Admitting Deceit

It's a fairly common observation that most people find it hard to admit defeat. But, in my experience, not nearly as hard as they find it to admit deceit.

A certain friend, who I may return to in later posts, taught me, amongst other things, a great deal about bullsh+t first hand. Not, as you might expect, by pulling the wool over my eyes and leading me up the garden proverb, but mainly through a fearless, shameless and relentless effort to expose my own bullsh+t at every conceivable opportunity. And I presented plenty of those. It was an unsettling relationship, but the result is not only that I am a lot more careful about what comes out of my mouth these days, but also that my own BS radar is now a finely tuned, precision instrument. And goodness knows, in this business it needs to be.

One of the more obvious techniques of experienced, hard-core bullsh+tters is to turn up the volume in order to disguise the smell. It's a BS fact that the bigger the pile, the more emphatic the misdirection, so my advice (if I may be so bold) is to ensure your skepticisim is at its keenest when proponents are their most hysterically evangelical. (This post came perilously close to touching on religion there so a quick change of tack, methinks...)

I am disappointed by the fact that the word bullsh+t is now so overused. Most often, when I hear or read "that's bullsh+t!", it is actually being used to say "that's incorrect.", which to my estimation seriously dilutes the phrase's true value. It's so perfect for conveying it's real meaning: saying "bullsh+t" should be shouting aloud that not only have I caught you in the act of pretending to know the answer when you don't, but also that I am going to expose your deceit! Which is very different from shouting "You've made a slight error in your calculation there."

Most people are natural bullsh+tters. It's the default position, when you don't want to look silly, stupid, thoughtless, ill-prepared, etc. to just wing it. And put like that it sounds pretty harmless, but it's not! That little lies lead to big lies is inevitbable, inebivatble, inevtia... a foregone conclusion.

Kim Jong-Il: Level 12 Bullsh+tter