Harry Frankfurt started his 1986 essay “On Bullshit” with these words: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
By 2005, when Princeton University Press published the essay as a bestselling book, Frankfurt’s words splashed into a culture flooded with so much more bullshit.
And today, another 17 years on, it’s grown only deeper and smellier. We’re smothered in bullshit.
Normally, 30-Second Read wouldn’t publish “bullshit.” But when the word is spoken casually during U.S. House committee hearings broadcast to the world, when cable TV anchors and pundits utter it without bleeps, and when it fits the craven human behavior thus described, we make an exception.
Frankfurt, in “On Bullshit,” favors truth over the flexible acquaintance with reality that liars and bullshitters (and demagogues) bring to human interactions. It’s philosophy, not politics. But it sure fits our time.
Here again is Frankfurt: “The bullshitter .… does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
Bullshit is right.
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