by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
Critics of Capitalism have demonized that economic system for many reasons. Some are definitely compelling. Only a few of them take into consideration humanity, and I’m not sure if any have taken in the fact that humanity often wills without the slightest comprehension. They call it alienation when a man is subjected to meaningless work, that the man has no agency in his work. Today, many people are proud to partake in bullshit jobs and to sell bullshit because it affords them money, if successful in their trickery. And agency is restored to them via this money.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a little book – On Bullshit – to investigate what bullshit is. He took a typical academic approach to try and define the word bullshit. He had his nose in the right place, but had to suffer because he had a chair in a university which forced him to write the way he did; a lot of bullshit has indeed nuzzled its way into our ‘culture’ and we don’t know what that means, or how it functions.
It is a common opinion that people are fed-up with political rhetoric; politicians, they say, are like people involved in extra-marital affairs and always have a justification. Funnily enough, the people of this opinion tune-out here and tune-in to others who unashamedly spout bullshit. They once again say it is because they are fed-up with lies and, although this other politician may talk a lot of bullshit, at least he’s saying it as it is.
Bullshitters don’t care if what they say is true or false; it’s all one and nothing to them. A great trick of bullshit is that we often presume there is something to analyse, and so bullshit has a headstart on us. They don’t care beyond persuasion.
A friend of mine recently called something to my attention. She said: “yeah, I know everyone says he is a good guy and all that, but if he is making TikTok videos about bullshit pills that “cure anxiety and give you ‘super-energy’”, then is he really?” The guy in question was an old housemate of mine and what he aspired to was to go viral. It never happened. Money, as we noted, generates a lot of bullshit marketing, even the mere idea of money.
Already with the rise of what has been called ‘Bullshit Jobs’ (and I have done a few), the future may be so steeped in unnecessary bullshit that bullshit will become necessary. Perhaps, via the road of bullshit, humanity will finally find peace and place for everyone. Or, Earth can be held as the refuge for bullshit, the greatest experiment in bullshit, like a strange Worldwide Las Vegas. Extra-planetary settlements will have their own codes of serious conduct based on their own rationales; they visit Earth for the needed dose of bullshit.
Bullshit may have grown out of lively play. There is great pleasure in bullshit; at school, for instance, bullshit has the power to subvert the all-important lesson. Like giving a presentation on music saying: “music originated from ancient Egyptians just banging on drums” and “Beethoven lived for a couple hundred years but died at a young age”.
Bullshit, bullshit; the first thing to fly out of Pandora’s Box, it zipped out so quickly that Hesiod didn’t even manage to put it in his poem. It is only more obvious today because everything is more obvious and overt today, communications ever increasing. The mistake, if it is one, is the expectation. As more and more information drivels through the air, more fads erupt out of nowhere, and more cycles of fashions are explained and noticed, opinions rise up to meet it. Even if you have no idea, someone is bound to tell you, and as soon as a group are discussing then it is as though it were of real worth. The learned like to talk about the foundations of our society: the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Scientific Revolution etc. but they hardly say that it is also bullshit, bullshit as part of the backbone. For a genealogy of Bullshit! What might that exhume? You scoff, you wax sanctimonious, but bullshit only strengthens those in pursuit of actual value.
Bullshit is seductive for it has no concern whatsoever; it is not bound to the chair of philosophy at a university. However, when it enters ‘culture’ on a larger scale, then something else happens. It isn’t as much fun; at best it is a pest, at worst it dulls the mind and frustrates the meaning that an individual would expect to find in the larger ‘culture’ – provokes cynicisms of all kinds, or a kind of lethargy, a passive nihilism. I now see why Frankfurt spent so much energy on trying to define bullshit. He even saw it as more pernicious than lying. At least you can read a lie backwards and get some truth.
What is bullshit is that we will not collectively agree on what bullshit is. One day, someone, it needn’t be a man nor a woman, just someone, is strolling down the street. A bus passes with the most non-sensical poster for a money-grab film, or an advert that makes little sense; the person’s face begins to scowl. Someone else, walking towards the now scowling person, smiles as they approach and is returned with a glare; no, not a glare, a nothing, a phlegmatic nothing; they, at least, had that courtesy: not to give that scowl away, and that was all the energy they had. However, the person walking by them now thinks: what a miserable bastard, is it that hard just to smile?
If we didn’t have such a rich history of art and transcendence then we would not be so constantly annoyed by bullshit and our being forced to soak in its stench. This is only partly true; if we had never experienced love, then we would not be so constantly fed up by it.