The notion of “bullshit” pervading academic, social and political life is a common theme most people encounter in their adolescence. Everything can be reduced to bullshit if it appears to be contrived. Many are repelled by the huge amount of bullshit that exists in the world once they realize what bullshit is. It’s quite alarming actually – acknowledging bullshit puts you right back into the philosophical position. Hence bullshit’s not something that draws approval from many, except the few that use it to their advantage.
What I’ve been seeing lately is all the academic bullshit that tends to push the young enthusiasts away, maybe myself included. However I’m focusing on the “intellectual” part of life that encompasses all forms of social, political and academic thought – or what can be called bullshit at times.
Bullshit hits people the hardest because it goes against the very nature of the context from which it’s born, which is understanding/truth/knowledge/intellect/ whatever-you-want-to-call-it. It’s not an easy target to eliminate because it hides behind what we want to believe. Yet I think bullshit can be seen in a different light. We don’t have to necessarily see it as a positive feat and try to understand its significance for humanity’s development, but rather why instead it can be considered necessary in our existence.
The world consists of many living things. Some things are observable. Some are not. I’d like to illustrate my interpretation of bullshit through the use of a metaphor. So, take this notion of intellect (that which encompasses everything related to thought) and imagine it as a living organism in your mind. There it assumes a figure and contains internal parts, etc. that keep it functioning healthy. Literally the term bullshit refers to excrement that the bull’s body gets rid of because the body has identified it as useless. Every living thing gets rid of its waste somehow. Either it’s exited out the body or that part of the organism that is no longer useful will deteriorate to waste.
Going back to the idea of viewing the intellect as a living organism – it must also relieve itself of all the excess useless waste. Life has a great variety that any organism, after a certain amount of consumption, gets rid of irrelevant waste. It’s important to note that nothing starts off as waste. It enters the body just like everything else; except now that these parts have no real value for the body, they are bid adieu.
Similarly the bullshit that we read about in books, hear from people, see on TV, etc. that make us think “what a load of crap the world is” – it’s not the final story. The living organism of intellect, so to speak, that exists beyond any tangible reach also needs to sometimes just “shit it out”. Unfortunately this can be overwhelming for us when we come into contact with this type of waste; yet it’s not indicative of all that there is. Instead what it reveals is that there are other parts to our thought and existence that persist and are in fact healthy. Consequently the living organism of intellect decides to keep whatever’s good and healthy for its well-being while spewing out the excess as bullshit. The immediate manifestation of this health is the fact that civilization has survived – not all our thoughts or ideas destroyed us.
There is a common complaint that there is too much bullshit in the world, hence the entire world can be said to be made out of bullshit. However that’s not necessarily the case. Rather this just signifies that we are looking in the wrong place. Instead we ought to look at the healthy parts of our thought in human existence that has persisted thus far. The bullshit parts may not matter, but the healthy parts do.
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