THE HABIT OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 19, 2010.  We develop a deeply ingrained habit about language, about how it feels to operate it, how it feels to understand it, how it feels to be confused by it, how it feels to go back and forth with it, how it feels to think with it, how it feels to report events and states of mind with it.

Okay, fine.  I’m not advocating destroying language or the experience of it.  I’m just pointing out, to those who can grasp it, that using language puts us in the position of believing we understand what’s it all about, what it feels like—and consequently, when some radically new notion about language shows up, we automatically reject it because, well, we think we’re already experts…

It’s okay and acceptable if someone comes along and says, “Guess what?  The Hopi language has no words that indicate time.  They only have the present.”

Well, we say, that’s weird, but it’s very interesting and illuminating.  We can deal with it.  We know about present and past and future tense, and if some tribe doesn’t have two of those tenses, we can grasp that.

Of course, it turns out this assertion about Hopi language is controversial.  There are people who claim it’s entirely false and the Hopi do have words about the past and so on…but that’s another story.

But suppose someone (in this case, me) says there can be language in which all the “words” can change meaning and do change meaning from moment to moment, as they are received, and yet each experience of a “word” is powerful and clear and distinct and subjective and expansive.

No, that couldn’t be.  That isn’t language.  That goes against every experience and feeling about language we have.  It goes against the deep, deep habit we’ve formed about what language is. 

So we have a person who goes to a museum and looks at a room full of paintings by Kandinsky, and the meanings of these paintings comes through as clear as a bell—and each time the person returns to that room, the meanings are clear and vivid but DIFFERENT.

And, to top it off, the person sits down in a chair and takes out a pad and oil crayons and begins to make drawings that are RESPONSES to the Kandinskys.  “Hey, he spoke to me, so I’m answering him.”

And then Kandinsky actually APPEARS in the room with his own pad and oil crayons, so he can answer back…

Well, without invoking ghosts, we can have this kind of exchange.  For example, on a stage in front of an audience.  THE MAGIC THEATER.  Maybe it won’t be drawings, it’ll be words, but words no one has ever heard before.  Invented words that sound like…music…sort of.  Words, sounds, that carry great emotion and attitude.  Back and forth, back and forth, between two characters on the stage.

And a certain portion of the audience leaves the theater because they think they’re in a crazy place and they want no part of it.  But others remain, and after awhile, the whole thing on the stage begins to come through like a revelation out of the fog.

This is REAL.  This is happening.  These people are communicating on stage, and what is passing back and forth between them is creating layers and levels of sensation and feeling in the audience…layers and levels they’ve never felt before and didn’t even know existed.

Didn’t even know existed.

It’s not religious feeling or sensation, and it’s not mathematical feeling and sensation, and it’s not like the sensation of listening to Bach, and it’s not like the sensation of writing a clear paragraph, and it’s not like the sensation of eating a pineapple….it’s unlike any sensation or feeling the person has ever experienced.

In fact, these new feelings and sensations and thoughts are opening up whole new huge territories that were previously unknown…and the sensations aren’t engraved in stone, they’re changing.

I once did a brief poetry experiment.  I brought together several people from different countries and I taped them reading poems in their native languages.  Portugese, Persian, Italian.  It was all about listening to the SOUNDS of the poems.  What they meant was unimportant.  I didn’t care about that.  We just listened to the sounds and rhythms and the emotion.  We had no idea what the words meant.  It was quite fantastic.  Of course, it went against the habit of language to be listening to the poems in that way, without knowing or caring what the literal meaning was.  But that’s what we did.

The habit of language limits our experience.  It limits our experience of what language CAN BE. It limits our experience of what REALITY can be.

Well, someone says, this whole thing is ridiculous because you don’t really UNDERSTAND what these people on the stage are saying to each other, you as the audience are making it up, it’s entirely subjective, you’re IMAGINING IT.

Yes?  And?

You see, that’s exactly the point.  This is a language of imagination.  On both sides. 

It’s talking in and through and by imagination.

But that doesn’t make it any less real, whatever “real” means.  It makes it compelling and powerful and beautiful in ways we’ve never imagined before.  The impact is THERE.  It’s alive.  It’s changing.

We’re plugging into a faculty and facility that has been lying dormant in us for perhaps eons.  And now that we are plugging into it, reality is expanding by the second.

The old habit is being shredded, and we’re flying freer and higher and wider and deeper.

Who knows what spaces and times will now become available to us?

Now, perhaps you understand better why I’ve spent so much time over the years writing and talking about systems and structures and their limits.

The habit of language and the belief that we truly understand what language is and isn’t?  It’s the lid we place on possible reality.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

TELEPATHY IN THE FUTURE

OCTOBER 18, 2010.  For some reason, the notion that, down the road, people will be able to transmit pure thought to each other without speaking is considered a reasonable possibility.

So let’s explore this a little.  Will this telepathic communication be carried on with silent words? Is that how it’ll work?

“I like you.”

“I like you, too.”

Or will Person A project “the energy of liking” and have it returned by Person B?

Let’s take the latter format.  What is this “energy of liking?”  Is it thought, feeling, energy?

All of the above?

Regardless, it’ll be language in some sense.  A different kind of language.

Many people have no problem accepting this, but to suggest that we could have a written/spoken language in which symbols are open and change meaning swiftly seems impossible, or impossible to fathom.

I think I see why.  It’s assumed that telepathy will be reductionist, whereas the sort of new language I’m suggesting is all about proliferation.

Telepathy will reduce the need for explanation.  Simple and powerful bolts of energy will distill what we are (imprecisely) trying to say to each other.

As if this is a good thing, just the thing we are looking for, to obviate misunderstanding, confusion, conflict, and so on.  It’s yet another Utopian dream.

I actually believe this kind of pure telepathy exists, but I also believe we are dealing with a prejudice against proliferation that is deeply rooted.

People want the simple solution to existence.  They want it in any form they can find it.  They want a god to intercede out of the sky.  They want UFOs to bring us universal abundance on a silver tray.  They want a beneficent and monolithic government that will take care of us from cradle to grave.  They want planets to align so we can live the life we desire.

And because they want this, they’ll willingly sacrifice anything that looks like complexity, including their own minds.

When the subject of telepathic communication is brought up, they like it, because they see it as a kind of reduction down to “simple salvation.”

The whole world—the many worlds and universes—of art speaks of just the opposite.  Proliferation.  Imagination unleashed.  THIS language(s) doesn’t need purified telepathy. 

Religion, salvation, global government, New Age thinking—these and other allied notions all imply the final and complete and overarching solution to our problems.  The only trouble is, when you strip the veneer away, the problem turns out to be freedom.  Freedom is for imagination and creation.  The road to greater life is through the endless proliferation of what freedom is for. 

A truly open language is created through and by imagination, and it is understood by imagination.

This is where we could be heading, if enough people wake up from their amnesia/narcosis, from the reductionist obsession.

See, it IS possible that some very, very good and simple and big thing can happen to you—but the fixation on that and the accompanying sacrifice of endless proliferation of creative power, your creative power, is what gives us a tyranny of limits…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

A NEW KIND OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 16, 2010.  No matter how interesting or unusual we may find the language of some remote group living at the end of the world—and I’m not discounting the import of such a language—I’m suggesting something different:

A kind of language that constantly changes meaning and yet has distinct and powerful impact in each momentary incarnation.

At first glance, the idea may seem absurd.

But what happens when you look at a painting by Willem de Kooning or Hieronymus Bosch?  Is there merely one stable and lasting impression?  Of course not.  Are these paintings precisely defined scientific statements?  Of course not.

In fact, think of a place you love to visit.  Do you return, over and over again, because you experience EXACTLY the same feeling each time? 

How about weather?  Would you say that, because weather is a constantly shifting thing, it is meaningless and can’t be grasped?

Do your friends evoke carbon copies of themselves every time you see them?

Therefore, why not consider the possibility of language that constantly shifts meaning, as a fundamental aspect of its nature?

Such a subjective language would have a far-reaching effect.  In fact, I’m suggesting that it would shake apart many notions, ideas, convictions, and premises that limit our experience of so-called reality.

And if THAT happened, who knows what might follow?

We all have “pillars” of thought and conviction about reality that remain stable over time.  Our language reflects and enforces the solidity and durability of these foundations.  Now, we take off with a new kind of language that engages a far different aspect of our imagination.  In the process, the pillars begin to crumble.  We’re no longer living in precisely the same structure.  We can see beyond it.  We discover there are infinities beyond it.  And the key to that discovery lies in the use of language that allows us to impart new and changing meanings of an entirely subjective nature. 

Subjective impressions and meanings never went far enough.  We dipped into them here and there, but we restricted their range.  We were locked into the formal structure of our language to such a degree that we never imagined we had such a vast field of invention at our disposal.  It simply never occurred to us.  We were blinded by the shape and syntax of our language.

We assume that the reality that lies in front of our eyes, that challenges us every day, is so problematical that we need all our troops to carve out an area of success for ourselves—and the very last thing we’re going to do is sacrifice those soldiers, the soldiers of our present language.  However, it turns out that if we can temporarily set them off to the side and bring on a whole new set of meanings from the depth of imagination, we speak a new language that changes everything—for the better.

What a strange notion.  But what if it’s true?  And is it any stranger than the thousands of stories that purport to assure us that some vast external intervention is going to save us?  Perhaps those stories are a piece of a larger mosaic, and the missing pieces are the ones that we ourselves would supply, if we could find a medium (a language) that would permit us, finally, to express what we really want to say—with all its shifting and changing emotions and energies and poetics. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 15, 2010.  On October 13, I did an hour of commentary on my radio show about THE MAGIC THEATER and the effects of language-structure on our view of reality.  I recommend listening.

http://garynull.squarespace.com/the-jon-rappoport-show/     

Okay.  Let’s start here:

The best way to trap a person is to make him think he’s free.

Even better—far better—the person traps himself and then tells himself he’s free.

We impose the structure, the syntax, the order, the sequence, the vocabulary, and the grammar of our language on ourselves—and then we pretend this imposition in no way colors or limits our view of reality.

That’s quite a trick.

It reminds me of the trick called the Rorschach Test (RT).  RT was invented by Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), a young Freudian psychoanalyst.  As a boy in Switzerland, Hermann was nicknamed Klecks, which means “inkblot” in German.  He used to fool around, as apparently many kids did at the time, making these blots.  The activity even had a name: Klecksography.

When Hermann grew up, he thought a standardized sequence of blots might make a revealing psychological test.  Therapists could infer a great deal about their patients’ neuroses.

The test is still in wide use today.  The patient is shown the abstract blots and reports what he sees in them: birds, cows, planes, Mommy making bread at the oven, spiders crawling up the sides of buildings…

The Test is a kind of language.  The blots are pictographs, except their meanings are left open.

Of course, in true medical fashion, it is assumed that what a person finds in the blots tells a tale about his shortcomings, problems, disorders, symptoms.

Such an assumption is no accident.  Why?

Suppose we omitted those medical biases and, instead, used blots as open symbols that could be infused with unlimited meanings by those who viewed them?

We would have a different KIND of language.

One that opens doors instead of building walls.

No professional culture (e.g., psychology/psychiatry) would ever admit, in a thousand years, that such an activity was worthwhile or meaningful or possible or tolerable or positive or in the nature of a breakthrough.  

If we found interesting and extended ways of working with such open symbols, our view of reality would change.

This is, in fact—though very few people would admit it or see the far-reaching potential—one of the great implications of modern art.

Let me give you a ratio.  Working and communicating in some fashion with open symbols stands in relation to the Rorschach Test as freedom does to slavery.

For the human race, language has always meant system, structure, and syntax.  To mention language in the same breath as open and changing and subjective infusion of meaning into symbols is considered a perfect contradiction.

But it isn’t.

There is an old actor’s exercise in which students toss gibberish at each other, back and forth, imparting to it certain attitudes and feelings.  The idea is to get actors used to coloring dialogue with non-verbal meaning.  When the exercise is done well, people get the point.  They know what is being exchanged, even though the sounds uttered make no literal sense at all.

Of course, people who are dedicated and committed to precise clinical language would never confess to understanding gibberish.  Every cell and molecule would resist admitting they really do know what is going on.      

The level of reality we all accept, every day of our lives, is like a government agency.  It maintains itself against all attack.  It stonewalls.  It refuses to answer embarrassing questions.  It issues denials.  It defends its own existence as absolutely necessary. 

Its thick volumes of regulations are the evidence of its entangling operations. 

In the same way, our language is an ultimate rationalization of the reality we defend.

If we began to engage in another species of language, our reality would reveal huge open spaces where new experience is possible. 

How and why new experience would surface is answered by the simple word: imagination.  Imagination, wrapped in the cocoon of the kind of language we now employ, is operating on only a fraction of its potential.

But in order to know that, one would have to explore language beyond the limits we presently put on it.  Contrary to expectation, there is no sacrifice involved in launching such expeditions.  Nothing central and secure is left behind.  It’s not an either-or game.  It’s all addition and proliferation.

This would be one of the operations of THE MAGIC THEATER.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 14, 2010.  I can sum up many thousands of pages, many academic careers, and much labor in the area of modern philosophy by saying:

The sun sets in the western sky—and our language mirrors that event by stating: “the sun sets in the western sky.”

In other words, language reports events in the physical world.

You wouldn’t believe the internal wrangling that has gone on for decades in the field of academic philosophy around this fairly simple issue.

(In a somewhat related matter, noted linguist Noam Chomsky reported that, because children learn to speak their native tongue so quickly, they couldn’t merely be responding to inputs from their environment—these kids have some sort of innate capacity [or mental imprint] that involves language ability.  I’m shocked, I tell you.  Shocked.)

However, language as we usually understand it and speak it and write it is not our only option.  We could explore and invent other types of language whose purpose is not to reflect events in the physical world.

These new languages would create new realities.

For example—modern poetry.  Modern painting.  Music.  Hah.  Turns out we have such languages all around us.  Who knew? 

Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down) 

ee cummings

Those lines aren’t merely constructing a fantasy that doesn’t exist in the world.  Those lines make relationships that confound what happens and how it happens in the world.  They subvert the grammar, syntax, and structure of how things are supposed to happen. 

Literalists hate this kind of thing.  They claim to the death they don’t understand it.  They claim no one, except perhaps insane people, can understand it.  They claim it’s a Communist atheist conspiracy eating away at the pillars of Western civilization.   

Of course, if you just read the lines of poetry, you begin to sense meaning.

Sea is moon,

Ever there you could,

You but I see

Leaning out over

I just made that up.  Why not? 

What would happen if two people began talking in a language that didn’t, in its content or structure, reflect the world?

Would they begin to “catch on” to something?  Would some previously dormant area of mind and imagination float to the surface and grasp what was happening? 

If so, we could speculate that, in fact, there is a huge area of mind/imagination that rarely if ever has the chance to make itself known—because we are trapped in matching our language to the world as it is—not only in content, but in structure and sequence.

I refer you to many movies that posit and depict other worlds of a fantastic nature.  But these movies show other worlds as if they were just like ours, except the people, events, and circumstances in them are “more advanced” in various ways.  The movies never present these alternate worlds as being of a distinctly different kind than ours.  By “different kind,” I mean the order of events, the processes, the relationships partake of a far different “grammar.” 

Suppose one of the intrepid Star Trek crews encountered a world in which everyone lived entirely in what we would call a subjective reality?  And had a language that reflected that?  And looked at life in that fashion?  What would THAT be like?

When I talk about the possibility of a magic theater (see my last article), I’m indicating we could have characters on stage partaking of a different KIND of world—and their language would reflect that. 

Why bother?

Because no one knows how deep the trance is that we live in, how truly devoted we are to the structure of ordinary reality, how tight we hold on to the sequence and grammar of that reality-language.  No one knows how much of our imagination is waiting in the wings to capitalize on a moment when we seek other possibilities.

I fully realize that what I’m saying in this article may take some time to sink in.  But that’s all right.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  And I’ll tell you a secret.  Rome was never destroyed.  It lives on in the vast dedication to its fundamental blueprint.

Our language confirms and feeds back to us our perception of what reality is.  A new kind language; a new kind of reality.  A new KIND of reality.  This is what few people want to contemplate. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE MAGIC THEATER PROJECT

By Jon Rappoport

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

www.nomorefakenews.com 

OCTOBER 13, 2010.  Lately, I’ve been looking over notes I made for a project called THE MAGIC THEATER.  It’s still on the drawing boards…

This article is a selection from those rather esoteric notes, and it’s dedicated to those of you who’ve stuck with me over the years as I’ve written many pieces on the power of imagination.  You know who you are.  I appreciate your interest and your desire to explore this vast area further and further.  To me, you’re champions.   

THE MAGIC THEATER would be for actors, or people who might want to act, or people who are already acting IN LIFE but are bored with the process and the results.

In other words, it’s for anybody.

Most actor-training schools focus on scenes and dialogue and movement rooted in Realism.  I have no problem with that.  I’m just interested in something else.

Here are some preliminary notes—-you may find these ideas opaque or confusing or puzzling…but I submit that just means you need to think about them a good deal more than you think about the news or what’s on television or the next thing you’re about to do. 

Notes—

We need an opportunity to use words, language and expressed emotion that surpasses the expectations of ordinary reality.

For example, if you rehearsed a scene with other actors in which the substance was a DREAM, and the language was an invented poetics in which the usual connections between words were advanced beyond rational and logical discourse, you would be approaching the point where new space and time became palpable.

Most “dream scenes” in theater or film hang on to ordinary language.  The setting and events are challenging, but the words are pedestrian. 

Language as we use it is ballast.  It keeps us rooted in the conventions of reality.  It assures us that the relationships between things and events and people are stable in a simplistic context.

According to at least one interpretation of the Chinese language, it posited, in its original form, a vital flow in which process and relationships and action verbs were the primary forces.  Objects, positions, nouns, measurable distances were background, incidental. 

Poetic drama has the potential to surpass the conditioning that accommodates us to every-day reality. 

Rarely has theater seriously transformed the very basis of language, dialogue, and verbal assumptions.  In that sense, theater has been a bird with rocks on its wings. 

In THE MAGIC THEATER, people learn to speak in different ways.

About 35 years ago, I was a regular in a theater experiment with Scott Kelman, at his Factory Theater in downtown LA.  Every week, about 10 of us gathered for something he called The Liars Club.

One by one, we would take the stage and tell a story about ourselves that was a complete lie.  The idea was to make it as convincing as possible.  We were motivated to tell some major lies.  It wasn’t just, I stole a marble from my childhood friend. 

The effect of each person stepping up and telling a story for 10 minutes or so was rather extraordinary, and it was sub rosa.  We didn’t quiz each other about the “lie aspect.”  There was no probing…just one lie after another.  Then, turn out the lights, and go home.

It took me about three weeks to realize that I was assuming people were telling the TRUTH about what had happened to them, under the pretended cover of lying.  It was that convincing. 

Of course, I didn’t know.  Still don’t.  Lying or telling the truth? 

Conscious lies change space.

Not being able to separate lie from truth, AND KNOWING YOU CAN’T, changes space.

The pressure to tell the truth reduces and distorts space.  Eliminate that pressure and space opens up.

Dada and Surrealism were efforts to subvert conventional space and truth, based on the alternative prospect of finding new space and time. 

THE COSMOS IS A FORGERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.

People tell or accept a story about the cosmos based on their conception about how the story might suit them.  Help them.

In accepting such a story, they create a reductionist version of what they are.

Imagination knows no bounds.

Theater, for all its props and stories, does relatively little to exercise the far reaches of imagination when it comes to language.  Even poetic drama tends to center on what is fondly called “the human condition.”  The human condition is a convenient set of stories about human nature and motivation which become a shorthand method for cementing people into a limited notion of what is possible. 

There are non-verbal “languages.”  Twenty years ago, I ran a series of experiments that other people started calling Sounding.  I never called it anything.  It involved working with a small group (8-15 people) in a room.  After a set of warm-up exercises, people made sounds—any sounds—for a half hour or so.  The effect was quite interesting, to say the least.  Language unhooked from words provoked all sorts of unique combinations of feeling and thought.

It was theatrical, although content normally associated with theater was absent.

It resembled a five-year experience I had with a space in LA called Dance Home.  Recorded music ranging from Strauss waltzes to techno-industrial-pop was played continuously for 4 hours a night, several times a week, in a dance studio.  People moved in whatever ways they wanted to.  At times, the events took on a distinct theatrical flavor.

In the late 1970s, I rented a small theater in West LA and did 3 one-man shows, which were a series of comedic monologues.  In certain ways, they were similar to my later experiences with The Liars Club.  I was telling surreal stories that became more and more ridiculous as they went along.  It was an early attempt to push the audience into unfamiliar landscapes.

Many years later, when I ran for a seat in Congress, in LA, my team and I began to realize there were significant possibilities for a theater of the absurd in mainstream politics. 

So…these are some of the threads I’m pulling on here.  THE MAGIC THEATER would utilize both improvisation and tight scene-work—using types of language that go far beyond ordinary speech or familiar poetics—to tilt the seesaw of life in the direction of much greater imagination and space for the participants. 

Human beings want to reach for more, but eventually they lose sight of what they could imagine and create.  THE MAGIC THEATER would function as a powerful antidote. 

In my experience, it is at precisely those moments when we, individually or collectively, seem more locked in than ever by external events, that breakthroughs can be made.    

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

RAPPOPORT RADIO ARCHIVE

OCTOBER 2, 2010.  My weekly radio show continues at www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com  The show airs live on Wednesdays at 4pm Pacific Time.

All my shows are archived at:

http://garynull.squarespace.com/the-jon-rappoport-show/

I believe you’ll find the program is one of the widest-ranging explorations in the world.  Here is a partial list of guests I’ve had.  All these shows can be accessed at the archive.

Peter Breggin—the conscience of psychiatry.  Breggin has led the way to greater knowledge of the dangers of psychiatric drugs and “biology-based” therapy.

Cliff Carnicom—a leader in research on chemtrails, their origin, meaning, and health implications.

Joseph Farrell—scholar of ancient texts and the accompanying science that may have led to interplanetary war in the dim past.

Michel Kassett—the world’s most fascinating numerologist and analyst of hidden mathematics behind language.

Peter Duesberg—heroic molecular biologist who exposed massive AIDS research fraud.

Rick Dubov—rising star in the firmament of painters working today.

Jonathan Emord—attorney who has gone up against the corrupt FDA numerous times and won stunning victories.

Catherine Fitts—economic insider who left the federal government and now exposes deep corruption in the financial world.

Check out these and other shows, and tell your friends.  There is much to be gleaned from these interviews.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

DR. BULLSHIT, TAKE 3

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010.  I’m taking this opportunity to present a backgrounder. 

A backgrounder on bullshit.

First of all, I realize that millions of people online prefer pictures to words.  To them, all I can say is: “You’re damned.”  I can’t work my way around that problem. 

Okay.  Bullshit comes in layers.  That’s the first thing you need to know.  Finding one layer is just the beginning, and if you keep pointing to that layer like a braying donkey and saying, “See?  That’s bullshit!”, you’re going to make a tiresome bore out of yourself, and anyone has the right to shoot you.

Bullshit comes in layers.  You can see this when a politician is caught with his shvance in the cookie jar.  He says, “I made a serious error in judgment.” 

He didn’t make an error in judgment.  He wanted to stick his shvance in the jar and he did.  Simple.  Of course, he can’t say that, because everybody is waiting for a dishonest, full-of-shit excuse from him.  That’s what they expect.

If the pol said, “Look, I shacked up with the woman because she was beautiful and I could afford it,” people wouldn’t know what to do.  They’d wander around in circles like drunken parakeets.

Anyway, then the pol goes into sex-addiction rehab, which is a combination country club and two-a-day AA-type meetings.  Another layer of bullshit. 

And if he gets religion, that’s another one.  If he attaches himself like a leech to a preacher, that’s another one.

But—and this is the interesting point—if he moves through these layers with reasonable haste, the public tends to accept his “repentance” because THEY KNOW IT’S BULLSHIT AND THEY WANT BULLSHIT.

Do you see?  In these times, bullshit is the most convenient navigational tool at everyone’s disposal.  Losing it would put too many people at sea.  There would be too much confusion.

We all recognize bullshit.  It’s the common coin of the realm.  So we maintain the social contract with it.

Can I quote the contract?  Ah, that’s not an easy thing, but I’ll try:

“We, the undersigned, recognizing that truth is a volatile and unpredictable material, which may cause considerable disruptions in the fabric of public life, opt instead for a relatively inert substance: bullshit.  Being intimately familiar with its forms and uses, we are able to pretend that those events which are being referenced by bullshit are real, when they are not.  In this regard, we are facile and practiced. 

“Furthermore, we openly confess our happy addiction to bullshit.  Among other advantages, it lubricates our inclination for constructing a multi-front fairy-tale world in which we can exercise our ideological preferences and ignore contrary evidence. 

“We recognize that this contract will permit many criminal statements and actions to fly beneath the radar.  To put it bluntly, this is the price we pay for a (hopefully) easier passage through life.”

We elect public officials and support media commentators and religious leaders so they can provide us with some favored brand of bullshit.  We expect them to broadcast it.  Furthermore, our reactions to it are bullshit, as well.  This is called Cooperative Bullshit.

Some blowhard bloviating, day after day, month after month, on his usual theme in the most preposterous way is music to our ears.  It’s Reliable Bullshit.  We can always count on the creature to sing the same few notes.

Occasionally, when we consider the alternative to this overall way of being, we glimpse subtlety, nuance, and God forbid, even art.  We quickly shrink from the prospect.  It would be troublesome, whereas The Way of Bullshit is transparent and widely supportable, like the foundations of a bridge.

Finally, there not only layers of bullshit, there are also what could be called orders or multiples of bullshit. 

For example, in a corporate conference room, the CEO asks a question which everyone in the meeting immediately perceives to be a piece of self-serving bullshit.  A person at the table answers that question, and of course his answer is bullshit, too.  Another person tacks on a further piece of bullshit.  This prompts the CEO to float a related question—more bullshit.  And so the process goes.

No one in the room would even think of trying to interrupt it, because they are feeling the exhilaration of a long ride down a snow-covered hill in a sleigh.  It’s Christmas.

DR. BULLSHIT

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