Now, more than ever: watch out for low-flying bullshit

[womzilla]

Back in September of 2008, Fred "Slacktivist" Clark* posted a wonderful article entitled "False witnesses". It starts off discussing the long-lived rumor that Proctor & Gamble's man-in-the-moon logo was proof that the company was owned by Satanists.

He eventually reaches this statement:

In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:

1. I assumed that the people who claimed to believe that Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan really did believe such a thing.
2. I assumed that they were passing on this rumor in good faith -- that they were misinforming others only because they had, themselves, been misinformed.
3. I assumed that they would respect, or care about, or at least be willing to consider, the actual facts of the matter.
4. Because the people spreading this rumor claimed to be horrified/angry about its allegations, I assumed that they would be happy/relieved to learn that these allegations were, indisputably, not true.

All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling -- so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.

[...]

Again, I'm not happy to be saying such things about anyone, and I'm only doing so here reluctantly, yet this is the appalling truth.

Maybe you're also a bit reluctant to accept this. Maybe you're thinking Hanlon's/Heinlein's Razor should apply -- the axiom that reminds us to "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

I wish that applied here. As I said above, I spent a long time distributing that dossier on that assumption that I was, in fact, dealing with stupidity rather than malice. But the spreading of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. Stupidity alone doesn't make one hostile to irrefutable facts. Stupidity cannot account for their vicious anger when the rumor is debunked -- anger at the person doing the debunking, and anger at the whole world for not turning out to be the nightmare they wanted it to be.

But in any case, no one is stupid enough to really believe such a story. The coworkers or relatives who fill your inbox with urban legends and hoaxes may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but none of them is stupid enough to believe this. And neither are those people who claim that they do believe it.

I was brought to mind of this while reading a moderately recent post on My Right-Wing Dad, the archive of those forwarded e-mails that make you fearful for the future of humanity. This one would have us believe that David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, was in a meeting with:

. . . a team of Obama people . . . explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn't "need" so many gas stations [...] Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank at big as a car to make that happen and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from...

The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here) "These laws of physics? Who's rules are those, we need to change that."

The story is bullshit; Cole has been using variations of this sentiment:

It's like: "I don't like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Let's get together in Congress and pass a new Second Law of Thermodynamics." Many of them believe that they can. That's how limited their knowledge is of the real world.

since at least 2004. He occasionally claims that someone "from Congress" actually said it to him, but more often he just says it as an example of the type of thing an ignorant politician *might* say. In now way did he say this about a recent meeting with "a team of Obama people".

It's bullshit, in the sense of "items said without regard for their actual truth". It's nasty, stinking, brain-clogging propaganda, and there's more of it every day.

*Clark is an editor, writer, and Baptist minister best-known for his amazingly detailed analysis of the Left Behind novels. And when I say "amazingly detailed", I'm talking Anchor Bible levels of detail; I believe his scene-by-scene discussion of the first novel ran over 300 posts.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Mr. Cole believes that the present administration is like the previous one, with the same disdain for the "reality-based."

[jimhenley.livejournal.com]

I tend to hew to Delany's characterization of stupidity as an active effort people make, so in a pedantic way, I think Fred Clark is incorrect to say that these people aren't "stupid."

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I think Clark is dealing with not stupidity, or even falsehood, but what Harry G. Frankfurt identifies so brilliantly as Bullshit.

(If any of you have 67 pages' worth of time, I strongly urge you to read Frankfurt's "On Bullshit." It's the seminal philosophical work of our time.)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Note my reference to "It's bullshit, in the sense of 'items said without regard for their actual truth'", which I get from Frankfurt.

Of course, the P&G logo "urban legend" isn't merely bullshit; there's evidence that it was created, spread, and reinforced by Amway.

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't catch the quote. And you're right, the P&G legend is probably not bullshit for the spreaders, but there's one school of thought--and it might even be one I created, since I can't find where Frankfurt mentions it--that bullshit exists on the receiving end, too. In other words, just as there are bullshitters who don't really care whether the story is true or not, there are many who are eager to hear bullshit, whether it's true or not. I suspect there are those who are simply eager to hear stories of satanic conspiracy and don't want to be bothered with determining their validity.

As for the Amway bit, I can easily believe it; I have an uncle who's been into Amway for many years now, and it has essentially turned him into a cult member who uses friends and even family members to achieve his ends. Not good.