In the last two weeks, there have been two instances when the word “bullshit” was used in reference to political pronouncements. Firstly, there was Former Minister of Education Dr. Henry Jeffery, using the term while referring to a pronouncement of President Granger that the nominees by the Leader of the Opposition for the vacant position of Chairman of GECOM “must be a judge or qualified to be a judge”.
The meaning Dr. Jeffrey gave to the word “bullshit” was made clear when he asserted that the President’s statement “is patently false, and it must be deliberately so”. In reaction to the President’s latest unilateral appointment of Justice James Patterson to the position, Dr. Jeffrey concluded: “Dangerous self-interest camouflaged by bullshit cannot perennially baffle brains!”
While readers may wince at the use of the word, it is now a “term of art” with its specific meaning, that we should all be familiar with. On February 2nd last, its usage was analysed in this newspaper by one of our columnists:
“About a decade or so ago, the Philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book, with the seemingly most non-philosophically sounding title, “On Bullshit”, became a NY Times bestseller. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it seems he was presciently offering Americans a vocabulary to analyse the utterances of their new President, Donald Trump. If we are to follow the definitions of Professor Frankfurt – of Princeton no less, we will understand not only the American President, but some of our local leaders.
The blurb to Frankfurt’s slim book – which was originally just an article – summarises the concept of “bullshit”. “He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do; that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms (like in our rum-shop gyaafs), excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not.
“Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true”. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” This last feature of bullshit is what makes bullshit so dangerous: very soon truth becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t matter when bullshitters are later shown to be “wrong”; what matters, as Trump boasted, is that people believed them when they spoke. Bullshitters are basically speaking to those with similar mindsets, who then are predisposed to accepting their claims.
What we in Guyana have to be aware of is that we are in the midst of a seminal change in the nature of what are “facts”, in that the Enlightenment’s insistence that there be a correspondence between what is asserted and what exists is breaking down. In this “post-truth” era, leaders here are discovering that followers will accept practically whatever they say, once it furthers what they consider to be “their interests” against the interests of “the other”, and it fits their stereotypes of the latter. Research shows that, unfortunately, they are not motivated to consider alternative formulations, and even when confronted with these, dismiss them.
