What do the following people have in common: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, George Santos, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Dr. Oz, Yuval Noah Harari, Barack Obama, Sam Harris, Elizabeth Holmes, Steven Pinker, and Jordan Peterson? According to Nathan J. Robinson writing in Current Affairs, they are all bullshitters.

So what constitutes a bullshitter?

The clearest philosophical exposition of a Theory of Bullshit was put forth by Harry Frankfurt in his short classic On Bullshit. Frankfurt argued that bullshit was different than lying, and in some ways worse. A liar knows what they are saying is false. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it is true or false. The liar has not abandoned all understanding of truth, but they are deliberately trying to manipulate people into thinking things are otherwise than they actually are, whereas the bullshitter has simply stopped checking whether the statements they are making have any resemblance to reality:

“When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. 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.”

One reason we have so much bullshit, Frankfurt said, is that in public life, people find themselves in circumstances where they are called to express opinions on topics they don’t understand, and feel the need to muddle along by just coming up with some bullshit:

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.”

Any such categorization is subject to critiques as to the validity of the definition as well as who should belong to the group. (For example, I would add Malcolm Gladwell to Robinson’s list of bullshitters.) Robinson has a slight quibble with Frankfurt’s definition.

Frankfurt’s work is amusing and useful, but I think it gets a few things wrong. For one, having now read the collected works of many hundreds of bullshitters, I don’t actually think Frankfurt’s distinction between the “honest man” and the “bullshitter” quite holds up. One thing I’ve concluded is that, on the whole, people truly believe their own bullshit. That is, they do care about “reality”; they just think their personal beliefs are an accurate description of it. (Steven Pinker, for example, has the utmost concern with rationality—his latest book is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.) Professing reasonableness and actually being reasonable are totally different things, but many people I would place in the category of “bullshitters” are convinced that their every word is God’s own truth. They just haven’t checked whether that’s the case.

Trump is an interesting case. Many people call Donald Trump a serial liar, and it’s beyond dispute that much of what he says is factually false. (Trump himself admitted to the intentional use of “truthful hyperbole,” an oxymoron.) Frankfurt’s theory would tell us that it’s better to call Trump a bullshitter, since he simply doesn’t seem to care about truth or falsity one way or the other. He’s not a liar because he’s not even aware of the facts; he just says whatever he expects will get the desired response from his audience.

I think it’s absolutely the case that Trump doesn’t check whether what he’s saying is true, and thus is a classic case of the Frankfurtian bullshitter. But after many years of Trump-watching (and having written an entire book on Trump), I’ve become convinced that at any given moment, Trump completely believes the words that are coming out of his mouth to be true. He might contradict himself in five minutes. But at any given moment, Trump is certain he’s right. Nothing would get him to admit the slightest mistake. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, has said that Trump “does not ever, ever, ever want to appear weak … or that he might have been wrong,” and won’t admit mistakes because “his manhood is at issue.”

The bullshitter is not just marked by a failure to test their opinions against the facts of the world. They are also characterized by having extreme confidence that they are right. The figures I have classified as bullshitters present themselves as authorities, and sometimes as sages or prophets. They issue predictions and consider themselves the embodiment of right-thinking reasonableness. The bullshitter’s arrogance is just as important as their relationship with the truth.

He goes further and argues that we live in an age where bullshitters seem to thrive and gives an explanation for why there is so much bullshit flying around these days.

Here we can start to see hints of an explanation for why there is so much bullshit circulating around us. I think many of us are far too easily swayed by confident people who pose as experts, especially on subjects where we don’t have the knowledge ourselves to evaluate the claims being made. I suspect that the careers of Shapiro and Peterson have been made possible in large part by these men’s astonishing levels of confidence in themselves. Peterson’s word salad magnum opus Maps of Meaning declares at the outset that it will speak truths that have never been previously discovered by humankind. It offers mostly mumbo jumbo instead (along with some comically convoluted diagrams), but Peterson speaks with such authority that confused readers may find themselves thinking that, given they can’t understand a word, they must simply be incapable of grasping the deep thoughts of the great Genius.

I must say that this article hit a little too close to home for comfort. In my blog, I write about a great many topics. Of course, I am not an expert on pretty much any of them and so am susceptible to being called a bullshitter too. My only defense is that I try to make clear the basis for what I say and when I know something and when I am expressing an opinion, though I may not always succeed in making clear that distinction.

In six consecutive cartoon strips, Doonesbury skewers blogs and bloggers..

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