Trump and the age of bullshit: the roots of a knowledge crisis

By now the claim that Donald Trump is a liar might seem like old news. Well-known fact-checker Politifact ranked 68 per cent of Trump’s statements as veering between “mostly false” to “pants on fire,” a.k.a blatant untruths. This might make it seem like Trump is just any other politician on steroids. It is now broadly accepted that politicians often mislead or lie, which would suggest this is just a worse form of business as usual. But I want to suggest that this is not the case now. Trump is not simply a politician who lies even more than the average person in public office. He is someone who has no conception of truth or falsity whatsoever. What is worse, he has gradually convinced many of his supporters to adopt this dismissive approach to knowledge and truth. In other words Trump is heralding an age of bullshit. Truth and bullshit To think through what this new age brings, it is helpful to look a little at the literature on the subject. The classic work on the subject is professor of philosophy Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 opus On Bullshit. Frankfurt argues that there is a distinction between being a liar and telling lies, and being a bullshitter. A liar, such as former president Richard Nixon, still fundamentally accepts that there is a difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. Indeed, they spend a great deal of their time trying to conceal their falsehoods because they acknowledge that what they said doesn’t correspond to objective reality. By contrast, a bullshitter doesn’t care or doesn’t understand the difference between truth and falsehood. To them, reality is what one makes of it; or worse, what one wants it to be. When a bullshitter speaks, it is with indifference or even hostility to the whole concept that there might be a real world out there which can and will contradict their statements. Now consider Donald Trump. In the Art of the Deal, Trump acknowledged that he didn’t think that misleading people or himself was a fundamental wrong: “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.” “Truthful hyperbole” is a colorful way of saying “bullshit your way to success if you have to.” It doesn’t matter as long as you get to the top, since people want to believe in exaggerated and self-glorifying stories that make themselves feel better. That has been the philosophy guiding Trump’s presidency. When confronted by the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and had lied about it by blaming non-existent illegal voters, Trump countered it didn’t matter since many people believed him. When it became obvious that his inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s, he rejected what his eyes told him and appealed to “alternative facts.” When commentators pointed out that the U.S. imposes tariffs on all kinds of goods, he played the victim and started a trade war anyway. The list goes on. What we see here are not simply lies told by a serial liar. It is someone who is indifferent to, or incapable of recognizing, the very idea of truth. To my mind that is the most dangerous long-term legacy of Trump. He is inaugurating an age where what is real or what is false should have no bearing on policy decisions, or rectifying trade imbalances, or maintaining relations with allies. What matters is that Trump’s simultaneously self-pitying and aggrandizing spin makes his supporters feel better. He playing to their contradictory desire for greatness and feelings of being victimized by cultural and media “elites,” who bring out their facts and tables insisting Trump and his supporters are just wrong. Trump’s postmodern conservatism is winning. As his presidency carries on it becomes increasingly difficult for people to know what is real or false, or even to care about the difference. It is frightening to guess at what this aversion to reality might lead the most powerful man in the world to do. Matt McManus recently completed his PhD in socio-legal studies. He is currently teaching politics and international relations at the university of TEC de Monterrey. He can be reached at garion9@yorku.ca . The Hill Times