On Bullshit
“My old man was really old by now, but he was still pretty sharp.
One time I said to him, ‘You’ve traveled all over the country, must have slept with hundreds of women. You’ve done everything, been through it all. What’s life all about? What’s the answer?’
He twirled his cigar and said, ‘It’s all bullshit.’”
Out of all the philosophy I’ve read the last few years, who would’ve thought the most trenchant philosopher of them all would be Rodney Dangerfield’s dad?
Since 2021 I have had more lost illusions than Lucien de Rubempré, finding myself saying those same three words over and over: It’s all bullshit.
The rat race and the concomitant status games. The criminal justice system. Amis de cour. Politics. Social media. How seriously some people take themselves. You need to look at it all through the beginner’s mind, through the eyes of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince. When you are face-deep in it, you don’t see it. But in one of the stranger laws of olfactory physics, the further you can remove yourself from all the bullshit, the stronger the scent of the bullshit gets.
If you want to see what bullshit looks like on a nationwide scale, the lame duck period of an election year is a great place to start. Everyone was falling all over themselves for four years pretending to care about climate change and diversity. Big business, politicians, people who legitimately post on LinkedIn with a straight face. Watch them now. It was all bullshit. Wait four more years and you will see how the things they’re preaching today will disappear overnight as the celestial cycle of bullshit renews itself.
“He felt the reproach of those who told him that ‘though all men of intelligence think as you do, it is not good that the commonalty [le vulgaire] should think so.’ This is what they cry out to me on every side; this perhaps is what you yourself would tell me if we two were alone in your study. Such are men; they change their language with their clothes; they speak the truth only in their dressing gowns; in their public dress they know only how to lie.”
I feel awfully curmudgeonly these days, but I would rather be curmudgeonly and correct than starry-eyed and wrong. I’ll be with Poppa Dangerfield if you need me.
Message received,
GB
