One of the greatest dangers our Sense-Making for a healthy society is exposed to: Disinformation, Bullshit (according to the famous essay by Harry Frankfurt: “On Bullshit”) and propaganda.
It is always shocking how and why people believe what Trump or some far-right-wing politicians in Germany or some self-proclaimed experts claim – when it seems so easy to prove that it is a blatant lie. And it is shocking when it is f.e. a racist or misogynistic lie that the followers support.
Central to the success of Trumpism is how lies were fabricated, circulated, sold, and bought by so many people. Misinformation will be remembered as the trademark of the history of Trumpism, a movement, regime, and ideology that brought populism extremely close to fascism.
This reminds us of course of the staging and propaganda during the Nazi era, which Sebastian Haffner, the german journalist during the Nazi-era, has described brilliantly and painfully precisely – see our article here.
In our podcast we talk about lies and bullshit – what´s the difference between them, and we talk about the sheer amount of both of it, lies and bullshit, the “flooding the zone”, where information is used as a weapon. And how to deal with it.
When, for example, Trump said “they´re eating the dogs and cats” – that wasn´t about whether that is true or not. It was extremely salient – and we will say more about salience in a minute. So, this stuck in your mind, and it was meant to invoke an emotional response. Which it perfectly did. One step might be – to be aware of them and of your reaction to them, so you can stay present and be aware of it. (When, by the way, this lie was addressed – nobody eats dogs and cats, this is absurd – Trump supporters said, well, what about the geese? Maybe they eat geese?)
Another example is the AfD, the right-wing party of Germany. One of the first thing they said after the election in Feb. 2025: “We gonna chase the other parties”. So – is that´s the most important thing to do? Instead of working together for the best for the people of your country? We are getting used to these phrases and often do not realize that this is pure nonsense, that´s not what politics is about, chasing other people.
So it’s not a question of whether it’s true or false. It’s nonsense. Actually, everyone knows it. These lies are so obvious, blatant lies. And maybe that’s the point: The more obvious the lie, the better it is for determining loyalty.
Loyalty
Let´s say the big lie of the stolen 2020 election. Anyone who wanted to become anything under Trump, anyone who did not want to fall under his destructive spell, had to adopt this lie. When the public sees someone supporting an obvious lie, the implicit message is: We put loyalty above reality. Truth is a matter of power and negotiation. Repeating an open, easily recognizable lie in public is the ultimate form of submission.
It was almost painful to watch the Republicans submit to Trump – how they tried at all costs to avoid saying, “Yes, Trump lost the 2020 election.” Instead, they said, “Well, Biden is the actual president now,” and they repeated that phrase over and over so as not to confront the lie of the stolen election that they had to submit to.
Federico Finchelstein, an American Professor in History and researcher of fascism, talks about fascist lies in an Interview: „One of the issues that makes the lies so successful is that these outrageous ideas become a matter of belief“. They become an ideology with their own „truth“. So, for fascists, ‘lies’ were not so much denials of the truth, as rejections of the ‘real world’ in favor of an idealised one, fitting their beliefs about what should be. They were statements of faith in a seemingly deeper ‘truth’. So you could say that the need to belong, the loyalty to an authoritarian leader, perhaps the need for orientation, is deeper than the love of truth or other values.
Maybe we have all had the experience of domicide, of losing a sense of home. We all have the same need for security for ourselves and our loved ones, we look for orientation and also for meaning – but we deal with it differently. And there is a vicious circle: Authoritarian leaders first create uncertainty (like proposing, that our economy is collapsing…) and then reinforce beliefs and ideologies that offer some kind of supposed security.
The insidious thing about disinformation is, that it can destroy trust. It fuels uncertainty when it creates the impression that lies are being spread everywhere and you can no longer be sure what to believe – so the need for guidance becomes stronger – and for some people this strengthens their attachment to their leaders.
By keeping us in an emotionally primed state, in which we are detached from conscious reflection, we are likely to get bullshitted. Our limbic system is being “hijacked”, often to the detriment of parts of the brain tasked with higher-order functions like cognitive judgements, evaluation of multiple perspectives and critical analyses. Or, to put it simply: you can´t be open or curious when you are anxious or agitated. It´s just impossible.
On Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt was a philosopher in Princeton and Yale University: In his famous essay “On bullshit” 2005), he talks about the difference between and bullshit and lies and how it´s related.
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is just so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” Harry G. Frankfurt
It is very important, in Frankfurt’s formulation, not to confuse bullshit with a lie. The two differ in one all-important respect―namely, in their relationship with the truth. There is a significant difference between lies and bullshit: “… lies are told in an attempt to deceive the listener of the truth. bullshit is completely unconcerned with reality”.
A lie and truth share something very significant: they share a concern for realness. The liar and the truth-teller possess a mutual appreciation for truth. The liar must know the truth in order to identify it, and must find it consequential for want to sabotage it. A lie is told to purposefully controvert the truth – it presupposes the importance of truth in desiring to undermine it. We might say then that a lie is told with respect to the truth. Mindfulness of the truth is essential to the projects of both the liar and the truthteller.
Bullshit is so defined because it is not troubled in the least with actuality and truth. Bullshit may be true or untrue. Either way, it is unconcerned. It has no commitment to the truth for better or for worse. It publishes itself irrespective to the status of its own reality.
Self-deception
And Frankfurt’s theoretical explication of bullshit is way more helpful to understand self-deception than lying does. Human beings cannot lie to themselves. We cannot know a fact and then say to ourselves no, it´s not true. We cannot know we have $1,000 dollars in the bank account and then believe that we have $100,000. Even if we desire to, we cannot knowingly invert our apprehension of the truth. Lying to oneself is an inadequate, unhelpful model for explaining self-deception.
Bullshit is not about making things real, it is about making things salient. The bullshitter means to direct your attention not to the truth or untruth of an idea, but to the catchiness of an idea.
John Vervaeke, the Canadian cognitive-scientist also emphasized this differentiation: “In a fast-paced culture driven by the need to succeed and dominated by consumerism, the meaning of life today in the Western world has been reduced to an endless striving for permanent “happiness”- by means of consuming.” – and, we might add, by what is salient. A commercial shows you a new car and combines it with adventure – or a beautiful woman – or safety for your family, depending on the car brand. The directives of that salience can be entirely disconnected from the depth of realness, and when this happens, you seek merely the catchiness of the idea.
You can bullshit yourself merely by directing your attention to certain things over others simply because they come to you more quickly… because you have conditioned yourself to favor them automatically. We can condition ourselves into retaining an idea regardless of its integrity. Our concern for salience can come at the cost of our concern for truth. This begins a circle of self-deceptive behavior.
“I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.” Elizabeth Gilbert
So we need to cultivate wisdom: to be able to question our beliefs, ideologies and convictions about ourselves and the world, in order to be able to admit our errors, when we have been duped or kidded ourself.
In other words we find our deep love of truth. That requires the capacity to tolerate frustration and to question your high held self-images and biased images of others. And we need to be able to make sense (make meaning) of what we hear and see – and this need is a longing in man. To Wilfred Bion, a british Psychotherapist, „truth is essential for psychic health, and deprivation of the truth has the same effect on the personality as does physical starvation on the physique.
Salience versus Relevance
One important step to more wisdom is learning to differentiate between salience and relevance. Salience (refers to the quality of being noticeable or emotionally catching) – and relevance (means the quality of being appropriate, connected, or important in a particular context) – this discernment is crucial for finding truth.
“Salience draws our attention – and relevance is what is actually important.“ Aligning and differentiating these two is crucial, especially in this modern attention-capture economy where salience cues that are irrelevant to healthy living are everywhere. We need to encourage ourself to reflect on our values, be clear about what we think should be relevant. We should cultivate life practices that minimize salient but irrelevant or even harmful distractions and work to bring what is authentically relevant onto our salience landscape. This skill is one of the keys to wise living in our modern world.
Truth refers to a shared reality. When something feels “real”, that gives us a sense of connection, a way in which the felt experience relates to patterns or events in the world. Truth takes two. This refers to participatory and perspectival knowing: a far deeper coming to know the truth.
Perspectival knowing (to be aware of something in its meaning, scope, impact, changing perspectives of my perceiving), is concerned with understanding what it is to be like someone else – such as what it is really like to be a refugee. Or a local councilor who wants to be re-elected. What it´s like to stand in your shoes …
Participatory knowing (knowledge of deeper wisdom), involves the interconnectedness between the organism and the environment, with others. I am not a passive (seemingly “objective”) observer forming true beliefs or only seeing subjectively – No, I am implicated in my observations, I inquire into the situation, really try to comprehend and engage into it – Contact with reality is then dependent on my being transformed by my knowing.
Like knowing love by experiencing it and being transformed by the experience – And as I transform, the world discloses more of itself. You don´t know what it´s like to be a parent, until you are a parent.
One example of participatory and perspectival knowing, as Josef shared in our podcast: “Lately I discussed with a colleague the Ukrainian war. We both had our own ideas, how this war should end. But the more we exchanged thoughts, beliefs and ideas, the more we realized that we were not really listening to, or really caring about each other’s arguments. Our ideological divides deepened, we were no more touchable. Only when we asked questions like: “What concerns you the most about this war?” or “how come, we don’t listen to each other anymore?” did we begin to reveal deeper truths to each other. And we realized that we both had a deep longing for peace – just with different ideas about how to get there: both valid. We felt changed by the mutual touch.”
Metta Meditation
As a useful tool to strengthen both perspectival and participatory knowing, we proposed to you the Metta Meditation in our third podcast episode. Metta meditation is one of the oldest forms and still one of the most important forms of meditation in Buddhism today. This Meditation opens us to Perspectival and Partcipatory knowing, thus gives us access to sense into, what the other might feel, what he or she might experience.
Metta meditation is based on the idea that every sentient being, that is, every living being on earth and in the universe, should be treated with benevolence and kindness, so you practice that benevolent attitude. This may not be easy for you at the beginning, but it is easy to learn and to experiment with it.
There are a lot of instructions online, so we don´t propose you a special one, but encourage you to find out what might be helpful for you. On the podcast we say more about it.