The Psychology of Shit

Picking the "least shit" thing on the menu means you're still eating faecal matter.

In Feb 2022, VST did a brief round up of then Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s litany of confirmed lies, told before he took up office in Downing Street, entitled “Democracy makes all of this our fault, doesn't it?”.

If:

• some or all of the above is accurate and true (enough) when it comes to Boris Johnson’s lying (which heavily features money in his own pockets); and

• this information all existed before the 2019 general election; and

• you voted for the Tories under Johnson partly because of something about Boris Johnson;

Then you just “democratically” legitimised a known liar to run your nation.

If you voted for him and are happy with his performance in office, good for you. There are a significant number who will be and will have voted for him as a known liar. You may have benefitted as a result of that.

If you voted for him and are not happy with his performance in office, on what basis did you put him there?

“But I didn’t know about Boris’ chequered past with the truth!” you may protest.

Then why didn’t you check? Don’t you do any due diligence on the people running your country? Did you look for any reviews about the last kettle/toaster/builder/restaurant in your life? If so, you paid more attention to things of probably less overall consequence than you did to someone in the supposedly prime position of power in the UK, and who many, many people now want to blame (in part or whole) for the last two years, which have been demonstrably chock full o’lies.

“He was the least shit of two shit options!” you may opine. Why are you only being presented with two shit options?

Led By Donkeys has just released a summary timeline of Johnson’s lies, deception, recklessness, philandering and questionable character.

Johnson has likely temporarily resigned from the Tory Party and his position as MP, leaving behind a trail of provable shit spanning the Brexit campaign, his time as Foreign Secretary, taking the PM job via a possible internal coup, Covid and Partygate, among other issues.

If some of this Telegraph article proves to be well-informed enough to be true, Johnson is manoeuvring to escape consequences or constraints relating to his prior behaviour and may stand for another MP job. Time will tell. Boris Johnson was paid £250,000 per annum as a Telegraph columnist for whom he made bigoted and racist statements under his own name. He was rehired by the Telegraph after he made the same kind of statements while British Foreign Secretary. He became Prime Minister despite such statements, or perhaps because of them.

There is a surface narrative and a sub-surface reality. Both are shit. The questions linking the two are “why is this shit tolerated or allowed?” and “what does this shit mean?”

The surface narrative is one in which Johnson - who’s life and character couldn’t be more removed from a representative view of the majority of the British public - took multiple offices while lying consistently and repeatedly. He won the elections for the position of London Mayor. He won one election as incumbent Prime Minister, which means that, when judged via “popular vote” enough people bought Johnson’s shit. All his other political appointments were just that - appointments or internal selections by, essentially, peers within the party system. The Covid narrative has been proven to be based on lies and shit, and the way it was politically and practically managed around the globe was and remains shit. And yet, everything that people paying attention anticipated would happen as a result of what Covid enabled is still happening and being enshrined in law. Shit people doing shit things appears to lead to more shit people and more shit things. Johnson has been replaced by people pursuing the same agenda, irrespective of exactly how they do it or who plays what role in the overall pursuit.

This gets us to the sub-surface reality, which is connected to the superficial narrative by, you guessed it, tectonic plates of shit. What reality is is only what can be perceived, surmised and proven, all of which takes time and effort and is directly dependent on the ability and will to plough through shit and determine what’s shit and what isn’t. If the shit is so thick, constant and debilitating such that we are drowning in it and forced to eat a sufficient amount, then it becomes the accepted superficial, narrative reality. In truth, those who rule are completely divorced from accountability because they have all invested the time and energy in eradicating accountability. They do what they want and their ability to do that is proportionate to their accountability. What they do is reality. What they say about it is the thickening layer of shit that surrounds and obfuscates their actions that further shields them from scrutiny and accountability.

What the linked Telegraph article describes is simply groups of ruling elites scrabbling between themselves for control over the means to bring about their reality as they keep the sluice gates open. It does not in any way concern itself with how lamentable what Johnson represents is, or what it means for UK citizens.

The meaning is clear: the means of governance employed in the UK, the EU and the US is simply based upon nothing more than aspects of neo-feudalism, corporatocracy, kleptocracy and fascism, all of which must be wrapped up in layers of obfuscating shit in order to prevent enough citizens from getting a view or a grip on that system of governance.

This is not news in and of itself, and nor is it secret. There remain some increasingly marginalised and deliberately suppressed voices who are still prepared to call a spade a spade and prove it. What is of greatest concern is not that the veneer of the superficial narrative is so thin and of such poor quality that it takes nothing to break through it; it is that the quality of the faecal veneer is so low that it reeks from millions of miles away through the vacuum of space, and that it is so thick as to be practically impenetrable. Thus, it is an effective shield around the reality that the ruling elite persistently create.

The reality being created is not new. It is the same as all previously despotic and tyrannical rulers have created before, wherein the few exploit the huge majority. It is not the shit that is sophisticated; it all comes down to the quality and the bore width of the plumbing through which the shit flows.

Under Mao, the people were told that Chinese farmers grew 200lb tomatoes and gigantic pigs. Chinese farmers told each other the same lies, despite none of them ever having done such things or seeing them elsewhere. What’s the difference between that and anything we are told to believe in the west or care to repeat to each other? There is no difference.

The psychology of this is straightforward. Remove quality, remove truth, remove accountability to a sufficient extent over a long enough period of time and reality can be recalibrated. What was abnormal becomes normal. That degrading norm point becomes the recalibration point for the next step down the ladder. Society is descending, not ascending, across the western world for the majority. If you check out or give up in the face of all the shit, they win. If you accept the shit and the new normal, they win. If you talk about the shit in place of doing anything else, they win. If you try to plough through the shit at the expense of other things, they win. If you pick between the shit they give you on the basis that “I chose the least shit option”, they win.

Here is Tucker Carlson’s latest comment on some aspects of the Psychology of Shit. Make of it and his view count what you will:

If you take issue with Carlson, try this report about the British media, including The Guardian, FT and Private Eye, as reported by the NYT:

British media protected pro-war serial sex pest Nick Cohen for decades

Or this one about Marianna Spring and the BBC:

Troubling questions surround BBC ‘disinformation correspondent’ Marianna Spring

Or this one about the British Police and Government, based on the first person report and experience of Kit Klarenberg:

British police detain journalist Kit Klarenberg, interrogate him about The Grayzone

VST highlights all of these because they are evidence of the existence of tectonic plates of media, tech and institutional shit that orbit, shield and involve both the US and UK government in exactly the same ways, to the same ends. They are all current examples, but dig below the surface and you will easily discover that this recent shit is simply a rechurning of shit that’s decades old.

We’ve been eating faecal matter for ages.

Now, consider these interactions with the US government:

"We trusted the government not to screw us," said Edward Snowden. "But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Karl Rove