Tundra Tabloids’ regular tipster and commentator, Anushirvan, files the following report on politically correct and multicultural based bullshit as a philosophical concept, which in his mind seems to tie in with what we’re seeing happening at the moment.
NOTE: A well meaning but ignorant statist politician, is a very dangerous person indeed.
Obama’s and Cameron’s Narcissistic Bullshit Circus and the Syrian conflict
With regards to Obama’s eagerness to meddle in the Syrian conflict, the sustained efforts to browbeat the war-weary American public into acceptance of another war is taking on a life of its own. It has turned into a ridiculous Narcissistic Bullshit Circus. First off, we need to clearly define the term bullshit in order to analyze the problem. The next excerpt is taken from the essay ‘On Bullshit’ by Harry G. Frankfurt (pages 63 to 67) and demonstrates the problem at hand :
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.
Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.
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 “antirealist” 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.
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. “
End quote.
The very essence of bullshit attaches a high value to the emotional aspect of wanting to appear sincere outwardly, which is basically its main goal. Bullshitting is essentially driven by the projection and preservation of a certain self-image in public. Frankfurt’s description of the process is actually reflected in everyday reality, particularly in the lives of snooty teenagers and equally snooty university students in their late to mid twenties, who are generally not hampered or bothered by the pursuit of objective knowledge that could serve as a fundament to base their world views on.
The mobilizing “quality” of bullshit is to rally the masses with emotions as the sole underlying virtue to any action taken, objective scrutinizing of reality is not part of the equation. When we think of both categories, bullshit doesn’t seem to be all that odious on the surface. Alas, bullshitting can also deliberately morph into something altogether more ominous, when essentially juvenile bullshit turns into a deliberate strategy with which adult politicians try to deceive the general public. In other words, bullshit can turn into an explicit propaganda exercise. What appears to be a narcissistic exercise based on politicians puerile and desperate want to be perceived as sincere, is actually a way to draw the general public into a larger scheme, by appealing to the better nature of the public in order to gain general acceptance for ill-conceived ideas, such as meddling in the Middle East’s uneasy equilibriums.
Bullshit as such can only have an effect on those members of the general public who themselves attach high value to the emotional content surrounding such issues, whilst at the same time overconfidently deciding that any realistic knowledge of the issues at hand is surplus to requirement with regards to our understanding of them. Most of us are de facto NOT ME experts and we bank on our politicians to make the right decisions in the world theatre, and whether the MSM are feeding us the necessary knowledge in the process or not becomes superfluous that way, which is exactly what politicians are banking on themselves. Bullshit is ultimately designed to elicit an immediate emotional response from the public, and not a rational one, which invariably takes more time to conceive.
Conversely, any member of the general public who either understands the very essence of bullshit or the nature of ME history and geopolitics, or even both, will naturally display the utmost disdain for such puerile emotive attempts to rally the general public’s opinion to the cause of politicians, i.e. the unnecessary involvement in Syria’s horrendous civil war. Such is the nature of the average Counterjihadist in fact, that any PC/MC issue thrown at him can be swiftly disassembled by him as mere poppycock, humbug, hot air, and yes, bullshit. Like for instance the ruse that “Islam is a religion of peace”, the ensuing detection of “moderate Islam”, the distinction between “Islam and Islamists”, the differentiation between “Islam and Jihadi extremism”, and the likes.
Contrary to the average PC bullshitter, who has a high stake in the preservation of his self-image and the survival of PC/MC, moral relativism, and the mollycoddling of Muslims by infusing every debate on such matters primarily with emotional flimflam, the Counterjihadist builds a discourse solely on what is readily available as objective and verifiable knowledge of facts and realities with regards to the subject of Islam and ME geopolitics. The very intent of this would be, first and foremost, to BE as genuine, truthful and rationally correct as is possible with regards to those subjects, and NOT to merely APPEAR sincere to boost the ego and to consequently further an egotistical goal, like narcissistic bullshitters do for whatever purpose they see fit. And thus, Counterjihadists are de facto Islamorealists primarily concerned with enlightening the members of the public, above all !
The last few days it has become readily apparent that our politicians, like the Obamas and Camerons of this world, are desperately trying to ‘bullshit their way through things’. In fact, the childish desperation reaches further than previously imagined, they actually wanted to rush their decisions through solely on emotional grounds, with or without consent of their respective parliamentarian institutions. Every citizen in the West should think of our politicians’ behavior. If bullshitting is primarily the characteristic of the naive, the uninformed, the juvenile, the insecure, the narcissistic, the arrogant or even the plain stupid and has become an integral part of mass deception of the general audience, then we can conclude that Western politicians don’t really take the voters in high esteem at all.
By projecting their own crude line of thinking on the public’s imagination to have it rally to their cause, politicians are actually insulting our intelligence, time and time again. To enable shifting the focus toward emotional content to support politicians’ self-righteous “sincerity” with, any objective background info on the situation in Syria has to be omitted from the public consciousness. Thus, the citizens of the West can only turn to Counterjihadist bloggers in order to unearth the underlying truths and realities of this particular conflict to harness the correct intuition that we would better stay out of it.
Such is the juvenile nature of PC/MC politics in the West that it desperately keeps denying the fundamental realities accessible by all in the ever expanding Interconnected Age. Go figure ! How stupid can you get ?
