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.

Under cover of coronavirus, the world's bad guys are wreaking havoc

The pandemic has allowed strongmen and tyrants to get away with murder and mayhem while we look the other way writes Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian 

 

‘Viktor Orbán has long sought to rule Hungary as an autocrat, but the pandemic gave him his chance, allowing him to brand anyone standing in his way as unwilling to help the leader fight a mortal threat.’ Photograph: Tamás Kovács/AFP via Getty Images


Under the cover of coronavirus, all kinds of wickedness are happening. Where you and I see a global health crisis, the world’s leading authoritarians, fearmongers and populist strongmen have spotted an opportunity – and they are seizing it.

Of course, neither left nor right has a monopoly on the truism that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. Plenty of progressives share that conviction, firm that the pandemic offers a rare chance to reset the way we organise our unequal societies, our clogged cities, our warped relationship to the natural world. But there are others – and they tend to be in power – who see this opening very differently. For them, the virus suddenly makes possible action that in normal times would exact a heavy cost. Now they can strike while the world looks the other way.

For some, Covid-19 itself is the weapon of choice. Witness the emerging evidence that Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and Xi Jinping in Beijing are allowing the disease to wreak havoc among those groups whom the rulers have deemed to be unpersons, their lives unworthy of basic protection. Assad is deliberately leaving Syrians in opposition-held areas more vulnerable to the pandemic, according to Will Todman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. As he puts it: “Covid-19 has provided Assad a new opportunity to instrumentalize suffering.”

Meanwhile, China continues to hold 1 million Uighur Muslims in internment camps, where they contend now not only with inhuman conditions but also a coronavirus outbreak. Those camps are cramped, lack adequate sanitation and have poor medical facilities: the virus couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground. What’s more, Uighur Muslims are reportedly being forced to work as labourers, filling in for non-Muslims who are allowed to stay home and protect themselves. That, according to one observer, “is reflective of how the Republic of China views [Uighur Muslims] as nothing but disposable commodities”.

Elsewhere, the pandemic has allowed would-be dictators an excuse to seize yet more power. Enter Viktor Orbán of Hungary, whose response to coronavirus was immediate: he persuaded his pliant parliament to grant him the right to rule by decree. Orbán said he needed emergency powers to fight the dreaded disease, but there is no time limit on them; they will remain his even once the threat has passed. They include the power to jail those who “spread false information”. Naturally, that’s already led to a crackdown on individuals guilty of nothing more than posting criticism of the government on Facebook. Orbán has long sought to rule Hungary as an autocrat, but the pandemic gave him his chance, allowing him to brand anyone standing in his way as unwilling to help the leader fight a mortal threat.

Xi has not missed that same trick, using coronavirus to intensify his imposition of China’s Orwellian “social credit” system, whereby citizens are tracked, monitored and rated for their compliance. Now that system can include health and, thanks to the virus, much of the public ambivalence that previously existed towards it is likely to melt away. After all, runs the logic, good citizens are surely obliged to give up even more of their autonomy if it helps save lives.

For many of the world’s strongmen, though, coronavirus doesn’t even need to be an excuse. Its chief value is the global distraction it has created, allowing unprincipled rulers to make mischief when natural critics at home and abroad are preoccupied with the urgent business of life and death.

Donald Trump gets plenty of criticism for his botched handling of the virus, but while everyone is staring at the mayhem he’s creating with one hand, the other is free to commit acts of vandalism that go all but undetected. This week the Guardian reported how the pandemic has not slowed the Trump administration’s steady and deliberate erosion of environmental protections. During the lockdown, Trump has eased fuel-efficiency standards for new cars, frozen rules for soot air pollution, continued to lease public property to oil and gas companies, and advanced a proposal on mercury pollution from power plants that could make that easier too. Oh, and he’s also relaxed reporting rules for polluters.
Trump’s Brazilian mini-me, Jair Bolsonaro, has outstripped his mentor. Not content with mere changes to the rulebook, he’s pushed aside the expert environmental agencies and sent in the military to “protect” the Amazon rainforest. I say “protect” because, as NBC News reported this week, satellite imagery shows “deforestation of the Amazon has soared under cover of the coronavirus”. Destruction in April was up by 64% from the same month a year ago. The images reveal an area of land equivalent to 448 football fields, stripped bare of trees – this in the place that serves as the lungs of the earth. If the world were not consumed with fighting coronavirus, there would have been an outcry. Instead, and in our distraction, those trees have fallen without making a sound.

Another Trump admirer, India’s Narendra Modi, has seen the same opportunity identified by his fellow ultra-nationalists. Indian police have been using the lockdown to crack down on Muslim citizens and their leaders “indiscriminately”, according to activists. Those arrested or detained struggle to get access to a lawyer, given the restrictions on movement. Modi calculates that majority opinion will back him, as rightist Hindu politicians brand the virus a “Muslim disease” and pro-Modi TV stations declare the nation to be facing a “corona jihad”.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu – who can claim to have been Trumpist before Trump – has been handed a political lifeline by the virus, luring part of the main opposition party into a government of national unity that will keep him in power and, he hopes, out of the dock on corruption charges. His new coalition is committed to a programme that would see Israel annex major parts of the West Bank, permanently absorbing into itself territory that should belong to a future Palestinian state, with the process starting in early July. Now, the smart money suggests we should be cautious: that it suits Netanyahu to promise/threaten annexation more than it does for him to actually do it. Even so, in normal times the mere prospect of such an indefensible move would represent an epochal shift, high on the global diplomatic agenda. In these abnormal times, it barely makes the news.

Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, argues that many of the global bad guys are, in fact, “demonstrating their weakness rather than strength” – that they are all too aware that if they fail to keep their citizens alive, their authority will be shot. He notes Vladimir Putin’s forced postponement of the referendum that would have kept him in power in Russia at least until 2036. When that vote eventually comes, says Niblett, Putin will go into it diminished by his failure to smother the virus.

Still, for now, the pandemic has been a boon to the world’s authoritarians, tyrants and bigots. It has given them what they crave most: fear and the cover of darkness.

150 years of data proves it: Strongmen are bad for the economy

By Annalisa Merelli in QZ.com

As governments around the world gravitate toward rightwing populist and authoritarian leaders, many have pointed to the 2008 global recession and the economic hardship that followed as the reason.

Take America, for instance: According to many analysts, the rise of US president Donald Trump has to be seen in relation to the great recession, and was aided by a frustrated working and middle class that saw in his election the promise of new economic wellbeing.

This repeats a historical pattern: When facing dire straits, populations tend to delegate responsibility and look for a leader who can (or at least promise to) get them back to better times.

It’s a bad idea, however, and not just for democracy: It’s terrible for the economy, too.

A study by researchers of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Victoria University in Melbourne published in Leadership Quarterly looked at economic data in relation to the performances of authoritarian leaders versus democratic governments.

The authors analyzed the governments of 133 countries between 1858 to 2010, and found that autocrats were either damaging or inconsequential for the economy of their countries. Besides showing the poor economic outcomes of oppressive regimes, the study calls into question the idea of “benevolent dictators”—for instance Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew or Rwanda’s Paul Kagame—who are commonly believed to be good for the economy.

“Autocrats with positive effects are found at best as frequently as predicted by chance, while autocrats with negative effects are found in abundance,” wrote Stephanie Rizio and Ahmed Skali, the authors of the paper. Strongmen mostly leave a county’s economy worse than they found it, or simply “ride the wave” of an economic growth that would have happened regardless of their rule.

The researchers used data from the Archigos dataset of leaders, which lists both the leaders of countries and the person with the most power in a country at any given time. The official head of state might sometimes be no more than a figurehead, while someone else holds the actual power. For instance, the paper notes that Septimus Rameau was the de-facto ruler of Haiti between 1874 and 1876, while his uncle Michel Domingue was the official leader; or Ziaur Rahman, who was actually in charge of Bangladesh between 1975 and 1977, while Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem was the country’s official leader.

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The data was then cross-referenced with the Polity IV dataset, which establishes the kind of political government in place for 185 countries every year, defining whether the country is a democracy or an autocracy. For each year, countries are scored from 1 to 10. Scores below 6 indicate an autocratic regime, while democracies stand above six.

To analyze the economic outcome of a strongman’s rule, the researches looked at per capita GDP. The researchers then compared economic growth in countries with autocratic regimes to economic growth in democracies, looking at whether the impact of the autocrats (and the democratic leaders) was relevant—or if the results were ascribable simply to chance.

In the large majority of cases, countries led by autocrats—whether benevolent or otherwise—were found to have worse economic outcomes in terms of growth than democracies. And not just in the short term: The researchers also looked at delayed growth, testing the hypothesis that reforms put in place by a dictator might take time to bear fruit. They found no demonstrable growth to connect with autocratic rule.

Growth isn’t the only economic metric on which autocrats failed to deliver. They also fell short on employment, health and education spending, and government debt.

But—in what is possibly good news for Trump, who is facing the threat of another recession—while it seems people are inclined to vote a strongman into power to fix their economic woes, they aren’t as quick to get rid of him if the economy doesn’t improve. The paper found that while authoritarians do pay for their bad economic performances, it takes much longer for them to lose popular support and be deposed from power than they do in a democracy under comparable economic circumstances.

Skali told Quartz the research didn’t look into the relation between economic hardship and the rise of autocracies, and why distressed populations gravitate towards strongmen. But he did share a speculation: In times of hardship, primates tend to accept, and follow, the authority of an alpha male.