EARLIER THIS WEEK, when I checked social media, up popped a photo I’d posted six years ago. The heading was “Your memories on Facebook” and the intro began as follows:
Gary, we care about you and the memories you share here.
Usually, I read right past those words, but that particular morning I took note, which prompted a number of questions. Who, for starters, is the “we” in the sentence? The roughly 60,000 people employed by Facebook? Am I supposed to imagine that all (or any) of them care (or even know) about me and what I post on my feed?
Is the antecedent of “we” the developers who wrote the code that went into the algorithm that directed the computer that served up the old photo on my timeline? Is Zuckerberg himself among those who care about me, and the hundreds of millions of other Facebook users who get the identical message on their timelines each week?
And on what planet can a nonexistent “we” be said to “care” about anything? Care implies things like affection, concern, empathy, a willingness to help. Technological execution has nothing whatsoever to do with those qualities. Facebook—“we”—cares about little ol’ me about as much as an anteater cares about each of the 30,000 ants it hoovers up each day.
Come on, you say, lighten up? What’s the problem? If we think about it, we all know that “Gary, we care about you. . .” is bullshit, and that such bullshit is inescapable—it’s always and everywhere. Actually, that’s the problem right there: we don’t think about it, or challenge it, and so it seeps into our being and starts looking less like bullshit and more like the natural, time-worn bedrock on which all sales and marketing, war and diplomacy, and business and politics are built.
And so the world has been for as long as I can recall. I grew up reading magazines in which “3 out of 4 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes,” Cheer detergent “washes so white you can see the difference,” and blowing cigarette smoke in a woman’s face made her want to sleep with you. Today, “Degree keeps working when others quit,” ScotiaBank tells me “You’re richer than you think,” and a robo-voice repeatedly assures me “Your call is important to us” while making me wait 45 minutes. (Note to service providers: if you’ve been experiencing “unusually high call volumes” for four years now, it’s not unusual.)
Consumerism is the religion we’re taught from birth, and bullshit is fundamental to the faith—for example, the bullshit that (at least until the fairly recent idea took hold that consumption is ruining the planet) new is better than old, more is better than less, and spending $700 rather than last week’s price of $900 is not really spending at all—it’s saving $200. Spending is saving, more beats less, and the new 2024 Mazda CX-70, I just learned, is a “game changer.”
Now, I happen to know that the 2015 Mazda 3 was also a game changer. So was the 2016 Chevy Malibu, the 2018 Buick Enclave, and doubtless other models I haven’t researched. Beyond the automotive field can be found any number of game changers. Sports Clips is a game changer. Gatorade was a game changer. So was Xbox 360, a new flavour of Pop Tarts, the tacos at a restaurant in Tampa, Florida, and a thousand other products, tweaks, and innovations I haven’t bothered to track down.
If they’re all game changers, how come the game hasn’t changed at all? Tacos are still tacos, Gatorade tastes like Gatorade, Pop Tarts are Pop Tarts. Line up all those game-changing cars in a parking lot and I’ll bet you couldn’t tell them apart. They all have steering wheels and engines and seats. They go forwards or backwards. You can drive them from A to B.
Now, if you could drive one of those cars out to the airport and onto the tarmac, accelerate down the runway, lift off, and fly the thing to Chicago, it actually would be a game changer. (Waiting on you, Elon.) Until then, it’s the same old game, and the name of the game is, as ever, bullshit.
ON THE 2016 Chevy Malibu TV spot, a dither of millennials is shown milling around a shiny new vehicle. The car is anonymized, so that the millennials can be surprised to learn that it’s not a BMW or an Audi but rather the game-changing new Malibu. A caption reads REAL PEOPLE, NOT ACTORS.
If you study those words, they turn to bullshit. The caption implies that the ad is not bullshit because the admirers are not actors but real people, and real people would never bullshit you the way actors would (which is bullshit because real people will bullshit you every bit as readily as actors will), but also because the binary distinction between actors and real people is itself bullshit. Actors are real people, just like plumbers and nurses and realtors. And whatever else they may be, real people who sign contracts to do multiple takes in front of camera crews are actors.
NEXT TIME you’re walking through a shopping mall, take a good look at the posters in the shop windows. How’s this—which I spotted recently in a mall in Tsawwassen, near Vancouver—for blatant deception:
Total, unapologetic bullshit, since the mouseprint is all but invisible, and because any dictionary will tell you that “everything” doesn’t mean “some things in this store.”
The sign in the window next door—“Buy one pair of shoes and get 50% OFF (a second pair)”—may be less obvious bullshit, but it’s bullshit all the same. “Buy two pairs of shoes and get 25% OFF” is truth in advertising. Just a matter of emphasis, granted, but we’re constantly bombarded by these misdirections, evasions, and distortions.
In the 1970s, people were exposed to something like 1,000 ads a day. A typical North American in 2023 is said to see about 10,000 ads each day (thank you, internet). A TV spot from my youth had an esthetician named Madge softening a woman’s hands with Palmolive dish soap. “You’re soaking in it!” Madge tells the woman. We’re soaking in it, all right.
HERE I WOULD spend a couple of paragraphs making the case that bullshit is the very lifeblood of politics, but no need. Politicians of all persuasions make the case with almost every utterance. Few things are as blatant and taken for granted as the hypocrisy and outright fabrication—the bullshit—that spills from the mouth of any politician or political candidate in range of a camera or microphone. (P.S. Nixon is not a crook, and Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman.)
Wars are great generators of bullshit, from the use of distracting euphemisms— extraordinary rendition (kidnapping), collateral damage (dead civilians), insurgents (villagers), enhanced interrogation (electrified genitals), etc.— to falsified reports of dead and wounded, and sober assurances that things are going swimmingly in Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Ukraine, or Gaza, or wherever.
The euphemisms above are intended to downgrade and divert. Hyperbole, on the other hand, is used to exaggerate and distort. “It’s not soap—it’s Zest!” Yeah, except that Zest is soap. (Or was. It’s been discontinued.) A “miracle weight-loss program” is a diet. A “brand new you” is you. A “spectacular sales event” is a sale. Nothing brand new, miraculous, or spectacular here, folks, just empty words in the service of bullshit.
I CAN’T DENY that bullshit has a valid place in everyday life. Religion is petrified bullshit that gets drummed into innocents at an early age and passed down from generation to generation. It has always been used to promote tribalism, generate wealth, “other” people, and justify acts of the cruellest sort; but it has also inspired extraordinary works of art, music, and architecture, and it provides comforting ritual for believers, a North Star for adherents, and easy answers for those who can’t accept that the universe is under no obligation to make its ways known to humankind.
Here on earth, “Fine, thanks” is a perfectly acceptable way of replying when your partner has left you, you just got fired, and you have a chronically ill kid. “Good to see you” is more civil than “You lied to me,” and “Let’s have lunch soon” is a gracious way to escape a bore. I’m not talking about that sort of harmless, daily, transactional bullshit. That’s just social lubrication. I’m talking about the bullshit that drains your bank account, or addicts patients to opioids, or sends young people off to get slaughtered.
Given that my aim here is to help you become a better writer, what does this little rant have to do with anything? Just this: good writing does not contain bullshit. Not major bullshit—by which, say, an invasion that kills half a million civilians is justified by non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Not run-of-the-mill marketing bullshit, by which a “$149 fare-saver” flight to Toronto actually costs $512 because you must pay various taxes and have a place to sit. And not the two-bit stuff either, such as “award-winning, best-selling novelist,” when the award dates to Grade 11 and the novel spent a week at No. 10 in the Brandon Sun.
Here's today’s Ross Rule: in all that you write, be scrupulous in your avoidance of bullshit. There’s more than enough in this world to go around. Social media is thick with it, and machine learning directs and amplifies its dissemination with terrifying efficiency. Do not add to the sum total of bullshit. Recognize it for what it is, call it out when appropriate, and do not counter it with more bullshit.
Zoom in on the words you read and the images you look at. Ask yourself whether they’re bullshit. Zoom way out and look at how many of your beliefs, aspirations, and decisions are shaped by bullshit.
In your own small way, use your writing to help make the world a better place.