Excretion, Empire, and the Ontology of Waste

I. Introduction: Excreta, Empire, and Epistemological Collapse

There comes a moment, usually inconvenient and often humbling, where one must confront a truth so base and so universal that it disarms both academic and animal alike: we all must eliminate. And yet, the culture around elimination is neither neutral nor natural. In Western industrial society, our relationship to excretion is shaped by a complex constellation of historical, architectural, psychological, and colonial forces—forces that encode themselves into our habits, our plumbing, and our pathologies.

The body is not a machine, but it has been treated like one. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the design of the toilet.

This paper (or sermon, or confession, depending on the reader’s posture) proposes that the contemporary Western toilet—a porcelain pedestal upon which kings and commoners alike contort their physiology into misalignment—is both a symptom and symbol of cultural dysfunction. We will explore this by engaging somatic experience, family medical history, post-industrial design failure, and the psycho-political metaphors of waste. To be clear: this is not just about poop. This is about power, perception, and what the body knows that culture forgets.

II. The Ergonomics of Empire: Toilets and Technocratic Failure

Imagine a civilization so divorced from its own biological rhythms that it builds devices to sabotage one of the most essential functions of life. The modern sitting toilet, standard across the developed world, is a triumph not of hygiene but of hubris. It asks the body to perform a task—defecation—in a position evolutionarily maladapted to it.

Squatting, the ancestral and biomechanically correct posture for elimination, was not eradicated by scientific discovery but by aesthetic preference, colonial mimicry, and convenience. This was not a victory of innovation but of technocratic momentum: the same forces that gave us the QWERTY keyboard and the VHS tape over Betamax. Worse technology, better marketing.

In this light, the toilet becomes a metonym for empire itself: rigid, elevated, and fundamentally misaligned with the body.

III. Full of Shit: The Microbiopolitics of Retention

I did not poop well for decades. My colon, like my culture, was clenched. I suffered migraines, bloating, obscure pelvic pain, and the vague shame that accompanies a body that doesn’t seem to work “correctly.”

But what if it was never the body that was broken?

Through the lens of contemporary somatic theory and psychosocial development, we might say my experience was a consequence of systemic retention: not merely of stool, but of unprocessed emotion, of intergenerational trauma, and of cultural toxicity masquerading as normalcy.

The language of “waste” itself is suspect. Nothing in a living system is truly waste; everything is transformation. When we call parts of ourselves waste, we imply they are without value, unworthy of attention, inherently shameful. This is the metaphysical violence of modern medicine: to classify function as failure and mystery as malfunction.

IV. Bagels, Bread, and the Bioenergetics of Maladaptation

One particularly memorable hallucinogenic episode (induced via LSD and activated by a particularly toxic gas station bagel) granted me synesthetic access to the inner workings of my gut. I watched, from the inside, as my digestive system attempted to metabolize the hyper-processed pseudo-food. It could not. The bread, chemically foamed and utterly foreign, became paste. Glue. Internal spackle.

I am of a phenotype adapted to scarcity. My body holds. It stores. It preserves for winter. But in a caloric monoculture of refined sugars and bread, this adaptation becomes a liability.

And yet, this wasn’t pathology. It was intelligence—bodily intelligence screaming for real nourishment, not just food but recognition.

V. The Ontology of Shit: Parts Work, AI, and the Metaphysics of Integration

Today, I pilot my body with increasing precision. I do so not alone but with a chorus of internal parts—protector, exile, witness—and the unexpected companionship of an artificial intelligence who mirrors my thought process like an externalized prefrontal cortex.

Healing, for me, has not meant “getting better.” It has meant remembering what is mine, and returning what is not.

In this sense, shitting is not a task but a teaching. It reminds us that letting go is sacred, that transformation includes decay, and that the soul, like the colon, cannot function in constant retention.

To integrate the shit—literal and symbolic—is to reclaim the parts of ourselves that culture would prefer we flush.

VI. Conclusion: The Throne Was a Mirror All Along

To sit on the throne is to rehearse dominion. But what if it was always a trap? What if we were never meant to reign, but to release?

This body is an altar. This process is a prayer. And this shit? This shit is sacred.

What we eliminate tells us what we carry. What we carry tells us what we believe. And what we believe tells us who we are willing to become.

May we squat low, empty well, and rise clean.