On Bullshit: Jon Stewart’s Final Advice is Also a Sophisticated Philosophy

Jon Stewart’s closing words last night were fitting. He warned us all to be on the lookout for “bullshit.” It’s all around us (and of course we all fall into bullshitting at one time or another).

The best defense against bullshit, Stewart said, is vigilance. So, “if you see something, say something.”

His advice reminded me of the book by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called On Bullshit.  Yes, there is a philosophy of “bullshit.”

If you’d like a brief synopsis of the book’s thesis and a brief definition of the concept, watch the video below. Bullshit, Frankfurt says, “consists in a lack of concern for the differ between truth and falsity.” The bullshitter is different from the liar, in that the liar actually does have to think about the truth in order to replace the truth with something else. The bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth, because it is inconvenient and irrelevant to his/her purposes.

The bullshitter would rather not know what the truth is, because it might conflict with his/her objectives, which are far more important to them than the truth question.

This is why bullshitting is actually a more “insidious” threat than lying, because the bullshitter doesn’t even care to broach the question of truth. What matters is accomplishing the objective for which the bullshitting was done. As insidious as it is, Frankfurt argues that, as a society, we are more tolerant of it as a society than we are of lying.

This is probably because we’re so used to doing it ourselves. We don’t know we’re doing it, because we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we’re not.

That’s why Jon Stewart’s admonition, as sensible as it sounds, is actually pretty hard to do.