Labour Has Gone Beyond Lying to Bullshitting

Not quite 18 months ago Labour was elected to office having promised “a return to the foundations of good government, national security, secure borders and economic stability”. As he entered Downing Street the Head of Chambers new Prime Minister told us that he would “tread more lightly” on our lives.

It has achieved these things – the return of stability while treading more lightly on our lives – in eccentric ways. Here’s a few of them (by no means exhaustive): the introduction of randomised policing; the cancellation of elections; the effective dissolution of the national borders; the introduction of de facto infanticide; the bewildering surrender of overseas territories (with the twist that we seem to be both buyer and vendor at the same time); the immiserating amplification of cultish environmentalism; the fetishistic regulation of speech; and the criminalisation of silent prayer in public, although only in those places where it is most needed.

Its most recent contribution to the spiritual health of the nation? The proposal that childhood in all its innocence, enchantments and bafflements can be in some circumstances an opportunity for irreversible medical experimentation.

This is not really what most of us were expecting. For some, the thing to focus on here is the lying. To me that seems a bit odd. If a husband tells his wife that he missed dinner because of traffic, when in fact he was out murdering a sex worker, I’m not sure that the lie is the worst thing going on in that situation.

It is true that lying is morally wrong, more so with some lies than with others. St Augustine gives the unimprovable analysis in his sermon De Mendacio. A lie, to count as such, must be a deliberate attempt to mislead. And a lie can never be justified since God is truth, and it can never be morally right to say that the world is not as He has willed it to be, when you know that this is what you are doing.

You shouldn’t even lie to bring about something good, or to avoid something bad. Why? Because lying corrupts the soul, and the tedious formulations of moral relativism or utilitarianism are inapplicable to the deeper truths of spiritual physics.

But all that is by-the-by when talking about this Government, which isn’t so much composed of liars as bullshitters. And in some ways bullshitting is worse than lying.

This distinction – between lying and bullshitting – is codified by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in a bracing monologue written decades ago (i.e., pre-X) called On Bullshit (I suppose it could hardly have been called anything else). In his analysis it amounts to something like the following.  

When we lie we are knowingly asserting that what is false is true (or vice versa) but when we bullshit we aren’t concerned about whether what we say is true or false, so much as by whether in saying it we convey a certain impression of ourselves, or somehow get what we want. The ‘language games’ of lying versus bullshitting have very different grammars – the former involves falsity, the latter fakery.

At some point over the last 18 months, or perhaps incrementally, I suspect that the Government moved from lying to bullshitting without giving fair warning. We thought we were playing football then it began to play rugby, and since it has the ball on loan until 2029 there isn’t much we can do about it.

Bullshitting is worse, then, because unlike lying it is not conceptually attached to truth. The bullshitter will say that he very much is concerned with truth but that’s part of the schtick. He may accidentally or expediently say something true, but never sincerely. Frankfurt puts it as follows:

The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides… is that the truth-values of his statement 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.

Another reason why bullshitting is worse than lying, and I think we are seeing this in the extraordinary shambles following the Reeves budget, is that it sends you mad. This is partly because when you drop all concern for truth you become, in the literal sense, incorrigible. The normal mechanisms of correction cease to be effective. You start to believe in your own bullshit, which is as good a definition of insanity as most of us need.

If you wonder why it is that these people seem genuinely affronted when confronted then there’s your answer. They’ve driven themselves mad.

“Why are you going on about handball? We were always playing rugby. We were quite clear on that.”

A sexual analogy might help. Think of lying as being like a one-night stand, a very occasional fling. Not good, morally speaking, but not likely to engender spiritual crisis if you only get lucky from time to time. Bullshitting, in this analogy, is more like unfettered promiscuity – a habit which leads to genuine spiritual illness.

Looked at like that, we have a Government of nymphomaniacs. Apologies for that image.