pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I grew up, as did you. being told and taught, that there was an importance to telling the truth. I believed then, as I do now, that the world requires the truth of things so that it can function correctly. Universally agreed constants of measure are the defining principals of all science, societies thrive on held truths that most agree upon and that are criticisable by all citizens, deception is a harmful endeavour.. etc etc etc.

Well, I was wrong then, and I am quite obviously wrong now. Everything I thought I had learned about the most important facets of the world, the social, political and power-based links between people, is bullshit. A while back I wrote, along with a friend, a blog post on Lying, called In Defence of Lying, in it we speculated that there could be good reason to tell fibs, in extreme circumstances, or when they would create mistruths that would not do any real harm in the grand scheme. Revising my naive perspective recently I have more come to think that in a social fabric where everyone is at all times lying to each other, then the only strategy is to lie also. This has a problem for me, in that I’m demonstrably no good at it. I am shit at playing poker because my face gives away my excitement or disappointment, I’ve never been able to lie convincingly enough to fool a partner, and I see no point in it because I’m neither creative enough to make it believable nor do I possess memory enough to keep the recanting of it stable over time. If I were to set out on a journey of lies I would crash before much ground was covered, so I just don’t bother.

So why has this strategy worked so well for others that I know? A good friend of mine is a cunning liar, creative even when caught out, slippery enough to get himself out of the situations he has found himself in because of his lies by offering yet more and on and on. His ability, and the benefits of such, are at times quite enviable. He has achieved many goals and suffered few losses because of his deceptions. Another pal provides the peer group with tremendous hilarity due to the nature of his fibs, the stories he tells are retold and for many years laughed at again and again, his deception has that usefulness at least. None of us believe his fanciful yarns, nobody could, Peter Kay might even have based his Phoenix Nights character Kenny on this particular guy. But then there is the liar that wears you out with his nonsense, the guy that is neither funny, nor admirable, nor impressive, but he wishes to be. This guy it is hard work to listen to. He, through some strange process of the mind that I can never understand, has come to believe of himself that he is how he describes himself, or has gotten used to describing himself. As if the creation of the narrative then creates the persona and the experience that is the person in the world. A Walter Mitty I think they call it in the forces, a bullshitter we call it in civilian life.

A certain amount of self aggrandising, or deception, may be necessary so we aren’t each looking into the void without some hope. A little bit of sexing up our stories may even be healthy at times, that way they are easier on the listener and not just a textbook of our experiences. We each have some narcissism naturally as it is a human trait. I have met these guys, the embellishers of stories, we don’t generally mind them because the story is often somewhat true, and usually quite entertaining or informative. The wild story teller can get away with it, if there is a punchline, or we all laugh at the end over how ridiculous it is. The straight face bullshitter, recanting his history as the gospel of himself, telling stories that we can wander through the holes in, is a different breed altogether. He must think us rather stupid to imagine we are following him in his bullshit wagon down the bullshit avenue of bullshit lined trees. I recently have encountered this type, I find him very hard work, though I sense a weakness in his nature that I don’t know the origins of that might explain why this nonsense is manifesting itself so starkly, though I have no will to put up with it even if I could understand it, because there is no necessity for me to be the victim (I think that’s the correct term, I can find no better one currently). He is a fantasist, his view of self, and projection of self, is designed to be absorbed by the weak minded, which I do not consider myself to be. And his strategy of bullshit is contingent on obscurity; being the person in the room that has some knowledge of the subject, and hoping that the others do not have it in greater abundance, if at all.

I’ve seen this tactic used many times, it is a weakness that wishes to be a strength, and it stands in place of the humility that should be present. Nobody knows everything, even in their own field of expertise, that’s just a fact of being a flawed and limited human with a memory that is dubious and a capacity to learn that wanes over time. Trump and his ilk do this, and even when caught out they use another tactic to push the narrative further, they either double down, challenge truth with power, seek to be offended, or they try to say that what they were trying to say was what has been said in correcting what they actually said, and they were just misunderstood. Another, more aggressive tactic, is to try to turn it around, to accuse the person who is doing the correcting of being in error because there is no arbiter in this argument and no tools to demonstrate the error available during the argument. Further there is the tactic of trying to break down the correction by finding a flaw in it, as if that flaw ruins the entirety of the correction, this is the casting doubt tactic. Whatever the method, when you are wrong you are wrong, and you don’t get less wrong by attacking those who criticise you. Maybe in American society, and we are getting more like them every day, that sort of thing works.

Whatever happened to just maybe occasionally admitting, to the room and one’s self, that one may not know a thing, or know it well? If you can pick a hole in a theory then that does not destroy the theory, if you can point out a discrepancy in a story then that does not destroy the story, but if you can successfully demolish the premise of a claim then all that follows from that claim is null. That still doesn’t mean the story cannot be useful, but if the story only has purpose to make the story teller prominent, then the destruction of the whole is complete and the story is vacuous. The story teller must, we conclude, have only personal gain in mind when telling their story, and to embellish it is to deliberately deceive the listeners, no?

What I have recently encountered is persons who wear the successes of others like a cloak whilst pretending that they are in their own garb, and that they are in fact the success. Worse still I have seen it working to the effect they desired. If the audience has power, and you wish to be the beneficiary of that power, let’s say for a reward of some type, then deception is your friend only if they are not wise. For the deceiver the lack of wisdom on the part of the receiver is the mechanism, the tool, of their labours. This is what a con trick or an illusion is, to turn what is a weakness, lack of wisdom, or an abundance of hubris, against the power. To manipulate them, those that have power, because they deserve it for their lack of knowledge. That is the mechanism which the conning person employs to admonish the guilt of deception; it’s your fault I fooled you, a very Hellenistic way to look at things, and I might add a very Boris way.

In my employed field, I am technical labour, we might refer to this project on the part of the deceiver, as MAKING IT LOOK LIKE MAGIC. Often the technical person holds a massive advantage over the other persons in the company because their job is so very obscure to the other workers that view it. Everyone knows that the accounts department counts up money in and out, and that’s easy to understand thematically, people have a fair idea about what the gardeners do all day, or the painter, or the receptionist, but start them about the technical stuff and they often can’t get past the first sentence without making a false assumption or confusing one detail with an unrelated one. Now we might think that some of the more endeavouring spuds might have an idea because they have read some magazines or they fiddle with technical devices in their own life, but that would be a mistake also, what happens in a home while playing games or sending emails is not relational to the technical forces at play in a business, it is a different world entirely. The technician, and I’m just using this example because I know it well, has the ability to fool even the most senior of company persons into thinking they are working hard when in fact they are doing nothing but displaying analytics on their screens, which can look extraordinarily busy if you have enough SNMP OID objects being monitored and shown at the same time (see I fooled you there with tech jargon, you have no clue what I just said, unless you do, in which case hello fellow geek).

The magic trick only looks like magic when you do not know how the illusion is being performed. Each person with the power to fool someone else has to ask themselves if they, by fooling the other person/people, is engaged in an entertaining practice, or an act of fraud? And if it is the latter then at what severity/implication? I’m not saying that deception has only these two purposes, but they are ones to consider.

I am not against this tactic, sometimes the need is to be inactive while chewing a problem, and I do fully understand the differing nature of support service provision to productive labour (the nature of maintenance problem being that it is, in terms of cost effective efficiency overall, an inverse relationship), but what I don’t understand is the necessity to quite foolishly attempt to fool a fellow of the discipline, and how the fooler could hope to pull it off. My thoughts are that at some point the bullshitter gets so used to bullshitting that they fail to see where it will not work. Let’s say we have two persons who are writing pascal (a programming language), and let’s assume they are good at it. How then could programmer 1 fool programmer 2 into thinking that he has invented the method he is using if programmer 2 is also using that method? It would be easy for the programmer to convince a non-programmer that they had invented pascal and its libraries, because they would not know better. Here we get to the very reasoning of where our bullshiter is at his best, and I believe where the society aspect comes in.

We know that we now do not challenge opinion using facts, or truths, because opinions matter to people and their emotional wellbeing is seen to hinge upon them being protected from any sort of scrutiny as a right of them being a valued object in society. Knowing this, our bullshitter only has to protect his bullshit with his feelings, and everyone steps back thinking it is better to let the bullshit be, than to attack it. I personally think this is a mistake, Nietzsche said to push over what is shaky and I agree strongly with that sentiment because I think it is the only way to progress as a person, and as a collective. The Hegel method is to establish a theory, a counter theory, then pitch them together to see what remains, Thesis Antithesis Synthesis and on and on until the truth is revealed, ever moving in the direction of knowing more and getting closer to the better way to organise and to think of it all. In a society of bullshit we stand still, respecting each other’s right to be wrong and happy, but should we not be happier to be wrong? I’m delighted when I learn something new, it seems to give me some sort of perverse purpose to talk to people and have my thoughts challenged well. I don’t mean argument in the husband and wife way, I mean argument in the two pals and a glass of wine way. To learn you must first not know, that is ignorance not expertise. If you think you know all then you can learn nothing, so confidence in knowledge is useless if it stifles learning, so to learn is to be doubtful.

The method we use in my line of work to spot the bullshitter is direct, to call it out, but it is not me the bullshitter wishes to bullshit because it is not me that has the power to reward. Claims of expertise can be hard to verify if you also do not possess that expertise (I am not an HP printer specialist, I could be fooled into thinking somebody else was), but there is one universal indicator… Remuneration. Expertise has a price, if that price is attainable, and the expertise is demonstrable, then that price will always be attained, simple as. This is true of my profession, though it may not be true of others. A person could be very talented but just lack opportunity, or they could lack the industry to realise that talent (I started as a cutter, I’m time served as they say, but Britain does not make clothes anymore…), but for technology this is not the case, if you are a DBA you will be making 45k+ pa, if you are a network engineer you would be a fool not to be making 45k+ pa, if you are a Cloud Architect you will be selling yourself short at 50kpa, and if you are a high level security expert then 60kpa is a very low bar to set. So If you find yourself an all-rounder, and you have no specialisation, then to claim otherwise will only fool those that do not know better. Again, it is their lack of wisdom that is your greatest strategy. Should they know better? Yes I think so, they should find the knowledge from somewhere, an honest source, and believe the assessment given to them if it is offered as genuine. I find what often gets in the way of this rational process is the will to have things different than they are. This is the second aspect, where we may see why lies are working in the modern world, being that people actually seem to want to be lied to. I find this rather disturbing.

What of the liar that does not know he is a liar? I say he simply because our fantasists tend to be male, all the bullshitters I know are anyways. I think this may have something to do with what Christopher Hitchens was on about when he wrote the article Why women aren’t funny, in which he points out that evolution has made that trait unimportant and unnecessary in the female gender because we males fancy you females anyway, and since you do not fancy us that much (men are mostly very ugly) we must impress in some way, humour, protective ability, financial stability, honesty etc. The same could be said about lies and bragging, maybe women don’t need to tell them in an effort to impress, the goal of the brag, because they don’t need to impress? The liar that does not know he is a liar is in cognitive trouble, there is a blur between reality and the daydream where the daydream, a wish of the mind, replaces an actual experience sufficiently enough that it becomes indistinguishable from memory at a later date. I mentioned my pal, a magnificent liar, earlier in this piece, I think it important to state that at no point did he come to believe any of the stuff he made up, it was just useful to him that other people did.

I think this difficulty in distinguishing the real from the imagined may be stimulated by a competitive urge, where some of us feel forced to it by the possibility of going unnoticed in a crowd of competing voices or raised hands. Insignificance is not a place anyone wishes to be, we all want to be significant to somebody, to be valued by others so that we can value ourselves. For some this may be just the love of a partner, I know that my partner provides for me a feeling of always having someone on my side, and that is enough, but she would never let me get away with being a fantasist. Ones peer group, or family, may drive, quite unwittingly, the fantasy. They may support and nurture the bullshit as a means of potential self development. We often encourage children to explore stories of elves and talking animals, fantasy and creativity go hand in hand in childhood. And as adults we absorb fantasy too, Arnie jumping out of a building window onto the top of a jet fighter plane, the Avengers movies, Marvel and DC nonsense, Vampires and Lycans. My favourite film is Highlander, a fantasy where the hero is an immortal that wields a sword and fights other immortals until only one remains, I have never let it make me think that there are immortals among us running about chopping off heads and fighting for a prize of some sort. This is the necessary boundary between truth and belief, where belief is a possibility conjured in the mind and truth is that which can be proven. It is important to envisage the possibilities of things, and there is a portion of the brain that does this very specifically, but in those people who become their fantasy there is clearly a problem with this function.

If we are presented with a mistruth, one that we have a suspicion about, there is a task involved to uncover it depending on how complex it is, and there is an assessment to be made concerning how much it might matter either way. If the impact assessment yields the view that it matters more to have the semblance of fact than the actuality of fact, let’s say because the goal is to look like a box has been ticked whether it has or not, then the lie that is a lie becomes unimportant. Personally I would value an uncomfortable truth over a comforting lie, but then I am not a powerful actor. Let’s say the lie was exposed and nothing was done? We might think that the powerful actor may themselves be, or have been on the way to power, a bullshitter also. Someone who is prone to skewing the narrative of their own life, and has successfully rewritten their history. They may respect the tactic employed upon them as they have used it themselves. An older lion spotting a younger, keener, more hungry lion, and seeing something of itself in that beast it acts to make an ally of it rather than an enemy; a kindred spirit of bullshitters we might say, like an honour amongst thieves. Bullshitters supporting each other’s bullshit, an emperors new clothes bullshit phenomenon. Is this the way the world is configured now, are we all part of created narratives skewed by the view through the veil that is a society addicted to its own digital media ego and emotionally avoiding the truth in case it dents the fragility of the self?

I like to think I know when I am being fooled, but I claim no expertise in all things, or even many things. I go with the Cui Bono (who benefits?) method of looking at a situation sometimes. At other times I ask myself if I feel the thing offered is likely to be true? Sometimes I use the too-good-to-be-true sceptical method. Often I am risk averse, so when I don’t know I do not then act. Many times I have dismissed claims on lack of evidence to support them, the prove-it method. There are various other methods to employ, and we all do, but sometimes we are persuaded by personality, we might like someone (cult of personality), or worse than that we may feel the alternative is less palatable (can we afford not to?). Each one of us can be deceived, I have an ex-wife ffs, so I’m not any exception, but the real stupidity is to know we have been fooled and to refuse to believe that fact.

I’m calling Bullshit on the whole thing..

Paul S Wilson