On Bullshit: Excerpts

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted ... Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked.

In the old days, craftsmen did not cut corners ... These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to features of their work that would ordinarily not be visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences. So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps also say, there was no bullshit.

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth–this indifference to how things really are–that I regard as of the essence of bullshit ... It does seem that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie ... Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception ... Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood ... Bluffing, too, is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit.

This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it needs not be false. The bulshitter is faking things ... A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well.

Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are, but that cannot be anything except bullshit.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk about without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceeds his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic ... Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country's affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are ... Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself ... As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them ... Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

(The above paragraphs are taken verbatim from the book On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. They form a concise summary for us who want to cut the bullshit.)