On the Need to Take People (Including Politicians) Seriously, Not Literally

Facts matter. And I have complained many times (Applying Principles, pp. 293-95, 307-15) about the lack of concern for facts.

But what if they don’t matter? What if the people you love and work with, or the ones you admire (or don’t admire) from a distance, say, politicians, sling inaccuracies around with seeming abandon? For example, inaccuracies from ignorance, faulty and selective memory, sins of omission, exaggeration and serial embellishment, bullshit, or even fabrication?

I’ve sat at many a lunch and dinner, both personal and professional, in which hyperbole was the main course, and in many academic meetings consisting mainly of selective memory and BS.

When this happens, should we stomp our feet and cry boohoo, as the press today is doing in relation to our current president?

The press, including the anchor of a network sympathetic to the current president, continues to rail on and on about the many less than factual statements coming out of the White House.

As if other presidents have not played fast and loose with the facts! Or spent twenty-plus minutes BS’ing an answer to a simple question. Other presidents have been slicker—more polished—than the current one, as a Wall Street Journal column pointed out recently. The problem is that the press takes our current president literally, but not seriously.*

This is a mistake in human relationships—for all of us, not just the press.

As a young man, straight out of undergraduate school, I worked for a service firm in midtown Manhattan. Our task was to process certain jobs and deliver the results to customers. When clients complained about not receiving their jobs, a familiar phrase of the production manager was, “Tell ‘em it’s on the truck,” when it wasn’t. I did not whine to the manager and say, “You’re a bad person.” I did lie a couple of times, but quickly learned not to promise what I could not deliver and developed a number of techniques for keeping my clients happy.

One of those techniques was to translate misstatements of the people I worked with—the production manager was not the only one expert at misrepresenting facts—and consequently to learn how to enjoy their company. They were all respectable people who had their own psychologies. Getting to know them was key to understanding them and thereby to working with them.

Why can’t the press do the same with our current president? And tame their intemperate headlines and articles?

Children who stomp their feet and throw tantrums are insecure because they do not feel loved. The press’s personal identity today is simultaneously being attacked and ignored. They are not feeling the love!

They are not feeling the love because the press, especially those who represent the bi-coastal elites, have set themselves up—on a pedestal—as intellectual guardians of the free society.

As F. A. Hayek wrote in 1949, the press (along with other self-appointed intellectuals) filter and disseminate fundamental ideas to the populace. Their filter requires that the selected ideas “fit into [their] general conceptions, [their] picture of the world which [they regard] as modern or advanced.” The “modern and advanced” ideas today are those of the Marxist Progressive Left. Anything else is assumed to be old-fashioned, backwards, and anathema to their version of a free society.**

The pedestal that the press has been sitting on for the past many years is now crumbling, if not being knocked from under them. This, they cannot tolerate.

Our current president does not give a hoot about the political correctness mantra that the press promotes as gospel. That the press does not, or deliberately chooses not to, acknowledge the ideas on which they base their screeds is enough alone to call them biased.

Telling the press that they are biased and that they sometimes fail in their factual inquiries and publish what appears to be fabricated news is, for them, beyond the pale. For them, this is tantamount to threatening censorship and those who criticize them are assumed to be actual or wannabe dictators.

Tweaking another person’s defense value or defense mechanism, such as telling a compulsive talker “you’re a big mouth,” is insulting and is experienced by the talker as a considerable threat—literally to their pseudo-self-esteem, not actually or seriously to their physical well-being.

Tweaking the press’s pretentious defense value that views themselves as guardians of the free society is what is going on now. Literally, they feel a considerable threat—to their pseudo-self-esteem, not actually or seriously to press freedom.

Add to this that it is difficult to take the press’s whines seriously, because literally what they write (the Marxist Progressivism of the Left) promotes destruction of the free society. They certainly are not promoting the genuine protection of individual rights or anything resembling an authentic (classical) liberalism.

For the press to take our current president and the sense of life of his supporters seriously, they would have to reexamine their own unexamined premises. For as badly mixed as are our current president’s ideas and those of his supporters, and despite what either of them might literally say, their sense of life captures the essence of what once did make America great: namely, being left alone, that is, free, to pursue their own values through hard work and achievement, followed by appropriately earned rewards for the effort.

If the press wants to be taken seriously as defenders of the free society, which means they want to convince the public that they know how to present alternative viewpoints, they should take a serious look at the fundamental ideas on which laissez-faire capitalism is based.

Yes, it would be nice to live in a perfect world in which everyone shoots straight and factually. However, we don’t live in such a world and free will and psychology preclude it from ever happening. Therefore, we must learn to cope with the imperfections that confront us.

Distinguishing the serious from the literal would be a good first step. This means looking for what people are really saying, deep down, and what they really mean.

Focusing only on the literal can create fantasy relationships.


* The expression, referring to our current president, goes back at least to this article in The Atlantic.

** Hayek’s argument is summarized here. I say “Marxist Progressive Left” to distinguish this brand of Leftism from the earlier Bismarckian type of the 1890s to about 1930. See Thomas C. Leonard’s extensively documented book on the early Progressives and my comment on the book (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).

Why Don’t Facts Matter?

In several previous comments I have in one way or another attempted to answer the question that titles this post.

My first encounter with the issue occurred when I complained to a colleague about other associates whose selective memories seemed beyond the pale, because I had assumed it was impossible for the latter to have forgotten what was said in a meeting not too long before the immediate incident.

The colleague gave me a dead serious glare and said, “Facts don’t matter!” I briefly responded with an embarrassed “you can’t be serious” chuckle, but soon realized that the glare was not going away.

Naiveté aside—I am aware that there are dishonest people in the world—I nonetheless have a hard time understanding those who seem to be honest, yet clearly are not sticking to the facts.

In 2006 I wrote an academic paper about Harry Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshit, in which Frankfurt distinguishes liars from BS’ers. Liars care about facts in order to say the opposite. BS’ers, however, don’t care because their goal is to impress and sway whether or not what they are saying is true. Are BS’ers dishonest?*


In my paper I argue that there are a couple of continua operating here, the relevant one ranging from the deliberately dishonest to sloppy thinkers who are unware of their premises or where the premises came from.

This may somewhat account for those who seem to be decent people but at the same time are habitual hyperbolizers and habitually selective rememberers. But where do these habits come from?

In a 2008 blog post I make the not too original point that we learn—that is, pick up habits—from our parents, teachers, and significant others, which means our significant others learned from their significant others who learned from theirs, etc. In the absence of an infinite regress, however, someone somewhere along the line had to have chosen to embellish his or her statements and selectively ignore certain facts. Why?

Free will, of course, dictates that anyone in the present, or past, can choose to ignore facts. Is that it? Isn’t there more to the sloppy thinking that many seem to exhibit?

Consider the following cases.

1. Philosopher Sidney Hook describes two instances from his travels in the mid-twentieth century (Out of Step, pp. 585-88). In Japan, Hook relates, he was confronted by his academic hosts and the Japanese press with nothing but complaints about the US bombing of Hiroshima, yet not a single word was said about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In India, the conversation centered on US race discrimination—without mention of India’s caste system. Near the end of his stay, Hook invited an academic host to dine with him at his hotel, but the host, after several evasions, finally admitted that he could not accept—because the waiters at the hotel were Muslim and the host was Brahmin.

Hook does not provide an explanation for the stark logical disconnects in either instance, other than to imply differences between Eastern and Western cultures.

My conclusion would have to specify the lack of Aristotelian logic in the East and its presence in the West. Most westerners, however precariously they may do so, cling to the notions of non-contradiction and non-fallacious thinking, which means they maintain some respect for facts that apparently the educated in the East do not.

Respect for logic means respect for facts.

2. Anthony Watts, former television meteorologist and current climate change doubter (to use the Associated Press’s preferred moniker for global warming skeptics), blogs on wattsupwiththat.com, a site that enjoys three to four million page views per month. Several highly qualified guest climatologists also regularly post their thorough, technical analyses of “climate change” issues.

Last June, Watts reported the details of a meeting he had with journalist, ardent environmentalist, and staunch global warming supporter Bill McKibben. Instead of fireworks and hostility between the two, Watts described their discussion as civil and friendly. They discussed their respective agreement and disagreement on numerous climate and environmental issues.

Concluding his report, Watts said, apparently to challenge strong opinions within the denier community, “I don’t think Bill McKibben is an idiot.” He then added, “But I do think he perceives things more on a feeling or emotional level and translates that into words and actions. People that are more factual and pragmatic might see that as an unrealistic response.”

Why don’t facts matter according to the scientist Watts? Because emotion sometimes trumps facts.

3. Ayn Rand in her article “To Dream the Non-Commercial Dream” (The Ayn Rand Letter, January 1, 1973, reprinted in The Voice of Reason) emphasizes the significance of emotion trumping fact. She says this about “impassioned advocates” of altruism and collectivism:

They are not hypocrites; in their own way, they are “sincere”; they have to be. They need to believe that their work serves others, whether those others like it or not, and that the good of others is their only motivation; they do believe it—passionately, fiercely, militantly—in the sense in which a belief is distinguishable from a conviction: in the form of an emotion impervious to reality. (Emphasis in original.)

Deep down, in their psychologies, it is emotion that dictates to these “sincere” people what is true. Facts don’t matter because emotion says otherwise. Altruism and collectivism have become their entrenched beliefs.

Rand adds that this “depth”—the “deep down” part of these unexamined psychologies—can be “measured by distance from reality” and that there exists a continuum, based on the distance, that runs from “sincere” to totalitarian dictator.

Rand puts “sincere” in scare quotes, which probably means she is not entirely endorsing the term, but I still have to ask: are those on the “sincere” end of the continuum . . . sincere? And honest? Who, really, after all is a bad dude?

Rand goes so far as to acknowledge that the “butcher of the Ukraine,” Nikita Khrushchev, was compelled to believe the “truth” (my quotes) and magical ritual of dialectical materialism. He had to, she says, lest he “face something more frightening than death” (Rand’s quotes).

This comment on Khruschev takes me back to The Criminal Personality by Yochelson and Samenow. Criminals certainly are bad dudes. They lie (and BS) as a way of life and enjoy getting away with the forbidden. (“If rape were legalized today . . . I would do something else,” one offender told the researchers.)

And criminals, like Khrushchev, don’t have much deep down, that is, they are considerably deficient in self-esteem. What is there, as Rand puts it, is distant from reality. “I am a nothing, a zero,” several criminals confessed, but added that if they routinely thought that way, they would have to kill themselves. So they live by substitute thoughts, or rather rationalizations. Their accumulated mental habits have taught them to believe and say: “that guy deserved it” or “everything in the store belongs to me” or “she really wanted me.”

Khrushchev substituted the communist mantra.

So how can these bad dudes seem “sincere”? This brings me back to the liar and BS’er. The goal of the liar and BS’er is to sound good. Most criminals are con artists, which means they are consummate liars and BS’ers to make what they say sound good.

The same applies to dictators. Many have been charmers at cocktail parties. Hitler was.

So would I want to be friends with someone on the “sincere” end of Rand’s continuum?

Sidney Hook and Anthony Watts did not seem to find offensive the disagreements they had with their associates, but those associates were presumably not on the extreme end of Rand’s scale.

I would say that friendships, whether professional or personal, depend on how distant one’s contact is from reality. That is to say, on a scale of decency—by adapting Rand’s continuum—honest, fact-oriented people are at the top, scummy criminals and Khruschevs are at the bottom, but most decent people, the “sincere” ones Rand was talking about, fit into the middle to upper tiers.**

The difficulty in forming professional and personal friendships is in understanding the other person’s psychology and discovering that distance from reality.

Facts do matter.



*Frankfurt thinks BS’ers are worse than liars—and more likely to be found among the highly educated because of their facility with language.

**In Rand’s article she was talking about a retired editor of the New York Times.

Polylogism, the Right to Lie, and Serial Embellishers

The subjectivist belief that each class has its own logic, that is, that there is no universal logic that applies to all human beings, is an essential tenet of Marxism (1, 2, 3). Capitalists have their logic; proletarians have theirs. Communication between the two is not possible. Therefore, the capitalist bourgeois exploiters must be controlled and, in some cases, liquidated.

This is why, in reference to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Ayn Rand said, “What those goddamned communists wanted was the right to lie!”*

If you’re an enemy, facts don’t matter.

Today, polylogism is rampant and assumes that all kinds of groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, physical ability, etc., ad nauseam, have a unique logic that is consequently beyond rational understanding. White males in particular are typically targeted as enemies, but groups in a position of power can and do declare any other opposing group persona non grata and, as a result, conclude that they owe the other groups nothing but ad hominem attacks.

One moderate liberal, Jonathan Chait, recently acknowledged that his more radically left colleagues “borrowed” Marx’s polylogism to establish our current virulently absolutist climate of political correctness. However, Mr. Chait is mistaken. Political correctness is rooted deeply in Marxism and its proponents are the tenured radicals of the 1960’s!

This means moderate liberals, as well as conservatives—most people today, in other words—have uncritically and probably unwittingly swallowed the Marxist agenda of their professors. Have they bought into the “right to lie” part of the agenda?

Probably not, though there are plenty of “serial embellishers” in all areas of our present culture.

“Serial embellishment” is an interesting new phrase that has popped up to describe repeat BS’ers, such as the now less-than-esteemed NBC News anchor.

When facts don’t matter, fiction and fabrication become primary. The trouble with serial embellishment is that the embellishers intend listeners to take their words as true. And most listeners assume they are.

When the words turn out not to be true and the speakers are obviously not novelists or screenwriters, listeners will draw one conclusion: embellishers have adopted the right to lie.

Criminal psychologies are those that lie as a way of life. How should we classify serial embellishers?


*I am quoting from memory here, from the 1970’s. Rand was answering questions of a small group of students after a lecture in New York.

The Bureaucratic Personality: Similarities to the Criminal Mind?

The criminal personality enjoys manipulating and intimidating others. Excitement from lying and getting away with the forbidden is a way of life.

Intimidation includes verbal abuse and physical harm (robbery, assault, murder), which means bullies are potential criminals, actual when they get physical. Power over others is what the criminal  thrives on. Lack of empathy for victims and lack of conscience are nearly total.

Criminals, according to Yochelson and Samenow in their fifteen-year study The Criminal Personality, get away with substantially more crimes than they are ever arrested for—200,000 for one offender over 40 years with the only arrest sending the criminal to a mental institution, along with a “no criminal record” statement in his file.

Criminality, the authors point out, is a continuum of irresponsibility ranging from hardened psychopaths to less extreme arrestable criminals to a category they call “non-arrestable criminals,” the type of persons who on the surface look like responsible citizens but under cover of family and job lie, cheat, manipulate, and intimidate everyone they come in contact with.

Non-arrestable criminals seek the same power over others the hardened criminals do, as well as the jolts of excitement from getting away with the forbidden (in this case, getting away with what is considered unethical, rather than what is illegal).

Given this description of non-arrestable criminals, a startling question arises in my mind. Does bureaucracy provide protection for criminal personalities and therefore attract them?

Facts Don’t Matter, Or: The Art of BS

On numerous occasions in the very political world of academic bureaucracy I have been known to express dismay over less than accurate statements made by my colleagues. On almost just as many occasions one colleague and dear friend has promptly looked me straight in the eye and said, “Facts don’t matter!”

The word “politics,” when used in “academic politics” or “company politics” or the real-thing “political politics,” means maneuvering for advantage without regard for merit or ability. It means one-upping others through connections or favors to get what the politician wants. It means acquiring unearned power over others.* With merit or ability removed from the equation, it means that facts don’t matter.

Theory of the Big Mouth

It is with great trepidation that I write this post. Not ever having been one to talk a lot, I know from experience that if I dare to talk back to a talker I will be talked into the ground. Talkers do not suffer comment lightly, especially when the comment comes from quiet people. Talkers are experts at having the last word, and if they do not like what I say in this post, I am certain that they will tell me.

The theory of the big mouth has a simple premise. The world is run by people who talk a lot. The trouble is that 99.9% (well, some large percentage—I have not conducted a survey) of the talkers do not know what they are talking about. I sometimes fantasize that the world would be a better place if the talkers were to take a holiday one day a month and say nothing for twenty-four hours. Having been a shy, quiet person all my life, I have been on the butt end of many a talker comment. Also, by not talking a lot I have been able to observe much talker behavior. What follows are my comments to talkers, my turn at talking back to them.

The butt end of talker comment is the unsolicited and often rude and ill-mannered advice given to quiet people. “Speak up kid,” “bite your tongue kid,” “you're going to have to learn to speak up or you won't survive in this world,” and that gem of the reverse golden rule given to me as fatherly advice when I was a young man working in business: “you’re going have to learn to do it to others before they do it to you.” Variations on these comments go on ad nauseam. I have often wondered why it is okay for a talker to give unsolicited advice to a quiet person, but rude and ill-mannered for a quiet person to talk back to a talker, for example, by saying something like, “you’re going to have to learn not to talk so much” or “you need to stop and think before speaking.” When any attempt is made like this, the talker usually responds with an indignant “how dare you talk to me that way.” Funny, I always thought advice-giving was a two-way street.

My observations of talkers have shown that many talkers are oblivious to psychology, especially the psychology of the person they are talking to. Often they are just oblivious, unable to see or acknowledge the obvious boredom on the faces of their listeners. It is especially sad, though, to see a parent feeling embarrassed for the behavior of a shy child when, say, the child speaks an inaudible “thank you” or “goodbye” or does not speak up at all. Haranguing children in such situations will not help them become comfortable in the company of other people and encourage them to speak up; it may drive them to become quieter and more withdrawn. Addressing their fears and discomfort is the correct aid. Besides, shyness does tend to decrease with age and maturity. It did for my father, a quiet man most of his life, and today even I, in my older years, talk to strangers!

The “theory of the big mouth,” of course, is an unfriendly designation. In me it renders an image of the bigmouth bass, a fish. What I am really talking about is a variant of Glasser’s external control psychology, best captured by this quote:

The seeds of almost all our unhappiness are planted early in our lives when we begin to encounter people who have discovered not only what is right for them—but also, unfortunately, what is right for us. Armed with this discovery and following a destructive tradition that has dominated our thinking for thousands of years, these people feel obligated to try to force us to do what they know is right. (Choice Theory, p. 4)

And talkers seem to be the ones who know what is right for everyone else, especially those pesky quiet types. It is in the elementary school years when children become aware of right and wrong. As they discover what is right, they often conclude that whatever they do is not just right for themselves but also for everyone else. They fail to acknowledge, and need to be taught, the existence of options, the wide range of behavior that is not the same as theirs, but still is right. If not corrected, this premise can lead to rankism (1, 2, 3) and BS’ing, or worse.

It is not a sin (or disadvantage) to be shy. Remember the western cowboy heroes? They all spoke few words. Indeed, psychologists have found that many people, including the gregarious and famous, feel shy at some times and in some areas of their lives. The entertainer and comedian Johnny Carson several times said that he often felt shy at cocktail parties. The advantage of being a quiet type is that we can sit back and observe what is going on in the world around us and then write about it—as in a blog like this one. And I don’t think I’ve been a failure in life. So talk on you talkers. I’ll just write about you!

Faking Your Way Through Life

When I first came up with the title for this post, I thought I should google it to see if anyone had done anything similar. Sure enough. Phony!: How I Faked My Way Through Life, a confessional memoir, was just published. I have not read the book, but the publisher’s blurbs say it is the story of a young woman who lied about not having a college degree and rose to high positions in business. Degrees and diplomas do not impress me as qualifying anyone for anything, but I was taught that it is not nice to lie.

My interest in the subject is not so much why people fake reality in a big way like the author of this book, but why do they fake reality at all? Why do people misperceive the most obvious facts? Why do they exaggerate and embellish them? Why do they have selective memories? Why do they fake reality in the smallest of ways when, to an outside observer, a simple statement of truth would be so easy and anxiety-free to make?

As creatures of habit, we learn much of our behavior from others, especially by example from our parents and other admired adults. Sometimes, those lessons are not the best ones to learn. For instance, an attendant at the ticket booth of a tourist attraction, where children under six were admitted free, related this story. One parent said that his daughter was under six, but the daughter, proud of her recent birthday, shot back with an “I’m six!” Lesson learned and seed planted? Fake your way into paying events and, when generalized, fake your way through life, such as saying you have a college degree when in fact you do not. Why would the father say such a thing? Affordability aside (the ticket price was trivial), he presumably learned it at an earlier time from his admired others.

This line of thought only leads to an infinite regress. At some point, someone must have decided on his or her own, absent outside influence, that something is not true or completely true and yet went on to recite the falsehood. The standard motivations offered to explain lying are fear and glory. Fear of being caught for having done something wrong and glory of enhancing one’s image in the eyes of others. And children are known to exhibit both motivations. When children become adults, however, some follow the straight and narrow of truth-telling, others do not. Among the others, some become self-aware fakers; the rest fall into that fuzzy middle ground and become BS’ers (1, 2, 3), all the while insisting that they are completely honest. Why?

The answer has to be some combination of influence from the outside and decisions made by the individual. The myriad decisions made daily, from childhood to adulthood, about the myriad influences that come into our minds from the outside ultimately determine how we go about living our lives. A commitment from early on to perceive facts as facts and to state facts as facts, without regard for the consequences of getting caught or for an unearned image in the eyes of others is the path to developing a mind that will find faking of any kind anathema to living a decent life. A lesser commitment leads to fudging, guessing, and being susceptible to the influence of fear and the siren calls of glory. A lesser commitment leads to the adult who, in a seemingly confident and oh-so-precise manner, asserts in a meeting that the vote two years ago was nine to nine to one, when in fact there was no vote at all.

The result of these decisions and commitment is what Ayn Rand called psycho-epistemology, the mental habit built up over time that determines each individual’s unique way of perceiving reality. This is not determinism in the philosophical sense that we have no genuine alternatives in life because every decision and action is causally preformed and could not have been otherwise. Our decisions and actions could have been otherwise because of the myriad decisions we have made since childhood. The cause of our behavior is the decisions we have made, and continue to make, about outside influences. We make them every minute of our waking lives. That the results of the decisions have become entrenched premises in our subconscious minds since childhood only makes changing them as an adult difficult, but not impossible. It is in this sense that our behavior is self-caused.

This means that the policy of faking one’s way through life could have been and, in the present, can be otherwise. Changing a psychology at an advanced age can be achieved, though it can be challenging—and painful—to go against the years or decades of prior decisions. Preventive medicine calls for making correct, reality-focused decisions in one’s early years. The task of parents and teachers is to be especially alert to these decisions and encourage their children and students by example and instruction to see facts as facts and then to communicate the facts as facts. Nothing more or less.

The Dangerous Admiration of BS

Why is BS’ing admired, almost to the point of being “cuddly and warm,” as philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, whereas lying is considered morally repugnant?

Frankfurt examined BS in his 2005 monograph On Bullshit (BS) and distinguished it from lying. The liar, Frankfurt argued, is focused on facts so he or she may state the opposite, but the BS’er is an entertainer or artist who uses words and sophistical arguments to manipulate others. Individual statements of the BS’er may be true, but their truth or falsity are irrelevant. The “show” is what counts. A sales rep, thus, puts pressure on a prospect by saying, “buy now, because I already have two firm offers.” The rep may or may not have two other offers; those particular words were chosen because they provide the most persuasive language.

Frankfurt’s discussion seems to imply that the creative and imaginative skills of the artist are what people admire in BS’ers and lead many to make comments about BS’ers to the effect “He’s good” or “She’s clever.” Such comments may be made about anyone. Politicians, of course, are often consummately admired spinmeisters, as are many lawyers and sales and advertising practitioners. Some admiration may stem from the challenge a BS’er must overcome, such as a sales person confronted with the objections of a particularly difficult prospect. A well-crafted story, not entirely based on fact, to convince the prospect to buy can produce the above accolades.

Expectation of truth is doubtless the reason we are offended by the liar, but why not the same for the BS’er? After all, the overall impression made by the BS’er is false, even though individual statements made by such a person may be true. BS, as I suggested in a conference paper, is a species of lying, the two behaviors occupying opposite ends of a continuum.

In a post-publication interview, Frankfurt named marketing (of course) and, perhaps surprisingly, democracy as causes of the preponderance of BS in our culture today. Marketing, because salesmanship and advertising are falsely assumed to mean lying in order to separate consumers from their hard-earned dollars. And democracy, because in such a system we are obligated to have an opinion about everything; since we cannot know everything, says Frankfurt, our opinions amount to BS.*

One consequence of the connection between democracy and BS, Frankfurt continued, is that the highly educated, because they have the linguistic skills with which to express their opinions and the arrogance to neglect facts in the process, are more prone to BS than their lesser educated counterparts. Does this “democratic skill” cause admiration of others who exhibit the same?

Rationalization abounds to justify BS, such as “everyone does it,” “everyone knows it’s done this way,” and “that’s how business (or politics) is conducted.” Not “everyone” does know it, however, and if everyone did know it, how would that justify departures from the truth? Storytelling belongs in the art of fiction, not in business, politics, or daily conversation. Justifying fabrication in negotiation and salesmanship is precisely what gives capitalism a bad name.

The danger in admiring BS, and not carefully distinguishing it from the creative fiction of a true artist, is that habits of mind become established and human relationships end up being built out of little more than BS. Perception of the truth becomes nearly impossible, because every statement is for show, not a description of facts. Politics has become almost entirely a BS show, with honest intention seemingly nonexistent.

Worst of all, parents can encourage this habit in children at an early age. Smiling approval of a less-than truthful statement can communicate a “you’re clever” message to a child. For example, a boy who wants to get his way makes something up that will please his mother. The mother plays along, knowing fully that the gambit is less than genuine. A pattern of behavior has just been sanctioned by the mother.

Commitment to facts and truth, when such encouragement is continued throughout childhood and adolescence, goes out the window. Of course, parents who exhibit the same behavior become their children’s models. The BS habit becomes ingrained in the child’s subconscious and he or she may not even be aware that anything is wrong. “My parents do it. Everyone around me does it. Politicians do it. It must be right.”

From this beginning in the home, we derive a culture of BS.


* The fundamental cause is altruism, specifically the premise that self-interested behavior, which is required in our daily lives, is opposed to character and morality.)