Are we living in a bullshit society?

Browse through the business or psychology section of any large bookshop and you’ll find a mulititude of titles on how to be an effective manager, how to improve your life in 293 easy stages, how to make the most of self-help books, how to sound clever by spouting meaningless management jargon, etc. ad nauseam. At a rough guess I’d estimate that 99% of these titles are pure unadulterated bullshit.

There are even extremely patronising books on topics like how to look things up on the internet, many of which end up as bestsellers for fuck’s sake!

As mentioned in a previous entry (shameless self-plug there!) I was once invited to attend a course on how to file paper and fork out £200 for the privilege! What is the world coming to?

We live in an age of bullshit terms like “knowledge management”, “benchmarking” and “human capital” invented by corporate wankers who think they’re being clever.

David Bolchover’s book The Living Dead skilfully riducules this type of crap, contemptuously describing such books as an expensive substitute for Andrex.

I have 2 theories on this:

(a) That the writers actually believe in what they say and want to tell the world how great their ideas are, or

(b) They know it’s bollocks, but also know they can make a lot of money by spouting it – as long as it’s full of modern jargon and stupid meaningless diagrams involving bullet points, arrows and boxes.


In modern times we have also seen the dumbing down of academia. Certain universities are now offering Mickey Mouse degrees like golf management, equine studies or used car salesmanship. These are all noble career pursuits in their own right, but do they really require 3 years of academic study as a substitute for serving a hands-on apprenticeship at a car showroom, stud farm or golf course?

Many graduates will end up as a call centre workers or bank clerks anyway – ie doing jobs they could have done straight after leaving school – so why not cut out the middle man and skip university altogether – think of all the debt you could avoid getting into. Earning money rather than watching daytime TV while nursing a hangover is surely more attractive proposition.

Adam Craig is spot-on in his article “Radically rethinking the purpose and operation of higher education” which examines this trend from an Australian perspective.


We also still have a lot of snobbery in education. A degree in 3-D computer game design from University College (formerly polytechnic) of East Grinstead is probably of more practical and economic use than a degree in ancient Assyrian literature from Boatrace College, Oxbridge, yet the latter institution will have more prestige. A graduate from the latter will potentially have contacts in high places and is likely to end up as merchant banker (deliberate use of rhyming slang there) or stockbroker, doing something which has absolutely nothing to do with their degree subject.


Bolchover’s book exposes the growing trend of employees getting paid to sit at a desk and pretend they’re working when in reality they’re doing sweet FA. This charge has been traditionally levelled at civil servants and other public sector workers. Northern IreIand readers, for example may be familiar with the popular joke that the Department of the Environment (DoE) is an abbreviation for “Dossers only Employed”. However Bolchover, drawing on his own personal experience attests that it’s equally rife in the private sector, particularly in big corporations where individual employees are effectively anonymous – cf Homer Simpson’s non-descript job as some kind of safety officer at Springfield’s nuclear power plant – very clever satire of corporate dishonesty and not as far-fetched as one might think.


Can sitting at a desk staring into a computer screen and taking the odd phone call for the best part of 8 hours a day really be classified as a professional white collar job that requires a university education? Surely one is better off in the open air laying bricks or mixing cement or in a salon styling someone’s hair. At least this is the real world – these employees may not enjoy the prestige or perks of the suited deskbound office worker, but at least they’re not deluding themselves and not indulging in meaningless buzz words like “capacity building” or “knowledge harvesting”

Am I alone in thinking this? Would anyone like to be back me up? Or disagree with me?