I’ve boiled bullshit ignorance down to a 2-step process:
- Recognize it as it happens.
- Let it slide off you, unaffected.
Bullshit lurks in nearly every avenue of America waiting to strike innocent victims and assimilate its prey into yet another practitioner of nonsense. I call it The Bullshit Assimilation Project. Recently I encountered one of the most miserable jobs in the United States: Toddler Control Agent (TCA).
At a stop in Chicago, my 2-year-old daughter decided to cool off in a giant park fountain seemingly designed for the express purpose of cooling off 2-year-old kids in summer. In pure kid fashion, she lost her freaking mind running and playing in the water despite the angry admonishment of a government appointed TCA in a crisp uniform shouting at her to stop running. Huh? Turns out, my daughter is an expert at ignoring bullshit and just kept on truckin’. Recognize and slide.
This is not so easily accomplished but there are some basic clues to both recognizing and sliding. In general (because I’m sure we can sea lawyer an exception), if you are doing nothing wrong and somebody is strongly urging you to reverse your action you can safely call this bullshit. In other words, if your action has little to no consequence to anybody but yourself then you are not obligated to follow anybody. You might even call this idea, “freedom.” I’ll let you insert the guerrilla.
In general, you can employ some basic 2-year-old type tactics to achieve the slide:
- Pretend you don’t understand language.
- Briefly consider the admonishment, but do what you want anyway until somebody physically restrains you (we call these “consequences”).
Here’s the thing — I’m fairly certain the Toddler Control Agent hates her job. Who would want to walk around all day in a polyester uniform yelling at kids for having fun? The government uniform means that her job most likely pays well, and there’s a strong chance that she needed some type of degree in order to land that coveted position. She is one of the victims in the Bullshit Assimilation Project that has produced the kinder, gentler America that is more afraid of liability than atrophy.
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In “Metatropolis”, (Scalzi), “bullshit” is defined as a legitimate speech subset. I wish I could remember the examples from the book: clinically dissected bits of stuff that people made up, examined from the future view, like ad jingles and political speeches. GW saying, “Mission Accomplished” for example, would be called “propaganda bullshit”.
Your TCA, I would call “authoritative pissant bullshit”.
We need to be specific about the bullshit we are going to ignore, if we are to enjoy the good stuff from the sea lawyers…”This is no bullshit…”;-)
This post reminds me of a lifeguard screaming at me from the distance about not swimming out to, or standing upon a floating platform in Lake Washington after I’d already done it. She kept yelling to get off, so I dove off, swam closer to her, and found out that I wasn’t “supposed” to dive off it either, or even be swimming in that part of the lake to begin with. Naturally, I turned around, swam back to the platform and dove off again. After re-surfacing, she screamed, “Fine! It’s your life!”
Exactly.
More afraid of liability than atrophy… yeah, that about sums it up.
As a great man (Douglas Bader) once said: “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”.
It is essential that the small minded petty bureaucrats that would dictate observance of ‘rules’ be peaceably resisted. For in the obedience of bullshit lies the road totalitarianism.
This little video should help anyone doubting the parameters of their liberty: http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.swf
Welcome home FG.
@A.F. WALKING: I enjoyed the video. Thanks.
A.F. Walking:
That video was bullshit.
It was commonly accepted bullshit, though, so you get credit for that. Ayn Randian as it was, it has a lot of things backward, and it assumes that people make decisions consciously, as well as putting the present ‘liberty’ at the top of the ownership pyramid. This is loved by the banks and marketers.
I think our present ‘life’ is responsible to our future world, not our present self. Value is determined by future usefulness, not present desires (which are unreliable as a measurement device), and “property” is a purely imaginary concept, built on a hoarding instinct that would be better considered as “the things you have accumulated in the past which your future self is now burdened with” (unless what you ‘own’ is the food you are planning to eat next). The humanitarian view also makes the same mistake: that what is good for humans is good for everything else. This makes the assumption that humans have some magical ability to see the future (which they are horrendously bad at), to remember the past (which, by nature, is hakuna matata), and to make choices based on reason and logic using these faulty sources of data which, combined with emotions, are “thoughts”.
I will defer to Pearl S. Buck with “All things in moderation, even moderation.”
Tommy’s fountain experience is a perfect example of it. Build something beautiful, protect it from hordes of schoolchildren who would stampede through it, but realize that one 2 year-old child isn’t going to carry away a concrete sculpture.
People who THINK they have liberty because they can do anything they want right now are merely stealing that liberty from their grandchildren’s resources.
Liabilty.
Insurance industry.
Laywers.
Morons.
Put these four together and what do you get? Bullshit.
The day mornons were allowed to successfully sue for their idiotic and irresponsible behaviour, was the beginning of the end for freedom.
On the news yesterday there was an item about a town in Ontario that narrowly defeated a motion to restrict people from diving off a pier into Lake Ontario. Apparently there were “concerns” (i.e. code for liability concerns) about people injuring themselves as they wantonly dove off the pier. Should anyone get injured, their chances of successfully sueing the Town for damages are high. There have been plenty of legal precedences for this. The foundations of rot from within have been well laid.
Apparently a sign that says ‘No Diving’ is not sufficient to stave off disaster. The Town must have a by-law in order to absolve the Town of any responsibilty. The stupidity thickens.
Freedom managed to win over stupidity and fear: this time. But these kinds of freedoms are an endangered species. There’s little hope that freedom will triumph over stupidity in this toxic environment. The cards are stacked disproportionately against it.
As an aside, your TCA will likely retire with a big fat pension that you and I have provided, while we founder in our later years trying desparately to stay afloat for survival in an ever-increasingly hostile economic environment. This aspect of the status quo has me near the boiling point.
Well, when someone says I can’t do something, I just want to go do it. The best way to do something is to just do it, and the more sacred it is, the better. Somebody has to shake up the petty tyrants.
And welcome back.
Chinle! Didn’t see you on the train. Were you there?
Awesome. This is good stuff. I fully support the idea of breaking the law doing things you enjoy doing that aren’t negatively affecting anyone or anything. There is a lot of wimpyness (not a real word apparently) and rigidity in America these days, and it always feels good making those kinds of people uncomfortable. Even people in law enforcement tend to hold the laws more sacred than the real reasons they were enacted in the first place. We live in a system that charges you fees to live, just so you can keep some idiots employed in jobs that provide no value to society. If you want to cheat and get revenge, that’s the best place to begin in my opinion.