On a theoretical framework for Bullshit
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. Most people
are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to
avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused
much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In
consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is,
why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves .
[...] Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be
sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other
times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than
ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have
increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is
actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help
to account for the fact that it is currently so great.
The paper is deeply reasoned, and is worth perusing in some detail. In the end, he comes down on our lack of reliable access to an objective reality, viz.,
Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a
common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide
honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no
inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth
about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature.
... As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and
we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them.
Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in
experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the
truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts
about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical
dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial —
notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other
things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
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