House of Eratosthenes

I’ve come to be aware of something: There are three different grades of bullshit, each one distinctly different from the other two, both in substance and in purpose. There could be more than three, but a quality personal awareness of just those three would be useful in detecting it. If you think in simpler terms of “bullshit” and “not bullshit,” it is far easier to get snookered by it.

The background is this: I was having a debate with one of the characters over at Cassy’s place during my guest-blogging stint, which is still ongoing until sometime Sunday…and during the debate, we began to wander into the overarching theme of whether private industry exists because of government, or is it the other way around. People keep questioning me about why I do this with these people. It’s not like an obsessive-compulsive disorder or an addiction; contrary to belief, I really am trying to learn something about what makes them tick.

It’s more complicated than it looks. I’ve been arguing on the innernets for over twenty years now, and I’m still learning things. This last epiphany is more practical and useful than most.

First, another few words about bullshit. About three years ago I bought H. G. Frankfurt’s three thousand word hardcover book (yes, you read that right) On Bullshit, in which the following profound point is made:

What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. 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. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar…A [liar is] responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it…For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

So in the bullshitter, we have this sense of apathy about what the truth really is — which is missing altogether from the liar who must know what the truth is so he can misrepresent it.

There is something insidious about the kind of bullshit we’ve been enduring lately, I notice. It has evolved to become sufficiently sophisticated to bullshit people in the twenty-first century. We need to learn about how that works, so that we can fight this new-grade bullshit when it engulfs us. And engulf us it does; often. Without this edification, you don’t really have a mechanism for deflecting bullshit when it comes to consume you, apart from the purely Victorian-era method of cataloging your acquaintances according to whether they’ve been known to bullshit you or not. That’s a nineteenth-century technique that simply isn’t going to work now.

In March of last year, I noted,

People are presented with a premise A. A is proven by B. Global Warming is proven by “Day After Tomorrow,” or President Bush called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper” because some crappy tabloid says he said it. In cases like this, B is widely acknowledged to be bullshit. Even people who desperately want to believe A, understand B is bullshit.

And yet, they believe in A more fervently with B, than without B.

Stating the reasons why they believe A, they cite B, which they know to be bullshit…this trend lately of reinforcing assumptions that may or may not be true, based on pieces of evidence known to be rancid crap and nothing more — with a straight face no less — is a harbinger of bad times ahead.

Prophetic, no?

So there’s a sultry and subtle seductive quality to the results of this exercise of mixing different grades of bullshit together. This is a sort of epoxy bullshit, if you will. The mixture has a more powerful bond than either of the component agents in isolation. What has merit, is blended together with what lacks it.

You see it in the comments of “Baz,” my sparring partner…

The job stability created by unions enabled mortgages to come into existence. The interstate highway system encouraged car-buying and promoted tourism. The Internet spawned whole segments of the economy. The GI Bill made it possible for many families to have their first college graduate, with all the economic benefits that go with it. Investors demand the safety that government-regulated economies provide. When a government collapses, money is the first thing to flee the borders. Why is there no investment in Mexico? Weak government.

Here are your two grades of bullshit. You have sub-bullshit, which isn’t bullshit at all, it’s absolutely true. Mexico has a weak economy, because Mexico’s government is corrupt. There is a slight skewing of the facts here, sort of a sleight-of-hand. As far as I know, nobody in a position of knowledge is asserting Mexico’s government to be particularly lax. It’s just dirty.

That’s something of a miniscule and insignificant distinction, since Baz’s argument is essentially utopian. Governments should be benevolent, strong and meddling. His vision incorporates all of these things, and I would agree that all three of those attributes would have to be present in any situation that honestly tests his theory.

And then this sub-bullshit is paired up with opti-bullshit, which is the bullshit that is supposed to be carried around and gossipped. Eventually, it will be sold via argumentum ad populum fallacy — everyone believes it, so it must be so. Mexico’s corrupt government is injurious to foreign investments…therefore…an economy rises and falls based on the strength of a country’s government. And here we have our epoxy effect — the mixture of these two layers of bullshit, is much more salable than either one of those layers by itself. It would be silly to contest this by advancing the notion that Mexico’s government is a good one, and this has an intimidating effect on those who would challenge even more vulnerable parts of the argument. Like, for example, that the mortgage owes its existence to labor unions.

This is what we see with global warming. Sub-bullshit, bullshit that exists as bullshit to sell other pieces of bullshit, but by itself isn’t bullshit at all. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere…carbon dioxide is recognized as a greenhouse gas, and in recent years we have a higher concentration of carbon dioxide; human activity contributes to this. All of these things are measurable. From that, we have — human activity is about to push us past a point of no return, and the world will become incapable of supporting life as we know it. That’s silly and absurd. If you can’t bring yourself to dismiss it, you’d certainly have to permit a challenge to it. But the human tendency is to evaluate challenges to this complex argument, as challenges to the single strand of the argument that is most durable.

“Are you denying there is such a thing as global warming?” How many times have you heard that.

But there is a third component to this, the supra-bullshit. This is what I saw Keith Olbermann pumping out tonight as he was giving his softball interview to Paul Krugman. My goodness, the things I learned from that.

– Our high national gas price average is the direct result of “two oilmen in the White House,” and we really should’ve seen it coming.
– All these other countries are years ahead of us; they’re already driving around in cars powered by sugar cane.
– Vice President Cheney is the “Worst Person in the World” because he doesn’t care when people get killed.

As I watched this drivel pour out of the boob tube, it slowly dawned on me what Olbermann’s position is in all this bullshit we’re being sold. He and Paul Krugman bring to the table this third layer of bullshit, which is more important to the process than those other two.

Quoting myself from summer of ’06…

We indulge in “modest” bullshit about why we were late for work; why we aren’t wearing the sweater Grandma gave us for Christmas; that our wives’ asses aren’t fat; being from the Government and being here to help you; that the check is in the mail. But on the subject of dangerous international criminals who would give their very lives to take a few of us down, and on the unrelated subject of good-lookin’ young women in skimpy clothes, logic takes a complete, pure, undiluted, five-star don’t-even-page-me holiday. “Modest” bullshit, on those two subjects, isn’t good enough for us. We wade in neck-deep into triple-A grade, twenty-four-karat, 99+44/100 percent pure platinum bullshit. We use this high-grade quality bullshit, it seems, on no other subject save for those two…and on those two subjects, we haul it out with a reliability and with a punctuality we display nowhere else.

To the list of terrorists and girls in tiny outfits, we should add the subject of our oil men in the White House driving up gas prices.

The job of the supra-bullshit is to be this platinum bullshit; it is there to be doubted. It is there to fail the sale.

It’s exactly like negotiating a salary increase with your boss. You walk into his office wanting a ten percent increase, knowing he wants to give you a four percent increase that will barely keep pace with inflation. The boss is probably expecting to give you a six percent increase anyway, so if you walk in asking ten, six is probably what you’re going to get. So here is what you do: You ask for a twenty-five percent increase you know you’re not going to get. He’ll say no, and demonstrate by his counter-offer just how ludicrous you’re being…seven is as high as he can go. Well hey, you’re not that tough, you could settle for fifteen. And he says aw, shucks, maybe nine. Maybe at this point you bring up another company that has been interested in your talents lately. The negotiations proceed from there.

And that’s all it is, is negotiating.

That’s exactly what the bullshitters are doing with us. You have your sub-bullshit, your opti-bullshit and your supra-bullshit. We get snookered by this blend time and time again, because we have a tendency to say: I know the sub-bullshit is true; I do not agree with the supra-bullshit, but compared to that the opti-bullshit is believable. And so we believe the opti-bullshit, the bullshit calibrated to the optimum degree of self-reproduction. We will repeat the opti-bullshit to people we know. And if anyone dares challenge it, we will treat the challenge as a challenge to the sub-bullshit. Anytime the sub-bullshit is demonstrated to be true, which it will be, we will take that as further proof of the opti-bullshit, and become more convinced of the validity of the opti-bullshit…which we haven’t even tested, or observed anyone else testing.

Through it all, we will think of ourselves as critical, skeptical thinkers simply because we’re showing some ornamental reluctance to agree with the Olbermann brand of supra-bullshit.

“I do not agree that we’re going to lose the oceans in ten years…but…it seems to me there’s definitely global warming going on and that humans are causing it, and if we don’t bring our excesses in check we’ll pass a point of no return.” Good, smart, reasonable, and even critically-thinking people say that every single day. Every single one of them is a convert to the cause, and the poor bastards don’t even know it. I mean, read that aloud as one sentence. Listen to how reasonable it sounds! It certainly comes off sounding responsible. But it isn’t either one. You’re saying humans are about to irreversibly alter the climate of the planet. George Carlin’s monologue makes much more sense.

The moral of the story is what I said at the beginning. You can’t protect yourself from bullshit if you don’t recognize it. You have to know enough to break it down into its component parts, the sub-bullshit, the opti-bullshit and the supra-bullshit.

As a chain, an argument is as strong as its weakest link, not its strongest one. We are not inclined to evaluate complex arguments that way. We tend to treat complex arguments, all complex arguments, even complex arguments to which we’re not necessarily endeared, as sacred cows. We tend to become more hostile to honest challenges to the idea, than to the idea itself. There is no intellectually sound reason for us to behave this way.

Thing I Know #121. One verifiable fact can sell a whole package of unlikely speculation. One appealing opinion can sell a whole package of outright falsehood.

Cross-posted at Cassy’s.

Just had a quick moment at work to glance at this post – bravo.

Well thought out, and the path leads exactly where you want it to go.

My only regret is that the title of the post won’t leap off the page when it becomes a permanent sidebar link, but perhaps you could change that. This post may help to frame all of the other blog posts you’ve written, and most of the other blog posts on the entire web. Maybe you’ll get instalanched bacause of it.
- wch | 08/01/2008 @ 11:21
Your post was timely.

I took a ferry today to one of the outlying islands. Unfortunately I was stuck in front of three loud, ignorant young men who spent the whole trip talking about conspiracy theories, 9-11 and the US government’s involvement in it… crap like that and so on.

I spent the whole time thinking (well, except for those few moments when I thought of telling them how ignorant they were…but nevermind) about which level of bullshit each of their particular points sat on.

It was interesting to be able to analyze it that way.
- pdwalker | 08/02/2008 @ 11:42
[…] recall the H. G. Frankfurt book On Bullshit… What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/25/2012 @ 10:25

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