> Carroll, let's keep separate things separated. There is a difference
> between a genuine social movement -- i.e. one that has real support in a
> population or its segment -- and one that exists mostly in the imagination
> of moral entrepreneurs striving for a recognition. It is my opinion that
> Louis Proyect not only is an example of the latter, but a very unscrupulous
> one the top of it. He seems to specialize in inquisitorial personal
> attacks and smear campaigns against people to whom he imputes inferior
> motives. See for example his posting [PEN-L:11948] Open letter to NACLA,
> Susan Lowes and Jack Hammond to which nobody except myself bothered to
> respond. I am quite surprised that this snitch, his provocations and
> character assassinations are taken seriously or even tolerated on this
> listserv. I guess it is a sad testimony to the state of mind of many
> "Leftists" in this country who cannot tell shit from an argument anymore.
>
From *On Bullshit* by Harry Frankfurt.
"Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is more of it nowadays than at other times...The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves,then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness the, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising, and of public relations, and the nowadays closely interelated realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who--with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing and so forth-- dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every image and word they produce exactly right.
"What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning the state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
"This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it...For the bullshitter, he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."
*The Importance of What we Care About* Harry Frankfurt, p130-2. Cambridge U PRess, 1994.
Odysseus Abercrombie
Research Director Product Development Swenson's Fine TV Dinners 103, Friedlard Way, Des Moines, Iowa.