Lies, Damned Lies, And Bullshit

And what the hell are "vibes"?

In November, we will be presented with a choice between a former President who, many say, is dangerously unprincipled, and a Vice President whose principles, many say, are a danger to Democracy. 

Democrats have been calling former President Trump and his VP pick, J.D. Vance, “weird.” Columbia professor John McWhorter thinks that linguistically, it’s an effective put-down. Why? It’s hard to fashion a clever comeback and it “pegs MAGA as a detour, a regrettable temptation that a serious politics ought to render obsolete.”

If that’s what the word evokes, this whole election is pretty weird as far as I can tell. Joy sounds a lot better.

When Biden ceded the nomination to Harris, who has a legitimate chance of beating Trump, it surely elicited a lot more joy in his supporters than did the first Presidential debate. Yet, at the Democratic National Convention, by some accounts, Trump’s name was invoked over 250 times. That doesn’t seem like “the politics of joy” (whatever that means).

Meanwhile, Trump calls his opponent a liar. “Nobody lies like her,” he says. “She is a liar. She makes up crap.” (Pots & kettles come to mind…)

NPR did spot about a dozen of what they called “misleading or lacking-in-context statements” in Harris’s DNC speech. But they also noted 162 of what they referred to as “misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies” in Trump’s August 8 news conference.

Lies and Errors

According to social psychologist Thomas Gilovich, our heuristic for assessing the veracity of things that confirm our biases is “can I believe it?” while for anything that contradicts our biases, it’s “must I believe it?” As a result, we can much more easily find examples of the other side’s errors (false statements the speaker believes are true) and lies (false statements the speaker knows are untrue) than we can find on our own side. And given our tribal nature, we’re more likely to see our opponents’ errors as dangerous lies and our own side’s lies as benign errors.

When Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller falsely claimed that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office on the day of Trump’s inauguration, Trump and his supporters saw malign intent to mislead the public. After a White House aide confirmed that the statue was still in place, Miller quickly retracted the claim, saying it was a mistake. But to Trump and his supporters, the impression stuck that Miller was there to report “fake news.”

On the same day, Trump made inflated claims about the size of his inauguration crowd on the National Mall, saying it “looked like a million-and-a-half people” stretching “all the way back to the Washington Monument.” At a press conference the next day, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, used a detailed calculation to explain and defend the inflated number, adding, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

The crowd was certainly not a million-and-a-half. And photos clearly illustrated that the crowd did not stretch all the way to the Washington Monument.

Two days later, saying that his intention was “never to lie” to the press, Spicer admitted that although he had believed those numbers were accurate when he gave them, they turned out to be incorrect. When asked pointedly whether he stood by the claim that it was the largest in-person crowd for an inauguration, Spicer said that he did not. (In other words, he’d made an error.) Instead, he said that including both TV and online attendance, “it was the total largest audience witnessed in person and around the globe.”

While online viewership is difficult to quantify, according to factcheck.org, it is possible that he was right. “Some data,” the organization found, “suggest Spicer is correct that online viewership was up dramatically from 2009.” (Others, however, say it ain’t so.) Factcheck.org also discovered that from Trump’s vantage point, it could have visually appeared to him the way he described it. (Or maybe he was just feeling the vibes…)

Few in the media, however, were inclined to give either Spicer or Trump the benefit of the doubt.

Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum dabble in both intentional and unintentional misrepresentations. According to the late Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, there is another, entirely different kind of misrepresentation. He called it bullshit. Just as actual bullshit is mostly empty of nutritive content, metaphorical bullshit is mostly empty of informative content.

Bullshit

Here’s Trump in February of this year:

You know, if you think about it, you have men, you have women, and you have religion. If you look at it, you have more than the men, you have more than the women. You have such power.

One fundamental way in which bullshit as a philosophical concept is distinct from errors and lies is that while errors accidentally represent falsehoods as truth and lies do so intentionally, bullshit is unconnected to and unconcerned with the truth.

Frankfurt explained:

“[The bullshitter] 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.”

Wait — is bullshit the same thing as vibes? (As an aside, for a good laugh, I highly recommend the hilarious book, Bigly: Donald Trump in verse by humorist and TV writer/producer Rob Long, who arranged some of Trump’s bullshit as poetry.)

Memorably, before Spicer’s correction, Chuck Todd of Meet the Press asked White House counselor Kellyanne Conway about Spicer’s falsehood. She responded that the press secretary had given alternative facts — a bullshit answer so exemplary of the concept that it became a meme.

Bullshit is bad enough. But another type of misrepresentation has also taken up residence in American politics. It’s not merely bullshit and it’s not merely lies. It resembles lies in that its content obscures rather than illuminates, and it resembles bullshit in that it is unconnected to the truth. But it goes even further. It rejects truth itself. I call it damned lies.

Damned Lies

The essence of bullshit, according to Frankfurt, is not that it is false — though it can be — but that it is phony (e.g. “alternative facts”). The essence of damned lies is not that it is phony — though it can be — but that it is inverted. And while the truth-value of bullshit is of no central interest to the speaker, the central intent of damned lies is to rob truth of value for the listener. Whereas the bullshitter’s guiding and controlling motive is unconcerned with truth or reality, the guiding and controlling motive of damned lies is to make the listener unconcerned with truth and reality.

This is how we end up with claims like “words are violence.” It’s how we’re now inundated with the conspiracy theory that Jews, the indigenous people of the land of Israel, are “settler-colonialists.” And it’s how we’re expected not to balk at phrases like “her penis.”

It is of particular concern in legal contexts since it involves redefinitions and revisions that create legal frameworks resulting in the opposite of their original definitions and intents; e.g. claiming Israel is perpetrating a “genocide,” defining a non-white, entirely homogeneous group as “diverse,” and referring to dangerous and irreversible pediatric medical treatments that interfere with children’s normal development as “life-saving” and “affirming” “care.”

As another example, Harris has said that efforts to ban transgender children from playing sports… undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values. If there were, in fact, efforts to ban transgender children from playing sports, it would certainly undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values. But not only do no such proposals exist, Harris was likely referring to — and misrepresenting — efforts to preserve the single-sex nature of sports teams. If so, it’s a damned lie.

Title IX of the Education Amendments Act was enacted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Since then, girls and young women have been afforded single-sex sports teams.

The Harris/Biden approach to Title IX, however, has attempted to remove sex-based protections for girls and women and replace them with gender-identity protections. This results in requiring girls’ and women’s sports teams to include male athletes whose felt gender identity doesn’t match their sex and physiology.

This is obviously unconnected to reality. But it is not mere bullshit. It is designed to degrade our contact with reality by intentionally confusing the subjective (gender identity) with the objective (sex). Instead of protecting objectively female athletes’ right to compete safely and fairly, it provides objectively male athletes the right to access female-only athletic teams and spaces based on a subjective feeling. This makes girls’ and women’s sports less fair and less safe.

Plenty of critical thinkers, however, can see the reality. As a result, litigation against the Harris/Biden sex-discriminatory Title IX revisions is making its way through courts across the country. There are now injunctions (upheld by the Supreme Court) barring the Department of Education from implementing the Administration’s Title IX inversions in over 700 schools across 20 states.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Frankfurt wrote. Never has that been truer than it is in American politics today. And it’s at least as true of damned lies.

(But let’s hope that “vibes” goes the way of “awgwan,” “gadzooks,” and “fetch.”) ◆

More to come…