To be born into modern human civilization is both a great privilege (for the safety and opportunities it provides) and a rather absurd thing (because of the sheer volume of bullshit you’re fed, for a range of reasons both intentional and otherwise). 

I’m writing this essay to try and make sense of all of that. Why do we live in an age of such unending bullshit? What is my place in Bullshit-ville?

Before Civilization: Life was violent, brutish and short

Consider first the life of most humans for most of time, before schools and supermarkets and 9–5 jobs. It was nasty, brutish, short. Violent. The main concerns were food, sex and physical safety. People typically lived in small groups and had no concept of government, bills and so on. Groups must’ve had leaders- usually fathers, patriarchs, chief hunters, etc. Physical strength would’ve mattered a lot more then than it does now. Violence would’ve been a natural way of settling disputes.

Violence is still a tremendous feature of our everyday lives, but it’s not so obvious any more. Force itself isn’t necessary- what we use most of the time instead is the threat of force, typically monopolized by States. Before States we had tribes and villages, which consolidated into kingdoms. 

I’m not a historian, so my understanding of this stuff is a little vague– there were hunter-gatherers up until about 4,000BC, then there were pastoral nomads (“barbarians”) and sedentary folk (“civilised”). There’s a bunch of interesting details (and complexity) about how civilisations basically formed around resource-rich areas– typically rivers, where they could grow food. There’s some bickering about how exactly that happened, but that’s not what I’m interested in here. 

The fact is that people started settling down one way or another– and when people were born into settlements, that would become the world they knew. When you grow up farming or practicing some trade within a settlement, it becomes a lot harder to make an exit decision– to pack up and leave town because you hate the place. [1]

My life is unusually violence-free and that’s… odd

At this point I think it makes sense to talk more about my context. I’m a Singaporean born in 1990 — which means that I was born into a miracle story, and I have no personal experience of how miraculous the story is. I was just born into a world that was clean, neat, tidy, orderly, where there a reliable rule of law, where things get done, bad guys get apprehended, people in charge are generally honourable and good. 

My parents’ generation experienced one of the greatest improvements/increases in quality of human life in the history of our species– sometimes called ‘from third world to first’. Some people here would start talking a lot about Lee Kuan Yew and his achievements, or about colonialism, and so on. That’s been covered pretty extensively so I’ll skip that.

V: On rereading the above, I realize that I’ve left out some pretty important things about how violence is abstracted/veiled in SG today. Will want to add.

Suppose we posit that for the purpose of this essay, modern civilisation began with the industrial revolution and printing press and so on. (I know this glosses over the entire Roman Empire and all sorts of important things… I’ll try to figure how all of that fits in later.) 

History of man = History of violence

Let’s jump forward to, say, the birth of America. America had a very violent beginning. It involved a lot of guns. It’s very difficult for me as a young Singaporean to appreciate the American love of guns, but I suppose that’s because guns were a huge part of American history while a non-concern in Singapore’s. 

In comparison, Americans tend to struggle to understand Singapore’s draconian attitude towards drugs. Well, it’s history again: Singapore used to be basically an opium den in the 1800s (the nickname then was Sin-Galore!), and we have some sense about how China was brought to its knees by the British with opium, so we have some cultural baggage there. (Personally I think we could do with some relaxing, but I’m not representative of the average Singaporean. The point is that different peoples with different histories have different attitudes about things, in ways that may not be immediately obvious.)

V: There’s probably more stuff about SG’s history with drugs that I’m missing. “our perception of opium and drugs is primarily colored by victorian morality”. Also China’s history with opium isn’t straightforward. Nothing is ever straightforward…

Between 1776 and now– America had slaves, where humans literally owned other humans by force, bought and sold them like cattle, raped them, all sorts of horrible things. And then there was a civil war, and 620,000 people died. In contrast, about 6,000+ Americans died in Iraq (more would’ve committed suicide, and gone home maimed and wounded), but consider the order-of-magnitude difference there.

(Digression: By the way– about 400,000+ Americans died in WW2, and 27,000,000 Russians died. Can you imagine 27 million dead bodies? About 3–6m of them died from famine and disease, which is basically all of Singapore. It’s hard to imagine.)

I guess the point I’m trying to make is– it’s easy for a young Singaporean born into relative peace and prosperity to overlook the fact that our species is violent and destructive. (One of the most salient anecdotes from LKY’s autobiography is his description of Chinese Singaporean heads on pikes outside Cathay cinema.)There have been so many atrocities even in fairly recent times– WW2, Vietnam, Korea, the killing fields in Cambodia. The situation in Syria right now. People say things like “Oh, it’s never been better!” and that’s a good thing, but it’s hard to be too paranoid about the state of our species. It still sucks to be a black person in America, the aftershocks of slavery aren’t done yet. And kids are still getting shot every day. And people die in car accidents every day. And we have crappy diets and sedentary lifestyles (that we feel guilty and ashamed about, which seems to make it worse), and it’s just a whole lot of death and suffering.

Could we do better?

I can’t say “civilisation is more bad than good”, or “civilisation is worse than the alternative”, because obviously we have a whole bunch of great things. Fewer people die in childbirth and from early childhood diseases and stuff than ever before. Life expectancies are going up.

But I think the point I’m trying to make is that the world we’re living in isn’t quite good enough. We can and should do better, for ourselves and our children and so on because life is precious and fleeting. And every day when I go to work I sit in a comfortable office surrounded by colleagues I enjoy– I do go through a shitty commute to get there, suffering along with thousands of other people who’re subjected to the same thing– but it’s probably better than anything my parents or grandparents endured. 

And every day I get to look out the window and see many instances of my grandfather toiling in the sun and rain, working hard in difficult conditions so that his grandchildren might someday enjoy the privilege of middle-class guilt and maybe write blogposts about it to make sense of his thoughts and feelings.

___

[1] This has changed more in our globalised era– while there’s more paperwork, I could theoretically leave Singapore, my hometown, and go live somewhere else. But that doesn’t feel like a very real option to me, and probably because I grew up never having entertained that prospect seriously. I was born pledging allegiance to a flag, singing a national anthem, doing involuntary military service… and grew up eating the food, speaking the language– to migrate somewhere else permanently would be rather tedious, and I think people from sedentary cultures are generally uncultured to be tedium-averse, or novelty-averse. I not sure. 

Part 2 

Let’s try to quickly summarise what the previous post was saying.

1. Pre-settled human life was brutish and short, but it was also simpler and relatively bullshit-free. In contrast, modern civilised life is bureaucratic, long, complex (byzantine, really) and full of bullshit. A “confusopoly”.
2. A strange thing about being a young Singaporean is witnessing effectively zero violence and suffering, when so much of human history is so full of death and killing.
3. It would be very naive to imply that “people in the past had it better” — rose-tinted glasses are a thing. Life is better today in many, many ways. 
4. But it’s also probably true that our current state of affairs is suboptimal in ways that we do not even begin to realise– because we were born into this reality, and this reality is (usually) all we know. We may be bored and lonely and upset and depressed for all sorts of reasons we don’t appreciate.

Righto. That about sums it up. Let’s move on. What am I trying to say with all of this?

I appreciate that life is longer than before, but I don’t like that it’s bureaucratic and byzantine and full of bullshit. And I’m trying to figure out how to live well in such a time. (Rereading this now, I suppose folks like Seneca and other thinkers of the past have grappled with their versions of this.)

I would like to be grateful for all of the gifts, privileges and opportunities that civilisation provides me (which are things I love), but I’d also like to inoculate myself against bureaucracy, needless complications and bullshit (which are things that I hate).

I guess to do that I need to understand why things are the way they are– and I have to strive to do this as objectively and neutrally as possible, without bias. I need to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that underly these things, and figure out the actions that I should take to build a better life for myself (however I choose to define that).

“Please don’t screw up this civilization thing, because the alternative really sucks.” — Thomas Hobbes, probably

I’m scanning through a summary of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan now– I don’t know anything about either Hobbes or Leviathan, but the phrase “brutish and short” has stuck in my mind for a long time and it turns out that it was Hobbes who coined it, to describe the unfavourable situation of pre-civilisation– the “war of all against all”. 

I like what I’m seeing so far– Hobbes didn’t like that his predecessors appealed to the “greatest good” or “summum bonum”– the variability of human desires meant that there could be no such thing. I intuitively agree with this. He did however believe that there was a “summum malum” — a greatest evil, the fear of violent death. This I’m not so sure about. I’m inclined to agree that it’s probably legitimate — as I said in an earlier post, I come from a privileged, sheltered background where I’ve never had to fear my own violent death. So at best it’s still just a hypothetical thought experiment, rather than a real fear.

Hobbes argues– and I have to agree– that there can be no industry or productivity in an uncertain environment, where everyone fears that all might be lost at any instant. That sounds legitimate. We work and save money because we believe that the value of money will hold over time. History has shown that this isn’t always the case, and that hyperinflation and anarchy are real things that can descend upon a previously orderly community or context.

“In the state of nature nothing can be considered just or unjust” — this is true.

“One ought to be willing to renounce one’s right to all things where others are willing to do the same” — this is a prescriptive appeal to social contracts. It would be nice if everyone agreed to this, but in reality not everyone does. People like situations that are designed to favor them– heads I win, tails you lose. (Yeah apparently people used Hobbes to try to tell black people to be patient and well-behaved during the civil rights movement)

Hobbes goes on to describe how a State should be like — how it should establish, enact and enforce laws, preside over disagreements. Interestingly, he favoured press censorship and restrictions on the right of free speech if they promoted order over chaos. In this regard it seems Singapore is more Hobbesian than the USA, which priorities the separation of powers.

Interesting. Hobbes lived from 1588 to 1679, and published Leviathan in 1651. 

(Digression: Some historical context– Japan was under the Tokugawa shogunate at the time, and there was a failed uprising by a number of ronin. The Taj Mahal was completed 2 years later. China was under the Qing dynasty. Louis XIV was King of France, crowned in 1654, and Ferdinand III ruled the Holy Roman Empire. Oliver Cromwell is a significant dude. Saturn’s largest moon Titan is discovered in 1655, by the same dude who’d then invent the pendulum clock. History is so much more interesting that current affairs.

Okay wait, so why did Hobbes write Leviathan again? Apparently his mother went into labor prematurely upon learning that the Spanish Armada had set said to attack England, and Hobbes wrote “fear and I were born twins together”. So I suppose he wrote it in fear that people wouldn’t uphold a decent State? Yep– he wrote it partly as a response to the political turmoil of the English Civil Wars. He was a Royalist– a person who supported King Charles I. He had been developing his philosophy of political and natural science for a long time before — maybe a couple of decades. Which makes me wonder about what might be stewing in my mind that I’m not fully aware of, that I would write if I were triggered.

Anyway.

So I spent a bunch of time reading up about Thomas Hobbes and about 1650s history. I guess there were civil wars and stuff going on at the time. The French Revolution would probably happen not too much later– well it would be 130 years later, from 1789 to 1799. And then Napoleon showed up. Hm, and this was after America declared Independence. Interesting. 

(Digression: I guess the big lesson for me here is that the history of States is far more complicated than I realize. But I think it’s necessary to figure out the big picture anyway, leaving allowances for inaccuracies and so on. And now I’m in a rabbithole reading and learning about the French Revolution, which is actually pretty interesting.)

But let’s get back in focus on what I wanted to figure out– which is, what is the source of bureaucracy, unnecessary complication, bullshit? Why is it such a prominent feature of our modern times? Can we do anything about it?

Part 3 

A quick recap– I’ve been thinking about the context that I live in, and the history that has lead to this context, and how it shapes my thinking and my life. I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s joke at a commencement speech, about an old fish greeting younger fish with “Good day boys, how’s the water?”, and then one fish says to the other, “What’s water?”

Water in my case is modern civilization– the physical spaces, the technologies, the ideologies, the media, everything. I’m also thinking now about Paul Graham’s essay What You Can’t Say, and how he talks about moral fashions, and how we inherit them, and how they can prevent us from thinking certain thoughts altogether.

I relate to Paul. I want to be able to have freedom of thought. I want to be able to be free in every way that is afforded to me– or at least I say that because I think that will lead to a happier life for me, with more pleasure and more enjoyment and more fulfilment and all of those good things. 

(on hindsight – is ^this actually true, though?)

I outlined that there are things about modern civilization that I love– and I don’t need to talk too much about those things because that part is easy to rant and rave about — and there are things that I hate. And the things that I hate are (to name a few) bureaucracy, unnecessary complexity and bullshit. And boredom, I suppose, though boredom is a luxury and a privilege compared to living in fear or worry. Let’s focus on the earlier bits.

Life went from “brutish and short” to “long and bureaucratic”

I chose bureaucracy as an antonym for brutish– I was thinking of Hobbes’s phrase “brutish and short” as a descriptor of life in pre-civilization. I was trying to figure out the inverse of that– long, obviously, but what’s the inverse of brutish? I came up with “bureaucratic”– and I was delighted to find out that the word’s etymology is rooted in “desk”. And that sums up a lot of the transition, I think. We’ve gone from being wild to being desk-bound. We’ve gone from playing in the streets to playing in santized playgrounds, staring at iPads all day and whatnot. 

(Displeased with the “staring at iPads” line – unimaginative, and unintentionally cues a “kids these days” image. Not what I’m going for. Will rephrase.)

I don’t think of myself as an iPad hater. I love technological tools. I love my Macbook and my Android phone, and I’d quite like an iPad too though I can’t quite justify the expenditure right now. But the point I think is that we’ve gone from living primarily in our bodies to living primarily in our heads (Ken Robinson has a great riff on this, re: how our education systems have been modelled after the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment and so on– that math is somehow definitely more important than dance, for example.Strength coach Elliott Hulse also has some fun thoughts on this. And in a more grim sense, if we go back to David Foster Wallace’s water speech, he points out that people who shoot themselves almost invariably shoot themselves in the head.)

I’m not going to say that dance is more important than math, but dance is important. Diet is important. Exercise is important. Flirting is important. Movement is important. Hiking is important. We seem to have, in our eagerness to evolve or progress in some way, thrown out a bunch of things about ourselves that made us who we are.

(Define important. I think I mean “important to human welfare”, or flourishing.)

Okay I’m being a bit vague and grand here, I should be more precise. What am I trying to say here? We cut out a lot of things from our lives in an attempt to make things more tidy, more organized, more legible, easier to account for, easier to measure and so on. Standardized tests. Standardized everything. 

Again I probably don’t fully appreciate how powerful and empowering standardization must’ve been for a lot of people. It would’ve brought them out of poverty, given them dignity, so on and so forth. I’m writing all of this under the blanket of security and wealth provided by all the sacrifices that people made before me, and for this I am grateful. 

Byzantine, bureaucratic bullshit-ville

But I still want to understand how exactly we got to byzantine, bureaucratic bullshit-ville, so that I can navigate it better. My main way of dealing with BBB is to be angry, or sarcastic, or absurd, to call it out, to complain about it, to laugh at it, to find other people that I can laugh at it with. But it doesn’t make the problem go away. BBB stucks around after I’ve made fun of it. So I need to change my approach if I want to have less of it in my life.

Some tentative thoughts: 

1. Cutting through bullshit requires knowing what the truth is. 
2. The truth is often obfuscated in civilization.
   1. Sometimes this is because truth is expensive and tedious and people don’t want to bother putting in the effort when they don’t have to. See: “The amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.“. Bullshit is convenient.
   2. Often people don’t really want the truth because it’s awkward, painful, uncomfortable and so on.
   3. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
   4. Sometimes this is because bullshitting can be outright profitable or beneficial.  The latter can seem like a conspiracy theory but that doesn’t necessarily make it invalid. (I recall reading a quote from someone in power who said that the drug war was knowingly perpetuated so that the “wrong” sort of people could be smeared on dinnertime television night after night for years. That makes total sense to me.)

But I’m not doing this to take BS-artists to court. (Speaking of which, courts and legal systems are incredibly byzantine and full of BS too, allowing all sorts of wiggle room and interpretations– so much of it is theatre, blah blah…). I’m doing this so I can come to a place of acceptance about my place in the BBB circus, and figure out steps for myself to climb out of it, to dust myself off and at least carve out a space that I can inhabit comfortably and not feel like blowing my brains out or otherwise committing acts of indecency. Or being lulled into a sense of helplessness and apathy, which is equally bad, I think. Sometimes I shake myself up a little in a silly way because I think that would be preferable to getting jaded. But I think I need to figure out a more sustainable solution for myself.

^ 

this is where the essay ended. I’m going to just share this messy thing with friends and then update it afterwards.

Afterthoughts

Rereading all of the above, I suppose the way out of Bullshit-ville is simply a rigorous adherence to truth-seeking. And I suppose the first uncomfortable truth I need to grapple with is the fact that I’m not nearly as truth-seeking as I’d like to believe. I seek truths about things that are relatively easy, convenient or comfortable. Worse, I use those pursuits as indicators that say “Ah, look, I’m seeking truth!” – which allow me to avoid more painful/pressing/important truths. And over the long term, this leads to all sorts of frustration and discomfort. In a way this was one longwinded way of me arriving at a simple truth – that I should worry less about how the world bullshits me, and more on how I bullshit myself.

Well how do I bullshit myself… that’s probably the subject of an entire other essay altogether. I find myself resisting writing it, because… it would be uncomfortable. Difficult. Painful. Awkward. So… I gotta do it. But that also helps me get a feel for why the world is so full of bullshit (probably). It’s because BS is easy when you’re safe. In violent times, BS got you hurt, killed. 

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” – George Orwell