Analyzing Bullshit: How persistent post-truth narratives are a more insidious threat to truth than lies
Princeton prof’s 20-year-old book On Bullshit is more relevant than ever; foreshadowing Trump, pandemic anti-vaxxers, post-pandemic populism
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Conservative Premier Doug Ford in Ontario received a gift last week in the form of a criminal act as rare as a jackpot.
What the two did with that gift was politicize the hell out of it, illustrating to Canadians an example of the difference between liars and bullshitters.
Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt’s seminal 2005 book On Bullshit took a deep dive into his 1985 essay on the subject. Frankfurt's premise is that truth is a foundation of civilization and lying violates that truth. Bullshit is something else, a deformity of truth and a significant feature of our culture posing a more insidious threat than lies.
Eleven years before Donald Trump, 15 years before the pandemic, 20 years before the politics of today, Frankfurt explored what is arguably the most important problem in the world.
So what is bullshit?
“It consists in a lack of concern about the difference between truth and falsity, the motivation of the bullshitter is not to say things that are true or even to say things that are false, but serving some other purpose,” Frankfurt says in a video interview on Princeton University Press website. “The question if what is said is true or false is irrelevant to the pursuit of that ambition.”
Poilievre and Ford seized on a lightning-strike of a criminal case to set their populist hair on fire to feed their supporters a steaming serving of bullshit. Jeremy McDonald is an Ontario man charged with aggravated assault after stabbing an intruder, Michael Breen, who broke in to McDonald’s apartment carrying a crossbow. Breen had to be taken to hospital by air ambulance suffering from life-threatening injuries.
A highly unusual case where one’s primal instinct may be a feeling of shock at a seeming injustice, overlooking the fact that Canadian law allows for a violent response in self-defence, but only to a point. This nuance is easily overlooked by conservatives always keen to foment fear by complaining about non-existent problems.
“That is why Conservatives are standing here today, based on the principle that your home is your castle,” Poilievre said at a press conference on August 29.
He and other Conservatives jumped up with performative grievances claiming Canada’s self-defence laws are “broken” and homeowners should be able to use “reasonable force” to protect themselves. Canada already has laws that protect people who defend their “castle”with reasonable force, laws brought in by, you guessed it, the Stephen Harper Conservatives in 2012 that Poilievre supported.
What we do not have is U.S.-style castle-doctrine laws allowing property owners to shoot to kill if someone lays so much as a toe on their property.
“Canadian law is focused on reasonableness, not frontier justice,” according to lawyer Michael Spratt in an op-ed in Canadian Lawyer Magazine .
Poilievre knows this. He’s not dumb. He’s not lying. The recipe Poilievre uses is to throw out grains of truth, a sprinkle of exaggerations, a pinch of outright lies, and if he adds a few mistakes, who cares? It’s whatever is needed to get to the end goal: rile up the base, sow distrust in government, spread fear in the populace, while presenting his party as the only solution.
Poilievre isn’t a fool and he isn’t a liar. He’s a bullshitter.
“Bullshit is a more insidious threat to the values that I’m concerned with than liars are,” Frankfurt says.
In an academic paper published first online March 12, 2019 entitled, “Leadership in a post-truth era: A new narrative disorder?” Hamid Foroughi, Yiannis Gabriel, and Marianna Fotaki indirectly touch upon what Poilievre does with the home-invasion story. It is similar to how he uses conversations about trans rights such as when he said “biological males” should be banned from female sports.
Various elites have always shaped public agendas via the mass media by channelling or manipulating or even censoring stories that reach the public.
“Often performed in tacit collusion with powerful think tanks, lobbies or even the elected representatives, such strategies have been deployed to manufacture dissent about issues that are comparatively unimportant in order to prevent real dissent about issues that matter.”
This is precisely what Poilievre does (and other conservatives do) when he gets fired up about crime in one of the least crime-ridden countries in by far the least crime-filled era in human existence. Or when he claims foreign workers are taking jobs from Canadian youth despite the fact that you couldn’t get a Gen Z kid to work at Tim Hortons with a gun to his head. And when he expresses shock and horror that a trans woman has success in a female sporting event, he is focusing on something so exceedingly rare and irrelevant that pointing to it serves no other purpose than fear-mongering, i.e. spreading bullshit.
Why are we tolerant of bullshit?
Lying is nothing new. Neither is bullshitting. There does, however, seem to be a growing propensity for bullshit amplified by social media, information overload, and a relatively new and widespread view in democratic societies that everyone should have an opinion on everything, according to Frankfurt.
“You can't know very much about everything,” he says. “So your opinions are likely to be based upon, bullshit.”
Despite literally decades of digging into bullshit, Frankfurt (who died in 2023), didn’t have a great answer to the question of why we are so tolerant of it.
“Lying strikes us as somehow a violation. We feel that the liar is is injuring us in some way, or at least threatening to injure us.”
The same isn’t usually true about bullshit, which is puzzling. I think it’s because bullshitters sprinkle truths into their lies, spin exaggeration into a web of reality, turn logical fallacies into accepted modes of argument, and we are so befuddled by it all, left shaking our heads unable to fact check constantly, that we shrug and move on.
Another factor could be that an outright liar is often a sociopath or an unlikable person, whereas the bullshit artist is often an intelligent person using creativity and imagination.
At the risk of using hyperbole to describe maybe the most hyperbolic world leader ever, Donald Trump is truly a bullshit artist of the highest order. From his creation of “alternative facts” to questioning Barack Obama’s place of birth to his ability to claim that facts from opponents are opinions or conspiracy theories, he does it all.
The uneducated masses are left not quite knowing what to believe, which is precisely the point.
Again though, bullshitting is not outright lying and it’s not an unskilled form of (mis)communication.
“Such bullshitting can be calculated and carefully crafted – at times aided by advanced and demanding techniques of market research, public opinion polling or psychological testing – but it is delivered in a way that gives the opposite impression,” from the academic paper reference above referencing Frankfurt’s work. “This allows the post-truth leaders or bullshit artists to resist calls for serious and austere discipline in distinguishing between facts and opinion.”
It’s brilliant and all too many of us fall for it all too much of the time.
Citizens would be wise to think about the rise of bullshit and the art form the next time Pierre Poilievre is behind a podium repeating the three-word slogan of the week. We can’t eliminate bullshit but as a community we should learn to recognize it and call it out.
“Liars at least acknowledge that the truth matters. Because of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
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Paul J. Henderson
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