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 formal resignation of 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. Studies show that if you had bought $1000 of bullshit common 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 the Twentieth Anniversary edition was issued last week. Re-reading his work forty years after inception affords ample grounds for surveying our present predicament. (These are, needless to say but I say anyway, all my personal views and not those of any person or organization with which I am associated.)
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 be false, may not be false, and may even be true—in fact, bits of verifiable truth can be super helpful in bullshitrage, while bits of verifiable falsehood can impede it.
Enough generalization. Here are some examples, as in an American Law Institute Restatement:
BS1: The London Daily Telegraph (Aug. 2, 2025) relates a 2016 interview of a billionaire’s butler who 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 hey, 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 bullshitdom has declined dramatically. Its sheer prevalence deprives actually getting caught of a 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 on anything.
“Botshit” according to the Harvard Business Review is an emergent term for the uncritical adoption of the output of large language model (LLM) generative artificial intelligence (AI). AI is indifferent to the truth of its hallucinations, as its principal effect (goal?) seems to be making 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 clamber out of the pit of muck in which we are mired? Frankfurt’s companion volume On Truth illustrates 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 in those fields people can die, whether from lies or from 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 bullshittery.)
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.
Frankfurt leaves room for mutually understood lying between friends. (Pascal said that if people knew what others really said about them, there wouldn’t be four friends left on the planet.) 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 one is an arcane and elevated argument. When reality doesn’t conform to our wishes, it’s pretty clear those aspects are distinct from us. The truth tells us, “Welcome to Reality City Limits.” Truth lets us perceive ourselves as beings separate from other beings (the source of compassion, among other virtues and vices) and from the universe (the source of spiritual wonder). We as individual persons cannot fail to take seriously “factuality” and “reality,” wherefore Frankfurt concludes 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 6’7 1/2”,” 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. Dave 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.