some things that set off my bullshit detector

what it says on the tin

I am pretty trusting. I’m so trusting that once in Boston I got reprimanded by a total stranger for leaving my stuff unattended to go to the bathroom, so trusting that I often leave my car unlocked, so trusting that I’ll talk to just about anyone who approaches me on the street. I don’t think most people have bad intentions. I don’t move through the world like I’m going to be hurt by it, and usually, the world obliges (the one time someone broke into my car, all they stole was a few quarters from the center console). I’ve never been hurt by a stranger, so I don’t fear them. This is, in some large part, a result of having lived in small cities and/or rural Michigan for most of my life—there’s not a culture of messing with strangers or neighbors where I come from.

But I think it’s also due to the knowledge that the worst harm doesn’t come from strangers. Just because I’ve never been hurt by a stranger doesn’t mean I’ve never been hurt at all! At various turns throughout my life I have been hurt in profound and creative ways by people I know, often people I know very well. As a result, I have honed an extremely strong bullshit detector. If it is set off, there is a pretty high chance the setter-offer will do me dirty, or is otherwise full of shit in some fundamental way. Once the detector is set off, I might choose one of several courses of action, depending on the egregiousness of the bullshit and the nature of the relationship.

Here are just three of the myriad things that set off my bullshit detector.

• conspicuous overcommunication
  it’s hard for me to express exactly what I mean by this, but I’ll do my best. it’s not necessarily about loquaciousness, though sometimes it is. it’s mostly about an excess of emotionally and/or politically tinged communication (prosody, word choice, eye contact, body language) that is designed to heighten, hasten, or simulate the experience of familiarity. it’s distinct from earnestness, because it’s not entirely honest. it’s got a beseeching quality to it which I would be allergic to even if it weren’t indicative of bullshit. it’s when your newish acquaintance stands too close to you and looks you in the eye the way two old friends look at each other. it’s when it’s when the barista you’ve never met before calls you “friend”. it’s when someone brings up attachment styles on the first date. it’s when your colleague sends an email containing the phrase “if that would affirm you”. this style of relating often takes place in a dyad, but it can be writ large, too. another feature that distinguishes conspicuous overcommunication from earnestness is that it’s unidirectional. you’re not supposed to engage too deeply with it. it’s more about spectacle than exchange, hence the conspicuousness (con+specere). it’s style over substance.

  
  of everything I’ll write about in this list, this set of behaviors is the least personally threatening to me, though it does always make me cringe. sometimes people just act this way because they are nervous. sometimes they even act this way because it’s mandated by their employer (I’m looking at you, Zingerman’s). but I believe that there are a lot of people for whom the spectacle is a smoke screen. this smoke screen can hide anything from poor social skills to crippling fear of rejection to cultural differences to a genuine, self aware desire to manipulate; in other words, conspicuous overcommunication often obscures some kind of relational skills deficit. only gathering more data will help you discern what shape this deficit takes, and how to proceed from there.
  

• conspicuous reliance on SJW semiotics
  if you’re reading from outside the United States (I know some of you are—hey Denmark, hey Iceland!), you can probably skip this section. I know that American cultural imperialism is a crazy beast, but I think that what I’m about to describe is a uniquely or mostly an anglophone North American phenomenon, thank god. you have probably come across it if you’ve been to American university in the last 20 years, in which case, my condolences; but it won’t apply to you. maybe your country has its own version of the phenomenon, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t live there. it sure seems super American in its grandiosity, though.
  
  related to and often overlapping with the above bullet point, this is a financially-and-academically-well-off form of what some might call “virtue signaling”. you don’t literally have to be rich to do this, but you do have to have some kind of proximity to academia, where this shit comes from. the Tumblr era democratized it a bit, and Instagram infographics have carried the torch. I used to be really well versed in SJW semiotics back when I had something to prove. I don’t know how much I conspicuously relied, but I definitely had wokescold bona fides back in the day. I knew allllll the neopronouns.
  
  SJW is an abbreviation of the slightly derogatory phrase “social justice warrior”. I don’t love using it, but I don’t really know what else to say. this milieu refuses to name itself, thinking that it’s just “how good people are” or something, as far as I can tell. that’s a problem because it’s hard to talk about something that doesn’t have a name. we are left with the names given to this culture by its opposition: it’s either “woke semiotics”, “SJW semiotics” or “libtard semiotics”, and I’m a sucker for a bit of alliteration. (oh, and semiotics is basically just symbolism and the study thereof. my friend Phil (not the one I normally cite, the other mysterious genius Phil in my life) used the phrase “hippie semiotics” the other day; I’m borrowing this construction from him, because neither “nomenclature” nor “aesthetics” really covers what I’m trying to get at.) anyway, people from within this subculture don’t seem to know they’re in a subculture; they don’t know that their parlance, carriage, and social mores are baffling and alienating to most people, not just to conservatives. this fact alone makes me feel completely nuts when I have the misfortune to be in groups where people act like this. it’s not normal, and it’s so fucking weird that some people think it is. it’s normal to them, I guess. goes to show that you can acclimate to anything.
  

  SJW semiotics includes talk of “folks” or “bodies” and how they “show up” “in the space”, for example. it’s the use of ill defined, loose, ever-expanding terms and acronyms like “queering” and “proximity to whiteness” and “QTBIBOC” instead of specific words that refer to specific things, and a simultaneous, ironically militant policing of the use of these terms. it’s wearing a keffiyeh to a coffee shop or one of your MFA seminars. it’s putting “black trans lives matter” in your instagram bio when you are neither black nor trans (you might think this is a dated reference, but I assure you that this trend is not all the way dead—ask me how I know). it’s calling North America “turtle island” while never having spoken to a native person in the flesh, and definitely not knowing where that creation story comes from, much less how it goes. it’s goddamn pronoun circles¹. unlike the bullet above, this kind of communication is usually public instead of dyadic, though it can be dyadic: SJW rules mandate a lot of active listening, a lot of nodding a paraphrasing and reflecting, and this is usually dyadic, because it’s borrowed from psychotherapy.
  
  not all use of SJW semiotics constitutes conspicuous reliance, though. sometimes people are just doing what they understand to be be culturally sensitive. i have a lot of sympathy for nice 50something ladies who volunteer in nurseries who just found out that saying “boys and girls” is offensive to some, so they bend over backwards to come up with something inclusive to say instead. conspicuous reliance begins when nary a conversation can be had without contrived newspeak, and it ends with SJW semiotics determining important aspects of your identity. (they/them pronouns are often fine, but she/they pronouns trip the bullshit detector 10 times out of 10.) it’s a slippery slope, though. you can start out a nice lady in a nursery, and then you can find yourself wanting to follow the new social rules so badly that you sacrifice your ability to relate to others who don’t follow the new social rules, and then you find yourself reading Robin DiAngelo and completely stripping yourself of all dignity, reducing yourself to just a bad bad while woman who can never really understand black people. of course, this is only a slippery slope if you are the kind of person who needs to follow new social rules to the letter because, deep down, you don’t trust yourself—you don’t trust yourself to be interesting to others, you don’t trust yourself to be palatable to others, you don’t trust yourself to be kind to others, and you definitely don’t trust your own judgment—so you need a manual. if you’re doing conspicuous reliance, you’re following your manual as loudly and publicly as you can get away with. this sets off my bullshit detector because when people don’t trust their own judgment, it means that you can’t trust their judgment either. if people are looking too closely at their manual, they are not seeing you. they are understanding you through at least one layer of abstraction. they are likely to treat you like one of the objects in their manual, and they are unlikely to treat you like you, and if their manual-induced myopia is bad enough, they might not treat you like a person at all. this is generalizable beyond the context of SJW semiotics, but manualized relating really deserves an essay of its own, so stay tuned for that.
  
  I don’t know where else in the article to put this, but I need to get it off my chest—recently someone said to me “if a diner owner is gonna be mean to me, I want it to be a Greek man, not some random white man” and I just…I mean I just smiled and laughed politely, because literally how else can you possibly respond to something like that? I couldn’t have asked for a better instantiation of how SJW semiotics makes people confused about the nature of reality, nor a better distillation of the purpose of SJW semiotics. who was that statement for? the mean (nonwhite????) Greeks of the world? no, it was for my benefit and that of the other people in the room. it was to telegraph to us and to herself that my interlocutor is one of the good ones, one of the learnèd ones who knows that the darker your features, the more you can act however you want, or maybe the whiter you are the more you deserve mistreatment from less white people, or something—I don’t keep up with the SJW orthodoxies anymore, but I used to, like I said, and that’s how come I know how wacky they can get.
  
  anyone can learn to say the right words, and they can say the right words for any reason, to any end. people who conspicuously rely on a given vernacular think that because they are using the language of the righteous, it means that they themselves are righteous, and any use of that language it righteous. these people are wrong. righteousness isn’t a set of symbols. that’s part of why conspicuous reliance on SJW semiotics is such bullshit to me. you can’t attain righteousness by just saying the right words or wearing the right piece of cloth. I don’t know how to say it any clearer.
  
  TL;DR I never want to hear about folks in the space. I will absolutely think you are full of shit if you talk to me about folks in the space.

• concentric deception
  people lie sometimes. I get it; I live in the world. I try not to lie, and I don’t like it when I’m lied to, but I understand that sometimes people feel like they need to lie. people fib, they spin yarns, they omit. people are dishonest in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons, some compelling, some not. not all dishonesty rises to the level of true bullshit. A single little white rice lie (“that dress doesn’t make you look fat”) puts me on alert, but it’s not enough to set off the bullshit detector.
  
  what does set off my bullshit detector is when you catch someone in a lie, and then they lie about that. you catch someone in a lie, and they double down, or they make up a new lie to help explain away the old lie. some people who do this are just bumbling idiots who are trying to pull the wool over your eyes for some kind of short term personal gain, but to me, there is something dopily charming about that brand of compulsive liar, even though I don’t want to be their friend.

  
  the really dangerous people are the ones who are good at it, the ones it takes a long time to catch. people who are skilled at doing this don’t always know that they’re doing it. the most skillful deception is self-deception: people who lie this way believe what they are telling you, at least in the moments they are telling you. in my experience (and that’s all it is, so take it with a grain of salt) with concentric deceivers, this pattern can arise among people who had really abusive or otherwise very troubled families of origin. to be really skilled at hiding what’s going on at home (something that dysfunctional family systems demand, lest you become the scapegoat), you have to delude yourself about what’s going on at home. you have to hide it from yourself as thoroughly as possible. you have to un-know it. unfortunately, honing the ability to un-know something changes your relationship to truth forever. if you are skilled enough at un-knowing, you can un-know things without even realizing. that’s why if you confront a concentric deceiver about their deception, it’ll be almost like they can’t hear you. in some real way, they can’t. if you cut through all the layers of deception, what you find at the core is an absolute phobia of truth. the most skilled and shameless concentric deceiver I’ve ever known has been baldly plagiarizing entire paragraphs from this very substack (yes, really! from Miss Apprehension herself!) and putting it on her own substack for a month and a half, which, by the way, is just about the lamest, corniest, most pitiful way to steal someone’s intellectual property that I can think of. if you or I were to confront her about it, she’d find a way to believe that she wasn’t, and to convince us that it was all just a misunderstanding. it’s quite literally crazy what an intense truth phobia will do to a person. it might even reduce you to a substack-stealing husk.

Having written all this, I can see that what sets of my bullshit detector is artifice, but not just any artifice. It’s like when lean on a wall that you thought was brick your whole life, but putting your weight on it reveals that it was just plaster the whole time. (This a literal experience that I have had more than once—what the hell is going on with Michigan “architecture”?)

My bullshit detector is set off when I knock on something and it’s hollow where it shouldn’t be. A misplaced void is the worst kind of bullshit there is.

there is more than one brick building in this photo that is not made of bricks

1. for the uninitiated reader, this is when you stand in a circle and say your name and the gender pronouns you would like people to use to refer to you, and usually some other cutesy fun fact. I’m sure there are people who feel affirmed (wink) by this practice, but I personally find them incredibly intrusive. I hate divulging personal information under duress to a crowd of strangers, and I hate that this is a normative practice in some corners of white collar world. I am fortunate to no longer be in scenes where pronoun circles are commonly utilized—dropping out of school took care of that—mostly. I did find myself in a surprise pronoun circle somewhat recently. I said my name but didn’t say my pronouns. they aren’t the business of a crowd of 20 year old hippies that I would never willingly spend 5 minutes with, as was the demographic of this pronoun circle. my pronouns are the business of people who give a shit about who I am. and I guess you do if you’ve read this far into this rambling footnote, so here you go: my pronouns are she/her—I’m a garden variety cis woman after all. but what if I weren’t? if I were a cis-woman-looking person but was in the closet of some reason, I personally wouldn’t want to tell a bunch of randos all about that, and I would resent being forced to choose between confessing my gender weirdness to a roomful of people, or betraying myself. I don’t personally know any trans or gender nonconforming person who ‘s like “yes! let’s all say our pronouns!”, or at least I haven’t since I was 18 at a fancy liberal arts college and they/them and she/they pronouns had just burst on the scene in large numbers. I really think that pronoun circles are not actually for trans people. they are for LARPing children at best, and for guilty, neurotic, HR mangers at worst.