While campaigning for the UK general election in December 2019, Boris Johnson told voters: “We have a deal with the EU that is ready to go, oven ready…just put it in the microwave and it’s done.” In the end, the UK did not officially leave the EU until the end of January 2021. The Withdrawal Agreement from the EU was far from ready and took a full year to pass. Was Prime Minister Johnson’s “oven ready” claim just a lie?
Many believe this to be the case, but there are other possibilities. He’s not lying, he’s bullshitting. Lying means claiming something that you believe is false. According to Harry Frankfurt, “The bullshit may not or may not even intend to deceive us either about the facts or about how we think about the facts.” In fact, the bullshit claims may even be true. The essence of bullshit is “indifference to how things actually are.” Bullshit people don’t stand on the side of truth, and like liars, they don’t stand on the side of lies. His eyes are not on the facts at all, and it is this truth about himself that he hides.
Mr. Frankfurt, who died in 2023, considered President Trump to be bullshit in his sense. In 2016, new york times It published a profile of Anthony Senecal, Trump’s longtime butler at Mar-a-Lago. When President Trump told guests that the tiles in his bedroom were made by Walt Disney, his aides rolled their eyes and protested that this wasn’t true. President Trump laughed and replied, “Who cares?” Even if it turns out that Disney manufactured the tiles, President Trump’s indifference to the veracity of his claims about their manufacture was a sure sign that he was making things up.
A version of Frankfurt’s essay, “On Bullshit,” was first published in 1986, when Watergate was still fresh in people’s minds and politicians like Richard Nixon were considered liars. As Frankfurt points out, it is impossible for people to lie unless they think they know the truth. The liar is at least responsive to the truth and has some respect for it. A man who bullshits “does not reject the authority of truth and oppose it, as a liar does.” He pays no attention to it at all. As a result, “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies.”
This seems questionable. What could be more dangerous than a habitual liar, like Hitler or Goebbels, who uses deliberate and monstrous falsehoods (the “big lie”) to promote genocidal policies that result in millions of deaths? Compared to this type of liar, and perhaps liars in general, bullshitters seem relatively harmless. People who bullshit are people you don’t have to take seriously, but people who lie are not. Morally and in other ways, lying seems like a bigger sin than bullshit.
In the afterword, 2025 Anniversary Edition In “On Bullshit,” Frankfurt argues that bullshit is far from harmless. Indifference to truth is “extremely dangerous” because “the conduct of civilized life and the vitality of the institutions essential to it depend so fundamentally on respect for the distinction between truth and falsehood.” All this may be true, but those who believe that lies are a greater enemy of truth than bullshit need not think that bullshit is harmless.
This assumes that there is a clear distinction between lies and bullshit, but it is often unclear whether someone’s false claims are lies or just bullshit. For Frankfurt, the mental state of the person responsible for making a statement is an important factor in determining whether the statement is fabricated. However, in the final paragraph of his essay, he also states that facts about ourselves are not particularly certain, nor are they always easy to know. This affects our ability to know if it’s bullshit.
Consider how Mr Johnson felt when he claimed he could deliver an immediate exit from the EU. Did he fully believe what he was saying? If not, did he at least half believe it? Did he not care at all whether he was accurately portraying reality or was he completely indifferent? Perhaps even Johnson wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do because he wasn’t entirely sure about his mental state. How much someone cares about facts is not always transparent, either to themselves or to others. Self-deception is always on the cards.
Frankfurt came to realize that things were often much less clear-cut than his explanations suggested. Writing in progress time In 2016, he reiterated that a bullsitter is indifferent to the truth or falsity of his claims, and that his goal is not to report the facts, but to shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way. He acknowledged that it is often uncertain whether a person actually cares about the truth of what he or she says, and therefore whether that person is lying or bullshitting.
Suppose it turns out that Mr Johnson genuinely believed his case for a ready-to-use Brexit deal. In that case, even if what he said was a lie, he didn’t lie or bullshit. Rather, the charge of bullshit would have to rely on the observation that although Johnson made the claim without adequate evidence, awareness of this fact did not deter him from making the claim. It was this lack of consideration that made Johnson bullshit – even if it was what he meant.
Therefore, the bullshit’s state of mind is not so much indifference to facts as indifference to one of the norms of assertion: not to make claims for which there is insufficient evidence. However, the problem with this analysis is that many everyday statements can be classified as bullshit, depending on how well-founded our claims are. Who among us is innocent of making claims that we know we don’t have sufficient evidence for?
The way to avoid this difficulty is to move away from the idea that whether something is bullshit depends on the mental state of the person making the bullshit. Philosopher GA Cohen suggested otherwise that bullshit is a type of inexplicable ambiguity, or nonsense. Whether a claim is nonsense depends not on the state of mind of the person making the claim, but on whether it actually makes sense. For Cohen, the works of certain philosophers (he mentioned Hegel and Heidegger) are haphazard not because they do not care about truth, but because of the inexplicable vagueness of their claims.
Frankfurt responded to Cohen in an afterword originally published in 2002. Although he does not deny the existence of bullshit in Cohen’s sense, he considers it far less important and dangerous than bullshit in the sense of mental states. What happens in academia may not have much impact elsewhere, and texts that are truly incomprehensible are unlikely to be widely read. When it comes to politicians’ nonsense, the problem isn’t that what they say is literal nonsense.
Although much of the analysis of bullshit focuses on political bullshit, the view was not that bullshit in the Frankfurt sense is limited to politics. He described advertising and public relations as an area full of bullshit, saying, “One of the most striking features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” If this was true in 1986, it was even more true in 2005, when Frankfurt’s essay was first published in book form.
It may be tempting to blame social media for the proliferation of bullshit, but social media didn’t exist in 1986. According to Frankfurt, “Anytime a situation requires someone to speak without knowing what they are saying, bullshit is inevitable.” In these cases, we try to bluff instead of confessing our ignorance. In this sense, a bullshit person is a charlatan, like an undergrad who hasn’t read the book and tries to bluff his way through a tutorial by pretending to know something he doesn’t.
But this analysis doesn’t apply to the nonsense of advertising and public relations, which Frankfurt describes as “the most uncontroversial classical conceptual paradigm.” The problem with advertisers who don’t mention their products’ poor safety records is not that they don’t know what they’re talking about, but that they’re intentionally hiding relevant facts from consumers when, in fact, they’re not lying. Far from being indifferent to the facts, advertisers care enough to want to hide them without saying anything strictly false.
Since the shock of Brexit and Trump’s first election as president in 2016, progressives have sought new ideas and concepts to explain political developments that remain incomprehensible. Since 2016, it has become something of a cliché to view the major political events of the year as evidence of the power of bullshit and the rise of “post-truth.” Some uses of these concepts are frivolous, but others are used seriously or semi-seriously as tools of political analysis. One of the popular ideas in the year after the Brexit vote was that the success of the Brexit campaign was due to the routine use of bullshit.
However, such claims are highly doubtful. Part of the problem is that we underestimate the strategic aspects of successful political movements. By dismissing figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson as mere bullshit, progressives have avoided seriously accounting for their electoral success and their ability to craft messages that appeal to large numbers of voters. A famous example was the slogan: “We send £350m a week to the EU. Let’s fund the NHS instead.” Was this, in the words of one critic, the ultimate political bullshit? If bullshit is understood as something generated selfishly or carelessly, that’s a different story entirely.
The £350 million figure was misleading in that it was gross rather than net, and closer to £175 million. Dominic Cummings, one of the architects of the successful Brexit campaign, said the purpose of using gross figures in slogans was to focus attention on the issue and provoke debate in the expectation that even pure figures would be considered too high by most voters. Carefully crafted slogans were part of highly effective campaigns, and their success had more to do with their ability to convey a message that resonated with voters than with the strength of their bullshit. If the Brexit slogan was bullshit, it was bullshit. strategic It is questionable whether strategic bullshit is really bullshit, rather than careless bullshit.
Frankfurt is torn between seeing the statement as a hoax and recognizing it as carefully crafted. He points out that the concept of “carefully crafted bullshit” comes with “some kind of internal tension”, but argues that this is not out of the question. Effective political operatives are like advertisers who, with the help of opinion polls, market research, and psychological tests, “strive strenuously to ensure that every word and image they produce is precisely correct.” But this is hard to reconcile with the laxity and sloppiness usually associated with the ordinary idea of shit. Trump’s claim about the tiles at Mar-a-Lago was bogus. do not have The result of unrelenting dedication to achieving a specific result.
To be bullshit in the Frankfurt sense, it must at least appear to be trying to depict reality, but not all bullshit is descriptive bullshit. In a phone conversation in November, Trump gave President Nicolas Maduro an ultimatum: defect or face the consequences. Maduro’s casual reaction and refusal to comply is easy to understand if you think Trump is making this up. Within weeks, when he was taken into U.S. military custody, Trump was found to be extremely serious. Danes and Greenlanders would do well to keep in mind that yesterday’s nonsense can become today’s reality.
A bullshit ultimatum is not meant to be serious, but an ultimatum is not a description of reality and does not describe what is actually going on. This is an attempt to shape reality by threatening others with dire consequences if they do not comply. A bullshit ultimatum is a bluff, and the person delivering it doesn’t care enough about non-compliance to survive the threat of non-compliance. Just as it is difficult to tell when purported explanations of reality are fake, as President Maduro has discovered, it is hard to tell when ultimatums are fake.
Although Frankfurt’s theory is original, it raises more questions than it answers. provides an analysis of be But it is debatable whether bullshit as Frankfurt understands it is garden-variety bullshit, which is one of the hallmarks of our culture. It’s comforting to declare that your political opponents are bullshit, but you can’t help but wonder if this claim itself is bullshit.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
