The Difference between Bullshit and Lying

We have suffered both. Some never speak the truth because they don’t know or care about it. Others know the truth but lie anyway wrires Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

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llustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian 

 
Sometimes it falls to an old book to tell us what’s new, to a white-bearded philosopher based far from Westminster or Washington to clarify the shifts in our sharp-suited politics. So spare yourself the annual round-ups in the newspapers or the boy-scout enthusiasm of podcasters. To understand the great political shift of this year, the work you need is a piece of philosophy called ­– what else? – On Bullshit.

I offer it to you this Christmas because surely no reader of mine can resist an essay that begins: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” Statements like that made it a bestseller upon re-publication in 2005 and turned its then-75-year-old author, Harry Frankfurt, from a distinguished moral philosopher at Yale and Princeton into a chatshow guest.

But to open the book now is to get a blast of something quite different, in a climate that just didn’t exist two decades ago. Read today, On Bullshit taxonomises an entire style of government. It foretells the age of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

The task Frankfurt sets himself is to define bullshit. What it is not, he argues, is lying. Both misrepresent the truth, but with entirely different intentions. The liar is “someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood”. He or she knows the truth or could lay hands on it – but they certainly aren’t giving it to you. The bullshitter, on the other hand, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshitters couldn’t give two hoots about the truth. They just want a story.

In that distinction lies an explanation for this era of politics. Commentators have struggled for years to coin the phrase for now. “Populist” doesn’t work. Too often, it merely denotes what the author and their friends dislike, throwing together clowns such as Beppe Grillo with social democrats such as Jeremy Corbyn. A similar problem bedevils “strongman”, a label stuck on Xi Jinping and Jair Bolsonaro alike. But “bullshitter” – that sums up just how different Trump and Johnson are from their predecessors.

‘Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Some enterprising future editor of a dictionary of political terms will carry the word “bullshit” and cite as examples: writing two opposing columns on Brexit, claiming the NHS will be £350m a week better off and affecting a hurt expression when asked the whereabouts of your promised 40 new hospitals. Come on! Those little-doggy eyes beseech the hard-faced TV interviewer. Didn’t everyone know that was bullshit?

Socially, there is little to distinguish Johnson from David Cameron: both are Bullingdon boys manufactured at Eton. In policy, too, there is a fair carryover between George Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” and Johnson’s “levelling up”, or between Cameron’s vow to get net immigration down to the tens of thousands and the pledges made by Johnson’s home secretary, Priti Patel. The great divide is in rhetoric: how Johnson talked to voters and the promises he made us. They were never meant to be taken at face value.

Among the media class’s artisanal industries of the past few years has been trying to find a thread that runs through Johnson the journalist, the globalist mayor of London and the Brexit prime minister. Frankfurt furnishes that link: it is bullshit.

Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames meet promises of an “oven-ready” Brexit deal. They are electioneering fables rather than manifesto commitments, grand gestures over small print, cheerful dishonesty in place of lawyered mendacity. In other words, they are all just careerist bullshit.

Much the same goes for Liz Truss, although she was clearly not as good at it. Looking back, this summer’s Tory leadership contest can be seen as a final hurrah for the “anything goes” era. And it certainly applies to Trump. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” Bullshit. “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest.” Bullshit. A “sea of love” at his inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Frankfurt’s book offers a theory of a generation of politicians who now appear to be leaving the stage.

‘A ‘sea of love’ at Donald Trump’s inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/EPA

Lies can be shown up: Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But there is no point factchecking bullshit, as parts of the British media still do over Brexit or the New York Times did with Trump. For a bullshitter, facts are beside the point – the real aim is to produce a story that erases the line between truth and falsehood. It’s why the philosopher concludes: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

We all lie sometimes, and around millions of tables there will be much bullshit spoken over the Christmas turkey. In British politics, the era of bullshit followed on naturally from a long spell of lies. Before Johnson, the most effective Tory of the post-Thatcher era was Osborne.

He blamed Labour and Gordon Brown for the banking crash, only later admitting that was untrue. He declared Labour’s 2008 package to bail out the banks would spark a run on the pound, before confessing: “Broadly speaking, the government did what was necessary.”

Most of all, he claimed that slashing benefits was essential to bring down borrowing and was being done fairly. Remember “we are all in this together”? Except a study at the end of the coalition by the late John Hills, of the LSE, alongside other leading academics, showed that the coalition’s tax and benefit changes had “a net fiscal cost” – which meant they increased the deficit. Not only that, but “the poorest 30% [of Britons] lost or broke even on average and the top half gained”. Heading the Treasury, Osborne was in charge of a machine that could calculate the effects of his policies. He would have or should have known the truth as he laid out each budget. And yet voters were fed something entirely different.

One might see these as common or garden political lies – falsehoods that could be checked and that aimed at nothing more than establishing a poll lead for Osborne’s team. They were not the alternative reality of Vote Leave. But if the currency of truth is sufficiently debased, voters may eventually choose the altogether more entertaining humbugger. In that lies a warning for both Rishi Sunak, the down-to-earth multimillionaire, and Keir Starmer, the man who said he was Corbyn before revealing himself to be Tony Blair meets Gordon Brittas, the TV sitcom manager whose words never match results or deeds.

One topic Frankfurt doesn’t address is the audience for bullshit. Why do people buy it? To which we might add another question. Why have swathes of the political establishment and the press spent the past few years claiming Brexit is a success or that levelling up is serious or that any alternative to the most venal dishonesty is just impossible? Answers would be welcome but were we to press for any, I suspect we’d be told to drop the bullshit.

Bullshit Economics to explain Supply Chain Failures

 

'Calling bullshit': the college class on how not to be duped by the news

Professors at the University of Washington say the course provides the most useful skill college can offer writes James McWilliams in The Guardian

 

‘Our world is saturated with bullshit,’ the professors say. ‘This is our attempt to fight back.’ Photograph: Leland Bobbe/Getty Images/Image Source


To prepare themselves for future success in the American workforce, today’s college students are increasingly choosing courses in business, biomedical science, engineering, computer science, and various health-related disciplines.

These classes are bound to help undergraduates capitalize on the “college payoff”, but chances are good that none of them comes with a promise of this magnitude: “We will be astonished if these skills [learned in this course] do not turn out to be the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.”

Sound like bullshit? If so, there’s no better way to detect it than to consider the class that makes the claim. Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World, designed and co-taught by the University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, begins with a premise so obvious we barely lend it the attention it deserves: “Our world is saturated with bullshit.” And so, every week for 12 weeks, the professors expose “one specific facet of bullshit”, doing so in the explicit spirit of resistance. “This is,” they explain, “our attempt to fight back.”

The problem of bullshit transcends political bounds, the class teaches. The proliferation of bullshit, according to West and Bergstrom, is “not a matter of left- or rightwing ideology; both sides of the aisle have proven themselves facile at creating and spreading bullshit. Rather (and at the risk of grandiose language) adequate bullshit detection strikes us as essential to the survival of liberal democracy.” They make it a point to stress that they began to work on the syllabus for this class back in 2015 – it’s not, they clarify, “a swipe at the Trump administration”.


There has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit

Academia being what it is (a place where everything is contested), there has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit. Most of that debate centers on the question of intention. Is bullshit considered bullshit if the deception was unintentionally presented? West and Bergstrom think that it is. They write, “Whether or not that usage is appropriate, we feel that the verb phrase calling bullshit definitely applies to falsehoods irrespective of the intentions of the author or speaker.”

The reason for the class’s existence comes down to a simple and somewhat alarming reality: even the most educated and savvy consumer of information is easily misled in today’s complex information ecosystem. Calling Bullshit is not dedicated to teaching students that Fox News promotes “fake news” or that National Enquirer headlines are fallacious. Instead, the class operates under the assumption that the structures through which today’s endless information comes to the consumer – algorithms, data graphics, info analytics, peer-reviewed publications – are in many ways as full of bullshit as the fake news we easily recognize as bogus. One scientist that West and Bergstrom cite in their syllabus goes so far as to say that, due to the fact that journals are prone to only publish positive results, “most published scientific results are probably false”.

Why smart people are more likely to believe fake news


A case in point is a 2016 article called Automated Inferences on Criminality Using Face Images. In it, the authors present an algorithm that can supposedly teach a machine to determine criminality with 90% accuracy based solely on a person’s headshot. Their core assumption is that, unlike humans, a machine is relatively free of emotion and bias. West and Bergstrom call bullshit, sending students to explore the sample of photos used to represent criminals in the experiment: all them are of convictedcriminals. The professors claim that “it seems less plausible to us that facial features are associated with criminal tendencies than it is that they are correlated with juries’ decisions to convict”. Conclusion: the algorithm is more correlated with facial characteristics that make a person convictable than a set of criminal inclinations.

By teaching ways to find misinformation in the venues many of us consider pristine realms of expertise – peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, reports by the National Institutes of Health, TED Talks – West and Bergstrom highlight the ultimate paradox of the information age: more and more knowledge is making us less and less reasonable.

  ‘Even the most educated and savvy consumer of information is easily misled in today’s complex information ecosystem.’ Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA

As we gather more data for mathematical models to better analyze, for example, the shrinking gap between elite male and female runners, we remain as prone as ever to misusing that data to achieve erroneous results. West and Bergstrom cite a 2004 Nature article in which the authors use linear regression to trace the closing gap between men and women’s running times, concluding that women will outpace men in the year 2156. To take down this kind of bullshit, the professors introduce the idea of reductio ad absurdum, which in this case would make the year 2636 far more interesting than 2156, as it’s then that, if the Nature study is right, “times of less than zero will be recorded”.

West and Bergstrom first offered the class in January of 2017 with modest expectations. “We would have been happy if a couple of our colleagues and friends would have said: ‘Cool idea, we should pass that along,’” West says. But within months the course had made national – and then international – news. “We have never guessed that it would get this kind of a response.”

To say that a nerve has been touched would be an understatement. After posting their website online, West and Bergstrom were swamped with emails and media requests from all over the world. Glowing press reports of the class’s ambitions contributed to the growing sense that something seismic in higher education was under way.

The professors were especially pleased by the interest shown among other universities – and even high schools – in modeling a course after their syllabus. Soon the Knight Foundation provided $50,000 for West and Bergstrom to help high school kids, librarians, journalists, and the general public become competent bullshit detectors.

In 1945, when Harvard University defined for the nation the role of higher education with its report on General Education in a Free Society, it stressed as its main goal “the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition”. The assumption, which now seems quaint, was that knowledge, which came from information, was the basis of character development.

Calling Bullshit, which provides the tools for every American (the lectures and readings are all online) to disrupt the foundation of even the most trusted source of information, reveals how profoundly difficult endless information has made the task of achieving that humane tradition. How the necessary shift from conveying wisdom to debunking it will play out is anyone’s guess, but if West and Bergstrom get their way – and it seems that they are – it will mean calling a lot of bullshit before we get to the business of becoming better citizens.

Cricket - This business called Elite Honesty

Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo

Here is some elite honesty, a very elite example of it. Australia 238 for 5 against Pakistan in Hobart, needing another 131 for the win. Justin Langer, on 76, edges behind to Moin Khan but is not given by the umpire Peter Parker. Doesn't walk. Fine. That's the difference between elite honesty and regular honesty, understanding that it's the umpire's job to make a batsman walk.

---Also read

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

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Langer's dad asks him about the edge. Nah, no edge, just a clicky bat handle. He tells his partner on the field and good mate Adam Gilchrist the same thing. Even his captain, elite honesty manifest as human, his mentor and idol, he tells him it was the clicky bat handle that dunnit.

These are elite mates and elite family, who deserve a bit of elite honesty and that's what Langer gives them. For the next decade and a half, this elite honesty is maintained. Then one day he downgrades it to mere honesty and reveals that he had smashed the hell out of the ball. He couldn't help it. He'd copped a bad one in the first innings. He was under the pump for his place. But while it lasted, the honesty was really elite.

If that was the only time you were elitely honest, then how elitely honest could you really be? Not very. So here's another quality bit of elite honesty. Notice how upright Langer is as he walks up to the stumps while fielding. The ball is dead and Hashan Tillakaratne in his crease. Langer deliberately tips a bail off the stumps and then watches his elite team-mates appeal for hit-wicket.

That we can identify this as elite honesty is only thanks to the ICC and their match referee Chris Broad. "Justin was disappointed that the charge was brought and explained his position in a very honest and succinct way," said Broad, following a hearing. You might call Broad's decision elite stupidity but I certainly won't. It's elite judgement.

Some say there is also elite honesty in how Langer ran Western Australia and Perth Scorchers, but I think the most elite example of elite honesty comes from Langer's idol, the true father of the modern Australian way. In a recent interview with Steve Waugh, our very own Melinda Farrell broached this idea of elite honesty (though we called it culture then). She asked Waugh about a couple of catches from his career that he dropped but claimed.

How do you look back at them now?

"Well, I don't really," Waugh responded, which is absolutely rule No. 1 in maintaining elite honesty. About the catch ("catch" used here in a way that also indicates drops) to dismiss Brian Lara, he continued: "It's just part of the game. I mean, at the time I still remember the catch. I still believe I caught it. It was inconclusive but in my mind it bounced off my wrist, but you know, that's all life. You don't want to look back at stuff. I try to look forward. You know, people have their own opinions on what happened there but I'm not going to change my opinion. My opinion was I caught it on the day."

You see why this is more elite? You understand? It's because from his response we end up learning something. We learn that catches are opinions, not facts. If your opinion is that the catch was good, then what business does the fact that it was a drop have anything to do with it? If you're asking yourself how you've managed life so far not abiding by these rules, console yourself that you're not alone. As the great man says, that's all life.

***

Us mortals alas, we aspire to mere honesty. Non-elite stuff. Proletariat. So here, humbly and hopefully, is some of it. 

This business of elite honesty - and Langer's elite mateship and elite humility - this is all elite BS. So is the Players' Pact. And the "hard but fair" act. It's classic corporate-speak - high-sounding words put together to sound and look pretty but that end up meaning nothing.

We're not talking about airplane seats where even economy can now be premium. Honesty is honesty. You either are or you aren't. There is no elite level to which you and I are not welcome and only Australian cricketers are. The truth is, and if it is not, then it is a lie; no number of demagogue leaders, politicians or cricket captains are going to change this fact (not opinion). In today's world, more and more people might not be accepting the truth, but that says something about a changing people and society, not the truth.

All that these words do is maintain the pretence that Australian cricketers operate - or should operate - on a higher moral plane than non-Australian cricketers; that the Australian line is the line, never mind that nobody's ever been told where that line is. It is what has got them into this mess in the first place.

It is what the extreme punishments to Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were so much about. The rest of the cricket world was made to look like a collective of tree-hugging liberal halfwits for having - fairly maturely, actually - come to terms with what is an on-field code violation and not a sign of moral decay. Sides tampered with the ball, sometimes they got caught and were punished and yes, sometimes they got away with it. That's all life.

Cricket, though, reactionary and conservative cricket, fell for it, responding by increasing the seriousness and stigma of tampering as an offence. Instead of doubling down, cooling the atmosphere, and insisting that tampering wasn't an existential threat to the game, it went the other way, aspiring to this elite Australian way.

It was a depressing reminder of the way cricket is still unable to drag itself out of the streak of puritanism that has marked its operations for so long, where it believes it is not just a morally superior game but that it produces morally superior humans. That's the subtext of the Spirit of Cricket, which, lately Australia seem to have clung to tighter than others. But here's a truth bomb for all of us: cricket isn't morally superior to anything. If it ever was, maybe it was nearly two centuries ago. It's a great sport, no doubt, but that is all it is - a sport. If it expanded globally in reality, rather than just in an ICC mission paper, it may well loosen up and understand this.

What Langer's words and the set of associated ideas among which they float - about the exceptionalism of Australian cricketers - do is set Australia up, at some point down the line, for another fall and greater unpopularity. Look at the sniggering already - magnificently played, by the way, Graeme Smith. Imagine now the next time one of them stuffs up, delivers a nasty sledge, or bullies an umpire, or tampers, or surreptitiously tips over a bail, or claims a dropped catch, or doesn't walk when he's out.

Of course it'll happen. They may be Australian cricketers but - and here's the big reveal - they are also human. They are humans like the rest of the cricketers they play with and against, ones who also do all of these things occasionally, ones they used to always beat and now ones they don't beat so often. They are humans like the rest of us who watch them, envy them, criticise them and worship them; humans who are fallible; humans who are striving for some regular honesty, sometimes succeeding but other times failing.

To this eye, and perhaps many others, all Australian cricket should stand for is Australian cricket, because that has always been more than enough. The way their openers and one-downs come at you, the way they don't stop producing super-fast fast bowlers, the way their keepers yap and catch, the way their slips stand chewing gum like they're a street gang, the way they think leggies are the normal ones and offies the ones to be suspicious of, the way their grounds can feel simultaneously so big and so small, and the way no game is over for them until the very last of them has physically sat on the bus and left the stadium. It has never needed any buzzwords or catchphrases beyond that.

Is your job pointless?

David Graeber in The Guardian

Copying and pasting emails. Inventing meaningless tasks for others. Just looking busy. Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

 

Shoot me now: does your job do anyone any good? Illustration: Igor Bastidas


One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I’m a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I would have to stack the books and not touch anything else, whereupon he would return at the earliest available opportunity.

The carpenter never reappeared. Each day, someone in the anthropology department would call, often multiple times, to ask about the fate of the carpenter, who always turned out to have something extremely pressing to do. By the time a week was out, it had become apparent that there was one man employed by buildings and grounds whose entire job it was to apologise for the fact that the carpenter hadn’t come. He seemed a nice man. Still, it’s hard to imagine he was particularly happy with his work life.


A bullshit job is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee can't justify its existence

Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. What if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are actually aware of it? Could there be anything more demoralising than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse? There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist? I decided to investigate this phenomenon by drawing on more than 250 testimonies from people around the world who felt they once had, or now have, what I call a bullshit job.

What is a bullshit job?

The defining feature is this: one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there’s a good reason for them to be doing it. They may not be able to admit this to their co-workers – often, there are very good reasons not to do so – but they are convinced the job is pointless nonetheless.

Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that are useless; typically, there has to be some degree of pretence and fraud involved as well. The employee must feel obliged to pretend that there is, in fact, a good reason their job exists, even if, privately, they find such claims ridiculous.

When people speak of bullshit jobs, they are generally referring to employment that involves being paid to work for someone else, either on a waged or salaried basis (most would include paid consultancies). Obviously, there are many self-employed people who manage to get money from others by means of falsely pretending to provide them with some benefit or service (normally we call them grifters, scam artists, charlatans or frauds), just as there are self-employed people who get money off others by doing or threatening to do them harm (normally we refer to them as muggers, burglars, extortionists or thieves). In the first case, at least, we can definitely speak of bullshit, but not of bullshit jobs, because these aren’t “jobs”, properly speaking. A con job is an act, not a profession. People do sometimes speak of professional burglars, but this is just a way of saying that theft is the burglar’s primary source of income.

These considerations allow us to formulate what I think can serve as a final working definition of a bullshit job: a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

The five types of bullshit job

Flunkies

They are given some minor task to justify their existence, but this is really just a pretext: in reality, flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. A classic flunky is someone like Steve, who told me, “I just graduated, and my new ‘job’ basically consists of my boss forwarding emails to me with the message: ‘Steve refer to the below’, and I reply that the email is inconsequential or spam.”

In countries such as Brazil, some buildings still have elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you

Doormen are the most obvious example. They perform the same function in the houses of the very rich that electronic intercoms have performed for everyone else since at least the 1950s. In some countries, such as Brazil, some buildings still have uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you. Further examples are receptionists and front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them. Other flunkies provide a badge of importance. These include cold callers, who make contact with potential clients on the understanding that the broker for whom they work is so busy making money that they need an assistant to make this call.

Goons

These are people whose jobs have an aggressive element but, crucially, who exist only because other people also employ people in these roles. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies; if no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers and corporate lawyers.

Goons find their jobs objectionable not just because they feel they lack positive value, but also because they see them as essentially manipulative and aggressive. These include a lot of call-centre employees: “You’re making an active negative contribution to people’s day,” explained one anonymous testimony. “I called people up to hock them useless shit: specifically, access to their ‘credit score’ that they could obtain for free elsewhere, but that we were offering, with some mindless add-ons, for £6.99 a month.”

Duct-tapers

These employees’ jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organisation; they are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. The most obvious examples of duct-tapers are those whose job it is to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.

Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct – tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven’t been either because no one has got around to it, or because the manager wants to maintain as many subordinates as possible, or because of some structural confusion.

Magda’s job required her to proofread research reports written by her company’s star researcher-statistician. “The man didn’t know the first thing about statistics, and he struggled to produce grammatically correct sentences. I’d reward myself with a cake if I found a coherent paragraph. I lost 12lb working in that company. My job was to convince him to undertake a major reworking of every report he produced. Of course, he would never agree to correct anything, so I would then have to take the report to the company directors. They were statistically illiterate, too, but, being the directors, they could drag things out even more.”

Box-tickers

These employees exist only or primarily to allow an organisation to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. The most miserable thing about box-ticking jobs is that the employee is usually aware that not only does the box-ticking exercise do nothing towards accomplishing its ostensible purpose, but also it undermines it, because it diverts time and resources away from the purpose itself.

We’re all familiar with box-ticking as a form of government. If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad – taking bribes, for instance, or shooting citizens at traffic lights – the first reaction is invariably to create a “fact-finding commission” to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it’s a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that any of this was happening (this, of course, is rarely true); second, it’s a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it (this usually isn’t true, either).


I had one responsibility: watching an inbox of forms asking for tech help, and pasting them into a different form

Local government has been described as little more than an endless sequence of box-ticking rituals revolving around monthly “target figures”. There are all sorts of ways that private companies employ people to be able to tell themselves they are doing something that they aren’t really doing. Many large corporations, for instance, maintain their own in-house magazines or even television channels, the ostensible purpose of which is to keep employees up to date on interesting news and developments, but which, in fact, exist for almost no reason other than to allow executives to experience that warm and pleasant feeling that comes when you see a favourable story about yourself in the media.

Taskmasters

These fall into two groups. Type one comprises those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster believes there is no need for their intervention, and that if they were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves.

Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.

A taskmaster may spend at least 75% of their time allocating tasks and monitoring if the underling is doing them, even though they have absolutely no reason to believe the underlings in question would behave any differently if they weren’t there.

“Strategic mission statements” (or, even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror in academics. These are the primary means by which corporate management techniques – setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do, and less and less time actually doing it – are insinuated into academic life.

I should add that there is really only one class of people who not only deny their jobs are pointless, but also express outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. These are – predictably enough – business owners and others in charge of hiring and firing. No one, they insist, would ever spend company money on an employee who wasn’t needed. All the people who are convinced their jobs are worthless must be deluded, or self-important, or simply don’t understand their real function, which is fully visible only to those above. One might be tempted to conclude from this response that this is one class of people who genuinely don’t realise their own jobs are bullshit. 

Do you have a bullshit job?

These holders of bullshit jobs testify to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turned into a parasite and a fraud. All wanted to remain anonymous:

Guarding an empty room

“I worked as a museum guard for a global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused. My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touched the, well, nothing in the room and ensure nobody set any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones, etc. As nobody was ever there, I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I was to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it.”

Copying and pasting

“I was given one responsibility: watching an inbox that received emails in a certain form from employees asking for tech help, and copy and paste it into a different form. Not only was this a textbook example of an automatable job, it actually used to be automated. There was some disagreement between managers that led to a standardisation that nullified the automation.”

Looking busy

“I was hired as a temp but not assigned any duties. I was told it was very important that I stay busy, but I wasn’t to play games or surf the web. My primary function seemed to be occupying a chair and contributing to the decorum of the office. At first, this seemed pretty easy, but I quickly discovered that looking busy when you aren’t is one of the least pleasant office activities imaginable. In fact, after two days, it was clear that this was going to be the worst job I had ever had. I installed Lynx, a text-only web browser that basically looks like a DOS [disk-operating system] window. No images, just monospaced text on an endless black background. My absentminded browsing of the internet now appeared to be the work of a skilled technician, the web browser a terminal into which diligently typed commands signalled my endless productivity.”

Sitting in the right place

“I work in a college dormitory during the summer. I have worked at this job for three years, and at this point it is still unclear to me what my actual duties are. Primarily, it seems that my job consists of physically occupying space at the front desk. While engaged in this, I am free to ‘pursue my own projects’, which I take to mean mainly creating rubber band balls out of rubber bands I find in the cabinets. When I am not busy with this, I might be checking the office email account (I have basically no training or administrative power, of course, so all I can do is forward these emails to my boss), moving packages from the door, where they get dropped off, to the package room, answering phone calls (again, I know nothing and rarely answer a question to the caller’s satisfaction), or finding ketchup packets from 2005 in the desk drawers. For these duties, I am paid $14 an hour.”

Facts do not matter

Amit Varma in The Hindu

The most surprising thing about these Gujarat elections is that people are so surprised at the Prime Minister’s rhetoric. Narendra Modi has eschewed all talk of development, and has played to the worst impulses of the Gujarati people. His main tool is Hindu-Muslim polarisation, which is reflected in the language he uses for his opponents. The Congress has a “Mughlai” mentality, they are ushering in an “Aurangzeb Raj”, and their top leaders are conspiring with Pakistan to make sure Mr. Modi loses. A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson has also launched a scathing attack on Congress president-elect Rahul Gandhi. None of this is new.

Mr. Modi’s rhetoric in the heat of campaigning has always come from below. From his references to “Mian Musharraf” over a decade ago to the “kabristan-shamshaan” comments of the recent elections in Uttar Pradesh, it has been clear that the otherness of Muslims is central to the BJP playbook. Hate drives more people to the polling booth than warm, fuzzy feelings of pluralism. But, the question is, are the Congress leaders really conspiring with Pakistan to make sure the BJP lose?

Answer: It doesn’t matter.

No care for truth

In 1986, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote an essay named “On Bullshit”, which was published as a book in 2005 and became a surprise bestseller. The book attempts to arrive at “a theoretical understanding of bullshit”. The key difference between a liar and a , ‘bullshitter’, Frankfurt tells us, is that the liar knows the truth and aims to deceive. The ‘bullshitter’, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth. He is “neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false,” in Frankfurt’s words. “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.”

The ‘bullshitter’ is wise, for he has cottoned on to an important truth that has become more and more glaring in these modern times: that facts don’t matter. And to understand why, I ask you to go back with me in time to another seminal book, this one published in 1922.

The first chapter of “Public Opinion”, by the American journalist, Walter Lippmann, is titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”. In it, Lippmann makes the point that all of us have a version of the world inside our heads that resembles, but is not identical to, the world as it is. “The real environment,” he writes, “is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.”

We construct a version of the world in our heads, and feed that version, for modifying it too much will require too much effort. If facts conflict with it, we ignore those facts, and accept only those that conform to our worldview. (Cognitive psychologists call this the “Confirmation Bias”.)

Lippmann sees this as a challenge for democracy, for how are we to elect our leaders if we cannot comprehend the impact they will have on the world?

Fragmented media

I would argue that this is a far greater problem today than it was in Lippmann’s time. Back then, and until a couple of decades ago, there was a broad consensus on the truth. There were gatekeepers to information and knowledge. Even accounting for biases, the mainstream media agreed on some basic facts. That has changed. The media is fragmented, there are no barriers to entry, and the mainstream media no longer has a monopoly of the dissemination of information. This is a good thing, with one worrying side effect: whatever beliefs or impulses we might have — the earth is flat, the Jews carried out 9/11, India is a Hindu nation — we can find plenty of “evidence” for it online, and connect with like-minded people. Finding others who share our beliefs makes us more strident, and soon we form multiple echo chambers that become more and more extreme. Polarisation increases. The space in the middle disappears. And the world inside our heads, shared by so many other, becomes impervious to facts.

This also means that impulses we would otherwise not express in polite society find validation, and a voice. Here’s another book you should read: in 1997, the sociologist, Timur Kuran, wrote “Private Truths, Public Lies” in which he coined the term “Preference Falsification”. There are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social approbation. But as soon as we realise that others share our views, we are emboldened to express ourselves. This leads to a “Preference Cascade”: Kuran gives the example of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but an equally apt modern illustration is the rise of right-wing populists everywhere. I believe — and I apologise if this is too depressing to contemplate — that the majority of us are bigots, misogynists, racists, and tribal in our thinking. We have always been this way, but because liberal elites ran the media, and a liberal consensus seemed to prevail, we did not express these feelings. Social media showed us that we were not alone, and gave us the courage to express ourselves.

That’s where Donald Trump comes from. That’s where Mr. Modi comes from. Our masses vote for these fine gentlemen not in spite of their bigotry and misogyny, but because of it. Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi provide them a narrative that feeds the world inside their heads. Mexicans are rapists, foreigners are bad, Muslims are stealing our girls, gaumutra cures cancer — and so on. The truth is irrelevant. Facts. Don’t. Matter.

Think about the implication of this. This means that the men and women who wrote the Constitution were an out-of-touch elite, and the values they embedded in it were not shared by most of the nation. (As a libertarian, I think the Constitution was deeply flawed because it did not do enough to protect individual rights, but our society’s consensus would probably be that it did too much.) The “Idea of India” that these elites spoke of was never India’s Idea of India. These “liberal” values were imposed on an unwilling nation — and is such imposition, ironically, not deeply illiberal itself? This is what I call The Liberal Paradox.

All the ugliness in our politics today is the ugliness of the human condition. This is how we are. This is not a perversion of democracy but an expression of it. Those of us who are saddened by it — the liberal elites, libertarians like me — have to stop feeling entitled, and get down to work. The alt-right guru Andrew Breitbart once said something I never get tired of quoting: “Politics is downstream from Culture.” A political victory will now not come until there is a social revolution. Where will it begin?

From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over

Andre Spicer in The Guardian

In early 1984, executives at the telephone company Pacific Bell made a fateful decision. For decades, the company had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on telephone services in California, but now it was facing a problem. The industry was about to be deregulated, and Pacific Bell would soon be facing tough competition.

The management team responded by doing all the things managers usually do: restructuring, downsizing, rebranding. But for the company executives, this wasn’t enough. They worried that Pacific Bell didn’t have the right culture, that employees did not understand “the profit concept” and were not sufficiently entrepreneurial. If they were to compete in this new world, it was not just their balance sheet that needed an overhaul, the executives decided. Their 23,000 employees needed to be overhauled as well.

The company turned to a well-known organisational development specialist, Charles Krone, who set about designing a management-training programme to transform the way people thought, talked and behaved. The programme was based on the ideas of the 20th-century Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. According to Gurdjieff, most of us spend our days mired in “waking sleep”, and it is only by shedding ingrained habits of thinking that we can liberate our inner potential. Gurdjieff’s mystical ideas originally appealed to members of the modernist avant garde, such as the writer Katherine Mansfield and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. More than 60 years later, senior executives at Pacific Bell were likewise seduced by Gurdjieff’s ideas. The company planned to spend $147m (£111m) putting their employees through the new training programme, which came to be known as Kroning.

Over the course of 10 two-day sessions, staff were instructed in new concepts, such as “the law of three” (a “thinking framework that helps us identify the quality of mental energy we have”), and discovered the importance of “alignment”, “intentionality” and “end-state visions”. This new vocabulary was designed to awake employees from their bureaucratic doze and open their eyes to a new higher-level consciousness. And some did indeed feel like their ability to get things done had improved.

But there were some unfortunate side-effects of this heightened corporate consciousness. First, according to one former middle manager, it was virtually impossible for anyone outside the company to understand this new language the employees were speaking. Second, the manager said, the new language “led to a lot more meetings” and the sheer amount of time wasted nurturing their newfound states of higher consciousness meant that “everything took twice as long”. “If the energy that had been put into Kroning had been put to the business at hand, we all would have gotten a lot more done,” said the manager.

Although Kroning was packaged in the new-age language of psychic liberation, it was backed by all the threats of an authoritarian corporation. Many employees felt they were under undue pressure to buy into Kroning. For instance, one manager was summoned to her superior’s office after a team member walked out of a Kroning session. She was asked to “force out or retire” the rebellious employee.

Some Pacific Bell employees wrote to their congressmen about Kroning. Newspapers ran damning stories with headlines such as “Phone company dabbles in mysticism”. The Californian utility regulator launched a public inquiry, and eventually closed the training course, but not before $40m dollars had been spent.

During this period, a young computer programmer at Pacific Bell was spending his spare time drawing a cartoon that mercilessly mocked the management-speak that had invaded his workplace. The cartoon featured a hapless office drone, his disaffected colleagues, his evil boss and an even more evil management consultant. It was a hit, and the comic strip was syndicated in newspapers across the world. The programmer’s name was Scott Adams, and the series he created was Dilbert. You can still find these images pinned up in thousands of office cubicles around the world today.

Although Kroning may have been killed off, Kronese has lived on. The indecipherable management-speak of which Charles Krone was an early proponent seems to have infected the entire world. These days, Krone’s gobbledygook seems relatively benign compared to much of the vacuous language circulating in the emails and meeting rooms of corporations, government agencies and NGOs. Words like “intentionality” sound quite sensible when compared to “ideation”, “imagineering”, and “inboxing” – the sort of management-speak used to talk about everything from educating children to running nuclear power plants. This language has become a kind of organisational lingua franca, used by middle managers in the same way that freemasons use secret handshakes – to indicate their membership and status. It echoes across the cubicled landscape. It seems to be everywhere, and refer to anything, and nothing.

It hasn’t always been this way. A certain amount of empty talk is unavoidable when humans gather together in large groups, but the kind of bullshit through which we all have to wade every day is a remarkably recent creation. To understand why, we have to look at how management fashions have changed over the past century or so.

In the late 18th century, firms were owned and operated by businesspeople who tended to rely on tradition and instinct to manage their employees. Over the next century, as factories became more common, a new figure appeared: the manager. This new class of boss faced a big problem, albeit one familiar to many people who occupy new positions: they were not taken seriously. To gain respect, managers assumed the trappings of established professions such as doctors and lawyers. They were particularly keen to be seen as a new kind of engineer, so they appropriated the stopwatches and rulers used by them. In the process, they created the first major workplace fashion: scientific management.

Charlie Chaplin ‘satirising the cult of scientific management’ in 1936 film Modern Times. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

Firms started recruiting efficiency experts to conduct time-and-motion studies. After recording every single movement of a worker in minute detail, the time-and-motion expert would rearrange the worker’s performance of tasks into a more efficient order. Their aim was to make the worker into a well-functioning machine, doing each part of the job in the most efficient way. Scientific management was not limited to the workplaces of the capitalist west – Stalin pushed for similar techniques to be imposed in factories throughout the Soviet Union.

Workers found the new techniques alien, and a backlash inevitably followed. Charlie Chaplin famously satirised the cult of scientific management in his 1936 film Modern Times, which depicts a factory worker who is slowly driven mad by the pressures of life on the production line.

As scientific management became increasingly unpopular, executives began casting around for alternatives. They found inspiration in a famous series of experiments conducted by psychologists in the 1920s at the Hawthorne Works, a factory complex in Illinois where tens of thousands of workers were employed by Western Electric to make telephone equipment. A team of researchers from Harvard had initially set out to discover whether changes in environment, such as adjusting the lighting or temperature, could influence how much workers produced each day.

To their surprise, the researchers found that no matter how light or dark the workplace was, employees continued to work hard. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was the amount of attention that workers got from the experimenters. This insight led one of the researchers, an Australian psychologist called Elton Mayo, to conclude that what he called the “human aspects” of work were far more important than “environmental” factors. While this may seem obvious, it came as news to many executives at the time.

As Mayo’s ideas caught hold, companies attempted to humanise their workplaces. They began talking about human relationships, worker motivation and group dynamics. They started conducting personality testing and running teambuilding exercises: all in the hope of nurturing good human relations in the workplace.

This newfound interest in the human side of work did not last long. During the second world war, as the US and UK military invested heavily in trying to make war more efficient, management fashions began to shift. A bright young Berkeley graduate called Robert McNamara led a US army air forces team that used statistics to plan the most cost-effective way to flatten Japan in bombing campaigns. After the war, many military leaders brought these new techniques into the corporate world. McNamara, for instance, joined the Ford Motor Company, rising quickly to become its CEO, while the mathematical procedures that he had developed during the war were enthusiastically taken up by companies to help plan the best way to deliver cheese, toothpaste and Barbie dolls to American consumers. Today these techniques are known as supply-chain management.

During the postwar years, the individual worker once again became a cog in a large, hierarchical machine. While many of the grey-suited employees at these firms savoured the security, freedom and increasing affluence that their work brought, many also complained about the deep lack of meaning in their lives. The backlash came in the late 1960s, as the youth movement railed against the conformity demanded by big corporations. Protesters sprayed slogans such as “live without dead time” and “to hell with boundaries” on to city walls around the world. They wanted to be themselves, express who they really were, and not have to obey “the Man”.

In response to this cultural change, in the 1970s, management fashions changed again. Executives began attending new-age workshops to help them “self actualise” by unlocking their hidden “human potential”. Companies instigated “encounter groups”, in which employees could explore their deeper inner emotions. Offices were redesigned to look more like university campuses than factories.

Mad Men’s liberated adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm). Photograph: Courtesy of AMC/AMC

Nowhere is this shift better captured than in the final episode of the television series Mad Men. Don Draper had been the exemplar of the organisational man, wearing a standard-issue grey suit when we met him at the beginning of the show’s first series. After suffering numerous breakdowns over the intervening years, he finds himself at the Esalen institute in northern California, the home of the human potential movement. Initially, Draper resists. But soon he is sitting in a confessional circle, sobbing as he tells his story. His personal breakthrough leads him to take up meditating and chanting, looking out over the Pacific Ocean. The result of Don Draper’s visit to Esalen isn’t just personal transformation. The final scene shows the now-liberated adman’s new creation – an iconic Coca-Cola commercial in which a multiracial group of children stand on a hilltop singing about how they would like to buy the world a Coke and drink it in perfect harmony.

After the fictional Don Draper visited Esalen, work became a place you could go to find yourself. Corporate mission statements now sounded like the revolutionary graffiti of the 1960s. The company training programme run by Charles Krone at Pacific Bell came straight from the Esalen playbook.

Since new-age ideas first permeated the workplace in the 1970s, the spin cycle of management-speak has sped up. During the 1980s, management experts went in search of fresh ideas in Japan. Management became a kind of martial art, with executives visiting “quality dojos” to earn “lean black-belts”. In their 1982 bestseller, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman – both employees of McKinsey, the huge management consultancy agency – recommended that firms foster the same commitment to the company that they found among Honda employees in Japan. The book included the story of one Japanese employee who happens upon a damaged Honda on a public street. He stops and immediately begins repairing the car. The reason? He can’t bear to see a Honda that isn’t perfect.

While McKinsey consultants were mining the wisdom of the east, the ideas of Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen started to find favour among Wall Street financiers. Jensen saw the corporation as a portfolio of assets. Even people – labelled as “human resources” – were part of this portfolio. Each company existed to create returns for shareholders, and if managers failed to do this, they should be fired. If a company didn’t generate adequate returns, it should be broken up and sold off. Every little part of the company was seen as a business. Seduced by this view, many organisations started creating “internal markets”. In the 1990s, under director general John Birt, the BBC created a system in which everything from time in a recording studio to toilet cleaning was traded on a complex internal market. The number of accountants working for the broadcaster exploded, while people who created TV and radio shows were laid off.

As companies have become increasingly ravenous for the latest management fad, they have also become less discerning. Some bizarre recent trends include equine-assisted coaching (“You can lead people, but can you lead a horse?”) and rage rooms (a room where employees can go to take out their frustrations by smashing up office furniture, computers and images of their boss).

A century of management fads has created workplaces that are full of empty words and equally empty rituals. We have to live with the consequences of this history every day. Consider a meeting I recently attended. During the course of an hour, I recorded 64 different nuggets of corporate claptrap. They included familiar favourites such as “doing a deep dive”, “reaching out”, and “thought leadership”. There were also some new ones I hadn’t heard before: people with “protected characteristics” (anyone who wasn’t a white straight guy), “the aha effect” (realising something), “getting our friends in the tent” (getting support from others).

After the meeting, I found myself wondering why otherwise smart people so easily slipped into this kind of business bullshit. How had this obfuscatory way of speaking become so successful? There are a number of familiar and credible explanations. People use management-speak to give the impression of expertise. The inherent vagueness of this language also helps us dodge tough questions. Then there is the simple fact that even if business bullshit annoys many people, in most work situations we try our hardest to be polite and avoid confrontation. So instead of causing a scene by questioning the bullshit flying around the room, I followed the example of Simon Harwood, the director of strategic governance in the BBC’s self-satirising TV sitcom W1A. I used his standard response to any idea – no matter how absurd – “hurrah”.

Still, these explanations did not seem to fully account for the conquest of bullshit. I came across one further explanation in a short article by the anthropologist David Graeber. As factories producing goods in the west have been dismantled, and their work outsourced or replaced with automation, large parts of western economies have been left with little to do. In the 1970s, some sociologists worried that this would lead to a world in which people would need to find new ways to fill their time. The great tragedy for many is that just the opposite seems to have happened.

Simon Harwood (Jason Watkins, centre) of W1A, the BBC’s fictional director of strategic governance. Photograph: Jack Barnes/BBC

At the very point when work seemed to be withering away, we all became obsessed with it. To be a good citizen, you need to be a productive citizen. There is only one problem, of course: there is less than ever that actually needs to be produced. As Graeber pointed out, the answer has come in the form of what he calls “bullshit jobs”. These are jobs in which people experience their work as “utterly meaningless, contributing nothing to the world”. In a YouGov poll conducted in 2015, 37% of respondents in the UK said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. But people working in bullshit jobs need to do something. And that something is usually the production, distribution and consumption of bullshit. According to a 2014 survey by the polling agency Harris, the average US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings. Many employees have extended their working day so they can stay late to do their “real work”.

One thing continued to puzzle me: why was it that so many people were paid to do this kind of empty work. One reason that David Graeber gives, in his book The Utopia of Rules, is rampant bureaucracy: there are more forms to be filled in, procedures to be followed and standards to be complied with than ever. Today, bureaucracy comes cloaked in the language of change. Organisations are full of people whose job is to create change for no real reason.

Manufacturing hollow change requires a constant supply of new management fads and fashions. Fortunately, there is a massive industry of business bullshit merchants who are quite happy to supply it. For each new change, new bullshit is needed. Looking back over the list of business bullshit I had noted down during the meeting, I realised that much of it was directly related to empty new bureaucratic initiatives, which were seen as terribly urgent, but would probably be forgotten about in a few years’ time.

One of the corrosive effects of business bullshit can be seen in the statistic that 43% of all teachers in England are considering quitting in the next five years. The most frequently cited reasons are increasingly heavy workloads caused by excessive administration, and a lack of time and space to devote to educating students. A remarkably similar picture appears if you look at the healthcare sector: in the UK, 81% of senior doctors say they are considering retiring from their job early; 57% of GPs are considering leaving the profession; 66% of nurses say they would quit if they could. In each case, the most frequently cited reason is stress caused by increasing managerial demands, and lack of time to do their job properly.

It is not just employees who feel overwhelmed. During the 1980s, when Kroning was in full swing, empty management-speak was confined to the beige meeting rooms of large corporations. Now, it has seeped into every aspect of life. Politicians use business balderdash to avoid grappling with important issues. The machinery of state has also come down with the word-virus. The NHS is crawling with “quality sensei”, “lean ninjas”, and “blue-sky thinkers”. Even schools are flooded with the latest business buzzwords like “grit”, “flipped learning” and “mastery”. Naturally, the kids are learning fast. One teacher recalled how a seven-year-old described her day at school: “Well, when we get to class, we get out our books and start on our non-negotiables.”

In the introduction to his 2015 book, Trust Me, PR Is Dead, the former PR executive Robert Phillips tells a fascinating story. One day he was called up by the CEO of a global corporation. The CEO was worried. A factory which was part of his firm’s supply chain had caught fire and 100 women had burned to death. “My chairman’s been giving me grief,” said the CEO. “He thinks we’re failing to get our message across. We are not emphasising our CSR [corporate social responsibility] credentials well enough.” Phillips responded: “While 100 women’s bodies are still smouldering?” The CEO was “struggling to contain both incredulity and temper”. “I know,” he said. “Please help.” Phillips responded: “You start with actions, not words.”

In many ways, this one interaction tells us how bullshit is used in corporate life. Individual executives facing a problem know that turning to bullshit is probably not the best idea. However, they feel compelled. The problem is that such compulsions often cloud people’s best judgements. They start to think empty words will trump reasonable reflection and considered action. Sadly, in many contexts, empty words win out.

If we hope to improve organisational life – and the wider impact that organisations have on our society – then a good place to start is by reducing the amount of bullshit our organisations produce. Business bullshit allows us to blather on without saying anything. It empties out language and makes us less able to think clearly and soberly about the real issues. As we find our words become increasingly meaningless, we begin to feel a sense of powerlessness. We start to feel there is little we can do apart from play along, benefit from the game and have the occasional laugh.

But this does not need to be the case. Business bullshit can and should be challenged. This is a task each of us can take up by refusing to use empty management-speak. We can stop ourselves from being one more conduit in its circulation. Instead of just rolling our eyes and checking our emails, we should demand something more meaningful.

Clearly, our own individual efforts are not enough. Putting management-speak in its place is going to require a collective effort. What we need is an anti-bullshit movement. It would be made up of people from all walks of life who are dedicated to rooting out empty language. It would question management twaddle in government, in popular culture, in the private sector, in education and in our private lives.

The aim would not just be bullshit-spotting. It would also be a way of reminding people that each of our institutions has its own language and rich set of traditions which are being undermined by the spread of the empty management-speak. It would try to remind people of the power which speech and ideas can have when they are not suffocated with bullshit. By cleaning out the bullshit, it might become possible to have much better functioning organisations and institutions and richer and fulfilling lives.