Identifying the Beginnings of Bullshit
I wrote the first piece as a pure thought experiment. I had no books open on the desk beside me, no podcast playing in the background. I was only trying to keep the chronology straight, one period after another, because I suspected the pattern would rise out of the order if I did not force it. I let it run from the hand stencils to the alphabet to the press to the screen, and when it was done I set it down and went to sleep.
A few days later I was listening to Jonny Tomson on the Big Think Podcast. He referenced Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit”. I had heard the title but never read it. I sat with it in the morning listening and having my coffee, and felt the sensation of reading my own diagnosis. Frankfurt was taking apart a word I love and disdain; “bullshit”. It is everywhere and I loath it. He says the liar still cares about the truth enough to hide it. The bullshitter does not even care. The bullshitter is indifferent to how things are. The timeline had shown me the same indifference, but it had shown it as a consequence of distance. When speech travels far enough from the speaker, the speaker no longer has to live with what he said. Frankfurt named the state of mind. The timeline had already shown the structure that makes the state inevitable.
Then Orwell came up in the same Podcast. Orwel was not writing about politics in the abstract. He was writing about what happens to language when it is asked to do too much, to travel too far, to cover too many people who do not share the same ground. He lists the dying metaphors, the verbal false limbs, the pretentious diction. He shows how concrete particulars dissolve into abstraction, how ready-made phrases think for you, how a mass of Latin words falls upon folks gracefully. From Orwell’s description of language in 1946, I remembered what the timeline had said about print compressing dialects into national languages, about speech losing its local anchor. Orwell was describing the debris. The timeline had described the machine that makes the debris. He wrote in 1946 that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. That stuck. The line was seventy years old and it described exactly the fork I had found between Track A, where words live or die by their immediate consequences, and Track B, where words are manufactured for strangers and manipulation.
Then in the Pod cast Jonny Thomson began walking through Bonhoeffer’s (another philosopher’s) letters from a prison cell in 1943. I listened while sitting on my couch sipping coffee, half in the world and half out of it. Bonhoeffer was watching the people he had grown up with, educated people, people from the same universities, become cogs in the Nazi machine. He called it stupidity, but he was careful. It wasn’t ignorance; it wasn’t foolishness; rather something else entirely; the surrender of critical judgment. The outsourcing of thinking itself and a willful refusal to know. The conformity that replaces truth with loyalty. I listened closer. I was standing back at the fork described in my first piece where A and B separated. Bonhoeffer was describing what happens to the human mind when it lives permanently on Track B. In Track A you cannot outsource your thinking. If you stop paying attention, the fire spreads, the child wanders, the crop fails. The consequences are immediate and they are yours. But in Track B, institutions hold the memory you once held in your own head. The government holds authority; the media holds the facts and Religion holds meaning. You are surrounded by strangers and dependent on systems you did not build. Under those conditions, outsourcing thinking is not a moral failure. It can be a relief. Bonhoeffer saw the moral catastrophe of that relief. The timeline had shown why the relief was waiting.
These three separate texts were not talking to each other. Frankfurt wrote in 1986, Orwell in 1946, Bonhoeffer in 1943. They came from philosophy, from journalism, from theology and resistance. They had never met. But they were all standing at the same fork, looking at the same thing. Frankfurt named the speech act. Orwell named the rhetorical style. Bonhoeffer named the human disposition that accepts both. And the timeline, which knew none of them, had already mapped the ground they were standing on. This was fascinating to me.
The convergence is sharpest at AI. In the first essay I wrote that AI changes the relationship between a person and the entire body of human knowledge. Now I see what that means in their light. Frankfurt warned about the speaker who does not care whether his statements are true. Orwell warned about the language that conceals meaning even from the speaker himself. Bonhoeffer warned about the mind that outsources its moral reasoning to authority or algorithm. AI automates all three at once. It can generate polished speech without concern for truth. It can supply ready-made phrases that aren’t yours. It can answer moral questions you should be reasoning through yourself. It does not begin as a liar, because a liar must know the truth to contradict it. It begins as the perfect bullshitter, indifferent from the first token to whether anything it says corresponds to reality. And it offers that indifference to everyone at scale.
I am not a philosopher. I do not have Frankfurt’s precision, Orwell’s ear, or Bonhoeffer’s courage. What I have is the chronology and endless curiousity. I followed the dates and the tools, keeping them in order, refusing to leap ahead. The philosophers arrived at the same intersection by different roads. Frankfurt came through conceptual analysis, taking apart a word. Orwell came through the craft of prose, watching his tools get corrupted. Bonhoeffer came through resistance to evil, watching intelligence become complicit. I came through the basement. I traced the wiring. And the wiring led to the same room.
The timeline knew this before I did. It knew that every technology that expands the reach of communication also expands the distance between the speaker and the truth of what is spoken. It knew that Track B does not merely change what we say. It changes what we must become in order to say it. The bullshitter, the euphemist, and the conformist are not three different people. They are three adaptations to the same condition, the condition of speaking into a void and trusting the void to sort it out.
I set out to write about communication. I ended up writing about how civilization takes form, and how the form can outgrow the care that built it. As it turns out, the philosophers had already categorized a lot of it. Me, I came up from below, through the foundation, and found the floor exactly where they said it would be. Now, the question, for me is, why won’t anyone listen?
