Double Happiness
Page 14
Thinkers down the years have not been sanguine about the human ability to identify the truth, or to tell it.
‘Everybody lies,’ said Mark Twain.
‘No one is happy,’ said Christian Nestell Bovee, ‘without a delusion of some kind.’
‘Humankind,’ said T.S. Eliot, ‘cannot bear very much reality.’
‘Man,’ said Chekhov, ‘is what he believes.’
A belief is an opinion that you cannot demonstrate to be true. Beliefs are worth scrutinizing because that is how we overcome superstition, gain knowledge and make things fairer, more peaceful and easier. But in the end what people believe is their own affair.
Bullshit is an attempt to foist a belief onto others: that these jeans will make you sexy; that when you die you actually don’t; that Jews are vermin; that this football match matters. The methods employed to do that foisting are what I have tried to isolate. All of them depend for their success on the nature of human nature, on the muddled condition of the beast that is uniquely self-aware and capable of thinking but that yet remains a beast.
It has just been announced that there is to be a new ‘face’ for Chanel No. 5, the perfume that famously comprised Marilyn Monroe’s entire nocturnal wardrobe. That ‘face’ is to be Brad Pitt, which is a bit of a surprise. What is less of a surprise is that in exchange for his services, Brad will be paid a six-figure sum (or perhaps it was seven, I can’t recall, and it makes no difference to me, and not much to him, really, since he already has enough to last several lifetimes).
But what is most remarkable is the announcement itself. No one has suggested that Brad Pitt likes Chanel No. 5, or uses it. The company is just paying him to act as though he does. And they are telling us so. Here look, they are saying, we’ve hired a hunk to suck you in. And even though we’ve forked out heaps we’re confident we’ll make more money than we’re spending because even though we’ve told you what we’re doing, you’ll still fall for it.
It’s all a bit discouraging.
Alexander Pope, 4 foot 6 inches tall, a lifelong invalid and a hunchback, had this to say about human nature in 1734:
Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
I first read these lines when I was sixteen years old and I thought them hard to better. I still do.
Celebrity Cat Recipes
(2010)
This book contains neither cats nor recipes, and the only celebrities are on the end of Joe Bennett’s skewer: Tiger Woods, say, or Michael Jackson. In this, his thirteenth column collection, Joe brings Billy Bunter into the twenty-first century, marvels at dead American mascots, anatomizes everything from Santa and cockroaches to earwax and Range Rovers, and spends time with that notorious firm of solicitors Mucus, Sputum and Phlegm.
As provocative, witty and cynical as ever, Joe Bennett continues to live up a hill in Lyttelton.
The World’s Your Lobster
(2009)
Even by his own rich standards, Joe Bennett’s had a remarkable year. New Zealand’s foremost columnist has written the inaugural speech for Barack Obama (‘Yea, verily, I am come unto you’), given the world a crash course in high finance (‘First find your hobo’), watched Christianity play Islam at football, been in court twice (once as Britney Spears), eavesdropped the Pope in Africa, and correctly predicted the skin colour of the Olympics 100-metre champion three weeks before the race was run.
He’s given advice to people who’re thinking of buying a jogger (‘Don’t’), written personal ads (‘Narcissist seeks similar’) and even a poem (‘’Tis the day before Christmas and what could be worse, Than having a columnist break into verse?’), and all in all he’s done his best to shine light on a naughty world with language as fresh as a virgin’s breath.
Joe still lives in Lyttelton. He has a house on the hill and a study with no windows.
Laugh! I Could Have Cried
(2008)
Joe Bennett was born into the middle classes of England in 1957. Life was stable, suburban and sunny. Computers weren’t around to ruin his childhood, nor terror of paedophiles, nor fast food. He had it easy.
Aged twenty-nine, he came to New Zealand for one year to teach. Aged fifty-one, he’s still here. But in 1998 he swapped the classroom for the opinion page of the nation’s newspapers. Since then, Joe Bennett has been Qantas Media Awards Columnist of the Year three times, he’s had eleven collections of his columns published in New Zealand and three worldwide, he’s written three best-selling travel books, he’s become a regular on radio and television, and he has made far too many after-dinner speeches.
In the introduction to his very first collection, Joe Bennett wrote: ‘If anything holds these articles together it is that I like people but not in herds. I distrust all belief, most thought and anything ending in ism. Most opinion is emotion in fancy dress.’
Ten years later, this book presents the very best of a decade’s work, organized by topic. Here are his most memorable thoughts on dogs, games, language, travel, the idiocy of belief, and the swamping trivia that shape our lives despite our best intentions, all of them written with the ferocious comic clarity that has made his name.
Alive and Kicking
(2008)
Alive: aboveground, animate, animated, breathing, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, capable of life, chipper, conscious, endowed with life, enjoying health, enlivened, eupeptic, existent, fine, fit, fit and fine, full of beans, healthful, healthy, in condition, in fine fettle, in fine whack, in good case, in good health, in good shape, in health, in high feather, in mint condition, in shape, in the flesh, in the pink, inspirited, instinct with life, live, living, long-lived, quick, tenacious of life, very much alive, viable, vital, vivified, zoetic.
Kicking: sticking the boot in.
Still alive after eleven years and eleven collections of columns, Joe Bennett sticks the boot into Beckhamania, golf umbrellas, beer ads, Hillary Clinton, all sorts of bureaucrats, and a fatso from the Middle East who flies halfway round the world to shoot our deer. But he writes loving stuff, too, about fish and postcards and Pavarotti and butter and dead dogs.
From his fastness in Lyttelton, New Zealand’s best-loved columnist once again dissects the weird, wide and sometimes less than wonderful world with peerless wit and concision.
Eyes Right (and They’s Wrong)
(2007)
In the last year New Zealand’s favourite columnist has turned fifty, lost a dog, been to China, been motivationally spoken to, built a goatshed, drunk with a Bangkok Buddhist, survived Christmas, eavesdropped Winnie with Condoleezza and … but why not let him tell you about it himself? Eyes Right (and They’s Wrong) is Joe Bennett at his ruthless, funniest best. There’s no more to say, really.
He continues to live in Lyttelton. Just.
Acknowledgment
My inadequate thanks to editor Anna Rogers, for her expertise, patience and wisdom, but above all for giving me courage. The faults of this book are mine alone; without Anna they would have been far more numerous.
About the Author
Joe Bennett was born in Eastbourne, England. After leaving Cambridge University he taught English in several countries, including Canad
a, Spain, France and New Zealand, before quitting the classroom in 1998 to make his living as a writer. Where Underpants Come From was the 2009 Travcom Travel Book of the Year. Joe lives in Lyttelton.
Copyright
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author or of other persons and are not those of the publishers: the publishers have no reasonable cause to believe that the opinions set out in the book are not the genuine opinions of the author or of those other persons.
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in 2012
This edition published in 2012
by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
PO Box 1, Shortland Street, Auckland 1140
Copyright © Joe Bennett 2012
Joe Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Joe, 1957-
Double happiness: how bullshit works / Joe Bennett.
ISBN 978-1-86950-957-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 77549 028 9 (epub)
1. Truthfulness and falsehood. I. Title.
177.3— dc 23
Cover and internal design by Springfield West
* For a catalogue of the atrocities committed or condoned over the centuries by religious authorities of all brands, I strongly recommend Christopher Hitchens’ magisterial polemic God is Not Great.