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.