Wank and Wankists

What if you ran into John Lennon and you weren’t feeling patient that day? “All you need is love,” John bleats, and you ask what about food, what about paying for food, and so on. You aren’t being a smartass, you aren’t turning the tables on him (“Need it for what?”). But you’d prefer to have a coherent discussion instead of nodding your head until he goes away. The topic: the world and how it functions. Proposed: one element alone is essential to this functioning, no other is needed. Implied: when people realize as much, their change in behavior will bring about the ideal state of man’s life here on earth. Some large facts lie in the way of this proposal. Food, money, the need to get them—what do we make of these things? Hard to say what’s up until both sides agree. But John’s mouth is a circle now; he’s on his feet, his fist are cocked. “Pig!” he says. “A pig mentality, that’s what’s you—” You think about those stories you hear, about what he did to that DJ in Liverpool.

When not beating people up, John Lennon was a celebrated wankist, a person who practices wank. We all know about lies, and the philosopher Harry Frankfurt told us about bullshit (defined as utterances made without knowing or caring whether they’re true). Now a tech worker in New Zealand has identified a third form of non–truth-aligned speech and given it the name wank. The term derives from the beloved British pastime, but wank isn’t the same as a wank. Iris Meredith, the term’s inventor, explains in a 6600-word essay found at Dead Simple Tech that a wank statement ostensibly describes reality but has a different purpose altogether, that of putting the speaker into some preferred emotional state. A bullshitter wants to produce an effect on others, to come off as somebody who’s caring or informed or whatever. A wankist wants to produce an effect on themselves. Effect produced, no further action is necessary and no further thought is desired.

The listener doesn’t have to believe the wank statement, but they’re asking for trouble if they try interfering with it. Do so and they’re interfering with something intimate, the speaker’s need to feel a certain way. From Meredith’s examples, I’d say the wankist may want to make a good impression on themselves, as with trying to feel caring or enlightened or savvy, or they may want to reassure themselves about outside circumstances, as with swearing that tech’s latest “breakthrough” promises renewed wealth and importance for the industry. Possibly a wankist might have both motives, I suppose. Either way a given wank statement doesn’t describe the speaker; it’s supposed to be about facts shared by all. But it’s wedged deep inside the speaker’s emotional Jenga pile and you’d better not jostle it.

Jostling takes the form of speaking as if the statement’s content isn’t a proven, agreed-upon truth, which it probably isn’t since the motive of wankists is to induce in themselves some feeling they need to have. Ask a question, or a few anyway (I think Meredith plays up the hair-trigger side of the situation, possibly because of experiences that inspired her to write) and the wankist will malfunction in a manner that ends discussion. There’s shouting and reproach, as with John, and there’s the nose swept in the air, as with the novelist Celeste Ng. Her tweets are now locked away, but I remember her asserting that Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal meant it was legal to hunt black people in America. Reply guys laid into her, saying that Rittenhouse had shot no blacks and was acquitted because the people he fired at, all of them white, acted against him first. “I think you’re missing the larger issue,” she answered (in my memory and as reported by Google AI).

Note that rolling your eyes over this piece of brilliance doesn’t mean believing that America’s racially just. But if Rittenhouse didn’t shoot at anyone who was black, his experience tells little about how the murder of black people plays in the courts. A white man might step out with a dangerous firearm and the intention of shooting looters. Most of the people looting might be black. He might especially want to shoot them because they’re black. But if he doesn’t shoot any, his case shows only that America has too many guns and at least one fucking idiot. As you read the preceding, you witness an aftereffect of the wank survivor’s experience. I mean this grim wading from point to point, the clenched jaw and the step-by-step rebuttal. A couple of wank statements from a popular novelist and I have to lay out what a given verdict can logically indicate about race, justice, etc.

“If you’ve ever been exposed to wank in any real concentration, you know exactly how hard and unpleasant it is to fight through,” writes Meredith. “You’re told, to your face, things that are simply not true, impractical or actually evil and asked to accept it on trust.” So true. Her work is flawed, I admit. I think her essay is really a definition with many extra paragraphs attached, and I’m not sure the right is as free from wank as she believes (she figures lies and bullshit predominate over there, with steady beliefs among rightists allegedly being too scarce to sustain wanking). I’m not sure that the progressive center is the wankiest sector (she’s a leftist and boils down centrist political thinking to “coming together” and “the truth being in the middle,” a wankish procedure on her part). And I’m not sure I have a clear idea of how wank menaces society at large, as opposed to plaguing the life of one tech worker in New Zealand. But wank is real and we know its name because of this pioneer, a woman who survived one “I truly believe” too many.