My Dear Students | Notes on authenticity and truth in a culture of misinformation

Today I want to talk about an issue that I have been concerned about for some time. It’s about, well, bulls**t.

In my youth, this term wasn’t considered proper in polite company but today its usage is widespread. In philosophical circles, there was even a famous article written about its meaning by Professor Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher.

I will refer to this article later but perhaps I should begin with a few examples. Now and then I go to a place called Sankey Tank in Bangalore for my morning walks. There I come across many groups of people whose main intention is not exercise but to conduct ‘bull sessions’.

The sessions are on the topics of the day: the Ukraine War, the role of drugs in Bollywood, the selection of the Indian cricket team, or indeed the disfiguring of Sankey Tank itself by civic authorities. The discussions are good humoured but vigorous.

The debating friends are not short of opinions and solutions and these are defended rigorously. But I don’t think any of them really believe wholeheartedly in their prescriptions. That these people are really ‘shooting the bull’ has never bothered me. One of the reasons I look forward to my Sankey Tank walks is to hear them talk among themselves. They are friendly. They have a social life. They are likeable.

But here’s what bothered me about a somewhat similar set of events. A few days ago, I was listening to a radio channel. The RJ was speaking of her friend’s problems with indigestion and explained how her friend’s situation improved when she took some medicines. This was bulls**t of course. There was no such friend although there was such a remedy, for which this story was a disguised advertisement. I started thinking why I was so bothered by the radio channel, when I was not bothered by the Sankey Tank friends. Was there a difference between bull and bulls**t?

As it so happens, the article on bulls**t by Harry Frankfurt explains the difference. When it comes to bull sessions, both the purveyors and the consumers of bull know that people are just testing out their favourite theories, and that the utterances are not meant to be taken as the truth. But when a person bulls**ts, he pretends to convey the truth while being indifferent about the truth. He just wants to influence or impress other people to achieve his own ends.

This difference between bull and bulls**t makes all the difference. People who bulls**t are dangerous because they can spread misinformation while not intending deliberately to do so. Liars intend to mislead us intentionally; bulls**tters are indifferent about the truth value of their statements, as long as the statements enable them to create an image or impression. The RJ just wanted to create a good impression about the product she was selling surreptitiously; she and her employers were indifferent about the truth of the proposition that the product when ingested cures indigestion.

It’s not easy to bulls**t. It takes a lot of talent to say something spurious but believable. But it can do a lot of harm. It can cause others to think the bulls**tter is saying the truth and is someone who ought to be believed. Earlier, the models for bulls**tters were politicians but today if you look around you, bulls**ters are everywhere. They are in our television studios, in our classrooms, in our families and in our neighbourhoods. There is no outrage over bulls**tting. Our society has learnt to accept bulls**tters. But this acceptance has come at a cost. We have lost the ability to trust people at their word.

Please don’t take me to be discouraging bull sessions where you try out your latest thoughts on each other. Just don’t take yourself and others very seriously in these sessions. Those Sankey Tank friends are discussing Ukraine for their own mental well being and it’s better for the rest of the world if others don’t take them seriously. In fact it is when people take bull sessions seriously that friendships are jeopardised.

But try to move away from a culture of bullshitting. You are still young and impressionable. Please don’t come under the impression that in your academic and professional life, you can get away over the long term by being inauthentic. It might help over the short term, but eventually you will be found out. In the near future, many of our verbal and written communication will be AI generated and as we know from ChatGPT, AI is capable of bullshitting on an industrial scale. In the future, bullshitting will be the norm and authenticity will be at a premium. You must resist the temptation to treat the truth with indifference.