The WEIRDest Bullshit in the World
The WEIRDest Bullshit in the World
We, as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people, have better stuff than non-weird people. We have better food, better clothes, better tools, better transportation, and better entertainment.
Why? Because we live in densely interconnected, capitalist societies where companies compete to provide us with goods and services at the highest quality and the lowest price. The result is an orgy of abundance and a bewildering variety of consumer enticements competing for our tiny attention spans.
In addition to having better stuff, we have better bullshit.
Bullshit is a product. It can be better or worse. It can be more or less effective. Companies compete to offer us that product, just as companies compete to offer us the best hamburgers and toothpaste. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, podcasts, movies, TV shows, books—all these offer us a cornucopia of different kinds of bullshit to choose from. Bullshit that speaks to us. Bullshit that reflects who we are. Like our junk food and our pornography, our bullshit is a superstimulus. It’s survived endless cycles of market competition, and it’s the sweetest smelling bullshit in the world.
I heard a story by an anthropologist friend of mine a few years ago, and it really drove the point home for me. The anthropologist was talking to a local villager where he was doing research, and the villager asked him why he was there. The anthropologist replied, “I like to learn things about people.” The villager responded, “Why?” The anthropologist replied, “It makes me happy.” The villager looked puzzled. “That is a strange thing to want. Why don’t you want something useful?”
Apparently, the idea that people do things for happiness is not a culturally universal idea. It’s a WEIRD creation, like Coca Cola, McDonalds, and AT&T.
I’ve already argued that no one wants to be happy, and that when we say we want to be happy, we’re bullshitting. But what I didn’t realize was that the “pursuit of happiness” meme is a commodity. It’s a product of market competition. It’s exquisitely crafted, focus-group-tested bullshit designed to mask our unflattering motives and justify crass consumerism.
The “pursuit of happiness” meme is just the tip of the iceberg. We get boatloads of psycho-bullshit from therapists, academics, sociologists, and self-help gurus. We use our childhoods and our parents as bullshit excuses for everything we do, even though our upbringing has barely any influence on who we turn out to be—it’s mostly genes and chaos. We blame everything on imperceptible cultural forces that control everything and are caused by nothing—“the media,” “society,” or “the system.” We talk about “authenticity,” which is supposed be who we really are, even though it’s just who we want to be seen as.
We’re also drowning in political bullshit. We’ve got politicians, pundits, podcasters, op-eds, partisan academics, and slanted news sources, all offering a plethora of moral rationalizations for the cobbled-together, historically contingent policies we’re supposed to support to show allegiance to our political tribe. We gobble up bullshit about how we’re intellectually and morally superior to millions of people who have the same human nature as us—a human nature which includes the tendency to see outgroup competitors as intellectually and morally inferior.
Thanks to the cornucopia of bullshit, we always have the right thing to say at the right time. We always have the perfect platitude, zinger, one-liner, or talking point at the tip of our tongue. It’s probably intimidating to people who weren’t raised in our WEIRD culture. It probably makes us seem like a society of smooth-talking salesman who can convince anyone of anything. When people unacquainted with our bullshit first encounter it, they’re probably awed and terrified.
To all the anthropologists and world travelers out there, I’m genuinely curious: do non-WEIRD cultures share our most advanced forms of bullshit?
Do they pretend to want happiness, or anything like “self-actualization”?
Do they talk about authenticity, humility, not caring about status, and bravely challenging social norms the same way we do?
Do they pontificate on the meaning of life?
Do they think they are special, enlightened humans who have transcended the dark side of human nature?
Do they think morality is about being nice and making the world a better place?
Do they think they don’t care what other people think?
I suspect the answer to most of these questions is “no.” These are advanced forms of bullshit that can only be found in our wild, WEIRD world.
Interesting idea. But are you sure that we WEIRDos actually do have the best bullshit? I grew up in non-WEIRD countries, and I remember they also had some real weapons-grarde bullshit there. Could it be that it just looks that way to us because we implicitly assume that the W, the E, the I, the R, and the D aspects would naturally lead us to *not* produce as much BS, and then the fact that BS is in fact abundant in our culture just is more salient than if a non-WEIRD culture produced BS?
I'm still thinking things through as I type, so bear with me. These are not fully fleshed out thoughts.
My experience as an American expat living in Thailand for the past six years (plus one year about a decade ago) is that the bullshit here is different, but not less. (Before I go on, I should point out that I live in a fairly small city about 1.5 hours from Chiang Mai. In bigger cities like CM and Bangkok, things are different.)
To answer your specific question, though, yes, I do think there's at least some truth to the idea that WEIRD cultures have more advanced forms of bullshit. Advanced in the "mo' money, mo' problems" sense, if nothing else. (I've brought it up here and elsewhere before, probably too much, but I can't help but see concept creep playing a big part in this).
When I was teaching in Thailand, many of my students looked at our "better stuff" in the the West and wanted in. There's definitely consumer culture here as well. Big time. It's just that, as some of my students told me, we have better and more to choose from there. Other than the basic getting-to-know-you questions, the next most common question I get here is "Why did you come here?" What's often meant, though, is why *would* you come here when you have it all already over there. It's hard to explain the desire to want to get away from all of that to people who desire the opposite.
As far as happiness goes, status is super important here, and a lot of people chase it openly. And many of those who have it flaunt it openly, without attempting to be humble about it at all, at least relative to in the West. Again, I'm still working this out (six years later), but at the moment, I would say that happiness is more of a status symbol than an actual desire a lot of the time. People will fake being happy because it elevates them in the eyes of others and earns them more respect. They don't pretend to want happiness. But they do sometimes pretend to already have it. The darker side of that is there is stigma around being unhappy. Same goes for "damaged" people. (Excuse the phrase, I just don't have a better one handy.) I know people who have damaged people in their lives and keep them largely hidden from others. There's shame in it.
On a loosely related note, when I lived in Cambodia, someone there told me how it was a compliment to be called fat. It meant you must be eating well, which means you must not be poor. (Likewise here, the one McDonald's and Starbucks in town are some of the more expensive places to go. So going to them is itself a kind of status symbol.)
Importantly, I don't speak Thai. (What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.) So my interactions and experiences are limited and have holes in them. That said, when I'm with other English-speaking Thais and trying to take the conversation deeper (human nature, morality, etc.), as my silly brain is won't to do, I'm often met with some variation of "Don't be serious." Which here mostly means: Don't overthink things. Just be happy. That sort of thing.
Making the world a better place doesn't seem to be a priority (it's not much of one for me anymore either, to be honest with you). The priority is your family and community, and then maybe your country, and I'm not sure I've seen it extend much beyond that.
Thai people, in my experience, care very much what other people think about them. Again, because of status. Losing face is a devastating blow.