By Grant Merrill, Ph.D. student
Originally published April 6, 2023
A student once confided in me that he doesn’t follow politics because “it’s all bullshit.” Taking his meaning perhaps too literally, I told him that “yes, by definition, political communication is chock full of bullshit.” My student may have just been looking to vent, but I saw this conversation as a teachable moment. Bullshit, I told him, is actually an academic term with a scholarly definition. Sometimes we think of bullshit as a type of lie, but lying and bullshitting are actually quite different, especially in politics. Bullshit is the dissemination of information with rhetorical purpose but with a disregard for truth. While bullshit can be deceptive, it is not the same as lying. A liar knows (or thinks they know) what is true and seeks to cover the truth. A bullshitter, on the other hand, does not know, or even care, if what they say is true. It is common to deride politicians for lying, but a much bigger threat to democracy today is bullshit.
A bullshitter’s goal is to say whatever it takes to serve their own purpose. In a light-hearted example, I might boldly claim that I bake the best biscuits in the state of Alabama. This lofty statement is impossible to verify. It technically could be true, but it almost certainly isn’t. My biscuits are indeed pretty good, but I’ve never submitted them to any baking competitions, nor is my recipe published anywhere. Regardless, many people would likely view the statement as intentional hyperbole. The goal of the statement is not to say with any degree of accuracy that my biscuits are the best; rather, this big biscuit energy presents me as a “serious baker.” In this example, I have no interest in the truth, only an interest in how I am perceived. Likewise, a politician may claim that they would have won reelection in a landslide if not for rampant voter fraud, or that a potentially incriminating phone call that they made was “perfect.” Sounds familiar…Again, such statements may be objectively false, but the bullshitter does not care.
In contemporary usage, bullshit is perhaps most comprehensively delineated by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in his 2005 book On Bullshit. To build his definition of “bullshit,” Frankfurt draws on Max Black’s definition of “humbug,” a close synonym of “bullshit.” Black defines “humbug” as “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes” (Black 143). For Frankfurt, the most salient component of Black’s definition is “short of lying.” While bullshit, humbug, and lying may all involve misrepresentation, they are distinguished by intent. As Frankfurt explains, “a person may be lying even if the statement he makes is true, as long as [they believe] that the statement is false and intends by making it to deceive” (8; emphasis added). Humbug, on the other hand, is “short of lying” in the sense that the speaker does not necessarily intend to falsify what they believe to be true. Thus, an essential feature of lying—and one that distinguishes it from bullshit and humbug—is the intent to deceive.
Bullshit does not comprise the essential traits of lies as stated above. A given utterance need not be false or even intended to be false to be considered bullshit. The essence of bullshit is not the misrepresentation of truth, but rather the misrepresentation of the speaker’s motives. As Frankfurt explains: “The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise” (53-54). To elaborate, we might think of both the liar and the bullshitter as attempting to convince their audiences that they are speaking the truth. But while the liar knows (or thinks they know) the truth, the bullshitter communicates without regard for what the truth actually is. The bullshitter is instead focused on advancing their own agenda. This purpose varies depending on the situation, but it is less about the message and more about the speaker and the audience. Bullshit is a means to an end.
In the wake of the 2016 United States Presidential Election, some scholars of rhetoric viewed Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House as a watershed moment in post-truth politics. In 2017, rhetoric professor Bruce McComiskey published a lengthy essay titled Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition. McComiskey begins his essay by calling out Trump’s use of unethical rhetorical strategies, namely “alt-right fake news, vague social media posts, policy reversals, denials of meaning, attacks on media credibility, name-calling, and so on” (3). McComiskey’s essay includes a chapter that explains bullshit in the rise of what some scholars call the post-truth era. While he quotes heavily from Frankfurt, McComiskey reminds us that Frankfurt’s On Bullshit was published long before the 2016 election. McComiskey argues that bullshit has evolved during that time: “Bullshit succeeds only if it, first, convinces audiences to accept bullshit as if it were truth and, second, manipulates audiences to misunderstand the motivation of the speaker. This is where pre-post-truth bullshit differs from post-truth bullshit. In post-truth bullshit, even the audiences have no concern for facts, realities, or truths, thus relieving speakers from the need to conceal their manipulative intent” (12; emphasis added). McComiskey’s point seems to be that political bullshit has evolved beyond a speaker-centered model. In a “pre-post-truth” world, we thought of bullshit as an extension of the speaker, but in a post-truth world, the audience is complicit in the bullshit due to their own disregard for veracity so long as the message is ideologically favorable.
Unpleasant though it may be, the stank of bullshit will probably linger despite our efforts to neutralize it. It is not enough to merely expose the inaccuracies of bullshit statements. While the use of fact checking resources such as Snopes has become commonplace, as has the practice of live fact checking presidential debates, these practices may be counterproductive. In particular, the far-right has successfully propagated the myth that they are victims of a liberal media that silences conservative voices with its relentless fact checking. Confronting a bullshitter with their inaccuracies doesn’t work because for them, the accuracy of their message was never the point. Bullshit serves to establish and maintain an identity, so they might treat any fact checking attempt as an attack on their character. They make the conversation about them instead of the message. Communication scholars who study deception often focus on improving lie detection accuracy, but this approach is more complicated with bullshit. Because of the name we have given it, bullshit may not be taken seriously; however, it is an epistemological threat that I feel warrants additional research.