This is my third time posting this idea. It might be the best work thought I’ve ever had, which is depressing, and if I never better it I will have lived my life in vain. Here it is:

Bullshit – Meaningful, inspiring ideas that seem to promise something, but that something can never be fulfilled through any practical action.

Chickenshit – Practical activity that seems like it ought to serve some meaningful purpose, but in reality is pointless busyness.

Bullshit is meaning without practice. Chickenshit is practice without meaning.

If you can bring together meaning and practice, so your meaning is a positive something that can be realized and your practical actions are a means to a meaningful end… then you are The Shit.

Apologies in advance: This is not a nice post. Chances are you are a chickenshit middle manager (and this might be true if even if you are an “executive”) or you are a bullshit idealist spouting off “visionary” nonsense in whatever realm you’ve identified as “anything goes”, where you can just make shit up. Most likely you are both chickenshit and bullshit, oscillating between the two all day long, depending on context. Think about it: generally, you call a meeting to navel-gaze a spew of bullshit which evaporates in mid-air before it even splatters on the conference room table OR  you convene to hammer out chickenshit minutiae. The notion that meaning must be actualized through concrete practice to amount to anything at all (as opposed to corporate messaging blather) and that practice must be motivated by meaning if it is to be willingly embraced and internalized (as opposed to enforced) — that is unthinkable to your average business flathead, whose sea-level/C-level intellect is busy, busy, busy and fragmented along eight different twittery thoughts at every individually fragmented minute of the day.

We’ve got 140 character attention spans. We invent 140 character-long bullshit slogans; we issue 140 character-long chickenshit tactical decrees. And we want to praise ourselves for our back-of-a-napkin brevity, and for being so action-oriented. Ready, fire, aim.  We are intellectually and operationally spastic, and proud of it.

So, yesterday, which I’m realizing now was a shittily eventful day, a colleague made the mistake of talking to me about how America needs to get back to those things we all agree on. Since it was yesterday, this became an excuse for a tirade.

I began with something like: “Heaven help us if we agree any more than we already have. Because wherever a Republican and Democrat agree on something, it is certain to be wrong in the most horrific possible way.” For instance, international style architecture — utopian uniformity to the leftist, cheap-as-hell to the rightist — What’s not to love? And mandatory two-income households — equality for men and women for the leftists, doubling the supply of laborers and consumers for the rightist — Paradise! Consuming every waking hour of our children’s lives with scheduled regimented educational activity, and filling the remained with easy parentless entertainment, which consists either of synthetic borderline-disorder (Facebook) or synthetic autism (video games) . Now we’ve got free childcare on one hand to compensate for our 24/7 careers, and the feeling that we’re turning education up to 11. More hours = more dollars and more standardized test points = more happiness.

Let’s agree to disagree, please.

And then I went on to point out that what we agree on is only that “Freedom”, “Happiness”, “Prosperity” are words that designate good things, but the concrete reality we imagine when we say these words could not diverge more.

Apart from these huge, hot-air sugar balloons, the only agreement we have is the necessity of innumerable brainless procedures. And we try hard not to discuss the purpose of them, because we all want to harness them to our own deeply divergent ends… etc.

Somehow I managed to rant on this topic without noticing that I was, once again, talking about Bullshit and Chickenshit.

America agrees on Bullshit and Chickenshit, but the substantial shit has become entirely undiscussable, just as it is in 99% of businesses, and 100% of public schools.