exploring bullshit and gaslighting
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
Harry Frankfurt, in his seminal 1986 essay “On Bullshit,” defines the latter as speech uttered with an utter insouciance over whether it is true. It is impossible to tell a lie and be unconcerned with the truth. After all, I must know what the truth is, and care about it, in order to deliberately misrepresent it. But bullshit is speech that has been essentially untethered from its ostensible import while seeming to remain firmly bound to it. We may imagine a “center-of-gravity” of concern that has floated, in a surreptitious manner, away from its purported abode. While appearing to speak about one thing, the bullshitter is in fact not speaking about that thing at all, or rather, is speaking about it only instrumentally. His real purpose is to present himself in a given light. In other words, the speaker’s center of concern abides in himself while pretending to be in the subject of his discourse.
Whereas the motives to proliferate bullshit has been probably always been present, the means to proliferate it are perhaps poised to increase by incomprehensible measures. Frankfurt observed that our society was already awash with bullshit in the late eighties, but now it appears that we are living out our moments in the shadow of a great tidal wave that is about to crash on us. An Arabic proverb says “if you let the camel poke his nose into the tent, soon there will be no room left for you.” The elephant, whose trunk is already in the room, so to speak, is of course the AI engines like Google Bard and ChatGPT, which are axiomatically incapable of entertaining anything approximating concern for the truth because they are computers whereas concern is a human disposition. And yet, they employ the same system of language that we do even at the very pitch of our concern for it. Never in history have we encountered to prospect of b.s. at such a magnitude. Perhaps we should begin to refer to it as “e.s.”
In any case, if we return to the definition of bullshit per se, it will be clear that it cannot be adequately situated on an imagined axis between truth and falsehood as our ordinary indicative statements can. Instead, it occupies a sort of orthogonal dimension; bearing a relation to the truth, if any, not of opposition but of unconcern. In other words, a bullshitter could be correct by accident. But that is precisely the crux of the matter: that it doesn’t matter to him. Instead, what matters is the light it casts on himself.
Given that bullshit cannot be placed on the truth-falsehood axis, is it possible, however, to define an axis whereupon it can be placed? I think so. Consider what it would mean for the surreptitious import of speech pretending to be about some subject to lie not in the speaker, as is the case with bullshit, but in the hearer. Suppose that I pretended to be talking about something but intended to affect the listener in some way; to cast her in a certain light. “Gaslighting”1 is the term we give to what is perhaps the most pernicious form of this kind of speech, and I will provisionally enlist it as a sort of metonym for the whole category. Gaslighting shares with bullshit that it employs speech like a horse full of Greeks; speech that pretends to concern some subject but is in fact serving as a means to an ulterior and hidden end. Whereas, however, in the case of bullshit, this ulterior end lies in the speaker’s appearance, in gaslighting, it lies in the hearer’s confidence in her own reasoning, perceptual, and sense-making ability.2 In other words, bullshitting attempts to manipulate the hearer into a distorted perception of the speaker; gaslighting into a distorted perception of herself. Bullshitting and gaslighting, then, both lie as terms in the axis of manipulation. If this seems right, I will leave it to readers to furnish examples. Otherwise, I will eagerly await correction.
The term “gaslighting” originated from a 1938 stage play called “Gas Light” by British playwright Patrick Hamilton, which was later adapted into two films, the first in 1940 and the second in 1944, both titled “Gaslight.” In the play, a husband manipulates his wife into believing that she is going insane by secretly dimming the gas lights in their home and then denying to have done so when his wife questions him about it.
It is, perhaps, a blasphemy against the Holy Ghost and hence, the one sin that “shall not be forgiven unto men.” (cf. Matthew 12:31)
Perhaps another example of what might go on the gaslighting end of the spectrum would be the psychoanalytic term "projective identification". This is when someone gets you to feel what they’re feeling by acting as if you're the embodiment of that which they're trying to get out of themselves. For example, it could entail relating to another as if they're completely at fault for something (to get the other person to carry the guilt instead of them). It's not typically done with conscious intent, but there's a complete disregard for the truth, as the whole point is to coerce another to feel and carry out feelings they desperately wish to disavow or diminish within themselves.
Couldn't help but contemplate the Tower of Babel when reading this... will AI engines be the new means in which this "tower" could be reconstructed? A tower of bricks and mortar replaced with bullshit and gaslighting?