The Constitution of Bullshit
Ratified by no one. Enforced by everyone.
I had been writing for years.
Or so I thought.
The notes began as fragments. An irony here. A contradiction there.
A mandate that made no sense, yet returned from every review untouched, having successfully addressed none of the comments.
Over time, the fragments began to form a pattern.
The incidents I had dismissed as isolated stupidity started recurring in the same sequence.
They became The Natural Laws of Bullshit.
Alongside them, another record quietly emerged.
John wasn’t merely surviving the system.
He kept returning, carrying work others had left unfinished and holding his ground when the system made competence costly.
The record of how an ordinary recruit became the person everyone relied on came to be known as The Natural Laws of Endurance.
When I returned to my archives, I found the same sequence waiting for me.
Different projects. Different leaders. Different organizations. Different decades.
The presentations grew more polished.
The language grew grander.
The promises stretched further.
Yet beneath each new vocabulary, the machinery remained unchanged.
The outcomes felt professionally familiar because the system kept rebuilding the conditions that produced them.
What looked like stupidity had been reviewed, approved, and repeated, complete with governance sign-off.
The chaos had an architecture.
Naturally, it also had governance.
Beneath the policies, governance forums, operating models, leadership principles, transformation programs, and strategic priorities, another set of rules governed what people approved, rewarded, ignored, and repeated.
It could place nonsense on a slide, route it through governance, and return it stamped as rational…with executive sponsorship.
It rewarded polished reports over sound judgment, visible activity over completed work, and public agreement over clear decisions, particularly when everyone agreed nobody understood them.
I had spent years believing I was collecting footnotes.
The pages formed a constitution.
No one had written it.
No one claimed ownership of it.
Everyone was already obeying it.
Johnny’s Footnotes is a satirical instrument, infused with humour, for understanding organisational dysfunction, grounded in The Anatomy of Nonsense, also known as the Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit, finally documented so you no longer have to pretend it isn’t happening.
Meet John’s Colleagues. They are here (& almost everywhere).
Disclaimer: The Footnote is a satire — an observation, not an accusation. If it feels uncomfortably accurate, that’s just coincidence. You’re simply not important enough to be targeted.
Follow the Genesis of the Laws
