensive, artificially charming, phony lumps are boxed up, loaded onto trucks and off it all goes for consumption.
Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.
And, unfortunately, so do most governmental agencies.
And so do non-governmental organizations (NGO), who are normally founded by ndbf technocratic administrators who are so amazing at corporateness they’ve become zillionaires whose egos have grown in inverse proportion to their infinitesimally shriveled souls.
They have big empty ideas about how their deep expertise in chickenshit, combined with the unlimited coercive power and scale of government could help produce bullshit of epic proportions and beneficence.
So the corporations and the government and the NGO zillionaires with great billowing bullshit ostentation, gather to have top-secret chickenshit meetings about the future of the entire world.
Of course, it is all bullshit that will result in nothing more than yet more chickenshit. But to those poor paranoids who don’t know jackshit about the realities of corporateness, it looks like some seriously sinister shit is probably going down.
Thus horseshit, in copious quantities.
I’ve been writing about bullshit and chickenshit for many years now, but I have never recorded the august ancestry of these two concepts.
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?
If you can fight fire with fire, why not fight shit with even shittier shit? All this shit flinging, by the way, proves conclusively that we are descended from apes.
And this is probably our best theory why everyone has suddenly gone apeshit.
Apeshit is the frantic nonsense we start flinging when the world has gone to shit, and the material we have available around us is shit and more shit. So that is what we throw at each other.
And so here we are.
We are up bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit and apeshit creek without a paddle. No, it is worse. These creeks have risen into rivers, and the rivers have swelled into an ocean.
A shitflood is drowning the whole world.
And Shit Theory is the Ark to help us stay afloat of it.
