Lies and bullshit

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt once drew attention to a useful distinction between lies and bullshit. When people tell lies, they intentionally state something they know not to be true. One of history’s most famous liars was Baron Münchhausen, the eighteenth-century nobleman who told tall tales about his adventures in the German military, including riding on cannon balls and visiting the moon. American presidents seem somewhat prone to telling lies, as when Richard Nixon lied about his involvement in the Watergate scandal, and Bill Clinton denied under oath his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. You might also wonder whether the young George Washington was entirely truthful when he said to his father, ‘I cannot tell a lie’, after admitting to cutting down a tree. People might even lie about lying.

Bullshit, in contrast, refers to statements made without regard to the facts. Bullshitters don’t care whether their utterances are true or false—they just make stuff up. We are continually bombarded with bullshit, from people trying to sell us things, from the media, from everyday gossip. Most advertising and television commercials are bullshit. Many popular ideas, such as homeopathy, Brain Gym, telepathy, much of alternative medicine and perhaps even a fair chunk of orthodox medicine, are largely bullshit.

People are much more censorious when it comes to lying than when it comes to bullshit. The ninth commandment exhorts us not to lie, and children are routinely punished if caught telling lies. George Washington may have calculated that the punishment for cutting down the tree was less than that of having been found to lie. The human species is especially well-equipped to tell lies. We are uniquely blessed with the faculty of language, which provides voluntary control over what we say. In most other species, in contrast, communication is involuntary and fixed. This may have been important for survival, because it means that the signal can be trusted. Crying ‘wolf’ is effective only if it infallibly signals that a wolf is indeed lurking. There are some exceptions, such as birds that mimic other birds, but human language is more or less unique in that it enables us to weave tangled webs of deceit. This is perhaps why human societies have developed strong sanctions against lying. Without such sanctions, the liar probably always stands to gain, but at the expense of the truthful, and ultimately at the expense of society itself. So society fights back against the liar.

Strangely, though, we seem extraordinarily tolerant of bullshit, to the point that entrepreneurship and promotional exercises are generally admired. Even Fair Go, a New Zealand television show normally dedicated to ferreting out liars and cheats, runs an annual competition for the best television commercials, which are judged not for their truth content, but for their entertainment value. It’s bullshit that seems to count. Our tolerance for bullshit also means that unscrupulous manipulators can hide their lies under the cover of bullshit. In his poem ‘Beware Madam!’ Robert Graves warns of the bullshitting lover:

Beware, madam, of the witty devil,

The arch intriguer who walks disguised

In a poet’s cloak, his gay tongue oozing evil.

Sometimes, though, we don’t really want to know the truth, and prefer the cloak—or perhaps I should say cloaca—of bullshit. We readily accept claims of cures for cancer, potions to prevent ageing, food fads to make us healthier or promises of a paradisiacal afterlife. And of course these things sometimes do have the desired outcome, due to the beneficial effects of belief itself. This is known as the placebo effect, derived from experiments in which neutral substances were prescribed for comparison with an experimental drug. In many cases, saline solution was discovered to be as effective as the drug under scrutiny, or at least more effective than simply doing nothing.

You might think, then, that a placebo shop might be a useful way to make an easy fortune, but it would only work, of course, if the products were not named as placebos. In fact, a great many commercial outlets for placebos, in the guise of alternative medicines or health foods, are already in existence, gumming up the advertising pages and the internet, if not our digestive systems. And they may in fact benefit the gullible, but it is the healthy profit from sales that is the main benefit.

Unfortunately, bullshit is everywhere. Robert Conquest, in his poem ‘A Grouchy Goodnight to the Academic Year’, gives this warning:

Then alas for the next generation,

For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.

Where psychology meets education

A terrible bullshit is born.

And remember that the book you have just finished reading was written by a psychologist with a long involvement in education.