Enemies of Truth

Kenyon seems to think so, in at least a qualified manner. He identifies two ways in which Trump’s statements fall into the discursive category of bullshit. Firstly, the ploy of making claims with little regard for whether they are true or not. For instance, in Trump’s visit to Canada in 2018, the so-called President of the free world vehemently complained to the then Prime Minster, Justin Trudeau, of a US trade deficit with the host country. Shortly afterwards, he audaciously admitted to fictitiously extemporising the claim, further revealing his fixation with trade deficits as a means of leveraging power regardless of economic reality. Secondly, Kenyon cites the device of spewing forth falsehoods that are so incredulous, the intention could not have been to convince anyone of their merit. A case in point is Trump’s distinctive forms of hyperbolic such as his misuse of percentages to variously claim that his administration will cut prescription drugs by 600 percent, justified by the health secretary Robert J. Kennedy Jr with the smug assertion that ‘President Trump has a different way of calculating… there’s two ways of calculating percentage’. Needless to say, this is something that defies the very rules of mathematics. All objective models (in the sense of ‘scientific’) are forced to bend to rhetorical imperatives.

Both these means of bullshit are political expedients aimed at different audiences through mass communications. The principal objective is to further the spectacle of politics as a primary means of exerting power; a performance the audience is fully aware of and participates in, like a gaudy variety of situationist comedy. Hence, as a derivation of public relations, populous formulations are geared towards cultivating an image of the strongman amid the disorientating chaos of the post-truth political landscape. This has the advantage of galvanising bases of support, particularly left behind social constituencies, against the mainstream media perceived as a major pillar of a wholly discredited liberal establishment. In making sense of the post-truth agenda furthered by the leaders of the new authoritarianism (Vladimir Putin, Javier Milei, and Narendra Modi being in this camp), philosophical inquiries into ‘bullshit’ can, perhaps, aid us in navigating an era upended by mass cynicism and justified disillusionment with Enlightenment ideals. Within a new, rapidly emerging value system, a lack of credibility can be a virtue, as is the refusal to play by the increasingly defunct rules of polite political discourse.

Kenyon’s application of bullshit to political rhetoric builds on the valuable work of its original pioneer. Bullshit was established as an analytic concept and category of rhetoric by the late American moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. No longer simply a colloquial term of abuse, its crudity has been transferred to the domain of respected study; reflective of how the degraded nature of public discourse requires new concepts imbued with, perhaps, the potential for greater explanatory power. The fact that it has gained a conceptual foothold in political analysis is in no small measure down to the collapse of ethical standards and decency in public life (something which has continued to pervade the UK political context across different administrations). Indeed, public ethics has been substituted in some instances with a sort of vulgar realism; hallowed out and at the behest of market values. It is no wonder that analysis of bullshit has since spread across diffuse fields of application, most notably taken up by the anthropologist David Graeber in his dissection of ‘bullshit jobs’.

The anniversary edition of Frankfurt’s treatise ‘On Bullshit’, celebrating its original publication two decades ago, gives us much pause for thought. The context certainly demands it: the unmooring of political reason from agreed upon procedures of establishing truth has accelerated within the last decade; the UK’s decision to leave the EU and Trump’s first presidency era creating political moments in this respect. In truly comprehending the analytic value of bullshit within the sphere of public communications, we are obligated to pose some clarifying questions, which can elucidate the terrain of its conceptual emergence. One such is: if we wish to apply the concept to political rhetoric, how does the term differ from the more conventional notions of propaganda and other tactics of control within public discourse? And another: is it a form of rhetoric that could only have emerged with such force and legitimacy — demarcating a new or postnormal — in the age and within the cultural modes of ‘late capitalism’? That is, within a political ecology subsumed within the diffusion of, and delineated against, consumerist simulacra? And, pivotally, what value does analysing bullshit add to our understanding of prevalent models of post-truth?

In Frankfurt’s estimation, bullshit appears to be a somewhat subversive rhetorical taxonomy. It is a type of surplus or excess of public discourse, constructed and spread most widely by public relations experts, marketing executives, the lucrative advertising industry, and, moreover, through the dark arts of political communications. While these are the concrete horizons for the (re)production of such discourses, Frankfurt’s aim is to initially establish bullshit as a contender for recognition as a discursive analytic category. In other words, as a concept deserving of philosophical treatment.

According to Frankfurt and following his carefully constructed argument, by contrasting the bullshitter with the liar, we get a sense of its conceptual structure or its problematics. The liars, in their effort to mislead others, still operate within the standard disjunction of truth and falsehood, or the classical rules of epistemic discourse (words that claim some knowledge about the world). Within the conceptual architecture of the truth or sets of verifiable facts, they insert an untruth to convince others of their claim. Such forms of rhetoric are still based on the liar having a grasp of the facts of the matter; after all the best liars understand the facts on the ground, and it is this which makes the lie espoused potentially plausible. The liar’s intention is to evade reality; to misrepresent the world and so, we may add, to perpetrate an epistemic injustice (a term coined by the philosopher Miranda Fricker). That is, an attempt at leading others astray from possession of true knowledge. Hence, we may ruminate on the lies that revise history, exacerbating the marginalisation of minoritised communities, and preventing their lived experiences informing public knowledge.

What distinguishes bullshit from lying is its disavowal of the truth/falsehood disjunction. The truth-value of a statement is irrelevant for the bullshitter. Bullshit is an art that presses beyond epistemic models, mirroring the benign ability of art to open up a transcendental or sublime realm beyond the merely empirical. However, the bullshitter’s intention is malign, through the generation of discourses that seek to detach themselves from models of representation and thought. Put differently, the purveyor of bullshit’s intention is to avoid adhering to epistemic rules at all; to disrupt the norms of civic discourse. They achieve this feat through deliberate obfuscation of the truth (as Frankfurt memorably puts it, ‘his focus is panoramic rather than particular’), just short of lying. In Frankfurt’s view, these are the grounds for radical divestment in the procedures of public ethics and morality, which makes the bullshitter a ‘greater enemy of the truth’ than the liar.

To explain why, we should elaborate on this line of argumentation in respect to how bullshit misrepresents. Indeed, there is a double misrepresentation at play. Bullshit misrepresents not simply a state of affairs, undercutting objectivity, but it also attempts to posit a fictitious impression of the self or subject. As a type of impression management, the bullshitters asserts themselves as credible in an excess of communication, in lieu of the truth. They ultimately misrepresent themselves or their mental state — the truth of their beliefs and knowledge — within the miasma of discourse they pour fourth. The unshakable belief in the subject, perhaps an absolute subject, then becomes the replacement for the truth of the external world. It is no onerous task to see how this could lend itself to authoritarian modes of political communication that build up the cultish image of the leader to the detriment of the public realm. One only needs to ponder Trump’s inimitable phraseology, full of repetitions, digressions, and obscene exaggerations, to get a sense of this. Indeed, Stephen M. Walt, Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Business School, characterises Trump’s political posturing as consistent with the ‘predatory hegemon’. For a commitment to mutually beneficial arrangements based on a grasp of reality, is substituted an unpredictability and ‘endlessly shifting set of threats and demands’ designed to shake up his fellow heads of state, softening them up and making them vulnerable to caving into ultimatums. The attention capture that Trump harnesses through his negotiating antics shores up his supreme position as absolute subject in the absence of any clear truths. In a solipsistic manoeuvre, he can lay claim to a triumph over the inconvenience of the external world.

More broadly, it is difficult not to look upon the ubiquity of bullshit without reflecting on the conditions that enable it to flourish. Within the confines of what the cultural theorist Federic Jamison termed ‘late capitalism’, what has become revered, and highly prized, is the ability of atomised individuals to market themselves for employment opportunities. Bullshit has suffused our everyday existence; an outcome of the neoliberalisation of everyday life that becomes hard to avoid. This, after all, is how contemporary industry functions; the power to secure job mobility is effectively bound up with the self-regarding narratives that you are able to communicate about yourself. The hypercompetitive conditions of the labour market – getting worse with the threat of AI starting to make itself felt by eliminating entry level jobs — encourages the type of exaggeration and lack of concern with facts, truth and integrity, that mirrors the acute perversities of the advertising industry.

As a corollary of this phenomenon, Graeber has proposed that we are living at a time replete with ‘bullshit jobs’. While the dynamics of the labour market impels bullshit as a form of career advancement discourse, it has also generated a large swathe of excess or ‘pointless’ jobs, with little or no true social value, utility, or benefit to wider society. He considers these ‘managerial, clerical, sales and service sector roles’ (‘private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants’) as constituting a form of wholly meaningless labour. The rationale behind such occupations is simply to secure corporate or institutional self-preservation and the reproduction of respective interests; to create a cadre of middle managers aligned with senior leadership and whose work is utterly divorced from any greater purpose. This is a similar stratagem of the predatory hegemon, whose bullshit is ultimately a tactic of conserving his authority. Most intriguingly, Graeber opines that these superfluous occupations inflict moral and spiritual damage on the people carrying them out. Echoing Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit as self-indulgent verbiage disinterested in, and, indeed, aimed at diminishing, the truth and public ethics, Graeber argues that bullshit jobs are void and, in fact, corrosive of truth and morality of the socially productive economy.

In a postscript the anniversary edition of On Bullshit, Frankfurt posits cigarette companies and how they advertise their products as a textbook example of how big corporates do not necessarily attempt to spread falsehoods, but are simply not motivated by matters of truth at all. Or else they hold little interest in clearing up obfuscations that they may perpetuate to conceal the truth. For example, the simulacrums that purport to sell you a certain lifestyle and guarantee your success in the world through a chain of consumer goods. While the truth of these links are very questionable and few corporations would explicitly make such claims, the implications are strong enough. There is a certain continuity in the cultural reproduction of consumerism, where simulacrum and images pile on top of and bury concern for truth, and the post-truthism pushed by Trump. The ability of the US president to monetise his office, and the folding of his personal and familial interests into international and trade relations, hints at what some foreign affairs experts term ‘neopatrimonialism’. That is, the rendering of democratic states as extensions of personal authority through use of clientelism and personal ties. Business interests, political power, and egotism combine in a toxic mix that proliferates within the lacuna opened up by the delegitimisation of modern institutions, such as the UN, the mainstream media, and public ethics. This highly worrying crisis situation is redolent of the phrase beloved by political theorist Nancy Fraser, quoting Antonio Gramsci, that ‘the old is dying, but the new is yet to be born’.

In the realm of international affairs, brought about by Trump as well as his proxies in other parts of the world, in industry and in the labour market, we are seeing a hallowing out of public ethics and disinterest in matters of truth. Frankfurt aligns bullshit with a sort of anti-realist doctrine. In other words, as a beastly, discursive protrusion of postmodernist ethics, which denies morality any solid foundations from which to operate.

However, this only seems like a partial and incomplete analysis. Many purported objective constructions have been mercilessly critiqued for being Eurocentric; taking the perspective and interests of the European observer as the basis for their validity. In other words, many critical and decolonial theorists have claimed the particularism of European values have been universalised, aspiring to be global values while excluding the Global South; the operation of the particular masquerading as the universal. The metanarratives posited through the Enlightenment, of a solely European truth, cannot offer any solutions in a world in which the global majority are situated in the Global South. It is therefore debatable whether some of Frankfurt’s methodological suppositions really captures the complexity of the world we inhabit; a world reeling from the reaction against globalisation, the liberal world order, and seeking refuge in reactionary varieties of nationalism and nativism. The modernist aligned analytic frameworks that Frankfurt seems to cling to cannot completely explain the contemporary postnormal world. This will require new frameworks that grapple with the complexity and many-sidedness of truth, combatting post-truth agendas, and the postmodernism vertigo that gives rise to them. Seeking comfort in modernist formulations that led to a dead end in the twentieth century cannot be the answer.

Where, perhaps, bullshit has some utility value is as an agile, cross-disciplinary notion. Unlike propaganda and forms of classical political rhetoric refined in the twentieth century, bullshit appears as a very contemporary discursive phenomenon. Propaganda, after all, is a product generated with most impact by the classical institutions of mass political parties, the clunking machinery of the state, large infrastructures, and so on. Bullshit defines our current trajectory; of a shallow, consumerist ethics at a time when our sense of values have been all but lost. It is most definitively the rejection of the possibility of any sort of collective ethics. It is the negation of the belief in a shared future for humanity; one borne of the very political act of arguing and agreeing on shared values, however (and necessarily) open to modification over time. It is only within an era in which the consumerism of late capitalism has penetrated every sphere of life, that discourses that stand in for the absence of any truth take hold. What is more worrying is the necessity for, and appeal of, bullshit in a world in which post-truth narratives have convinced many that the truth is no longer worth seeking.