How’s Your B.S. Tolerance?

Being a lefty implies embracing reasonable tolerance of your fellow human being. I believe you should not be intolerant of someone for things they can’t control like race, gender, birthplace, disability or aptitude, movie preference…stuff like that.  Tolerance can end with actions like hate, violence, greed, assault, bigotry, tailgating me on the interstate.  Shit like that.  The struggle is to find as many people to tolerate as possible because the alternative is unacceptable.

How is your tolerance to bullshit?           

Let me give you my definition of bullshit.  There are varying levels of course, but I think I like the dictionary definition of nonsense.  It is usually nonsense with an intent to deceive, but not necessarily so. The news is full of it, corporations, political-speak of course.  We all know that.  Advertising is the manifestation of bullshit for profit.  That’s all the stuff we all argue about on Facebook and it is monumentally wasteful and annoying.

I’m focusing on another type of bullshit. Personal bullshit. 

We all have to have some amount of it in our lives.  We shovel it when we need to, and in turn, we have to accept a certain amount to function.  At its best, it serves to preserve the peace which is okay in small doses when needed. At its worst, it disguises the rot of relationships and it hides darker traits.  Addicts and narcissists survive on other people accepting their bullshit.  Users, takers, dishonest jerkfaces spin bullshit like true artists.  As we grow older, we hopefully discern the difference between superficial bullshit and poisonous bullshit.

My problem is that I have never been able to accept any of it.  The intent is not to come across as some beacon of truth and clarity.  I bullshit plenty.  I give it as a good as your average bullshitter.  I just have never been able to play the game of taking any of it.  I also didn’t realize this until I was in my forties.  It’s not a good thing at all. It has been mostly detrimental to me as a person.  I’m a much lonelier person than I would have ever imagined because I don’t buy bullshit by the shitload.

We can’t speak the truth all the time.  We can’t, we don’t want to, and we don’t have to.  Your truth is your business and you reveal it when necessary, or never at all.  That is a reasonable behavior for anyone.  We also need to understand that other people tell us what they want us to know.  The rest, to a certain degree, is bullshit.  There are also types of bullshit to disguise shame or embarrassment or to prop yourself higher than you may feel about yourself. You embellish stories.  You pretend to know facts so you don’t seem uninformed.  You act like you have experience that you don’t have.  We all do it every day.

I think bullshit may be a basic tenet of comedy. Half of all the jokes I’ve heard are about pointing out bullshit.

We can read each other when we are serving or accepting bullshit.  You can tell when someone is buying it, or very good at looking like they buy it.  We can also tell when they don’t buy it.  That’s where I come in.  I have standing ‘I Don’t Believe This Bullshit’ face.  People can tell by my reaction or my lack thereof.  I’ve never developed the disguise. It’s not that I am confronted or chastised by people.  I am simply ignored.  Over and over, people can subconsciously detect whether or not another person is believing in their bullshit.  It’s in our DNA.  (A bullshit gene?)  When they sense they have been discovered, they bail.  They move on.  I am put on a list in the back of their mind of people they don’t talk to.  It kinda sucks. 

It really sucks.

The flipside is that the remainder of the people I do talk to don’t care. They’ve accepted my lack of bullshit tolerance and stuck around anyway. There’s still plenty of bullshit to go around but they don’t seem to mind where it’s shoveled.