We Are Surrounded By Bullsh*tters
Which doesn't mean we have to become them
Editor’s Note: Have a question about how to sell your hand-crafted creations on Slack Tide? Don’t ask Matt. He’s a professional journalist/Seeker of Truth, not Etsy. Though he did once make a kick-ass potholder in Vacation Bible School. If you wish to submit other questions and/or potholder bids, send them to askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
What is the definition of a bullshitter?
Sincerely,
Zen M.
I always hate when writers (or more often, editors — the writer’s natural enemy) bleep out swear words. It feels too much like we’re being required to play Hangman, or like readers should be hitting up Pat Sajak to buy a vowel. So though I partially bleeped out “bullshit” in the headline, in order to avoid getting trapped in your spam filter, let’s just be adults and spell it out, going forward.
I also hate when writers start pieces with “Merriam-Webster defines {whatever they’re writing about} as {whatever the dictionary definition is of whatever they’re writing about}.” It feels too much like they’re trying to fill space to meet a word count, or presenting a book report to their sixth grade class. So let’s go another direction.
The Urban Dictionary defines “bullshitter” as “one who lies out his/her ass.” Which, I have to admit, is a pretty no-bullshit definition. And one which covers about 90 percent of the people in public life at the moment, where bullshit — or bullsh*t for the more genteel among us — has become the coin of the realm.
And it covers private life pretty well, too. Why, just the other day, I was emailing with a senior corporate friend of mine, sending him a link about serial bullshitter, Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I will not be tackling our Ta-Nehisi problem here, but I highly recommend Jeffrey Blehar’s and Jonah Goldberg’s treatments if that’s your poison.) And my friend responded that he’d read it when he finished his ten Teams calls for the day. (Which he punctuated with the equivalent of a vomit emoji — concerning his teams calls, not Coates.)
Unhip to current corporate jargon — the very word “corporate” triggers me, I move faster alone — I suggested we switch places: He could write my column for the week. And I could take over his team calls, inspiring his troops with sentiments like: “There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there is ‘tea,’ which is why we need to break up this call for a refreshing iced tea break.” I am CIO material, I assured him.
“Your lack of corporate knowledge is showing,” he responded. “Microsoft Teams is the Microsoft equivalent of Zoom. When I say I’m on Teams calls all day, I mean I’m sitting on my ass in video meeting after video meeting, only one of which was with my ‘team.’ Bottom line: until you master the jargon, you are not CIO material. In all other areas (procrastination, disregard for policy and process, overt hostility, low IQ), you’ve got it nailed.”
The truth hurts, even if it came from a corporate bullshitter like my friend. Who I try to keep up with by regularly hitting the online Corporate B.S. Generator, periodically suggesting to him that he “monotonectally integrate enterprise models” in order to “synergistically expedite fungible e-business.” Even though my own tone-deaf ear knows that this particular brand of corporate crap is more dated than the last episode of The Office (2013). Because corporate America likes to constantly update its bullshit in order to make middle managers feel smarter than they are, and to provide the illusion that they are “holistically matrixing cost-effective resources.” (Sorry, that one came from the same BS generator. Which badly needs updated in order to collaboratively parallel task-interoperable adoption.)
But why pick on corporate middle-managers when our top public managers are every bit as bullshitty, if not more? Before spying this question in my inbox, I was going to do an entire column on North Carolina Lieutenant Governor (and the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee), Mark Robinson, a black Nazi trans-porn enthusiast. Who, to his credit, (sort of) told on himself. (These are all his labels.) Albeit, under the pseudonym “minisoldr,” which he used on the message board of the Nude Africa porn site that he frequented.
But then I figured: why bother? That story broke a whole week, or about 78 news cycles ago. And this being the MAGA GOP, a new Mark Robinson will come along in no time. Who, if not drummed out of polite society or imprisoned, will likely be in line for a cabinet position, since feeling shame is now about as fashionable as being Kimberly Guilfoyle on a Donald Trump Jr. date with his Palm beach socialite. As my old friend Jonathan V. Last has noted over at The Bulwark, the compound scandal of the Robinson ordeal isn’t just about his personal degeneracy, but the fact that it hasn’t even occurred to anyone in his party to call for him to step down. (JVL: “You can be exposed as a Nazi-loving fap-hound and everyone understands, implicitly, that Republican voters aren’t going to care and won’t push you out.” ) Our bullshitter-di-tutti-bullshitters, Donald Trump, even once called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.” And this, of a man who even before the current scandal(s) broke, had encouraged his audiences to “start reading” quotes from Hitler and Stalin, who equated gays to being “maggots” and “flies,” and who accused Michelle Obama of being transgender. (Which, coming from him, might be a compliment, since watching trans actors diddle each other seemed to be what turned Robinson’s crank, even as he dumped on them publicly.) Was this particular bullshitter offering a cry for help? An invitation to the former First Lady?
Only Robinson can answer these questions, but he won’t – not in any straight fashion, if Robinson will pardon the expression — because he’s a professional bullshitter. Which most often these days, it pays to be. So long as you’re fully committed to your falseness.
Just as his mentor, Donald J. Trump, is. Trump is now pretending not to know Robinson. I won’t give the extended treatment to the former’s bullshitery here. Not only because I already do so with great regularity, but also, because I don’t have the space to deal with it comprehensively. From claiming that he’d build a border-long wall and make Mexico pay for it (neither of which happened), to claiming that he won the 2020 election (that didn’t happen either), our bullshitter-in-chief, The Washington Post found, had made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. That comes out to 21 lies per day. For the sake of argument, let’s just say the Post overstated what a lie/misleading claim is, and Trump only lied half that amount. Even still, that’s 10.5 lies per day. Enough to make even habitual bullshitters Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon blush and/or envious.
How does he get away with it? Well, not only is Trump good at it — in that he is wholly committed to his own grift, willing to take a pedestrian untruth, and elevate it until it becomes God’s own holy writ, until it becomes true. But Trump, who is still in a dead heat, electorally — despite most sentient beings knowing he has made The Big Lie his entire franchise — doesn’t just scratch his own itch to tell untruths. He scratches The People’s itch to hear untruths as well. As plenty of us have that itch. And not just Trump fans.
On our best days, we say what we “know” is true. On our middling days, we say what we hope is true. And on our worst days, we often say what we wish to be true, even if we know that it isn’t. Studies have suggested the average person lies anywhere from 1-2 times per day on the low end, to 10-15 times per day on the Trumpster end of the spectrum. Of course, many of these studies are based on self-reporting, meaning the subjects are probably lying about how often they lie.
I guess my point here, if I have one, is not to merely recognize the bullshitter in others (Mark Robinson, Trump, et al.), which is often too-easy pickings. But the bullshitter in ourselves, which is a considerably harder thing to do. Being honest with yourself is unrelenting, truly difficult work. It requires you to acknowledge realities that don’t always mesh with your preferred worldview. It requires you to admit that people on your side are sometimes as dishonest as the people across the way. It requires you to recognize how you’re willing to cheat, when cheating is convenient or beneficial, bringing you a desired outcome that might be less accessible otherwise. That is too often our politics in a nut, and why we’re constantly digging ourselves out of heaping mounds of bullshit.
Politicians don’t just lie to us because they’re congenital liars, though too many are. (We generally choose the profession we’re most suited for. If you’re super-fast, you become a sprinter. If you’re super-dishonest, you run for Congress.) But they lie to us because it’s in their interest to tell us what we want to hear, even if it’s untrue. Which is actually on us, not them.
A cynic might ask: why shouldn’t we be bullshitters, since so many bullshitters obviously reap temporal rewards? Well, because you’re not only doing violence to others, but ultimately, your lies — not just the ones you’re willing to tell, but the ones you’re willing to listen to — are an act of self-hatred. As Dostoevsky put it in the The Brothers Karamazov:
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.
It might be presumptuous to project 19th century literary edicts on 21st century America. But — not to stoke your residual Cold War fears — it seems like the Russians were reading our mail. Or at least one of them was.
Bonus Tracks: A decent lying song, by Mumford & Sons, “Liar”:
Though I’m not a big Mumford & Sons fan, while we’re on the subject, here’s a solo shot from Marcus Mumford that I quite like, “Go In Light.” Performed here with Monica Martin, providing some lovely accompaniment. It rolls along slowly, with a nice payoff in the last third of the song.