We’re already eating shit

…and no, we shouldn’t learn to enjoy it

Those who know me are well aware of my disdain of motivational business speakers. In the past, I have written about how these speakers seek to capitalize on an ‘acceptable’ level of suffering, how modern interpretations of terms like ‘Thought-leaders’ and ‘Influencers’ are shaped by increasing precariety in the labour market, and how entrepreneurship is falsely presented as an escape from the realities of capitalism.

Every once in a while, I come across an example of these things that presents a new facet of exploration. This time, it came in the form of of an article written by a ‘viral blogger’ called ‘Sometimes We Have To Eat Shit For A While Before We Can Rise Up Again’.

The article is built around the story of the writer’s client who wants to quit her aspiration of becoming a life coach. The client has ran into money problems that had pushed her to the brink of homelessness and has her considering stripping. To compound this, the client had the additional “problem” of having a daughter.

Of course, the author thought that the best way to respond to this horrendous situation was to take this opportunity to instruct us. “Here’s how to eat shit for a while so that you can rise up again”.

Parables and false equivalencies

The article then proceeds with a list of generic platitudes and parables. How tough work builds character or ‘grit’. How suffering is temporary; and, in a condescending way, even suggests that the authors time at a call centre is somehow equivalent to his client’s experience because he “ate the worst kind of shit you could possibly eat and … tried to enjoy every moment of it.” The author then pulls the ultimate in moral absolutism and false equivalency by asking us, the readers, to remember there are others that have it worse.

The fact that all of these things have no bearing on the material conditions of the authors client, as in, they really don’t offer a solution beside glorifying suffering, didn’t seem to bother anyone. Neither did anyone seem curious about how we got to a situation where ‘grit’ is seen as more valuable than a sense of security (like not being on the verge of homelessness) or individual perception of morality (like not feeling that you need to strip to feed your child).

As a matter of fact, the article received one positive comment after the other that applauded the author for telling “the brutal truth of life” and how “Life is really about how you can eat the shit now and be prosperous later.”

Accepting dystopia

The most amazing thing about this article and the comments that follow is how self-assured we are in our ‘reality’ when the narrative presented by the article does not, on any level, reflect it.

The idea that eating shit is temporary goes against the reality where more than 50% of the workforce in the UK, Canada, and the US, are dissatisfied with their current work conditions. Individuals don’t just need to contend with the lottery of life, but also the lottery of the workplace where finding a job that matches your skills and aspiration, with a team and manager that provide you with the support to grow is clearly playing against the odds. Not to mention the fact that these conditions are supposed to be met under intense competition.

The author also conveniently dispels the impact that material conditions have in shaping what we view as acceptable, or rather, how society is molded by our material conditions. The writer pleads with his client, and his readers, to never do anything that goes against their moral values. But is this really a choice when someone faces starvation? What if my values include not eating shit? Obviously this becomes contradictory to the belief that eating shit is a necessary part of life. Where then do values and morality really stand in relation to these immediate material needs?

It’s easy to leave our interpretation of things on an individual atomized level, but these individual dynamics do have an aggregate impact. For example, more and more people are choosing to not have children due to financial difficulties or because of a fear that not much of the earth will be left for their children. Economic pressures are also leading to a general degradation in the state of mental health. Interestingly, the author identified his client having a child as a problem. Perhaps if she didn’t have one she could have lived in her car and not had to strip to feed her. If this isn’t a perfect example of the alienating force of capital, I don’t know what is.

So how does one get to the absurd position where the natural response to a near homeless and destitute woman with a daughter is that she should eat more shit and learn how to enjoy it because it’s building ‘grit’? Or that the natural state of life is that of a dystopian shit eating competition?

The trashcan of Ideology

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek opens his movie ‘The perverts guide to ideology’ with this, now infamous, statement:

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

Zizek explains how Ideology is not just a set of externally pre-imposed concepts that obscure our vision of reality, but also “our spontaneous relationship to our social world and how we perceive its meaning”. That means that ideology is not just inherited, it is also created by ourselves.

Zizek’s analysis is instructive to how our shit eating world view is formed. We are born into a world where competition, not collaboration and cooperation, decide how our scarce resources are allocated. It’s under these condition that eating shit becomes a necessity as competition restricts access to resources and ends up inflating the reality of our scarcity.

The reality of the situation though is that this mode of social and material organization is a choice, a choice we are born into. This makes it seem as a natural and objective way of life. It’s only if we accept this mode of organization as fact can we then point to the necessity for shit eating as an objective truth, as reflective of ‘what life is about’.

The fact that this mode of organization is a choice is so obscured to us that we would then rather deny facts — like the ones pointed out in the previous section — in order to maintain our perception of reality. This is the first function of this dominant ideology, a function so powerful that it obfuscates the fact that we are already eating shit.

But this is just the first layer of analysis. The second, and indeed the more important one is how our analysis of ‘reality’, that is our spontaneous relationship to our system of production, leads us to the veneration of eating shit! The power then of ideology is that not only will it obscure the ‘trash can’ but through our “spontaneous relationship to our social world”, to use Zizek’s words, leads us to the conclusion that eating out of the trash can is indeed a good thing.

Making a hard pill easier to swallow

The mix between the ideology of our mode of production and the sense of agency created by the message allows the author and the readers to interpret shit eating as a temporary state, and a necessary, even positive, one at that. However, one cannot undo eating shit and the cost of doing so on an individual, be it psychological or material is irreversible. The traumatic experience the writer’s client is going through is not something to be lauded. It is time, energy, and emotions that cannot be replaced, it is life being stolen and the ‘reward’ of grit comes at the cost of individual dignity and freedom. It is a concession to an ideology and not an individualistic triumph.

Instead of glorifying suffering, or falling into the fallacy that since we are are suffering then it must be natural, we should be actively seeking to insulate ourselves from having to make concessions in the first place. We must dig deeper to understand what our analyses and rationalizations are being informed by and if there are better alternatives to the solutions we come up with. I, for one, am sure that we can come up with something better than learning how to enjoy eating shit.