Currently train-of-thought style: To Be Re-Edited

How Do We Stop Bullshitting?

-- By MichelleLuo - 13 Feb 2012

How I've Bullshitted

On the first day of class, Eben said, “You have all been rewarded for bullshit.” This is so real.

There have been times when I’ve semi-consciously bullshitted and not only gotten away with it, but was heavily rewarded. My freshman year of college, I signed up for a writing elective called "Desire." I thought it was going to be about sex. On the first day of class, I learned that the full title of the course was “Desire of the Arctic Region.”

“So” my professor began, “I hope you have all chosen a topic related to the Arctic for your term-long research and writing project. Let’s begin with you” (me).

I had nothing. “Arctic…Barbies,” I said.

Luckily, Mattel had made three Arctic Barbies, and I spent the next ten weeks drawing tenuous links between “the design and marketing techniques” of these Barbies and “changing American perceptions of the Arctic.” I wound up submitting my paper to the 16th Inuit Studies Conference, the conference people liked it, and my school paid for a week-long trip in Canada for me to give a speech about my “findings” to a hundred Inuit Studies scholars.

The whole thing felt fraudulent to me. But I did do the research and I did write a 100-page paper and I couldn’t have given that speech if I didn’t at all believe in what I was saying, right? Yet when I explain this paper to people who ask about it – when I hear myself saying the ideas out loud – I feel embarrassed.

To illustrate how far I stretched logic and a priori conclusions, here is a synopsis of 20 pages of my paper: 1) In the 1970’s and 80’s, videos surfaced of commercial seal hunters clubbing seal pups to death. 2) Western animal rights advocates successfully campaigned to cease all seal hunting, but they were ignorant of the fact that Inuit hunters did not follow such inhumane practices. 3) The sealing bans destroyed the only sustainable economic option in Inuit communities. 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)

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.

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.

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.

Thinking Over the Bullshit

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?

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.

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.

How I Could've Not Bullshitted

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.

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.”