Bullshit

There was a brief flurry of fame recently for a little book called “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt. It is not a bad book, although it is not a very interesting one either. It’s fame stems, I think, from a huge appetite among the intelligent public for someone to talk honestly about bullshit. A legitimate new book would not be likely to have a word like that in the title – but hey!, here is a legitimate book by a serious professional philosopher. That provides the necessary cover of respectability.

But this in itself means it only gets past the censors because of bullshit. The book mainly distinguishes various percentages of truth content in statements, and surveys various earlier authors’ opinions, which are then examined. Perfectly proper academic activity. One thing: there really is no bullshit in this book. That is good. But publishing it now, in a world drowning in bullshit, grasping for something that will float in it, letting air in, and offering it up to the suffocating public, is bullshit.


Again, it would be hard to put the word “bullshit” in the title of a serious new book, what with all the apparatus of title-writers, editors, marketing gurus, focus groups, imprint guardians, subject-policy-definers, etc. But worries about pandering or going down-market are laid to rest by republishing an existing book. Unfortunately, “On bullshit” is a very, very short, rather dated academic treatise, entirely lacking in urgency. There is just not enough substance here. It is convenient that the title word “Bullshit” was there from the first. But the substance does not live up to the appeal grasped and engineered by displaying it on bookshelves. Publishing this now and marketing it: this is bullshit.


We really do need a discussion of the topic, since it is the adopted mode of communication of our government now, and, like all forms of deception, it is dangerous. The danger is not eased by the fact that the deliberate bullshitters are perfectly certain that they are the good guys, and therefore using it only as a necessary manipulative technique to bring about necessary good. They do not believe it is infecting their thinking.


But this is no consolation, in fact it is the greater danger, since all tyrants have thought thus. A hallmark of tyranny is the belief by the powerful that their actions are justified; so justified, in fact, as to be necessary; and therefore to require the overcoming or silencing or crushing of all opposition.


For now, let’s just note that nobody is much bothered by the word “bullshit” anymore, and the publication of an innocent little monograph has usefully rehabilitated this pungent little word. So thank you, Harry G. Frankfurt, since we can now talk about bullshit with the detached and patrician Buckleyesque air which it needs.


Moreover, Prof. Frankfurt’s central assertion is sound. It is this. A liar deliberately and knowingly avoids truth, whereas a bullshitter does not care about truth one way or the other. Immediately the loophole for pure evil emerges. Without even a change of style, well-intentioned oversimplification and persuasion can slip seamlessly into a systematic web of lies and deceit; a whole universal system based on power and delusion instead of honesty.

Think it can’t happen here? Why on earth not?


©ajm 2005
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