A BRIEF HISTORY OF BULLSHIT

By Pip Youngman

(Who should know)

Prologue

A History of bullshit has to start with a definition. Dictionaries are no help here.  By ‘bullshit’ I mean all the rubbish in our minds, the fact, figure or theory that you accepted without check because you found it in an article you agreed with and the other facts that you scorned without check because they came from someone you disliked.   I could have said ‘I’ or ‘we’, because we all do it.  

Bullshit arises when we use emotional convenience to decide what to believe and intellect only to seek evidence in that belief’s support. So our minds are full of rubbish.

This rubbish is what I am meaning here by the word ‘bullshit’.   I’m not trying to force this definition on you, just letting you know what I mean when I use the word.

This mental habit I describe above has it roots in fear and laziness, faults that few of us are free from.

Fear that too rigorous enquiry might destroy a belief that gives us much comfort, or deny us that belief in the first place.

And our laziness fears that having to rethink might be too arduous.

In this lazy, fearful way you may have finally developed a philosophy that is ‘you’.  Not too different, not too samey.

It says who you are, it gets you accepted somewhere, and it gets you by at parties. It probably contains an item that believes ‘honesty is a good thing’.  And you are not going to dump it because of some fact or other!

It would matter little that most minds have a great pile of such rubbish, except that we tend to disbelieve, distrust and dislike people whose pile is too unlike our own.

Even kill them.

We weave screens of strange belief,

We weave them with our minds,

Then use these screens of strange belief

To hide our fears behind

Yet then we find we have a fear

That could he here to stay

For then we find we fear the man

Who weaves another way

This it is, and only this

Divides the human race.

Would we not better face our fears

Than fear the other face?

The Brief History

Bullshit has many meanings; I’m meaning it only in the sense I have defined above.

Why do we bullshit so much?  How did it start? And is its history, perhaps, as important as any other?

I think so.

In the beginning

Well I can’t start at the beginning, because I know nothing of the beginning, I must stick to my own rules!

So, like any good historian, I will start at a point convenient to my case.

 I’ll start when the Earth was there, and Life was there, and that life was mainly little wiggly things. Little open ended wiggling tubes.

Open-ended tubes that wiggled some smaller, less fortunate creature in at one end, digested it, sucked its own life from that life, and then excreted the leftovers.  Life was simple, and

the GUT RULED, OK!

Then, either through evolution, or the unseen hand of God, life forms became more complex.  Sensors were added to detect food, and other sensors to avoid becoming food.

Limbs and fins and wavy things to chase and catch the prey

And horns and scales and nasty things to keep predators at bay.

The wiggling had become chasing.  But still food went in one end, and still shit came out the other, and the gut still ruled. The new bits were but servants of the Gut.

Came such a sophistication of sensors and moving bits that the bit that co-ordinated all the other bits had to have space of its own, and a character of its own, and in due course we were to call it the brain.

It was, however, just a sub-servant of the sensors that served the gut.

However this brain thing was a bit special in its own way, and as history progressed was due to become pretty uppity.  But for now, the gut ruled!  And I think, at base, it still does.

In due course these open ended tubes, these wiggly things, became pretty big, complex, and also beautiful, like lions and butterflies, and weird like duck billed platypuses and humans and you and me.  But before you and I personally arrived humans had had a long history.

First came the hunter-gatherers.  And chasing became hunting and gathering and still the gut ruled but at that stage one of our oldest institutions emerged. The boss.

Some bright spark, some primitive bright spark, realised that whilst his gut ruled him, so he could rule others.

“Hey you, smaller specimen, go and gather for me, go and hunt for me “

And the boss was born.  And that may have had its good side.

But rule depended upon communication. It was no use clipping the weakling’s ear if you could not tell him what to do.

So the boss system didn’t really flourish till speech came. And the boss, bosses, flourished.

 And the tribe was born.  And it was somewhere around that time that speech came and also memory came and for my argument the exact order of all this matters not a jot.  What matters is that with speech and memory and imagination there came the possibility of abstract thought.

With abstract thought came the possibility to frame and ask questions of an abstract type.  At that point mankind made its first and most fundamental intellectual blunder.

The supposition that the ability to ask a question presupposes the existence of an answer

Now questions and answers then weren’t just trivial pursuits. They were all fired important. ‘Is that berry poisonous? Is that a tiger in that bush?’   Get the answer wrong and you were dead meat. Sometimes a question of life and death importance could not be answered straight away but it was important not to forget that it was pending, unanswered, and still dangerous. Perhaps the unanswered questions is the mother of fear and the perceived danger the Father of fright.

Anyway speech would have allowed whole groups to live in fear because they could not answer an abstract question! Note that that in itself is not dangerous.

Probably there was already some other bright spark who had caught on to the wheeze of being the ‘question man’ as another way to avoid hunting for his own food.

Let us call this type the soothsayer. (Priest)

Trouble is when you have consulted the soothsayer, and he has said his soothe, you expected to be soothed.

’What is it all about Mr Soothe-sayer?’

‘Don’t ask me mate’

That won’t do! It would be back to chasing Rhinoceros.

He has to say something!

So when the first soothe sayer was first asked an unanswerable question, Bullshit was born.

 Now there are two guilty parties here, the bullshitter and the bullshittee.

For the bullshittee should have said ‘That’s rubbish’ But didn’t because what had been said sounded nice, and was comforting, and had made the nasty question go away.

And so Reflex bull was also born

Once again I’m not trying to define these words for all of us.  Just trying to clarify how I’m using them here.

There are enough bent, twisted and diminished words about already.

By Reflex Bull I mean the only too common habit of adopting a premise because it fits you emotionally, and then prostituting your intelligence to cherry-pick evidence in its support.

A symbiosis of ‘untruth said’ and ‘untruth accepted’ had been seeded and was to flourish exceedingly.

Did bullshit just die out as man and society developed?

Not on your nelly!

Next big step was settled agriculture.   Now other ways to avoid doing weeding sprung up. The specialist, the merchant, the ploughshare man, the medicine man. All of these worthies thought themselves worthy of having others do their weeding for them, probably justifiably so because they were useful. But the acceptance of this specialisation and softer options for reward gave opportunity to others more sinister. Problem was, the muscle men really came into their own.

‘That’s of lot of work son, but, there, cabbages don’t grow on trees.’

’I’ll guard them for you, at a price’ said the muscle man.

Then the muscle man became the muscle men.  And the biggest bloke became the chief of the musclemen.  And two more of our honoured institutions were born: the Military and The Monarchy.

Trouble was, the others, the rest, got restless, and got more restless as they got less.  This gave the Monarchs a problem.

So the Monarchs turned to the soothsayers and said ‘what shall I say to my people?’

 The soothsayers had to come up with something good, because they were now ‘priests’ and had a ‘temple’ and the roof needed repairing! As does St. Luke’s down the road.

‘Tell them, Oh Monarch, that Kings are appointed by God’

’Nice one, priesty. My soldiers will repair your roof.’

’And we will bless your swords, Oh King’

’Wouldn’t ‘anointed’ sound better, Brother?’ said the Arch Priest with his eye on the future.   ‘And why do you let him call you ‘priesty’?  Make him call you  ‘Father’’

So we now had The Monarch, The Military and The Church and the specialist.  And Bullshit was now woven into the fabric of society.

Except that, of course, at bottom, to coin a phrase,

The Gut still ruled.

***********************************

Surely things got better as man advanced, learnt more, invented writing, printing?

Nope!

Bullshit was now Dignified by the Capital Letters Spread by books, pamphlets, beautifully coloured Bibles and composed with more care by experts.

And the ‘People’ as the specialists now called the ‘Masses’ still wanted answers and still wanted comfort and were still happy to accept bad answers rather than no answers at all!

FIRST DIGRESSION

This reads like a work of science fiction, just a premise, a thread of thought being chased to a conclusion but surrounded by no flesh and blood, no character, no place, whereas, as we know, real history has been rich in people, in stories, in art and artefacts.

But should you have a bull loose in a china shop that is no time to start admiring the ripple of its musculature, the grace of the curve of a horn, or to recount stories of its derring-do.  No, in that circumstance you must concentrate on how you get the thing back under control.

We have a bull, or a bullshit, loose in the china shop of the world.  We must get it under control. To do so depends upon a proper understanding of its nature.  Others have written copious histories of Man’s story.  I make no apology for concentrating on Man’s major and most dangerous fault.  Call it bullshit, call it a lack of intellectual rigour, laziness, cowardice, call it what you will.  It is the preference for comfort rather than the Truth.

We do not know enough to know the truth, and probably never will.

By truth I simply mean the absence of untruth.  That we can recognise, we see it very easily in other people’s beliefs, but not in our own. You don’t need to be an expert in taurine faeces to recognise Bullshit.

SECOND DIGRESSION

 Where is God, the soul, the spirit, in this history?

 I do not know!

 Now there is a response I would recommend for more general use!

This reads as very definite, self-assured, arrogant even.  But read with care. I started by saying I knew nothing of the Beginning and I have now said I know nothing of God. That is the truth, maybe not for you, but certainly for me.  Surely some respect for truth, and for knowing your limits, must be one component of spirituality?  For I do consider myself spiritual.

By spirituality I mean an almost daily awareness, an acute awareness, of being part of something much bigger than me, much bigger than you and I, bigger than the here and now.  And of knowing that, for the most part, it is all still a mystery.

By Religion I mean an unfounded belief that you and ‘your lot’ know what’s what!  To me such beliefs are Bullshit when propagated, reflex Bullshit when accepted!

Clearly such beliefs have given comfort to countless individuals and the cohesion generated by shared beliefs has been the cornerstone of great civilisations.  But they do not rub together well. In a world shrunk by technology the cost of the clashes between beliefs now outweighs any internal gains within them.

THIRD DIGRESSION

Why do we still cling to such comforters?   Why cannot we humans grow up and find within ourselves the courage to stand beneath a sky we do not understand, and hopefully at that be more intrigued and thrilled than scared.  A sky, incidentally, which shows us only where the stars used to be, millions, billions of years ago, that still shows stars that no longer exist, and fails to show ones that have already existed for aeons, but not long enough for their light to reach us.

Living in Tehran I met a man called Stefan Stefan.  He was, so I was told, an American conman of great brilliance, but now unable to live in his home country.  (I have no idea if he was truthing!)

I asked him, ‘Is not a strange name like Stefan Stefan a hindrance in your trade?’

He looked at me with pity ‘Youngman,’ he said ‘you need educating’ and proceeded to do so.

He explained that it was essential that your victim/s started off by doubting you and that the strange name helped in this.  But the most intriguing thing he told me was about his use of what he called ‘the central absurdity’

He offered his ‘marks’ some great gain and into the plan to achieve this he put in some details of obvious absurdity. 

’Are you not just making life difficult for yourself?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘If I hawked a reasonable idea I would probably get a bite pretty quickly from some reasonable guy who would then reasonably scrutinise the plan and reject it.  Reason is my enemy, I have to enrol emotion. 

’So I offer something fantastic and include something stupid. I have to hawk it around for weeks. But when some greedy git bites I then get them to defend the stupid bit to a third party in public. Once they have done that they are on your side for good. Even if their friends warn them off they will no longer listen!’

The Virgin Birth and the Big Bang come to mind.

Earlier I defined Reflex Bull as choosing a premise emotionally and then prostituting your intelligence to cherry pick evidence in its support!

And exploiting this weakness was Stefan Stefan’s stock in trade!

I started this digression by asking, ‘Why do we still cling to the comfort offered by our many beliefs’?

Stefan Stefan had the answer. This is a matter of emotion and so is untouched by progress, by education, by the internet world.   If once we have been able to set our natural fears aside by accepting a truly comforting belief, the more absurd the detail is the more passionately we will defend it, we will die for it! Literally.

*****************************************

 Ian McGrew for certain sure knew

That God was Blue

Yet Ali Hasseem in a vision had seen

That God was Green

And other Macs and other Mullahs

Spoke of god in other colours

So they fought it out, And now are dead,

And all I know is, Blood is red.

******************************************

Back to the history, where we are now up to modern times

’Everything worth saying can be said in six pages’ (Heinrich Gotenberg)

So I had better wrap this up.

Did not science come to our rescue?

Sadly no.

Science was fine when simple enough to be practised by individuals as a hobby, but once the modern controlled mass production technology dependent modern state came into existence science became institutionalised and institutions means people.  People with careers and mortgages.  And where there is a mortgage

The gut still rules

Fear rules

And Bullshit still flourishes ok.

Ok so far

You can have a huge scientific institution, for example, CERN, which employs thousands, costs billions, headed by only half a dozen who could presume to understand what it is all about, and they all disagree and some hate each other.   But they will display shining unanimity when the next grant is needed. And they are looking for dark matter that is only needed to prove someone’s dubious theory.

Basic research, accident and experiment do, however, drive our technologies forward as the scientists quietly discard old theories as fact disproves them.

Do not look to scientific institutions for truth when they are all grant dependent.  At that, the Gut still rules.

And did the arrival of democracy help?  Let’s not be silly!  Democracies provide the natural home for bullshit, and for a very simple reason.  Modern societies are so highly specialised that it creates loads of little interest groups and from these you cannot necessarily expect truth.  You cannot expect truth from a politician who has a party to consider.  The businessman will speak to protect his corner.   And even the priests will be proselytising for a particular sect. 

The advertisers are there to gloss whatever they are paid to gloss and, sadly, the newspapers are there to sell more than to inform. 

But we, you and I, cannot be superior about this because we are the cause of it all.  We give a few moments’ thought before an election to find which politician best fits our own NIMBY perspective and then spend the next five years grumbling that we’ve been let down by the fraud we’ve chosen.  How truthful are we when we fill in a government form; when we apply for promotion; and even when we’re on the pull.  Will all family members without a secret please go to the first telephone box on the left.

When you look at language throughout the years and take away that purely workmanlike communication of ‘pass the salt’ or ‘take the next turn left’, you realise that what you are left with is a history of communication in which speech has been probably mainly used to dissemble, deceive, flatter or protect. 

Therefore, I am suggesting that if you are proud of being a well-educated, articulate person you should beware, because you are equipped with language which is most suitable for greater depths of self-deceit.

Well, that’s it folks.  That’s my history of bullshit.  But before we come to the Finale, let’s have a light-hearted and not too serious look at some of the gems of modern language.

Regional government will bring government closer to people.  What a sly use of the word ‘closer’.  What this really means is: ‘You will have yet another level of bureaucracy to go through but cheer up, their offices will be round the corner.’

We will be introducing a package of measures to modernise the organisation to make it suitable for the 21^st century.  Well, ‘package of measures’ can mean anything or nothing.  And surely anything that you actually do today, for better or for worse, is modernising.  And what a happy coincidence that it happens to be the 21^st century!

One of our leading supermarkets is advertising a Low-calorie energy drink.  And God is Love.  I should bloody hope so.  I should hate to be asked to worship a hateful God.  And God is great.  Well, if he wasn’t, he would hardly be a God.  There’s not much mileage in God is mediocre

But my personal favourite is one I’ve made up.  It imagines a young novice monk approaching the Father Abbott and saying, ‘Would it be all right if I took a modicum of pride in not being unduly humble?’  I quote this because it is the essence of this type of bullshit because the words in themselves make sense but there is no sense in the sense.

Now I have rambled on for 21 pages, far more than my ration under the Henry Gotenberg edict.  But that doesn’t really matter because I made him up. (Just testing.)

FINALE

So I have slated all our institutions, our intellect and our motives.

Having finished with the demolition job, can I now build?

You may well ask, have I anything positive to offer?  Do I have any creed to replace those I have scorned?  Any comforting ritual to fill the gaps I hope I have created?

Well, I think so. 

Only three things am I certain of:

One, I may be wrong.

Two, the Universe is an amazing place

Three, the human brain is one of the most amazing things in it.

SO there must be at least a fighting chance if we combine (2) and (3) of having a satisfactory life by using the one to look honestly at the other and keeping bullshit at bay.  It can last you a lifetime, I assure you.

But do not force too hard at its mysteries, for it’s better to live life as the owner of a good riddle than as a slave to a bad answer.

**********************************************************************

So that’s the creed. 

And I also offer a ritual…

Take yourself off to some private place and there, thoroughly, and with all due reverence face your own mortality and measure your insignificance.  In this you may, paradoxically, find your true importance.

Piss on the spot to mark it

Then put two fingers up to all reverence,

Finally, face the Southwest and say loudly, three times

‘Buggered if I know.  Buggered if I know.  Buggered if I know’.

And then just get on with it.

For you have a role to play.  For you, God help us, are part of the intelligence of the universe.  But that intelligence will be to no avail if you insist on using it to knit comfort blankets. 

And may the first person to query the significance of facing southwest in the ritual spend eternity queuing for the single toilet of hell.

The end

(or perhaps, a beginning)