The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
To which I responded,
it strikes me that one can very well describe the conservative movement as having the generation of bullshit as one of its primordial functions. They are profoundly anti-realist, and narcissistically obsessed with their own nature, which they presume to be far superior to mere mortals worrying about mere facts. So the fit is a very natural one.
Of course bullshit is not limited to conservatives. One can find it just about anywhere, the vast majority of it having nothing to do with politics. It also crops up as a natural phase in the developmental process detailed in William Perry's typology of cognitive development during college--though it's only a stage to be passed through. My point is that when it does come to politics, bullshit plays a special role for today's conservative movement--and for a relatively simple reason: conservative ideology is woefully inadequate to deal with the real world, thus generating an abundance of contradictory and confusing data. Fighting wars doesn't bring peace. Teaching "abstinence only" doesn't produce virgins. Deregulating markets bring one financial disaster after another, etc., etc., etc. There's a reason why "traditional conservative solutions" have been abandoned by the trainload since the 1700s: They. Just. Don't. Work.
This harsh reality makes it particularly appealing to simply reject objective reality outright. This is quite a reversal from traditional conservative claims of collective omniscience and omnipotence, which, in fact, conservatives are still loathe to give up. And so we have a classic characteristic stance of doublethink:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
I saw all manner of micro-manifestations of this back in the late 1990s, when I spent far more time than was healthy arguing with conservatives online. For example, even back then, the evidence for global warming was overwhelming. After all, that's when the civilized world signed the Kyoto Protocols. So how did conservatives argue against it? Their number one strategy was to repeat discredited arguments. It didn't matter how many times they'd been discredited, they'd just repeat them over and over and over again. This was a classic example of bullshit epistemology, since acceptance of objective reality would have forced them to stop using arguments that had been discredited over and over again.
Intertwined with this strategy was their habit of citing industry-subsidized scientists. When it was pointed out that such scientists lacked credibility, both for their claims and for their compromised financial connections, the typical conservative response was to assert that it was the government-paid scientists at NASA and elsewhere (including government research grantees) whose word should not be trusted because of the funding source--a claim often based solely on the fact that conservatives hated government, ergo, it was not to be trusted. A few sophisticates sometimes argued that such scientists were simply ginning up global warming in order to get funding for it. "Why would they do that?" I asked. "Most scientists have more research ideas than they can possibly pursue. They don't need to make stuff up, even if they could get it funded. So why would they do it?" I never did get a plausible answer to that.
But my favorite part of how the conservative arguments unfolded in those days was what came next. Having simply dispatched the entire scientific establishment with little more than a wave of their hands, my conservative interlocutors would then proceed to say, "How do most people know about global warming, anyway? They probably hear about it on cruises. Why should they believe someone making as little money as that? What does the staff of a cruise ship know about science, anyway?" I shit you not, I heard this same argument often enough that I concluded it must have been put out there by Rush Limbaugh or one of his wannabes.
It was truly amazing the way that they'd first eliminate the scientific establishment from consideration, then conclude that it was the cruise ship staff who were responsible for spreading the word about global warming, and finally proceed to dismiss them because they were mere underpaid service workers. The fact that only about 1% of the US population went on a cruise on any given year at the time fazed them not one bit. It was all their fault!
And so it was that the issue of global warming had nothing at all to do with climatology. It had everything to do with who were good people, and who were bad, and therefore whose word could be trusted. "Good people" who were being sincere were to be trusted. Scientists on the take from big oil? A-OK! Peer reviewed articles? Who has time for that? Just another Commie plot! Seriously, that's the way they thought. And there are many, many more of them today, and they are much more effectively organized. Still totally immersed in bullshit epistemology, and the collective narcissism of conservative identity politics, in which calling yourself a patriot makes yourself one, even as you call for secession in the very next breath.
