There’s
a lot of bullshit going around these days. Politicians are slinging
it. Philosophers are postulating it. Social scientists are
measuring it. This year John Jerrim et al. asked 40,000
15-year-olds from the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland,
Northern Ireland, and Ireland whether they were familiar with 16 mathematical
theorems, three of which were nonexistent. Jerrim used the responses to
the three fake theorems to create a bullshit scale and then used the scale to
compare different groups of respondents—boys vs. girls, high vs. low
socioeconomic status, and home regions. What he found was:
- boys are bigger bullshitters than girls
- children from privileged backgrounds bullshit more than underprivileged children
- North Americans lead the pack. (USA! USA!)
Jerrim also found
that the biggest bullshitters are overconfident about their academic abilities
and problem-solving skills, report higher levels of perseverance in the face of
challenges, and provide socially desirable rather
than truthful responses. In other words, they live comfortably in their
own reality, which is not our reality.
Sound
like anyone you know?
Interesting results,
but what is bullshit, actually? Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher emeritus
from Princeton University, explored this philosophical question in his book, On
Bullshit. In his inquiry, Frankfurt turned to St. Augustine’s On
Lying and the British-American philosopher Max Black’s The Prevalence of
Humbug, but he found what he was looking for in Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951), an Austrian philosopher.
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Harry G. Frankfurt
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Wittgenstein was one
of eight children born into a very wealthy, cultured Viennese family which held
salons and entertained the likes of Johannes Brahms. Wittgenstein had
four brothers, three of whom committed suicide, and he himself was an odd
duck. After publishing his first book on philosophy, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein felt that he had nothing more to say on
the subject and retreated to the Norwegian woods, where he built a small hut
and lived in isolation.
Wittgenstein’s major
contribution to the field lies in the philosophy of language and the concept of
nonsense. As Frankfurt tells the story, Wittgenstein spent a lot of
philosophical energy on calling bullshit. He had zero patience for
metaphor, simile, or other rhetorical flourishes. Frankfurt illustrates
as follows:
A
friend of Wittgenstein’s was recovering from a tonsillectomy. Wittgenstein asked her how she was
feeling. She responded, “I feel just
like a dog that has been run over.”
Wittgenstein replied, “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over
feels like.”
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| Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Hard to argue with
that! Frankfurt proposes that what prompted Wittgenstein’s abrupt retort
was not that he thought his friend was lying, but that her answer was
unconnected to the truth. In Wittgenstein’s view, she couldn’t have lied
because she didn’t know the truth about how a run-over dog feels. Therefore
she wasn’t saying something she knew to be false, which is the essence of a
lie. On the contrary, her statement wasn’t based either on a belief that
it was true or on a belief that it was false. Her statement was, from
Wittgenstein’s perspective, nonsense. Or from Frankfurt's, bullshit:
It
is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.
Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is
thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.
When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and
for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his
statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are
off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.
His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of
the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in
getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he
says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them
up, to suit his purpose… .It is just this lack of connection with the
truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence
of bullshit.
Sound like anyone you
know?
What Jerrim,
Wittgenstein, and Frankfurt tell us about bullshitters is that they are
overconfident, have an unrealistic self-image, speak in hyperbole and nonsense
(as opposed to untruths), and don't care if they describe reality correctly.
Furthermore, what they say has more to do with themselves and what they want to
project than it does with the truth. In other words, for the bullshitter,
it's all about me!
The bullshitter has a
lot in common with the narcissist. In the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth
Edition (DSM-5), the narcissistic personality disorder is defined as
comprising a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a
constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, as indicated by the
presence of at least five of the following nine criteria:
- A grandiose sense of self-importance
- A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
- A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions
- A need for excessive admiration
- A sense of entitlement
- Interpersonal exploitative behavior
- A lack of empathy
- Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her
- A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes
Sound like anyone you
know?
There is also a
variation of narcissism, known as malignant narcissism, which is a hybrid of
narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. According to the
textbook definition, the personality traits include narcissism, paranoia,
sociopathy ― exhibited by constant lying* ― and
sadism. Individuals with this profile
are jealous, petty, thin-skinned, punitive, hateful, cunning, and angry.
They have beliefs that swing from one extreme to the next. They rank
relationships and people based on superficial standards and categories.
They seek to win at all costs, even when engaging in an activity that isn't
about them. They view the world through a binary lens (winner/loser;
smart/dumb; rich/poor; pretty/ugly; black/white) — while believing that they are
superior. Their ego can be so fragile and their self-image so grandiose
that they will lie* and give the impression that
simply because they say it, that makes it real.
(*I would quibble with the words
"lying" and "lie." I think "bullshitting" and "bullshit" are more accurate.)
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| Aldo Brandolini |
Where does all this lead? To a huge mess. The trouble with
bullshitters is that you can't refute what they say, because they aren't
lying. They have no interest in what's
true or what's false. Their interest is
in getting away with whatever they say.
That leaves the rest of us with the Herculean task of mucking out the
Augean stables. Aldo Brandolini, who coined the bullshit asymmetry
principle (also known as Brandolini's law) puts it this way:
The
amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than
to produce it.
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Hercules
Rerouting the Rivers Alpheus and Peneus to Clean the Augean Stables
|
But when a
bullshitter is also a malignant narcissist, then you are beyond a simple
disconnect with the truth, and you have an existential problem. Because the trouble with malignant narcissism
is that it has the potential to destroy work environments, communities, and
nations.
Sound like anyone you
know? BINGO!!!!!
Keep it real!
= No bullshit!
Marilyn
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