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On BS

by rdf Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 02:12:20 PM EST

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt had a minor best seller a couple of years ago with his book "On Bullshit".

Here's a bit from the publisher's blurb:

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.


Now Frankfurt is a philosopher, not a psychologist, so he approaches this subject from an ethical or moral point of view. This is fine for those wanting to express moral outrage, but does nothing useful for those who want to see lies stamped out.

He seems to imply that liars have a concern for the truth, in that they know what it is, but ignore it while BS-ers are indifferent to it. I think that this still implies that the BS-ers know what the truth is. We condemn them when the continue to repeat things which have been shown to be false. We can't believe that someone could continue to maintain a falsehood in the face of evidence unless they were being deceitful.

I think there is something else at work here, a need for self justification for ones actions and beliefs. Notice that when a person of the cloth loses his faith it is a major psychological trauma as had been related many times in works of autobiography. When one has based their entire worldview on a certain set of assumptions then one is left adrift when these foundations are removed.

Right now we are seeing a spate of conservative justifications for failed policies - economic, social and international. People are getting increasingly upset the way these defenses continually twist actual historical events. But if your self image depends upon justifying your actions, then remembering history the way you wish it had been becomes a self-defense mechanism.

A good example, from history so we won't have to deal with current personalities, is that of Harry Truman and the A bomb. When he entered office he knew nothing of the advanced military planning that had been going on. Roosevelt thought he was a lightweight and kept him out of the loop. He got all his education from a group of insiders who had a vested interested in seeing the A bomb program completed and used militarily. So they fed him slanted information. The most outrageous was the claim, which he repeated throughout his later life, that Hiroshima was a "military" target. This was untrue and was further confirmed by later inspections once the US had occupied Japan. Truman was given later intelligence data. In fact the data was so damaging to the US story, that it, and the pictures from the scene, are still mostly classified.

What could Truman do with this new knowledge? Admit he had been misled, or misled himself and admit that he had OK'ed the largest war crime in the history of the world? So Nagasaki and Hiroshima remained military targets in his mind until the end.

Now we see the outgoing administration, and their enablers and cronies, lying about the basis for the two wars, the successes of prior social programs (the New Deal and the Great Society), the current state of the economy and public opinion. Lies or defensive mechanisms?

It makes a difference. You cannot debate a BS-er, they operate in a non-rational universe. The ends always justify the means. Whatever is needed to win your point at the moment trumps everything else. This is not to say that one should let them get away with distorting reality. There are always the impressionable listening on the sidelines who need to be reminded of the truth. But it does alter the way such counter efforts should be undertaken. Going onto a talking head show with a BS-er just gives them an opportunity to repeat their story and implicitly validates their position as being plausible. In addition there are no venues where the host will call out the guest for gross misrepresentation. This would be seen as the host being partisan and removing their credibility as a "neutral" observer.

Unfortunately the only ones willing to call BS on such people are on Comedy Central. A poor commentary on the state of our press.

There is a similar dynamic going on over the "debate" about evolution. Serious biologists will no longer debate creationists because just the act of appearing in the same venue enhances the creationists with their followers and the easily swayed bystanders.

I don't think those who relish face time on TV will listen to me and boycott such venues, but they might consider if they are helping or hurting the cause of truth by doing so at least. The business press and the weekly news magazines represent business interests so can never allow challenges to the capitalist, free-market, ideology of those who pay the bills. One would never expect the Marxists "Daily Worker" to support the bosses, so why any surprise over the distortions of the "Financial Times" or the "Economist". If you knew what they were peddling was false would you work there?

Keep up the good fight, but don't ever expect the BS-ers to yield.

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thats a book thats been on my to read list for quite a while.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 02:29:11 PM EST
Interesting that a philosopher should publish such a book. My experiences of those who have studied phoilosophy is that they are classic BS-ers, truth is irrelevant; philosophy teaches a set of arguing skills that are employed in order to win the day, lawyer-style, without care for the truth of a situation.

keep to the Fen Causeway
by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 02:50:19 PM EST
I think you will find this book of his more to your liking:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7749.html

   

This beautifully written book by one of the world's leading moral philosophers argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love.

Harry Frankfurt writes that it is through caring that we infuse the world with meaning. Caring provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it shapes the framework of aims and interests within which we lead our lives. The most basic and essential question for a person to raise about the conduct of his or her life is not what he or she should care about but what, in fact, he or she cannot help caring about.




Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape
by rdf (robert.feinman@gmail.com) on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 03:37:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]
aaargh...

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 07:26:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Damn I've been sussed ;)

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 08:57:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]
philosophy teaches a set of arguing skills

That sounds British, based on what may loosely be called Oxford Philosophy, that concerns itself with epistemology and the uses of logic. There are other ways of approaching philosophy. French philosophers, for example, are much more likely to concern themselves with the human condition and ethical questions, and to speak or write comprehensibly (and maybe usefully) about them.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Tue Jan 13th, 2009 at 02:33:21 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Do you mean and to speak or than to speak?</snark>

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Jan 13th, 2009 at 02:37:25 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Than could apply to some ;) but I meant and, thinking of Michel Onfray, for example.
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Tue Jan 13th, 2009 at 03:50:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Project mockingbird was one of the old school operations in American "secret" James Bond type operations which has in fact totally backfired.  Instead of rational real world conversations and solutions to real world problems we have retarded and destructive diversionary issues parroted by an extensive "news" media whose only purpose is to placate the proles into a docile stupor.  BS in this place is an institution, the ministry of truth.
They even admit it openly.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7a03e5b6-c541-11dd-b516-000077b07658,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http% 3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F7a03e5b6-c541-11dd-b516-000077b07658.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1& _i_referer=&nclick_check=1
by Lasthorseman on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 08:15:39 PM EST
Bullshit Promises, by Curtis Bridgeman and Karen Sandrik
Abstract:     
A few years ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an essay provocatively entitled, "On Bullshit." Convinced both that our society is laden with bullshit and that we nevertheless do not have a clear idea of what it is, Frankfurt set out to explain what bullshit is and to distinguish it from lying. While the liar seeks to lead his listener to a false belief, the bullshitter is unconcerned with truth altogether. Although the project sounds at first like the essence of philosophical navel-gazing, Frankfurt was trying to make an important point about how this indifference to truth has caused us to lose our way a bit in philosophical and political discourse.

In this project, we draw on Frankfurt's work to point out a disturbing trend in contract law: the use of bullshit promises. Bullshit promises are promises that are in a certain sense insincere even though they are not lying promises, at least not in a sense that would be actionable under the tort of promissory fraud. Promissory fraud is available in cases where a party makes a promise that it has no intention to keep, and it does so in order to deceive the promisee about its intentions. But it is quite common today for parties, especially companies dealing with consumers, to make promises that are not lying promises in that the promisor is not concealing an intention not to perform, but that are nevertheless insincere. In such cases a party uses promissory language but elsewhere reserves the right not to perform, or to change the terms of performance unilaterally as it sees fit. Such promises are not necessarily lying, especially if the promisor does not at the time have a specific plan to change the terms, but they are usually bullshit. By simply leaving its options open a party can help itself to the benefits of promissory language without being subject to the norms associated with promising, in particular some sort of commitment to a particular course of action. The tort of promissory fraud as now applied is not able to address this problem, but we will suggest minor modifications in both contract and tort that should help. At the very least, it is time courts and commentators recognized the phenomenon of bullshit promises and the potential challenges they create.

This certainly applies to ridiculous marketing heights.

by das monde on Mon Jan 12th, 2009 at 09:53:26 PM EST


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