Some Thoughts on Bullshit...

"On Bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt

I realize that Frankfurt wrote this piece as an essay about 15 years ago, but I am convinced that he, his editor, and Princeton University Press saw that the time was ripe for a very public discussion of his topic. As a sort of follow-up to the NY Times article linked below (via TRUTHOUT) regarding the Bush administration's "fast-and-loose" approach to reality, I wanted to bring to your attention a couple of really salient points about bullshit.

Frankfurt talks about truth and lies, and argues that both honest people and liars have a similar respect for the truth; the honest person innately respects truth for its own sake, and the liar implicitly respects truth because, without the truth, there is no lie.

On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom...He does not limit himself to inserting a certain flasehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well.
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For most people, the fact that a statement is false constitutes in itself a reason, however weak and easily over-ridden, not to make the statement...For the bullshitter it is in itself neither a reason in favor or a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way bullshitting tends to.
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The bullshitter ignores these demands (of factuality and truth) altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. [all emphases mine]

All the "corrected stories," all the "hoard work," all the back-peddling, all the contradictions of the Bush administration captured in a book of less than a hundred pages. I ask you: does this not sound like what we've been living through for the last four years?