Cut to the end of the chase: even the smartest people you know have a taste for bullshit – their own.
We all believe things that – if we actually had to back them up – we’d realize how silly we were for saying such things out loud (never mind actually believing them). We might even realize our problem’s much worse: bullshit has taken over most of our lives.
That ain’t bullshit.
I was watching the football club I follow – Tottenham Hotspur – play horribly again this morning. With ten minutes to go, they were down 3-0 to a team they should have thumped. Spurs lost earlier this week 7-2 to Bayern Munich in the Champion’s League. With ten minutes to go – and defeat a dead certainty (in a week we’d been outscored 10-2 FFS!), I still experienced a moment where I thought “Hey, we’re Spurs, we can still do this!”
No, we couldn’t – and we didn’t. We couldn’t get the ball past midfield. We’re in a mental freefall as a team. That’s the Truth. It’s bullshit to think Spurs can win anything right now.
But, for a moment, I tried to convince myself that they could. I tried to bullshit myself and I succeeded.
Bullshit is Hope’s evil twin. Just as Hope is aspirationally positive, Bullshit is aspirationally negative. It’s a lie easily thrown together, easily tossed off and easily forgotten – especially when new bullshit is created to replace the old. It’s the sausage factory from the seventh ring of hell.
And yet, damned if Bullshit Brand Sausage doesn’t sell.
For a lot of us, the addiction to bullshit starts early – with our “religious education”. That’s a non sequitur. You can learn about religion, but to be educated IN a religion is to be fed a diet of pure, unadulterated bullshit. Religion, mind you, is entirely different from spirituality.
Spirituality is the ineffable essence of the awe any human feels as they gaze up at the cosmos and tries to see how they fit with it. With the pure fact of “being”.
Religion is rules & regs. It’s crowd control. It’s the perverse corporatization of spirituality: an institution invents a “way” to spirituality – through them, through following their rules. Followers may flirt with spiritual experience but it’s always within the context of the religion’s rules. Any spiritual experience outside those rules? It’s heresy. You’re allowed the church’s definition of “spiritual” and not your own.
Funny irony? Jesus himself preached AGAINST having a church. He taught his followers to speak directly to god. No need for the Temple, its authorities or priests.
And no need to tithe any church either. Just “Do Unto Others”. It’s that simple.
How many American Christians “do unto others”? Not many (relatively speaking). Most are “church-goers”. They’re not followers of Jesus. They’re in it for the “exclusivity”, the clubiness. They like the mythology, too. They like the magic behind it because the magic says they’ll never die.
Magic is sparkly bullshit. It’s no more real just because it glitters a little.
The Truth is we’re all going to die. There’s no escaping it. There’s no proof of any afterlife. None. To insist that one might exist is simply magic forcing itself upon you.
It’s me thinking Spurs could come back from three-nothing with minutes left when all the evidence said they were already in the locker room, their heads hung low.
