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Bullshit and Personality
SARA BERNAL
Some bullshit is public and political. Other bullshit is more private, arising in interpersonal interactions. Yet other bullshit is more private still, arising within a single individual: people sometimes bullshit themselves.
Many of those of us who oppose the war in Iraq see the present cultural moment as one particularly rich in bullshit. But in this era of heightened public bullshit, private bullshit should not be overlooked. It seems to me that bullshit is at the core of many of the problems encountered and created by those afflicted with so-called personality disorders—those who have certain severe problems with navigating the social world.40 Accordingly, I will propose an analysis of bullshit that may be usefully applied to the psychology of personality disorders, and perhaps more widely in psychiatry.
My analysis takes Harry Frankfurt’s justly famous account as a point of departure. The departure is rapid: I disagree with his main contention, that bullshit is essentially unconnected to a concern with truth. I think many core cases of bullshit are better captured by an account on which bullshit has a stronger connection to the truth than Frankfurt countenances. What‘s more, applying this notion of bullshit to personality disorders tells us something interesting about why their core features lead to social difficulties, and sheds light on them in other ways as well.
Does the Bullshitter Pay Attention to the Truth?
Frankfurt claims that an “indifference to how things really are” is of the essence of bullshit. Bullshitters say whatever they need to say to achieve a certain purpose, without regard for the truth of what they say. Thus for him, bullshit is very different from lying:
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are . . . Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game . . . 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. (On Bullshit, pp. 59–61)
While this may be true in some instances, Frankfurt fails to acknowledge that in the typical case, the bullshitter is strongly connected to the truth via a desire to obscure a specific part of it. This desire may be more or less conscious. The bullshitter may have that part of the truth in mind clearly or fuzzily, or it may be in some mental compartment to which she has no immediate conscious access.
Consider a prototypical case of bullshit: the undergraduate who knows that she has nothing thoughtful or deep to say on an assigned essay topic, and that her opinions are not as well informed by the course material as they should be, but who aims to prevent her instructor from realizing all this by throwing up a screen of verbiage. She may be clearly aware of the awkward facts behind her screen. Or she may just know “deep down” that there is a mess behind it, so that she is not surprised if her ruse fails and her grade is poor. Undergraduates do sometimes bullshit with malice aforethought. Sometimes, however, a student may proceed less calculatingly, but still be motivated by a desire to get an A that she knows is not really deserved. In such cases we cannot make sense of the student’s behavior except by reference to this unconscious (or partially conscious) motive.
The bullshitter in this example, in both its variants, is like a liar in that she seeks to conceal from her audience some part of the truth (the mess behind her screen). She is unlike the liar in that she need not be clearly aware of this goal. She is unlike the liar also in that her method is indirect: she does not directly deny the truth behind her screen, but rather contrives various ways of implicating the contrary of that truth. Her bullshit is contained not in any single assertion within her essay, but rather by things like a pompous tone, a reluctance to get to the point, and general windiness. Thus her method bears out Frankfurt’s observation that a lie is a “more focused act” than an instance of bullshit.
One may bullshit not only by using indirect means to get one’s audience to believe the opposite of some part of the truth that one finds inconvenient, but also by simply distracting the audience from that part. In this second type, the bullshitter is again concerned with the truth in that she is motivated by a desire to conceal a specific part of it, and again this desire may be conscious or not.
Two Modes of Bullshit
Advertising and politics are replete with the two kinds of bullshit I’ve just distinguished. Two examples follow.
a. Indirect Implication of Falsehood
Newport cigarettes are advertised with the phrase “alive with pleasure.” This phrase is emblazoned on billboards along with images of young, beautiful and (so far as I know) mostly African-American people in situations of luxurious leisure, such as on a yacht.
This ad campaign aims to plant in its audience the belief that representative smokers of Newports are healthy, vibrant, and wealthy, and that smoking Newports is a badge of membership in this select group. The truth is that representative smokers of Newports are poor, unhealthy African-Americans who live in the rough neighborhoods in which these billboards are so obnoxiously displayed.
b. Distraction
The Bush administration used dubious intelligence reports about Iraqi efforts to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, suggestions that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected with 9/11, and various other red herrings to direct our attention away from a key fact: they had an antecedent intention, and perhaps something like a plan, to invade Iraq no matter what.
I do not imagine that these are all the kinds of bullshit there are, but they are two kinds worth paying attention to. Before moving on to further illustrations, I should note some features of this two-part conception.
First, as I’ve said, bullshit is connected to the truth in a way that Frankfurt does not acknowledge. The bullshitter must at some level pay attention to the truth, or else her bullshit is not likely to succeed. The “indirect means” of type (a) must, in order to be effective, be somehow vetted for their ability to jointly implicate a specific falsehood. The distractors of type (b) must lead the audience away from a particular bit of truth, so the bullshitter—or something in her—must be cognizant of what that bit of truth is, or she may end up with something that leads towards it rather than away. Bullshit of both types must be framed in sensitivity to a certain painful bit of the truth, or it will conceal that bit only by dumb luck.
That said, I can agree with an emended version of Frankfurt’s claim that the bullshitter “pays no attention at all” to the truth. For a bullshitter can say anything and everything that distracts her audience—except, of course, the truth that she wants to hide! Or she can say anything and everything that jointly implicates the opposite of the truth she wants to hide. That is, her utterances must be checked (at some level) not for their correspondence with the facts, but for their tendency to distract from, or to implicate the contrary of, certain key facts. So the emended version of Frankfurt’s claim is this: the bullshitter must pay attention to just one key part of the truth, namely the part she wants to hide. Call this her target.
Second, bullshit on my conception is related to lying as follows. The bullshitter always differs in her method from the liar: she never denies the target directly and explicitly, but instead distracts or contrives to indirectly implicate the contrary of the target. In the case of fully conscious bullshitting, the differences end there. Just like the liar, one who bullshits consciously has clearly in mind a target truth that she knows she wants to hide. That cannot be said of one who bullshits unconsciously, who therefore differs from the liar in more than her method. Thus the similarity to lying of any given case of bullshit depends on where it falls on the spectrum of conscious awareness. (Recall that I am countenancing degrees of awareness, so that “fully conscious” and “unconscious” are two ends of a spectrum.)
Third, since the bullshitter as I’ve painted her may not be aware of her wish to obscure her target, my story depends crucially on the assumption that there are unconscious motiv
es. In the typical case, like that of the bullshitting student, she is at least dimly aware of her motive (and hence of her target) as she frames her bullshit, and may become more clearly aware of it in hindsight—after she gets a poor grade on her essay, for instance. But again, the bullshitter may be completely unaware of her obscuring motive.
I cannot describe the operation of the bullshitter’s unconscious motive, but I can say a bit more to defend the claim that it is there, however it operates. The idea of an unconscious motive is of course not new. Neither is it the exclusive property of Freudians who would associate the motive with some bodily orifice. It is an idea with some currency in the neuroscience of today: it is commonly held that the bizarre confabulations of some neurology patients can be understood only by reference to unconscious motives.
Consider, for instance, some fascinating and well-known results about split-brain patients.41 These are patients whose corpus callosum has been surgically severed in order to treat their severe epilepsy. The corpus callosum is a thick band of fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. When it is cut, the hemispheres cannot communicate with each other, which can result in bizarre internal conflicts for the patient. One sort of test that was done on these patients was to show a picture to one hemisphere and ask for a report from the other. This is done by showing a picture to one side or the other of a patient’s visual field: pictures on the left project to the right hemisphere, and vice versa.42
It is the left hemisphere that talks—that side is primarily responsible for language. Thus when a split-brain patient sees a picture in her left visual field, and she is asked to say what she sees, she has a problem: the information is “stuck” in the non-talking (right) hemisphere. Patients in this situation reacted in a number of different ways: some would just frown and shake their heads; others could at least say what the picture was not of. Some, however, would make up stories about their own reactions to what they were shown: they would confabulate. It is these cases that are relevant to the present point.
To take just one example, a picture of a naked woman was presented to one patient’s left hemisphere, then her right. When it was presented to the left hemisphere, the patient giggled, then accurately described what she saw. When it was presented to the right hemisphere, she smiled mischievously and began to giggle. When asked what was so funny—and this is the startling part—she said, “I don’t know . . . nothing . . . Oh, that funny machine” (Gazzaniga 1970, p. 106). Such confabulations are often understood by neuroscientists in terms of an overarching unconscious motive to maintain a stable and internally consistent world-view.43
What incoming information might threaten the stability or consistency of the giggling split-brain patient’s world view? She has just giggled unaccountably. To uphold her belief that she is a sane, rational person who does things for reasons, and reacts appropriately to situations, she must somehow explain away the fact that she has just giggled slyly for no apparent reason, like a madwoman. Her target, then, is that she has just done something that appears crazy, nonsensical, bizarre. She has an overarching motive—an unconscious one—to maintain her image of herself as a sane, rational person. Her unexplained giggling threatens that world view, since it looks like the behavior of a madwoman. So she has a second motive, derived from the first, to explain her giggling as something quite sane and rational (Who wouldn’t laugh at “that funny machine”?). It is commonly accepted that patients who confabulate in this way have some such unconscious motive, though there is as yet no fully worked-out, generally accepted story about how this motive operates. Thus my own claim of unconscious motives is in good company—in this regard at least.
Fourth, while bullshit à la Frankfurt seems to be a largely verbal affair, the misleading and distracting of bullshit as I construe it may be achieved by non-verbal as well as verbal means.44 The photos that appear in Newport ads provide one example; I’ll discuss further examples below.
Fifth, bullshit as I construe it may occur intrapersonally. That is, you can bullshit yourself in either of the ways I’ve distinguished. The person who distracts from a painful part of the truth and the distractee may be one and the same; the person who contrives to implant a belief contrary to that truth may be the same person in whom the belief is implanted. Such self-bullshitting is a species of self-deception. Indeed, it may be all that self-deception is. Whether that is so is a large question on a rich topic (self-deception), and I cannot answer it here.
There are, however, some differences between self- and other-bullshitting. Conscious self-bullshitting is less straightforward than conscious bullshitting of others, if indeed it is possible at all. This is so for the same reason that explicitly lying to yourself is impossible. To do that you would have to be fully aware of some proposition p and at the same time assert not-p to yourself with the intention of getting yourself to believe not-p—an endeavor that would seem futile in the face of your established belief that p. To consciously self-bullshit you would have to deviously attempt to get yourself to believe not-p, though you are fully aware of p’s truth, either by implicating not-p or by distracting from p. This may be possible,45 but your own clear awareness of p introduces a difficulty with self-bullshitting about p that is absent from other-bullshitting about p. But having noted this complication, I can set it aside, as the cases of self-bullshitting I shall consider are not fully conscious.
Finally, it is an advantage of my account that, unlike Frankfurt’s, it has application in psychiatry. In particular, it nicely frames some key features of personality disorders.
Bullshit and Personality Disorders
Some people have bullshit deeply embedded in their personalities. Everyone knows that politics and advertising are replete with bullshit. It is not as widely appreciated that certain problematic personalities are also goldmines of bullshit. Indeed, so far as I know the concept has never been applied in any systematic way to personality psychology (or elsewhere in psychiatry, for that matter). Yet if you examine the strategems that characterize personality disorders, the bullshit fairly leaps out at you.
What Is a Personality Disorder?
A personality disorder is defined in the DSM-IV (the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of psychiatry) as “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture.” 46 To count as having such a disorder, one must have difficulties in two or more of the following areas: perception of the social world and one’s place in it; appropriateness and range of emotional responses; social interaction; and impulse control. The problematic pattern must be inflexible, and must be manifest in a broad range of situations. It is especially distinctive of personality disorders, among psychiatric disorders, to cause trouble and pain not just for the afflicted but for those around her as well.
Personality disorders are standardly characterized as encompassing maladaptiveness in several domains. First, they comprise maladaptive traits. These traits are normal, healthy traits taken to an extreme degree, and sometimes combined in especially problematic ways. Thus, conscientiousness taken to an extreme degree becomes obsessive-compulsiveness; very low trust combined with high hostility becomes paranoia. The mal-adaptive motivation characteristic of personality disorders is exemplified in the antisocial personality’s complete lack of motivation for intimacy. Maladaptive patterns in perceiving, interpreting, and planning—aspects of cognition—are also ubiquitous in personality disorders. The afflicted are especially challenged when it comes to perceiving and interpreting the social world: each personality disorder is marked by distorted perception of others and impaired social judgment. Each personality disorder is also characterized by some abnormal and maladaptive pattern of emotion: extreme volatility, perhaps, or an extreme of one emotion such as anger. Finally, the self-concept of a disordered personality tends to be out of whack: often, she doesn’t know quite who she is, lacking a clear, stable sense of herself; or her self esteem is either excessive or defi
cient.
The DSM-IV lists ten personality disorders, arranged into three clusters: the erratic cluster, often characterized by unpredictable or violent behavior; the anxious cluster, characterized by fear and distress; and the eccentric cluster, characterized by social awkwardness or disengagement. Brief descriptions of the disorders, drawn mostly from the DSM-IV, are supplied below. Sub-types are sometimes recognized, but the DSM-IV lists only the basic or “pure” type.
Here’s a clue to where the bullshit lurks in the following list. Where the afflicted is herself out of touch with some key aspect of reality, or where her stock behavior tends to lead others to false beliefs, bullshit is often found.
Antisocial personality disorder (erratic). These people have little concern for others. They are generally impulsive and irresponsible, and often violent. They feel no guilt over the suffering they cause to others. The textbook case of antisocial personality disorder is a violent, crafty, and remorseless criminal. They need not be violent, however: the Enron crew, for example, exhibit antisocial behavior in spades.47 They are con artists of a sort, and many con artists are diagnosable as antisocial. Antisocials often possess a glib, superficial charm, which allows them to take advantage of the unwary.
Bullshit and Philosophy Page 10