It’s possibly, no definitely, the best excuse around.  Stercus accidit.  There’s nothing to argue with.  There’s no blame to levy.  It’s perfect.

Even a curmudgeon can appreciate that stercus accidit.  We may not like it, It’s certainly not helpful, but it is nonetheless a universal truth.  No amount of snarling will make it go away.  We resign ourselves to that immutable fact.

Yet when someone hides behind stercus accidit, they appear to feel that they’re entitled to a free ride.  It’s not their fault.  They’re not to blame.  It just happened.  Wrongo.

Think of it like contract law.  You perform. I perform.  You do what you’re obliged to do and so do I.  One is consideration for the other.  It’s not an issue of moral culpability, but simple, basic quid pro quo.  It doesn’t require me to love you, hate you, think anything about you whatsoever.  Buy a pie from the bakery and you get a pie in exchange for a sum of money.  It’s got nothing to do with how deeply you care about the baker’s welfare.  You just want a pie.

What if the baker, harried that day, his kids bugging him for some shiny new gadget and his significant other complaining that he doesn’t sell enough pies to pay for Jimmy Choos, mistakenly grabs the salt instead of the sugar as he’s making the pie.  It was an honest mistake, hardly unintentional.  They look pretty much alike, and the bins are next to each other.  His assistant, similarly harried by his mother’s demand that he wakes up in time to make it to work on time every day, replaced the bins backward, so that the sugar ended up where the salt goes, and vice versa.  What a mess.

So you get home with pie in hand.  After a lovely dinner with good friends, you pull out the pie, set in a lovely Spode pie plate and walk it into the dining room.  Your guests ooh and aah as you place it on the table.  You slice it. You serve it. Your guests dig in.  They wretch.  It puts a damper on your dinner service.

So you go back to the bakery the next day, explain what happened.  The baker already knows. You’re the 3rd person to tell the story.  He offers a tepid apology (because you didn’t like it, not because he screwed up) and says stercus accidit.  He then walks away.

No, I have no beef with a bakery.  Dr. SJ bakes all the pies in my house, and does a wonderful job of it.  It’s just an example.

The sense of responsibility for for the fulfillment of one’s obligations toward others has been lost in the era of good feelings.  Not completely, as there are some who were not given a balloon as a child for losing, but mostly.  After all, he said he was sorry.  What more do you want?

The problem with having a really great excuse like stercus accidit at the ready is that it’s become a substitute for fulfilling one’s obligations toward others.  Most of us, even curmudgeons, can accept that stercus accidit.  We don’t ascribe moral culpability to an accident, nor demand blood in return.  However, your accident shifts the burden onto someone else, who bears the weight of your mistake.  As much as it may not be your fault, as in a deliberate failure designed to harm another, it’s not the other guy’s fault either.  The difference is that he fulfilled his obligation toward you.  You didn’t. Make good on it.

But this means you will lose something.  Some money.  Some effort.  Some self-esteem or prestige.  Bummer.  How terribly onerous is the burden of responsibility.  Yes, it can be a real drag.  And still, someone must suffer the consequences of failure, even if the cause of failure is stercus accidit.  If it was your stercus that accidit, then it’s your problem to fix.

Falling short, even to the point of total failure, of performing one’s obligations to others has become a pervasive problem in society, as people are working harder to make less money.  Things are cut too close, with no margin for error.  We live on a wing and a prayer, hoping that things work out well and nothing goes wrong.  While we know that things sometimes go wrong, our mind plays funny tricks and allows us to function where we believe we will be the exception.  We are exceptional.  Nothing will go wrong with us.

So when it does, we are unprepared to deal with it.  And strangely, it seems to work out most of the time.  People forgive that screw up.  People are conflict averse, incapable of walking into that bakery, asking to speak with the baker and telling him that his beautiful pie sucked.  Whether it’s because we don’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him the truth, or we would rather take the hit ourselves then put our psyche at risk by having the baker say mean things to us in response, varies.  Either way, people can’t bring themselves to stand up.  It’s scary.

So the baker walks away.  He feels that he’s fulfilled his obligation toward you when he apologized.  He’s actually miffed at you for bothering him; don’t you know the pressure he’s under?  Why is it always about you?  Why isn’t it all about him?

But the biggest problem is that the baker sold 27 pies, and you are 4th, and last, person to say something.  And when he walked away, so did you, fuming at the salty pie but unwilling to push it any further.  After all, you don’t want to act like mean person.  You don’t want the baker to think ill of you. 

No one is happy.  No one is satisfied.  No one was saved.  The contract failed.  When we engage in a problem transaction with someone, their response is to tell us all the difficulties they faced and had to overcome on their part.  They tell us how well-meaning they were, how they really wanted to do right.  They tell us stercus accidit.

Do you ever tell them how hard you had to work to earn the money you used to pay them?  Don’t bother.  They don’t care.  Their obligation ended with stercus accidit as far as they’re concerned.  Now it’s up to you to decide whether that’s good enough for you.  Are you willing to walk away, as if it’s a one-way street?