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.
Right now, Americans and other interested parties – read all world leaders and would-be immigrants to the US – are trying to get the measure of the man who seems to have no intermediary mental screening apparatus between his raw id and his lips; or the fingers that do his tweeting. A veritable industry of “fact checkers” have sprouted up like jumbie umbrellas to prove that Trump is “lying” or at best, being careless with the truth on so many assertions. One spokesperson claimed Trump is offering “alternative facts”.
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.
Bullshitters like Trump just want to show they have the answer to whatever they’re asked, or whatever subject comes up in conversation. It doesn’t matter they 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.
But Guyana has its own fair share of bullshitters. Think of some columnists who pontificate on every issue under the sun – and when shown to be wrong on crucial facts to their argument, blithely move on to the next splatter of bullshit. But even more worrying, are the local politicians in the mould of Donald Trump and his gratuitous bullshitting. Columnists, after all, may not have much traction in persuading citizens to action, but the reverse is true of politicians.
Think of the manifesto of the Government. They were in Opposition for three years and controlled Parliament with access to all the necessary information – financial and otherwise – in real time through their membership in the Sectoral Committees and their parliamentary majority. What else but bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense when they yet promised Government workers “substantial salary increases” and later claimed they had no money? And we can follow through with all the other promises such as “Constitutional Change” or a “Code of Conduct” for Ministers. These were not lies: they simply had to tell the people something on these issues that they could get away with, because the latter were predisposed to believing them.
Let us look a bit closer at the contract for the Parking Meters Project that had finally fired up the citizens of Georgetown. The Government assures us they cannot interfere because they want to respect the independence of the City government. This has to be undiluted bullshit since the Communities Minister had to sign off on the By-laws to permit the wheel locks, towing, impounding, etc, of vehicles in the city.
The question is not whether politicians will stop excreting bullshit – that is congenital, but how long will their followers swallow it.
