On its face, this question seems ridiculous. It is obvious where, physically speaking, poop comes from. It is so obvious that it is hard to imagine anyone who could ask about it asking about it because the fact is so well known. When it comes to metaphorical poop, the answer is less clear. We have already discussed that such poop obviously comes from others, but we can be a good deal more precise than others. We have already argued previously that metaphorical poop, the kind that makes our existence crappy, does not come from ourselves but it is something that comes from that which is inside others which then escapes their restraint and imprisonment and comes to negatively effect other people. What are the circumstances in which other people feel comfortable spreading their poop to the outside world and in making other people deal with it? Let us examine this question further, as it turns out to have some major implications as to why our lives are bad and about what can be done about it.

A lot of the crap that we have to deal with comes from other people in authority. This is something we intuitively recognize early on in life and it has major consequences in how we view authority as a whole. From the very beginnings of life we are subject to the authority of others, and how those people exercise authority has dramatic consequences. Yet we are able to meaningfully influence these consequences only very slightly, making a large part of the poop that comes from others beyond any meaningful influence. We have to deal with the crap of others, and it becomes our own burden in existence, but yet it is the behavior of others that determines what crap and how much of it we have to deal with. What is within our responsibility is how much crap we put on others and how we deal with what others do. Any influence we have over others in terms of the crap that they give us is, lamentably speaking, very limited and indirect, and dependent on the sort of influence we have on them.

This is all the more frustrating because among the larger sources of the crap we have to deal with are matters far larger and far beyond ourselves and our own existence. As an American, my interactions with other people may vary not only based on my own conduct towards these people, but also their own thoughts about their backgrounds and hundreds (or even thousands) of years of human history. An Israeli and Palestinian may become personal friends as a result of having mutually beneficial recognition of the humanity of the other, but this is not going to have a major influence on the Palestinian view of the Nakhba as a whole, nor will it make other people act in a moral fashion as a result of that personal decency. The individual choices we make in many cases are subsumed by larger questions of identity. I found this out much to my frustration once when I visited a friend of mine in Texas during my young adulthood. What I found, to my irritation, was that I could visit Houston and have a wonderful time enjoying the company of my friends, who I had made when both they and I were traveling away from home, but this did not give me any advantage in getting to know other people better when I visited the Texans in their home territory. My friendliness with particular Texans did not in any way increase the willingness of others to view me better as a stranger. It only helped me with the particular friends that I had made. The cliquishness of the rest of the people I was around was crap I had to deal with because it was a part of their own cultural mindset.

Those who believe in the concept of power rape deny that any meaningful consent to an intimate relationship can apply to those of widely disparate positions of power. As we might imagine, wide disparities of power have great and widespread consequences, but power is not as straightforward as we might think. To be sure, people with positions of authority have a great deal of formal power that extends from those offices, but it can be a complicated matter how much power such people wield. An active authority figure who is of sound mind and body is going to exercise a lot of that formal power. Odds are high that this sort of person is going to likely create a lot of poop in the lives of the people he (or she) is in authority over. On the other hand, let us assume that someone has a high office but his brains have turned into much and he is well into senility, not even able to get offstage after a public function without being guided to where he needs to be. Such a person is not going to be treated with the same respect, because those who know about the condition will be taking advantage of the authority of the senile person for their own benefit while denying responsibility for it. And though a senile old person in power is likely to be argumentative and difficult, such people will also have to deal with far more crap than they would be expected to handle based on their position alone. Their personal power, their ability to convert formal authority into the currency of power, is too low for them to leverage the formal authority that they have. In addition, many people who might seem to be pretty powerless when it comes to formal authority may hold great power because they have the charisma to be able to influence others who do hold power, or be able to mobilize groups of people. Such people, no matter what they claim, are not powerless, oppressed, subaltern people, regardless of how they lack formal authority or positions of authority.

As it turns out, power has a lot to do when it comes to the crap that we have to deal with from others. If we look at matters closely, only those people who have some kind of power with us can give us crap. It is not that these people have to hold official power, it is just that the people we allow close to us, or the people we are subject to, are all people who have the power over us to give us burdens and poopiness in our existence. This can happen in many ways. A small toddler may not hold a great deal of power, but we might find a tantrum of theirs to be embarrassing to us, and so they might be able to hold some power over us if we can be shamed by their antics. The fact that they will become ungovernable and will hold us in contempt for being so easy to manipulate does not negate this power, if we are susceptible to it. On the other hand, someone who is sufficiently cold and indifferent to such pressures will not be manipulated so easily. Similarly, while some people may be distressed by the antics of a boss who might like to give his employees jump scares from behind, other people will find themselves less negatively affected by such matters and may be inclined to turn the person in and get them in trouble. In many cases, it is not what we have to deal with on an objective basis, but rather the way that they affect us, that determines whether we let something roll off our back or whether it becomes poopiness in our lives that places a heavy burden on us.

In many ways, this presents to us the exact opposite picture of poopiness as a physical phenomenon. When we examine poop as a physical phenomenon, we look at substances from within our body (or any body) which find a way to escape to the outside world, to become externalities that other people have to deal with. When it comes to the poopiness of our existence, though, that poopiness has to do with the way that the outside world forces itself inside of our perspective so that we deal with it in our internal worlds. It is the externalities of the world forcing themselves into our consciousness that makes it poopy. External circumstances that we do not understand and are not conscious of can certainly damage us, but they will damage us in unconscious ways, ways that do not make us feel bad about it. To be sure, other people may be bothered by it, but we do not recognize what it is about and so we will not find it to be a burden that we resent. What we resent is what forces itself on our consciousness, what we have to be aware of, what we have to respond to, what we feel we have to deal with in order to maintain control over the boundaries of our very selves. Just like physical poop is necessary for our survival by taking waste and moving it outside so that it does not threaten the life that is inside the boundaries of the self, the poopiness of the world is the waste material of the world forcing itself into us, threatening our sense of integrity and control over ourselves. It is this which makes us so violently hostile and so bitterly resentful about the poopiness of the world. It is because we recognize something as a danger to our control over our thoughts and our feelings. Whether physical or immaterial, threats need to be dealt with for us to feel at peace and comfortable in our own skins. To have an identity means having something to defend, and that which seeks to breach our boundaries is that we will view as poopy. Who can blame us for that?