Abraham Maslow of pyramid fame famously noted that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

I know I’ve found a good book when, having introduced me to an idea, it causes me to see expressions of it everywhere. This is what happened after reading Iain Mcgilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things (about how brain hemispheres have a different way of attending to reality), Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind and Spent (about how sexual selection and costly signalling shaped human behaviour) and Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.

I’ve recently reread Frankfurt’s 2005 book and yes, I can’t get the smell of bullshit out of my cognitive nose. It’s everywhere I look.

The ancients were obsessed with the notion of truth. Philosophy captured that obsession from the start and carried it forward. From Parmenides to Plato, Aristotle and the myriad philosophical schools born in their wake like the Stoics, Epicureans, and even the Sceptics, truth was the philosopher’s stone of epistemology - to know is to know the truth from falsehood, the true from the illusory, from the fallacious, from deception.

Our age contributed to the debate in giving birth to a novel notion which Frankfurt calls the bullshit. And everywhere I look, I can see it in action.

No corner of modern public life is clear of bullshit.

Frankfurt’s central claim is that bullshit is not primarily about falsehood but about indifference to truth. He writes that “it is just this lack of connection to a concern with the truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit”. Unlike a liar, who cares about the truth precisely because they need to conceal or subvert it, the bullshitter simply doesn’t care whether what they say is true or false, only whether it serves their purpose.

A liar acknowledges the authority of truth. To deceive effectively, they must know what’s true, deliberately asserting its opposite.

A liar’s statement is necessarily false, as they’re consciously inverting reality. A bullshitter, on the other hand, has no such constraint. Their statements may happen to be true or false, since accuracy was never part of the calculation.

Most corporate jargon is bullshit-rich or bullshit-adjacent. Most advertisement is bullshit-centric. AI is fundamentally bullshit, as it cannot care about truth. It is indifferent to it. At best, it is parasitic on the truth-factor in its training data.

Soundbites are only concerned with how they sound, and with their own virality, therefore bullshit.

I received an email today from a company’s customer service rep who, having giving me the illusion of interpersonal significance, concluded with the statement, “We’ll get back to you without delay”. “Without delay” is Frankfurtian bullshit, it means and conveys nothing, cannot be assessed or measured, except through the deception that as a customer, I matter. It only serve the sender.

What’s another acronym to an already growing list?

The Return on Time Invested is the benefit you get from the time spent doing a particular activity. Don’t look it up, I made it up. With so many time-hungry temptations vying for our attention, ROTI does to the mind what rotisserie does to the chicken, a slow, patient roast, good for the customer, but not for the chicken.

And it also focuses the mind on a paradox.

The ancients had a far lower life expectancy than us, their risk of death was statistically higher and phenomenologically more salient (it was easier then to imagine how one’s own life could suddenly come to an end, or severe suffering could arise), but they don’t seem to have developed an anxiety about time or intuitions about time economies in the same way we have done.

Carpe diem was certainly not FOMO. The via negativa of so many ancient traditions, both East and West, did not, for some reason, produce the negative, loss-aversive intuitions about time scarcity, temporal trade-offs or lists of 100 places to visit before I die, although the 7 wonders of the world would arguably have been top candidates.

We have more time, less statistic personal risk, and yet we are more anxious about zero-sum time games than ever before.

So many people are making a fortune on our sense of ROTI, and so many lives become miserable because of this mindset.

The Greek historian Plutarch put it with typical proverb-level precision: kings are afraid for their subjects, tyrants are afraid of them. One preposition changing an entire regime type.

Here’s the thing, tyrannos wasn’t originally an insult. It just meant “sole ruler”. Full stop, no moral baggage attached. Probably imported from Lydia in Asia Minor, possibly a loanword with no established Greek pedigree at all. Periander of Corinth, Peisistratus of Athens, Polycrates of Samos, brutal, paranoid, occasionally murderous men who also built aqueducts, patronised poets, and generally made their cities nicer places to be terrified in. Peisistratus rigged elections and also gave Athens some of its finest infrastructure. A complicated legacy and a mixed ledger.

Compare that to actual monarchs behaving and leading atrociously. Nobody called Nero or Caligula a tyrant in the technical sense. They are two emperors who happened to be psychopaths. Tyranny, in the Greek sense, was about the mode of seizing and holding power, not the moral scorecard once you had it. A perfectly legitimate king could be a monster. A tyrant could, maddeningly, be competent, even desirable.

Then the word took flight. Renaissance humanists reached for it to justify killing rulers they disliked. That’s when tyrannicide gets a whole intellectual cottage industry. Enlightenment thinkers weaponised it against absolutism generally.

By the time John Wilkes Booth leaps onto a stage shouting sic semper tyrannis, the word has traveled from Corinth to Ford’s Theatre, dragging two and a half millennia of ambiguity behind it like a very long, very Greek shadow.

What kind of evidence would you need?

As readers of Biblonia know, I have a stubborn interest, to say the least, in etymology and the origins of language. And origins in general. No wonder I spent 4 years writing a PhD, although it was in political and textual history rather than linguistics. Origins tickle me, and it’s a good tickle, more like gentle st…

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Welcome to another week of Biblonia. Let me kick off with 10 hopefully interesting statistics about the state of languages and their speakers today (with an unavoidable focus on Indo-European ones).

1. The hardest languages for English speakers take almost four times longer to learn than the easiest ones.

   According to the US Foreign Ser…

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What do Gothic arches and steak tartare have in common?

Not a lot, except that they both got their name from a pseudo-historical connection.

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It’s often forgotten how richly profuse in ideas and intellectual schools the last third of the first Mediterranean millenium BC was. Following Socrates and Plato, the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicurians, the Pyrrhonist sce…

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Verba volant, scripta manent. Words fly away, but the writing remains.

The Latin proverb suggests that written text has a power which spoken words don't, which is the power of permanence. Spoken words may be forgotten, or misremembered, while what is written stays written, grounded and binding.

In Homer, words fly because they have wings. Or feathers. The Odyssey introduces quotes or dialogue with the words ‘epea pteroenta’, from epos meaning story or song and pteron meaning wing or feather.

Songs soaring for everyone to hear, vibrating through the ancient air, flapping their wings, ruffling their feathers, instruments of sharing, creating culture and a common vocabulary, a common history, a common horizon, the space where everyone breathes, and lives, and soars.

When winged words land on receptive ears, as Homer has it, they nest and carry the story forward. Friendship is an exchange of words in flight, affection lifted up by feathered words.

To write is to force the words down, to bestow on them a kind of weight that whisks away their fleetability. Text doesn’t have wings, or feathers, or any aerodynamic features. Books don’t take off, they stay parked in libraries. But their words may escape, and that’s when they become something else, far away from their homebase, at risk of evaporation but also fertile reproduction. It depends on us readers, sharers, adventurers.

The renowned Greek orator Demosthenes knew what growth mindset was.

With quite a bit of hindsight, Plutarch recounts how the young Demosthenes, in order to cure his speech impediment and weak voice (timeless challenges), practiced oratory with pebbles in his mouth, and recit…

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One common mistake is to mistake a wrong idea for the wrong idea. To disparage the (distant) past for getting things wrong. In fact, to get stuck on ‘they got it all backwards’ and miss the context and the bigger picture.

It can be shown that for every idea that the ancients got wrong, from medicine to astronomy, from psychology to epidemiology, there wa…

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Who doesn’t like a good proverb?

And who has trouble remembering one?

According to the Bank of English corpus, "first come, first served" is the most frequent proverb in its exact citation form, appearing 179 times (5.4 occur…

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There is no doubt that we are indebted to the ancients, Greeks and Romans first of all, as the vehicles through which the wisdom of the Mediterranean, refined over centuries of experimentation, conflict, consolidation and destruction, were transmitted to us moderns by the post-classic world.

But no matter how strong that heritage may be, and it certainly…

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Whether it’s climate, AI, civil war, or the thousand mythologies explored in fiction, television and cinema, such as plagues, aliens, natural disasters or anything in between or beyond, one thing is certain: the apocalyptic mindset is not a bug, but a feature of our post-modernity.

And how can it not be, since Europe had at least 1,000 years to incubate…

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Call it medieval slop, if you will.

Francesco Petrarca, born in 1304, certainly saw something rotten in the intellectual output of his own century, even if he lacked the vocabulary to name it that way.

He hunted down manuscrip…

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Every single time we drive down a British motorway, I subject my wife to the same complaint, and I suspect she now mouths it along with me before I even say it.

The sign says the next services are “6m” away. Six metres. Or, if you prefer my other exasperated reading, six minutes. It is, of course, meant to be miles, but “m” is not the symbol for mile. I…

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The typewriter may have been the most paradoxical invention in history. It promised speed: faster writing, faster correspondence, faster commerce.

Clerks could produce more words per minute than any pen allowed. Yet the same …

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People can be roughly divided into two types: those who wince at a misplaced apostrophe (check out my post here) or a dangling participle, and those who never notice, or care, at all.

Solecism, the grammatical slip that grates on one group and passes invisibly by the other, turns out to be doing more social work than either camp suspects.

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While Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is hitting the water next week, a different Christopher has put another vessel in the wake of Odysseus’ crisscrossing nostos (the Greek for ‘return journey’, the root of our word nostalgia).

The French novelist Christophe Ono-dit-Biot has recently publishe…

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The scale of institutional collapse that followed the disintegration of Roman administrative authority in the western provinces is so easy to state, to the point that it’s become a cliché. It is, however, difficult to fully absorb.

The usual suspects, taxation systems, road maintenance, urban water supply, and the apparatus of Roman law did not decline g…

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I have another confession to make here.

Misplaced apostrophes annoy me, and I suspect I’m hardly alone in this. Which is ironic, or fitting, given that the root verb of the word apostrophe means ‘to turn away from’…

There is something particularly grating about an error that arrives dressed as diligence, but is, as my wife likes to say, all fur coat but …

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