On Bullshit is an essay written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt who died in 2023 at the age of 94.
It’s exemplary as an artifact in argumentation and while it necessarily starts out a bit dry and academic it delivers profound wisdom and is well worth the thirty or so minutes it takes to read.
Even the definitional portion towards the beginning was still fun and humorous as the content largely centered around dissecting the key conceptual differences between humbug and bullshit. This essay was published in 2005 and I assure you it’s as fantastic as you would hope for in a 70-something year old philosophical genius dissecting the idea of bullshit in our culture.
The core message is that bullshit is distinct from other acts of misrepresentation in that it does not necessarily pay heed or have respect for the facts of a situation. For one to lie one must have some regard for what actually happened. The subtle danger of bullshit is that purveyors of it need not have any regard for facts at all—they may even be skeptical of the idea that facts are generally available to us i.e. they may hold a position of radical skepticism. This position while comforting is toxic to human flourishing. Taking after Frankfurt, I’ll leave the defense of this position as an exercise to the reader.
Bullshit misrepresents neither the facts of a situation nor the state of mind of the bullshitter with regards to what they actually believe. The objective of bullshit is simply to misrepresent one’s activity and intent. Frankfurt describe this as misrepresenting what “one is up to.”
Frankfurt doesn’t expand on the downstream consequences of tolerating bullshit but I’ll offer one here: because bullshit has no respect for understanding “the fact of the matter” — a culture that comes to tolerate large amounts of bullshit erodes respect for the truth and ceases to uphold such virtues as honesty and integrity. These—often highly political—cultures value “seeming” over “being.” As long as I seem to be doing something of value I am OK in such a culture.
When this seeming-of-value is rewarded more than being-of-value, such a society or a company or an organization begins to rot.