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You can have your mental house in perfect order--your little models ready to go so you can survive the day, yet keeping them more flexible than a drunken contortionist--but then a left-hemispheric will come along and try to shove bullshit down your throat.
These little fascists become as obvious as an orc at an elf convention once you learn to recognize them. He’s the pontificating goblin three tables over at the restaurant, the rat-face who makes every office meeting feel like there’s a steel clamp on your privates, the Uruk with a bullhorn on the street corner, the glamhoth who blocks your morning commute because it’s angry about the weather. These “Snaga” (black speech: slave) of the left hemisphere are so awful, you don’t know whether to pity them or to put them out of their (and everyone else’s) misery.
These foul folk suck, but they don’t have much power. Unfortunately, too many of their mental kin in government capitals do.
All legislation is built with the bricks provided by experts. Experts say this pile of bricks will fix problems A, B, and C, then the politicians try to fashion those bricks into some sort of model legislation to fix the problems.
But those bricks are like the collateralized debt obligations that crashed the economy in 2008: just a bunch of bullshit bricks built into a palace of bullshit.
CDOs and 2008: The federal government had a model: home affordability for every American, no matter how shiftless and useless. So it pushed banks to write “sub-prime” (i.e., crappy, high-risk-of-default, mortgage loans). In order to offload the risk of these crappy loans, Wall Street bundled them into big boxes and sold the big boxes as investments, with the (head-scratching) presumption that a bundle of shit packed into a single box is something better than a bundle of shit.
Experts concoct, cultivate, and cherish concepts. They’re guilty, as William James might have put it, of “concept-worship,” and they use concepts to build their models.
As explained last week, the models aren’t real. They’re bullshit. But the expert thinks they’re as real as Plato’s agathon, and he feels comfortable — aye, morally compelled — to share the models with the rest of us; and if we don’t share his taste for bullshit, he’s inclined to shove the bullshit down our throats.
The average person intuits that there’s a pretty big gap between models and reality, or at least has a sense of existential humility that intuitively prevents him from elevating his models into something worship-worthy.
Experts, in thrall to the power of their rational faculties, lack such intuitions.
Even when someone like Nassim Taleb comes along and painstakingly shows how the gap between expert models and reality tends to be wider than the gap between fashion models’ beauty and their real looks, the experts cling to the models. If you’ve ever suffered a collapse upon seeing your favorite pinup girl with no makeup, airbrushing, or shapewear, you know whereof Taleb speaks, but the experts’ enthusiasm for their models– sustained by the Viagra of their own Rationality– never collapses. Four hours is nothing for the expert. Try four decades or, in someone like Bertrand Russell’s case, eight decades.
My friend didn’t get a promotion at work because his employer needed to promote a less-qualified woman or risk a federal civil rights lawsuit. My friend told his boss, “That’s bullshit,” and the boss replied, “Yup, but it’s real bullshit.” The boss might as well have added, “And you have to eat it.”
If you could capture the energy from the left hemisphere’s kicks to our collective crotch, Saudi Arabia’s economy would collapse into its nomadic goat-lovin’ ways and we’d stop sacrificing millions of birds on the altars of wind turbines. The energetic fury alone from my friend after being forced to eat this bullshit could’ve powered a small village for a week.
Legislation–from building codes to civil rights laws—is nothing less than a model: a model of how politicians think things should be. The regulations and policy directives that then emanate from legislation ooze more bullshit than a cattle CAFO.
Of course, I’m being rather rosy here. Legislation, in the best-case scenario, is a model: a chunk of bullshit. Today, we don’t even get good-faith models. We just get legislation and regulation designed to increase the graft.
I’m not saying we don’t need laws. I’m just saying it’s helpful to keep in mind that all legislation is based on a model and so all legislation is bullshit, and the bigger the piece of legislation, the more bullshit. It doesn’t matter what political party is involved. The bullshit is unavoidable: all legislation is a model so the bullshit comes with it.
Every law is like an active volcano, but instead of lava, it has bullshit. The bullshit is always there. Even if it’s just oozing unnoticeably, it’s coming down that mountain. And sometimes, the thing downright erupts, spraying lavic bullshit over everyone.
The less that happens, the better.
