Cara said to Nick when she found out he has been seeing another woman, “What do you want? A harem?” Nick responded, “Two women? That’s not much of a harem.” Cara laughed, tickled by the charm that endeared Nick to her. With the laugh, Cara’s tension lifted, and they talked about other things.
Nick had finessed Cara in an elegant, tailor-made way. His involvement with another woman had hurt Cara, and he covered up through humor. He had been with Cara long enough to know that a humorous response would distract her and lift her mood. By her laugh, Cara cooperated with Nick. She enabled him to be a shit.
The potential for being a shit exists wherever two or more people congregate. Persons who succeed at being shits are so good at what they do that recipients do not realize they have been had. Cara, for example, did not know that Nick had hoodwinked and distracted her.
On Being a Shit sheds light on a pervasive human condition. In this book, I develop and test a theory of being a shit. This is the theory.
Being a shit is composed of four parts:
1. an unkind deed,
2. a desire to evade responsibility for the unkind deed,
3. cover-up, and
4. recipient buy-in; that is, the enabling responses of recipients that let enactors off the hook.
Enactors succeed at being shits only if the recipients of their unkind deeds buy into their cover-ups. Without recipient buy-in, enactors fail at being a shit.
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