Why is everyone so full of shit?

“Why is everyone full of shit?” Now there’s a question that’s right up my alley…

I am, by nature, a very naïve fellow. I am credulous, not terribly skeptical. I tend to believe what other people tell me and assume that it’s actually true, because why would someone say something unless they thought it was true? As I have grown older, I have discovered, to my astonishment and chagrin, that people are untrustworthy, not because they’re all playing a cynical game where they try to dupe each other and me, but because they have a tendency to spout bullshit without realizing or caring. Notice those last few words. People do not realize that they’re full of shit, nor do they care. This calls for a closer look.

Humans are social animals that run in groups. If you are a human living among a large group of other humans, you don’t necessarily need to understand how reality works because the other humans can take care of you. You don’t need to run out and kill a cow to get beef, or pick your own apples, or clean cuts to avoid disease, or observe weather patterns to predict when a storm is coming. All you need to do is convince some other humans that you can get money for them, and they’ll pay you money to do a job, and then you can buy your meat and vegetables using that money and get healthcare using the insurance from your job if you don’t take care of yourself and look at your phone, which you bought with money, to find out what the weather will be. The machine of human society is so powerful that you don’t need to be very in touch with reality to stay alive or even to thrive, which means that your survival and success is more dependent on how you interact with other humans than on how well you perceive reality. This was also true before the modern era, of course. For example, Caligula couldn’t have gotten away with being delusional if the rest of Rome had not been obligated to take care of him. But the industry and technology of modern society exaggerates this whole pattern a great deal.

Now, humans are pretty malleable creatures, and they tend to do whatever is most convenient and useful for them, which is one reason they’re so hard to kill, and this is why there are seven billion of them and that number is increasing. Humans are, in a word, adaptable. What makes them adaptable is their giant brains, which work by creating a model (you can think of it like a little hologram in their heads) of reality in their heads. The critical thing to notice here is that this model, this little hologram, only incorporates what is convenient and useful for them, and ignores everything else — at least, for most humans. There are exceptions, such as humans with a strong ethical or religious code that forces them to acknowledge things that aren’t useful or convenient for them, or humans who have this weird personality quirk where they care about truth for truth’s sake, and this is all strongly modulated by the human’s individual level of intelligence. But most humans will ignore anything not immediately useful or convenient for them, and this is where the trouble begins.

Now we can finally get to the answer: people don’t need to be honest or truthful in order to get what they want, and for most of us, if we don’t need to do something in order to get what we want, then we don’t do it. Even worse, since the little hologram in our heads, the model, doesn’t notice that this is going on, so we’re not even aware that we’re full of shit. Most of us can survive and even thrive by believing things that are socially convenient, so we do. And when we talk to other people, we say things that are socially convenient, because that’s all we need to say in order to stay alive and get what we want. And it never occurs to us that what we’re saying and doing is a load of BS, because that would engender a lot of existentially painful navel-gazing and reflection that would not make us any money or get us any approval from other people. We are not even aware that there could be this thing called “reality” outside of our skulls, because that idea is not useful for getting things from other people. Quite the reverse, in fact.

So, people don’t bother saying things that are true, or reflecting on what they say or think or believe or do, not because they’re incapable, but because they don’t care enough to become capable. They don’t care because they don’t need to care. And that’s why people are full of shit.