Imagine a terrorist plot to turn Americans paranoid by injecting LSD into our water supply. That would be alarming. I contend something very much like that is happening today, except we’re not alarmed because it employs something that we don’t take very seriously: bullshit. But even though we don’t take the bullshit itself seriously, we ought to take its consequences very seriously. Bullshit in a political context is actually much more dangerous than lying.
To see why, it’s important to examine the difference between bullshitting and lying — a distinction the philosopher Harry Frankfurt laid out in his 2009 book On Bullshit.
There are some who insist that lying consists solely of intentionally saying things that are factually wrong. That view is easy to disprove by examining lies of omission. Suppose I told you I had a thousand dollars in my pocket, and those dollars would be yours if you ate a worm. That would be a lie if I neglected to mention they were Liberian dollars, worth about a US penny each. But still, it would be strictly true that I was offering you a thousand dollars (of a sort) to eat a worm.
This illustrates an important truth about lying: lies can be made up entirely of factual statements. But if lying isn’t just making intentionally counter-factual statements, then what is it?
We can define a lie by its intended effect. A lie is an attempt to induce a false belief. The methods we choose to accomplish that don’t matter; using the truth in misleading ways serves very well. I’ll add what I think is an important point: to achieve the liar’s purpose a false belief invariably has to persist for a certain length of time. Maybe not forever, but long enough to get you to eat that worm.
The dictionary definition of “bullshit” is “nonsense”. We tend to view bullshit as an inconsequential lie, because it is nonsensical. But if it were inconsequential, why would bullshit be so prevalent? People bullshit for a reason. We incorrectly assume BS is innocuous because it doesn’t stand up long to critical examination. Nonetheless, I will show that bullshit can do immense harm if it is believed only momentarily, or even not at all.
If the liar’s program is to induce a persistent false belief, what is the bullshitter up to? Frankfurt does not go very far into this, other than to suggest that the bullshitter wants to convey a false (usually self-aggrandizing) impression of himself. And that is certainly the most commonplace and benign kind of bullshit, but it misses other, more sinister applications. Bullshit can be used to convey false impressions of the listener to himself (e.g. flattery), or false impressions of others (defamation).
BS is especially useful in scapegoating. Consider this example from Adolph Hitler, on the occasion of the Reichstag Fire:
In November 1918, the Marxist organizations seized the executive power by means of a Revolution1. The monarchs were dethroned, the authorities of Reich and Länder removed from office, and thus a breach of the Constitution was committed. The success of the revolution in a material sense protected these criminals from the grips of justice. They sought moral justification by asserting that Germany or its government bore the guilt for the outbreak of the War.
Reichstag Fire
Take a moment to consider how absurd these statements are taken altogether. Hitler is standing as Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic, arguing in effect that the Republic was illegitimate because it was the result of a communist plot to supplant the monarchy.
As the November Revolution had taken place only fourteen years earlier, everyone who heard this knew this wasn’t true. And what about that monarchy? Was he proposing to restore it? No, he was proposing to defend this supposedly communist-inspired institution from an allegedly communist attack by supplanting it with an entirely novel form of government which abrogated all prior constitutions, all in the name of a prior constitution.
It’s sheer nonsense, as pure bullshit as has ever been uttered. And yet it is not carelessly crafted; not in the least. It is artfully contrived to be received carelessly. To us as outsiders Hitler’s argument seems insubstantial as mist. You have to imagine yourself with the prejudices and passions of the people this was intended for.
Hitler addresses the Reichstag.
Why did Hitler bring up the dissolution of the monarchy if he wasn’t going to restore it? To stir up feelings of grievance among conservatives he needed support from. Why the transparent lie about the communist origin of the Republic? To arouse the fear of Bolshevism and insecurity over the stability of the Republic, and then yoke those two feelings together in the audience’s mind. This speech was an exercise in Pavlovian conditioning. Fact checking it would have accomplished nothing.
Hitler didn’t need anyone’s belief, he needed their response: feelings of insecurity, anger, and resentment. He intended to use the fear of Bolshevism to erect a mirror image of Stalinist totalitarianism. In fact with the surprising candor with which bullshitters can mix truth with sheer nonsense, Hitler pretty much laid this out in his speech. And they lapped it up. But did they believe it would really happen?
I suspect not, because that’s what a political bullshitter is really after: assent without belief. When you have achieved completely uncritical assent, rationalization will later “justify” that assent after the fact.
What persists from bullshitting are feelings toward people and ideas. Once you control their feelings you can get that all-important uncritical assent. You can even manufacture, as needed, a kind of ramshackle belief that lasts just long enough to do its job — often the fraction of a second it takes you to move on to the next piece of BS. Or better yet your audience will do it for themselves. That’s largely how the Iraq War was sold. Americans concluded Saddam was involved in 9/11 simply because the government acted as if he was.
So that’s the difference between lying and bullshitting: lying attempts to instill persistent false belief, while bullshitting attempts to instill persistent unjustifiable feelings. When you disprove a lie you defeat the liar’s purpose, but fact-checking a bullshitter leaves his purpose untouched. You have to counter the feelings he has aroused.
That is what made President Obama such a potent orator. While he was sometimes derided as cool and overly intellectual by his detractors, he had a rare gift for painting a picture of us as we could be, if only we tried just a little harder. And while this didn’t work on everyone, you can’t prevail in a contest with bullshit on this scale without appealing to emotion as well as reason. There is no better answer to paranoia and xenophobia than conviction and self-confidence.
Speaking of confidence, Frankfurt, near the end of his book, raises another interesting point: people are losing confidence in their ability to discern the truth at all.
One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by a dedication to correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.
If you think about it, this explains a lot about the last election, for example how supporters of a candidate can ecstatically proclaim that he “tells it like it is” even after hearing him directly contradict himself. Factual inconsistency doesn’t register at all in bullshit politics. What people respond to is a consistency of attitude and tone that they mistake for sincerity.
This suggests another way bullshit could be countered: by discrediting the sincerity, intentions, and authority of the bullshitter. Normally this is would be an ad hominem, however we aren’t talking about an argument over facts in which feelings about the speaker are a distraction. We are talking about countering unwarranted, uncritical feelings of trust.
Still, that is a dangerous course, and any who go down that path should adhere to strict standards of truth and fairness lest they become bullshitters themselves. Ultimately bullshit works because people want the feelings it arouses. In a case like this you can’t fight fire with fire, not without your fire being equally bad.
1 The immediate cause of the revolution was mutiny in response to the High Command’s waffling in the face of certain defeat (Supreme Commander Ludendorff may have had a nervous breakdown). While people who later formed the Communist Party did participate in the widespread labor unrest that accompanied that, the Kaiser only abdicated when told by the new Supreme Commander that the military no longer supported the monarchy. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD) declared a republic in response the abdication — they originally had favored preserving a constitutional monarchy. Two months later the newly formed Communists revolted against the SPD government, but were put down by the SPD with Freikorps assistance.
