First off, I want to defend my use of the term. Most people understand that Christians aren’t supposed to use coarse language. Contrary to what people seem to think, there isn’t a list of disallowed words. We are simply to present ourselves as honorable and pleasant people. There is no shortage of words one could use to describe falsehoods and fables, but the word bullshit seems to have a particular feel that other words don’t have. It is also in very common use so using it does not make a person stand out as a ruffian or a person of low character or breeding. The philosopher Harry Frankfort described it thus, in his essay “On Bullshit”.
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
I think this describes it pretty well. There is another concept we ought to be aware of and that is called Brandolini’s law also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than that needed to produce it. This is a fairly old concept. In 1786 the English writer George Horne wrote:
“Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.”
Studying both sides of a question is quite out of style these days as it will invite all manner of accusations and epithets from proponents of both sides. Truth is not the objective; it is allegiance to a particular line of bullshit. Note that bullshit as defined above may contain some truth. It almost has to because the purveyor is not aiming for truth or falsehood, he simply doesn’t care.
We are approaching a national election day which means for months we have been swimming in a sea of bullshit that gets deeper and deeper by the day. Red, blue, purple, many brands and colors and no brand smells any better than the others. Short objections that seem to be completely immune to the long answers dominate the internet and the airwaves. Some are new for this year, others have been recycled for decades. Let’s look at a few popular examples.
Gas prices are too high and Joe Biden is the cause.
I see this one about a hundred times a day. I can patiently explain how supply and demand work. That the demand crashed during the pandemic and wells and refinery capacity got idled. That these things cost money to bring back on line. That there is no current shortage and the oil producers are raking in huge profits so there is no financial incentive for them to spend money to increase capacity. Seriously, what proper capitalist is going to spend his own money to reduce his profits? Now there is a small influence in that a person is even less likely to spend money to decrease his profits when the current administration’s party has a platform plank to eliminate fossil fuels. Gas prices might be slightly lower under a different administration but not by much. All the talk about oil leases and such will affect future prices, not today’s. Today’s high gas prices are being caused almost entirely by forces out of the President’s control. Proof of this is that they are high all over the world. When I get done, eyes roll and the short objection comes back, but it was cheaper under Trump. The same explanation applies and around and around we go.
Inflation is raging and it’s the Democrat’s fault.
This is bullshit. If you want to know what the real causes of today’s inflation are, I invite you to do a little research. Maybe read 20 pages or so of analysis and commentary by economists from different schools and political persuasions. Most won’t because bullshit is more attractive.
The Democrats are a bunch of Communists and so is that Nazi George Soros who gives them money.
With a few notable exceptions the Democrats are not Socialists or Communists. Mainstream Democrats want the US to look more like the Scandinavian model. Capitalist societies with large social safety nets/welfare states. These countries are successfully implementing this with much larger tax rates than US people are willing to pay, so it’s slow going for the Democrats. Their voters want more services than they are willing to pay for. It’s not workable, but it’s not Socialism.
George Soros is a philanthropist who has spent most of his fortune funding things he calls Open Society Foundations. Their goals are about as far from Communism or Socialism as you can get. Yes, he likes that Scandinavian model of generous government help for people, so he gives money to Democrat politicians. I invite you to read the history of what the Open Society Foundations have done around the world. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/who-we-are/our-history If you still think he is the embodiment of evil, you have subscribed to bullshit without looking at fact.
Now for some bullshit from the other side.
Global warming, renamed climate change, will exterminate us all in a matter of years unless we take drastic action.
We all know this is bullshit. Climate change is happening and there may be some unpleasant effects. No one has a testable model that shows that we can’t adapt to the changes.
It is completely fair and OK to allow biologically male athletes that identify as women to compete in women’s sports.
Even the people saying this know it’s bullshit. The number one player on the women’s tennis tour couldn’t beat the number 200 man. High school males run and swim better times than female Olympians. It’s unfortunate but there is no good answer to this dilemma. A male that is dressing and identifying as a girl is not going to be accepted in men’s sports and has an unfair advantage in women’s sports. There might not be a solution.
These are just a couple of examples. The commentary shows on every network and cable channel are all bullshit, all the time. The shows and such that we watch spew bullshit by the pound. Social media networks amplify it exponentially. It used to be swapped around the water cooler and the bar so one person could spread the bullshit to a dozen or so others. Now that person can put a post on a social media network and spread it to hundreds or thousands of people in a matter of seconds.
Facts and truth are covered up with such a mass of bullshit that it takes real effort to try to find them. A friend told me recently that people just want to know the truth. I wish it were so, but I don’t think the average person does. If people liked facts better than bullshit, they would spend some time looking for them, or at least turn off the bullshit tap into their house. No, the Bible tells us that people want to be told what their “itching ears” want to hear.
People that voted for Donald Trump don’t want to hear that he lost to “Sleepy Joe” Biden. They want to hear bullshit stories of a stolen election.
Republican people don’t want to hear that inflation is the consequence of the pandemic on top of ten years of inflationary monetary policy by the world’s central banks. They want a bullshit story about how the party in power caused it and their party will fix it.
Democrat people don’t want to hear that transgender people don’t have a safe place to engage in athletic competition. They want to hear a bullshit story about how sex is a social construct and that boy’s and girl’s athletic capacities are the same.
It’s not just politics either, although politician’s public utterances are primarily bullshit. I am a Christian. Much of what I read about what Jesus stood for and what the Bible means is the result of thousands of years of scholarship. Some of it, unfortunately, falls into the category of bullshit. Stuff people made up that sounded “Christian’ish” that is no more rooted in the Bible than Grimm’s fairy tales. This is particularly evident when Christian teachings and political goals have the misfortune to intersect. I could elaborate on that for pages but that’s for another blog post.
I am also a recovering alcoholic, and, as such, somewhat of an expert at producing bullshit. I was born with a rather sensitive bullshit detector and the fact that I produced quite a bit of it has calibrated that detector so that it works fairly well. In Christian circles we call this “discernment”.
Part of the recovery process was learning that my philosophy of life was built on bullshit, and I needed to build a new one based on truth.
Both parties and many independents think the country is headed in the wrong direction. It most likely is. Preachers (the real ones anyway) tell us that it’s because we have abandoned the Bible and stopped spreading the Gospel. I think this is true, but it’s worse than that. We have abandoned truth. Not only Biblical Truth, but truth from any source.
Just as my life didn’t work well when grounded in bullshit, neither will the affairs of a country work well when grounded in the same thing. We have two political parties that are competing for the dominance of their particular brand of it. Neither party is particularly interested in truth. Winning is paramount and spreading bullshit seems to be the most effective method for winning elections.
I think most people want America to be a better place to live. We differ on what that looks like and we should be willing and able to have those conversations and hammer out compromises. That’s how it’s supposed to work. We can’t do that if we don’t know the truth and if we do know it, we refuse to admit it. We can blame all the bullshit on politicians, talking heads, and internet trolls but the real problem is us. They are producing what we want to consume.
If we want things to change, it’s time to stop. Turn off the cable news channel and read a newspaper. Better yet read three news sources. One from the left, one from the right, and one from the middle. It sounds strange but I think it really is better to be uninformed than to be misinformed. The uninformed person knows he or she needs more information to form an opinion or make a decision. The misinformed person is quite sure he or she has all the information they need when they do not. Make no mistake. If your only source of news is a single TV or streaming news outlet such as Fox, CNN, MSNBC, or Newsmax, you are misinformed. Even if you watch two or more of them you are only getting a glimpse. They just don’t take the time to really tell a story.
We are not going to have the country we want unless we stop buying, selling, and spreading bullshit. We need to start electing people based on their qualifications, not their line of bull. I am picking on Republicans but I know the Democrats have their own examples. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Jim Jordan, and Tommy Tuberville are not serious people. They have no business in government. Herschel Walker’s candidacy is a bad joke, but he won the primary.
People don’t care. We send unserious people to Washington and we wonder why it’s a mess. Then we cry for term limits so we can add inexperienced to unqualified.
We have to demand better. The most popular news hosts are the ones spouting the most bullshit. How can this not be what we want to hear? I hear people lament the lack of old-time new anchors like Walter Cronkite. The fact is that if he was on the air today, he would get fired in a few weeks because almost no one would watch.
I am not optimistic about America’s political future, but I am hopeful. Maybe the generation coming up will get tired of the battles over competing lies and different versions of unreality. The over the hill gang currently dominating the DC power structure will retire or pass on. Maybe the young people will demand smart decent candidates with competing ideas on building a future America rather than power hungry old mediocrities with tired old lines of bull. For the sake of my friend’s and sibling’s children and grandchildren I hope so.
