Unkind Deeds and Cover-Ups in Everyday Life

On Being a Shit: Unkind Deeds and Cover-ups in Everyday Life, is a book inspired by Harry Frankfurt’s bestseller, OnBullshit. The title sounds crude, I know, but please read on.

Unkind Deeds and Cover-Ups shows the various ways that people evade responsibility for their unkind behaviors and, whenever possible, blame others. I use humor and tongue-in-cheek scholarly language to make adifficult topic easier to take. I’ve thought a great deal about my use of the vernacular and decided to keep it since this is how people think about persons who dump on them. In some ways, the book is a spoof of academic writing not only for the language but I use a standard approach to theory building to construct a tested and refined theory of being a shit.

I wrote this book for persons who encounter others who enact being shits, a broad audience indeed. For more than 25 years, I did research on serious violence, such as rape, child molestation, and murder. In their own words, perpetrators described multiple and ingenious ways they evaded responsibility for their behaviors and, whenever possible, blamed others for their own terrible deeds.

As I became familiar with their tactics, I began to notice variations of them operating in everyday life among persons who had committed relatively minor unkind deeds and sought to cover them up through evasion, obfuscation, and blame. Eventually, I termed these everyday acts being a shit and decided to write a book about them. I wanted to let others know what I have learned from years of research and in so doing to help them avoid being ensnared in the machinations that are now so familiar to me.

With this level of sensitization, I freely admit I have been a recipient of unkind deeds and cover-ups and have attained expertise in enabling these behaviors. I am much better at being a recipient than an enactor, although I have some talent in that regard as well.