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< | Currently train-of-thought style: To Be Re-Edited |
| | How Do We Stop Bullshitting?
-- By MichelleLuo - 13 Feb 2012 |
| | 4) In 1982, Mattel released Eskimo Barbie.
5) “Eskimo Barbie is a cultural artifact of a significant conflict between Inuit and Western viewpoints in modern history.” (an actual line from the paper) |
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< | This is probably one of the more desperate attempts I’ve made to produce some reflection of the world, but I didn’t purposely set out to make things up that may have no basis in reality. I fell into the Barbie paper by accident and the end result was shaky, but during the process, I did the best I could to make connections that made some sense. Maybe this focus on logic – this reaching for abstract relationships that existed only in my mind and not in the real world – is why the end result was bullshit. |
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> | This is one of the more desperate attempts I’ve made to produce some reflection of the world, but I didn’t purposely set out to make things up that may have no basis in reality. I had to write something about Arctic Barbies, and I did the best I could to make connections that made some sense. Maybe this focus on logic – this reaching for abstract relationships that existed only in my mind and not in the real world – is how I came to produce pure bullshit. |
| | What is bullshit?
One way to define bullshit is in terms of what it is not - truth. I like what Eben had to say about Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (an essay I have not yet read), so I will borrow those ideas. Bullshit is not the opposite of truth. Bullshitters don't care about the truth; they care about selling a certain image of themselves. Liars have to know what the truth is in order to lie about it. Bullshitters don't have to know what the truth is to bullshit. |
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< | Legal bullshit is what Felix Cohen calls "transcendental nonsense." Transcendental nonsense is precisely a disregard for truth. When we don't tie the "supernatural concepts" to "social fact and ethical value, legal thought "trapez[es] around in cycles and epicycles without coming to rest on the floor of verifiable fact." When unguided by the social forces that ought to mold it, law is bullshit. |
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> | Bullshit in the law is what Felix Cohen calls "transcendental nonsense" – concepts based on logic and nothing else. Transcendental nonsense is precisely a disregard for truth. When we don't tie the "supernatural concepts" to "social fact and ethical value, legal thought "trapez[es] around in cycles and epicycles without coming to rest on the floor of verifiable fact." When unguided by the social forces that ought to mold it, law is bullshit. |
| | Thinking Over the Bullshit |
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< | Holmes said that logic is a cognitive structure of human beings and that the only way we can think about the world is through logic. If this were true, our cognitive limitations would preclude us from producing any reflection of the world that rises above bullshit. Is this true? |
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> | Holmes argued that logic is a cognitive structure of human beings and that the only way we can think about the world is through logic. If this were true, our cognitive limitations would preclude us from producing any reflection of the world that rises above bullshit. Is this true? |
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< | If we're going to think about human cognitive limitations, we should start with biology. We are social animals with the burden of consciousness and this mental process called logic. Before we were human, before we had logic, we were social animals living in a state of relative unconsciousness. The conservative estimate for the origin of human language and other complex cognitive abilities (roughly, logic) is 50,000 years ago (Bednarik, R. (2003). A Figurine from the African Acheulian. Current Anthropology, 44(3), 405-413.) Logic cannot be the only way we process information, because 50,000 years is an impossibly short amount of time to evolve away the mental processes we had before. The unconscious thinking remains. |
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> | If we're going to think about human cognitive limitations, we should start with biology. We are social animals with the burden of consciousness and this mental process called logic. Before we were human, before we had logic, we were social animals living in a state of relative unconsciousness. The conservative estimate for the origin of human language and other complex cognitive abilities (roughly, logic) is 50,000 years ago. Bednarik, Robert G., A Figurine from the African Acheulian, Current Anthropology, 2003, at 412. Logic cannot be the only way we process information, because 50,000 years is an impossibly short amount of time to "evolve away" the primary mental processes we had before. The unconscious thinking remains. |
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< | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people and it doesn't define itself according to other's judgments. The way around bullshit then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through multiple ways of thinking, particularly through forms of knowing that go to actual relations among people. |
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> | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people because it can't, so it can't define the human according to others' judgments. The unconscious, a place where self-representation does not exist, is also a place where bullshit cannot exist. The way around the cognitive limitation of logic then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through our multiple mental processes, to become aware of the way we think about the world in our unconscious. |
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< | How I Could've Not Bullshitted |
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> | The Lawyer Who Bullshits |
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< | My Arctic Barbie experience, consistently reciprocated over time, is the tragedy of lawyers. Lawyers need to know how things happen in society, but most are content with legal bullshit. |
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> | My Arctic Barbies experience reflects the tragedy of lawyers. Lawyers must write, make something happen with words. The some thang could be truth, but most lawyers would rather not go there. The writing of legal bullshit doesn't require the difficult task of exploring forms of knowing that go to actual relations among people; it doesn't require knowing anything at all. The lawyer that goes with legal bullshit wakes up in what Martha Tharaud calls "a 'what-is-life-really-about?' stupor" (Lawyerland 128) and he splits. |
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< | I should’ve said, “I’m not here to write about the Arctic. I’m here to write about sex. I’m going to follow Bukowski’s advice to Steve Richmond - 'What you need is life. Your work has to be alive. Drink, write, and fuck.' I can’t do those things if I have to make shit up about the Arctic, so I’m going to drink and fuck and write about it.” |
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