but this is 280 lbs of bullshit!

(2 min)

Bullshit is the lack of connection to a concern for the truth with indifference to how things really are … the bullshitter by his very nature is a mindless slob.” – Harry G. Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy, Princeton University.

Why do we accept bullshit?

Two pithy little books by the late Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University will give you a whole shitload of insight. On Bullshit is a ½ hour essay, and On Truth is less than a one hour read.

Well worth your time.

As Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy. And it is us.” It is not the purveyor of bullshit that’s the problem, it is the recipient. We need to stop trying to understand Trump (Psych 101 explains him) and begin to understand the 75+ million people who accept his bullshit.

How desperate do people have to be to allow themselves to be on the stinky end of an endless dump of bullshit and pretend it doesn’t matter to them? To their identity, to their sense-of-self, to their self-respect. Identity politics explains a lot but not a veritable landfill of bullshit, right down to 280 pounds of obesity staring them in the face and claiming on a medical report to be “6’3′ 224 lbs.”

The bullshitter doesn’t give a shit what you think.

If one’s obese friend didn’t admit that the overweight elephant in the room was himself and he kept bullshitting everybody, one would sooner or later have to call him out or move out of the shit house. Or continue to, as they say, “eat shit.”

“There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit … excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements have been exhausted.” – Harry Frankfurt

A picture is worth a 1000 words – and 100 pounds

Trump’s life of systemic bullshit is void of any “vital elements of nourishment” and his blatant reductionist twist about his height and weight is the tip of an obese iceberg. In 2019, he claimed to be 6’3″ 239 pounds and last week he came in at 6’3″ 224 lbs. It’s bullshit. He’s 6’1″ and at least 280! He needs to put some serious tariffs on his Big Macs.

So what?

Nobody cares much about how obese he is or how much he lies about it, but the more important point is: Where is our self-identity when we allow our lying eyes to tell our lying brain that the truth doesn’t matter? How far can bullshit go when we begin to deny what we see?

When Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), a French politician, was asked what he thought historians would say about WWI he replied, “They won’t say Belgium invaded Germany.” And yet, the President of the United States, Donald Trump recently declared the ultimate bullshit that Ukraine started the war against Russia. That’s how deep the American culture has allowed bullshit to be accepted. If you believe he’s only 224 pounds, you’ll maybe believe Ukraine started the war.

This is how bullshit erodes a society and undermines any chance of people having the wherewithal to recognize what Professor Frankfurt calls, “… a world of stubborn independent reality, facts, and truth in which we come to both recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others, and are able to articulate the specific nature of our own identities.” Millions become part of the bullshit, identifying with, and belonging to, similar disconnected group-think.

When bullshit replaces truth, honesty and self-respect, when it replaces the mortar that holds communities, citizens and institutions together – the cornerstones of a society – then the country morphs from a democratic nation to a house of cards to an out house (like the countries Trump once called “shit holes”).

“Is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?” – Harry Frankfurt

For the record:

This is 6’3′ 220 lbs

This is bullshit

Purveyors of bullshit require fiefdoms of loyal vassals who grow to accept not only that bullshit doesn’t matter but it’s preferable to any facts and flashes of reality that don’t fit their worldview.

Bullshit is fiction and fiction is so much easier to swallow than reality.