The power of pure bullshit

Clearly we’re in a golden age of pure bullshit. That is evident. There is an element of society that seeks delusion, and, finding it, clings to it tenaciously.

An advertiser could tell them, no, I’m serious, that is a line of pure bullshit me and some guys made up for the ad. It. Means. Nothing., and they’ll respond uh huh I see, so how does Coke add life exactly? What’s the secret to Snickers satisfying, like scientifically?

Right here, I could make up a joke example of pure bullshit, and just by its stating it, some people would be begging me to reveal its secrets. It’s a drug, and they are addicts— everything takes on a wooly opiated glow, and all reasoned questions and doubts vanish. There is only the sanctified bullshit, to be revered, defended, and lived by.

Obviously, the example of a certain contemporary political criminal, and his relationship with his devotees, is rife with examples of this, but I’m all out of the barf bags I would need to list them for you. It’s a literal death cult of bullshit— they’re making life and death decisions based on that person’s shoddy, plainly improvised, transparently self-serving bullshit. If their adherence to it kills them or others, they feel, so much the better. Remarkably, no reward is offered for this, mere participation in the delusion is reward enough.

The stakes of that are so great, we have to limit the attention we give it, just for our emotional survival. Best to stick, mostly, to relatively trivial concerns in the drumming community. Like, we have a certain major cymbal company’s “secret” thing— it could be a process, could be an alloy, the claim is evolving— allegedly handed down from antiquity, that means they’re the only people who know how to make a cymbal, despite what your lying ears have been telling you for decades. People will speculate endlessly about the nature and existence of THE SECRET, in the face the of plain reality that, if such a secret even exists, it is totally meaningless, since lots of companies make good cymbals. But somebody said secret, so there’s got to be a secret, and that’s it.

In drumming, closely related to this so-called “pure” bullshit is the bullshit of naming things; you give your little personalized regimen a name and everybody treats it as an ordained part of the canon. Rudimental Ritual, Great Hands For A Lifetime, whatever. Any named item will get attention for being uniquely important.

I’ll do that with some of my things, as a joke— my “Bishopdiddles”, for example— but that doesn’t have quite the power of true bullshit. I think people sense I’m mocking the principle. You can openly tell people you’re messing with them, that you made something up out of pure contempt for them, and they’ll go for it, even more fiercely than if you didn’t tell them that, but you can’t make fun of the idea of bullshit itself. People won’t take offense, it simply doesn’t compute, it’s just some sound to them.

Another mind-dulling agent is the bullshit of fame. Speak the word Ringo, or Meg White, and you will trigger an instant debate over that drummer’s merits as a player, even if you brought it up to make exactly the point that people will helplessly enter the debate just from the utterance of his name. People will engage in these branded “debates” tirelessly, for as long as there is breath in their lungs.

There is similar power in the bullshit of the touch screen— people will try to live their entire lives through their “device”, even when it’s completely stupid, impractical, and unrewarding to do so. Everything must be apps is the imperative, and it is dire. Dealing with the problems they created for themselves with this devotion is what gives their lives meaning— waiting for a lead sheet to “boot”, scrolling around the file tree looking for the chart for Satin Doll, comparing ways of turning a page of music with it— a function previously fulfilled quite ably by another piece of paper. Through fretting with technology we avoid the uncertainty of action. The more rehearsal time you eat up dealing the obstructions created by your device, the less time to play, less time to fail.

What makes this era especially tricky is that a lot of bullshit has co-opted the language of anti-bullshit, usually via inappropriate/incorrect application of rules of logic. Although that is increasingly outdated, as people train themselves in the even lower rhetoric of our inflammatory podcasters. There is no need to claim logical fallacy when you control the arcane powers of defiant ignorance, incredulity, whataboutism, deflection, and talking over people.

As a person resistant to these bullshits, you will mostly be invisible. If any of your speech breaks through their Fog of Bullshit, you may be identified as an unbeliever, an object of hostility, instantly channeled into the opposing camp of their prepackaged debate. The question “Are we talking about Ringo again?” will be met with “Why do you hate Ringo?” by one camp and “Why are you defending Ringo?” by the other. Any suggestion that the topic of Ringo has been fully explored, and that further discussion is pointless, is incomprehensible to them.

What you do not do, equipped with this knowledge of bullshit, is try to use it. Yes, there is money in snake oil, in the spam industry, in selling drugs, in doing literal crime. YouTubing, “crypto.” But trying to wield it, you become like the porn actors trying to get a bank loan in Boogie Nights— you’ve cannibalized your real value as a human being to get some money and attention.

…which you probably probably won’t even get, because the final actual truth is that bullshit mostly fails. And even if it worked splendidly for you, what did you become in the process?