"On Bullshit"

   I have enclosed the title in quotes because it is not another post in my deeply philosophical "ON Series", but instead, the title of the book by Harry G. Frankfurt.  You will likely take it more seriously if I mention that the book was published by Princeton University Press, which is about to publish a 20th anniversary edition, which provides another indication that you should take it seriously. 
   I know this because I get Ron Charles' "Book Club" newsletter, which you should also take seriously because he writes for the Washington Post. Here are a few of his comments about, the book, bullshit and President Trump, who one associates more with the latter term than the former.

   A few months before the 2016 presidential election, a retired philosophy professor wrote in Time magazine that it was difficult to determine whether Donald Trump’s “unmistakably dubious statements are deliberate lies or whether they are just bullshit.” Ordinarily, such a scatological appraisal by an old academic wouldn’t have attracted much attention, but the writer in question was Harry G. Frankfurt, the world’s foremost authority on bullshit....
   “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” he began. “Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” That tone may sound casual — it is — but Frankfurt wasn’t phoning this in. He went on to cite Max Black, Wittgenstein and St. Augustine. 
  “The contemporary proliferation of bullshit,” he wrote, stems from “various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.” 
   In 2005, Princeton University Press reissued Frankfurt’s essay as a little book, which — no bull! — sold more than 1 million copies around the globe. This is not, I can assure you, the typical sales trajectory for an academic treatise on epistemic indifference. Clearly, the world smelled it too....
  In our current political climate, Frankfurt’s words sound prescient to the point of redundancy. “The bullshitter,” he tells us, “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.”  Last month, squatting atop the excremental culture that bears him up, Trump castigated his supporters for believing what he called the Jeffrey Epstein “bullshit.” It might be time to replace the Republican elephant with an orange-haired ouroboros — a mythical creature that swallows its own tale." 

  That "bullshit" is a serious subject is proven by the fact that it was mentioned in another newsletter I received, this time from The New Yorker, in an admittedly unserious piece by Ian Frasier, “Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Ditched That Bullshit Detector," June 6.  A detector is surely not needed now since we are knee-deep in the stuff. 

A Bullshit Bibliography
   Given the seriousness of this subject, I searched the catalogue of the London Public Library for further reading. Although they didn't have, On Bullshit the Western Libraries does and at the LPL you can find these: 

   Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. At the related website, this is found:
   "The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit."
   The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, by John Petrocelli.
   Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, by James Bull

   There are even bullshit books about:
   Work - Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber.
   The Classics: Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology.
    And Food: The Angry Chef's Guide to Spotting Bullsh*t in the World of Food: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating, Anthony Warner.
  

Cancon: 
  I am pleased to report that a pioneer in the field of bullshit studies is Laura Penny. She also should be taken seriously since she has a PhD and teaches at King's (the other one in Halifax.) Even more serious-sounding is the MA thesis she did while passing through Western, (the one here in London) - Spent: On Economic Metaphor in Post-Structuralist Philosophy.  

The Bonus: A Related Concept and More Cancon
  The concept is Enshittification and the coiner of it is the Canadian, Cory Doctorow:

   "Last year, I coined the term ‘enshittification,’ to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

   So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters — and what we can do about it.

  We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit."

   You will likely take this concept more seriously if I mention that the quotation above is from, "My McLuhan Lecture on Enshittification"  and that there is a good piece about it in The Guardian: " 'What Many of Us Feel': Why 'enshittification' is Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year". If that is not enough, Paul Krugman wrote about "The General Theory of Enshittification" just a few weeks ago. 
                       "Making Light of Heavy Things Since 2016"