In my professional life, I work mainly as a copywriter. Businesses hire me to take their business self-images, boil them down to basic elements, and then from those little bits of lead alchemize psychological gold. My job is literally bullshit.

I make bullshit; I repair bullshit. I study bullshit and I peddle bullshit.

Bullshit isn’t always bad, because people don’t always mind being manipulated - in fact, they pay good money for it. They demand it. Every time you walk into a movie theater, or enjoy a good book, or even cherish a few melodramatic but romantic sweet words from your significant other, you’re enjoying the power of bullshit. Generally speaking, people only mind bullshit when they’re downwind of it.

As someone doing pretty well these days by bullshit, I’d like to offer a few pointers to the general layman on the subject.

Behold the sheer awesome power of bullshit, for it can save your life or kill you dead, get you the fairy tale or make you a headline. And it’s all your call. Here are the basics:

1. There are two kinds of bullshit. The whole point of bullshit is to skew perception, into either a form that motivates (inspires an active role) or one that confuses (inspires a passive one). You either want them to do something specific or nothing at all.

The first generalizes reality into absolutes; the technical term for that is “propaganda”. If you can get someone to believe that life is simple, that their options are limited, and that they play an exaggerated role in some greater drama, they’ll do just about anything to stay on that track. Governments do this all the time, but so do businesses. Apple is a damned master at it. The idea is to render the ambiguities of life into something that more resembles a fairy tale or myth, where everyone’s a hero fighting a villain for the fate of the world.

The second does the opposite - it creates noise, throws up dirt meant to confuse. This kind of bullshit overcomplicates life, telling you that things are harder than they are, that you’re not smart enough, that you should be content to stay where you are. The goal of this variety is to confuse you into passivity.

All bullshit is one or the other. All bullshit comes packaged with an agenda, offered at a price.

2. Bullshit is everywhere. You can’t escape it; in fact, the promise of escape is just another breed of bullshit. As long as intelligent life exists in the universe, the ever-present need for bullshit will exist. Truth told, bullshit is how life got intelligent to start with.

Every advance made by the human race throughout history, starting with the invention of language, has been the direct result of self-deception. Someone, somewhere, believed some halfassed nonsense that motivated them to venture into the unknown and chart new discoveries. Christopher Columbus, Thomas Edison, Galileo, Aristotle and Abraham Lincoln were all driven to great things by the power of bullshit, and then used that same power to bring greatness to the world.

Manipulating perception - bullshit - is why we have language, why we tell stories, why culture even exists. Without the desire to have one’s mind messed with, we’d all still be living in caves. You owe your life to bullshit. Don’t expect to escape it; it’s the very fabric of human existence.

3. Bullshit is market-proof. Through good times and bad, bullshit remains a growth industry. And it likely always will. Bullshit knows no recessions - in fact, when a market starts crashing, the commercial demand for bullshit goes through the roof.

With the right eye, you can see it in the news - more exaggeration, more propaganda, more insistence that the party is never going to stop, that everything is life or death, that you have to act now, etc. What’s happening is that scared businesses (and often politicians) are dumping loads of money into bullshit vendors because their positions are in decline. They’re desperate to turn things around before trading value falls too far.

The general rule of thumb here is, when you start hearing that the party is never going to stop, it usually already has - and everyone but the hard core drunks have already gone home.

Commercially, right now in the U.S. it’s real estate. I’ve been stunned lately at how many new marketing projects I’ve gotten over the last few months from real estate-oriented businesses: realtors, real estate investment firms, luxury developments, mortgage bankers. I’ve been doing this full time now for six years, and throughout the boom years I almost never heard from these guys. Now they’re everywhere, and they’re all dumping truckloads of cash into bullshit by the barrel. Their markets are in decline but their inventories are high; competition is beyond brutal. Bullshit evens the odds a bit.

Of course, good times are full of bullshit too. While bad times create desperation, good times inspire ambition - and thus are empires built from bullshit.

The only social condition that’s bad for the bullshit industry is stagnation. As long as society is going somewhere, up or down or sideways or backwards, bullshit will take it there.

4. Better your bullshit than someone else’s. Make no mistake: every single person you know or come into contact with in this life is trading in bullshit. Your spouse. Your kids. Your parents. Your coworkers. Your mailman. Your priest. All of them. Everyone has a vested interest in believing things that aren’t strictly true, and everyone has a desire for others to share and validate those beliefs. It’s inevitable. Bullshit is the human condition.

Power is based on bullshit, and generally there really is no happy middle ground of reasonable doubt - if you don’t have your own supply of bullshit, you’ll find yourself addicted to the bullshit offered by someone else. Someone who may not have your best interests in mind. So preempt; don’t be caught short of friendly bullshit when you really need it.

5. Only one kind of person is immune from bullshit.

The heart of bullshit is want - the desperate desire to find a more pleasing reality than our senses tell us is actually there. Self-deception, the essence of all drama. While bullshit is ever-present and eternal, and no one living will ever truly be free of it, there is one kind of person over whom bullshit enjoys no power.

A happy person.

You can’t manipulate a happy person; happiness is bullshit immunity. Contentment is bullshit Kryptonite. To the degree that you’re satisfied with your life, that you aren’t driven by want, the bullshit peddlers can’t get their claws into you. It’s really that simple.

Luckily for us in the industry, few people go around being happy all the time. Everyone wants stuff; if they’re content now, then by God we can make them discontent! Upset the applecart. Create want! Happiness isn’t good for the economy. And it’s usually lousy for the bullshit business.

So please don’t be happy, okay? I still hope to buy a new Mac this year.

6. The secret to happiness is the mastery of bullshit.

You can’t escape it; you can’t outrun it. Every once in a while, you can render yourself immune to it, but never for very long. So learn all you can about it.

There are plenty of good books on the subject. “The Image” by Daniel Boorstin is one of the finest. “Propaganda” by Jacques Ellul is another classic. Take a class on acting. Read everything you can about dramatic theory, both literary and stagecraft. Make the study of bullshit your life’s work, and keep yourself ahead of the bullshit technology curve. The more you know about bullshit, the better off you are.

When you choose to wield the awesome power of bullshit - and wield it you shall - do it wisely, as an artist. Liars and cheats are bullshit amateurs, incompetent at the craft, blinded by their own self-deceptions into short-term strategies that do more harm than good. Instead, be a maestro. Craft reality into pleasing shapes, and thus humanity into something a tiny bit nobler than it actually is. Spread a bit of happiness around.

Best of luck with your bullshit. Time I got back to mine.

Posted by Rob on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 8:35 pm.