Who cares if it’s true?
On republication of an infamous work by a philosopher who takes on apathy and cynicism and concludes it’s all bullshit.
Rob James
August 9, 2025 [anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resigning the Presidency, by the way]
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” With that stirring opening, Princeton philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt (1929-2023) faced one of the great challenges of our time—the prevalence of people who don’t lie so much as don’t care about truth.
On Bullshit first appeared in a scholarly journal in 1986. Forget Nvidia, bullshit has been the greatest growth stock. In fact, if you bought $1000 of bullshit in 1986, today it would be worth $137.5 trillion. (I have no idea if that is correct, but the whole point is you don’t either.)
It was published in book form in 2005 (the companion volume On Truth followed a year later) and is being republished this year. Re-reading his work forty years after inception affords ample grounds for surveying our present predicament.
Frankfurt spends a lot of time defining his term. An analytic philosopher in the mold of J.L.A. Austin, he focuses on how the concept is used. “The [bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” As a character in an Eric Ambler spy novel says, “Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.” We bullshit when our primary desire is to manipulate the opinions and attitudes of those to whom we speak. The test is whether it works on the listener. Bullshit may not be false, and may even be true—in fact, truth can be very helpful in bullshitting.
Enough generalization. Here are some examples, as in an American Law Institute Restatement:
BS1: The London Daily Telegraph (Aug. 2, 2025) relates that a billionaire’s butler read in his employer’s bestselling book that the tiles in the nursery of his mansion were personally made by Walt Disney. “Is that really true?” the butler asked, whereupon the billionaire is reported to have replied, “Who cares?”
BS2: I knew Shirley Jones was married to fellow actor Jack Cassidy. At a college dining-hall discussion of The Partridge Family TV show, I said knowingly that it wasn’t surprising that David Cassidy resembled Shirley, since she was his mother. After most diners left, my roommate told me David was born not to Shirley but to Jack’s first wife. I hadn’t intentionally lied, but I had not even thought to check (this was pre-internet and pre-smartphone) and was thus indifferent to the truth. My objective was to show others how much I knew. I was temporarily chagrined.
BS3: In 1976, a football player bragged to a circle of friends that he had received a 725 score (out of 800 maximum) on one part of the SAT test. After he left, a smartass classmate observed that SAT scores then only ended in zeroes, so he could not even possibly be telling the truth. (Yes, that smartass was me.)
Many factors are combining to produce a rich medium of agar in which the bullshit bacterium prospers. The postmodernists (building on Pontius Pilate’s “what is truth?” (John 18:38)) deny even the possibility of knowing an objective reality. We tend to see morality as a personal not doctrinal principle—if it makes no sense to be true to facts, why not instead be true to yourself, or better yet to what you can project yourself to be? With today’s distrust of media sources and eggheaded intellectuals, and everyone accessing only the news sources that cater to his or her existing views and prejudices, the risk of getting caught in bullshit has declined dramatically. Its sheer prevalence deprives the risk of getting caught of its once scandalous consequence.
We bullshit when we feel the compulsion to talk without knowing what the hell we are talking about. This occurs in public life for politicians—listen to their bloviations in any July 4 speech (especially in 2026, Lord help us). But it also occurs in private life for all of us—in social gatherings and on social media, when we sense we are expected or encouraged to opine about anything.
“Botshit” is an emergent term for the uncritical use of output of large language model (LLM) generative artificial intelligence (AI). AI is indifferent to the truth of its hallucinations, as its principal goal is to produce a good impression on the inquirer. As between AI and the user, it is far from clear which is the master and which is the servant.
Where is the knotted rope with which we can climb out of the pit of bullshit in which we are mired? Frankfurt’s works illustrate some philosophical techniques of plotting an escape route. I doubt they will work on bred-in-the-bone deceivers, but they are inspiring to those of us who are amateurs and dilettantes.
1. There are truths. There are no postmodernists in the university aeronautics and astronautics department, because people in their field die, from both lies and indifference. There may be interpretational issues at the margin but as Clemenceau said, future historians of 1914 “will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.” (Georges spoke before the 2025 Russia-Ukraine war-origin bullshit.)
2. Deep down, we love the truth. Spinoza says we are driven to be rational by love—by the passion we have to attain greater perfection. We can’t help ourselves loving truth. Lies deprive us of our connection to the world and to others. (Frankfurt leaves room for mutually understood lying between friends. I hope this applies to matters like guessing the other person’s weight, where my rule is to make an accurate and precise estimate in my head and then halve it.)
3. Truth defines and delineates our selves. This is an arcane argument. When reality doesn’t conform to our wishes, it’s clear those aspects are not part of us. The truth tells us, “Welcome to Reality City Limits.” Truth allows us to recognize ourselves as beings separate from other beings (the source of compassion, among other vices and virtues) and from the universe (the source of spiritual wonder). We as distinct persons cannot fail to take seriously factuality and reality, wherefore we cannot fail to care about truth.
A Restatement coda:
BS4: A law school classmate told of a Princeton party where he and two other good-sized fellows were standing and someone asked how tall they were. “I’m 6’7”,” said the first guy. “I’m 6’8”,” said the second guy. My classmate said, “I’m 6’6”.” It was apparent to all the partygoers that my classmate was the tallest one there. The other guys had been reporting their supposed heights for so long they would have passed a lie detector test.
That was Davison M. Douglas, the much-admired moral heart of our class and later Dean of the William & Mary Law School. He mailed me a copy of On Bullshit saying it immediately reminded him of me—not for bullshitting per se but for the careful scholarly attention it paid to an attenuated and subtle concept (see photo above). I accepted his gift and sentiment with pride and, more significantly, without pretense.