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An unlikely little bestseller is now making the rounds.
It is a tiny volume entitled "On Bullshit" (Princeton, 2005), written by Princeton emeritus professor Harry
G. Frankfurt. I have not read it, but I have leafed through a friend's copy -- it's just about the cutest little damned volume
you'll ever see -- and I have heard plenty of the talk about its surprising rise to pop notoriety. The story goes that it
was a scholarly paper of Frankfurt's that attracted such a cult following over the years that he finally adapted it into a
small book. The rest is media history, to the point where last summer even The New Yorker ran a piece [August 22, 2005], a
sort of history-of-bullshit muse, based on Frankfurt's book.
There are serious questions to be knocked around here, such as whether bullshit is defined by the intent to bullshit (is
a truth unintentionally told by an attempted bullshitter still bullshit?) or by the intrinsic meaninglessness of the bullshit
itself. And there is an ongoing debate -- mostly among people who have plenty of real food and possessions -- about whether
or not the very idea of reality is bullshit.
But what most people in the discussion seem to agree on is that bullshit is most dangerous when the bullshitter has utterly
lost his or her regard for the truth.
Sound like any sitting American president you've heard blustering lately?
I don't mean to put all of this on the Bullshitter-In-Chief. He is merely the ripe tip of a very deep pimple. What this
entire bullshit conversation is really about, it seems to me, is that we Americans have found ourselves at a point where the
great mass of our public life is now, well, bullshit: a pus-white expanse of thick, poisonously meaningless goop. And we know
it. And we don't like it. I mean, do you enjoy knowing that every shouted claim banging against your eardrums -- new improved
taste, more attentive doctors, superior pain relief, greater security against terrorists -- is an utter waste of your attention?
Does it give you pleasure to understand that you are bathed in untruth at nearly every turn of the news and commercial dial?
Do you like the feeling of expending so much of your cognitive energy in pointlessness? I'll wager that most Americans do
not, and I'll also wager that the makers of Prozac and Paxil are taking a good chunk of the resulting malaise to the bank.
To be sure, paying attention in America is no fun. But that's just the beginning of our problem. It's not just that it
feels so lousy to move through days and years in which nothing is worth believing. It's also that this kind of life -- our
culture of bullshit -- does real damage to us as human organisms.
Bear with me on this. Here's what I'm talking about.
For starters, a lifelong diet of bullshit breeds selfishness and a contempt for the human project. American suburbia,
for instance, with its interchangeable edge-city wedges of anonymity and its blur of constant forgettability, is basically
an engineered domicile for bullshit: a honeycomb of green compartments within which a smug derision toward collective meaning
can be safely and privately entertained. Active neighborhoods? Forget it. Shared social enterprises? No, thanks. In any way
of life where the shared experience of the many is trusted and honored, suburbia as we know it could never exist.
But the damage done by the bullshit life goes even deeper. Living on bullshit numbs the part of us that chooses to feel
the world, the part of us that remains open in its desire to embrace and believe. That neglected part of us, our quality of
openness, is like an arm that we no longer use. Like Lenin used to predict about the state, it withers away. Go out and stump
door-to-door for a cause? That's for crazies and suckers. March on your town hall or your nation's capitol? Sure, if you're
one of those physically unattractive true-believer misfits who has no life. Meet with other citizens to talk about how the
political system could be better? Yeah, if you can't get a date and you can't afford cable. We have succeeded, it seems, in
stripping public life of its publicness. Today, in the era of My Computer, our public space has become a mall that we walk
through on our way from one private consumer experience to the next -- while talking on our cell phones. It's all about me,
multiplied by about 300 million.
Which brings us back to the Head Me ensconced in the White House. What I find myself wondering, after Iraq and the secret
torture gulags and the NSA spying program, is if George W. Bush is in fact a true bullshitter or if he is a mere liar.
A true bullshitter, under Frankurt's definition, is someone whose intent is neither to evade the truth nor to embrace
it, but instead to simply pursue or promote a line of thinking for its own sake on the premise that there is, in fact, no
truth to be found in the world. To the bullshitter, the dynamic of truth and lies never comes to mind. It is simply a matter
of getting what one wants. In that sense, a pure bullshitter -- or, alternately, a raving crazy, which Bush could conceivably
be -- occupies a self-intoxicating reality without the burden of conscious deceit. A bullshitter's world is one in which the
very idea of truth versus lying seems distant and irrelevant.
But a liar is a different animal entirely. A liar knows truth, and makes it his or her conscious, devious business to
conceal it or to circumvent it. A liar operates in the same arena as a truth-teller, but from the opposite side of the field.
He or she is out to beat the living hell out of truth in order for lies to prevail, often by any deceitful or abusive means
available.
My guess, made without the benefit of private audience or access to psychoanalytic records, is that Bush is a bullshitter
and Dick Cheney is a liar.
Bush is the classic demagogue: a middling, muddled kind of guy who, by luck of lineage in his case, has gotten his little-bully
hands on the world's most powerful machine and is thrilled to euphoria with the resulting joy ride. He looks, talks and acts
like a boy caught up in a perpetual personal fantasy, like an only child in his bedroom acting out a drama with plastic army
men who has, for the time being at least, lost sight of the line between play and reality. He is possessed by the game. True,
one can make a case, as I've said, that Bush's ramblings are more battiness than bullshit. But I'll stick with my contention
that he's a bullshitter. Bush is no nut. He is simply consumed by the needs of his own story.
Cheney, on the other hand, comes across as a good old-fashioned, ice-blooded liar. He assesses. He calculates. He conceals.
He asserts, then denies, with no change of facial expression. He stands before the microphones and brazenly contradicts his
own past statements with that steely "I dare you to go dig up the tape" glare at reporters. He coolly defies subpoenas
from committees and confidently tells a senator in the full chamber to fuck himself. He cocks his head while speaking so that
the whirring of the gears is practically audible as he thinks three lies ahead of each sentence. He is as natural a liar as
has ever taken the public stage.
But, bullshit or lies, what it all comes down to is that to a lot of Americans everything now means less. The world is
fake. Nothing matters. Which means that a good portion of what the human animal was built to do -- to pay attention, to reason,
to feel, to understand -- is inclined to shut down, since seeking meaning and truth has seemingly proven to be a frigging
waste of time. I'd call that serious damage.
There is a scene in Woody Allen's film "Take the Money and Run" in which the Allen character, as a child, reads
in a science book about the existence of entropy and promptly gives up on life. He stops doing his homework, won't obey his
parents, and ceases to care about anything because, no matter what he does, the universe is inevitably grinding down toward
nothingness. When a child psychologist tries to urge him to participate in life despite the fleeting nature of the universe,
the young Allen shrugs indifferently and asks, "What's the point?"
At least the movie was funny.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 1/21/06)
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