> This distinction is captured by Frankfurt (2005) who argues that a liar is concerned about the truth, but attempts to replace it with falsehood. In contrast, the bullshitter is unconcerned with the truth and speaks with no reference to it. The bullshitter falls short of lying because they make use of insincere and misleading statements rather than outright falsehoods. Recent psychological work has found that established measures of everyday lying are sufficiently distinct from bullshitting.

I'll tell you what it really is: it's banal nihilism. We have this idea that nihilism is a kind of militant anti-truth, but it mainly manifests as a lack of conviction about anything altogether. When there is no fixed truth, and your survival depends on aligning to narrative, ("getting it" as they say) the abstractions you use become divorced from anything concrete that could be interpreted as a forcing function on the perceptions of the people you are speaking to.

The article underestimates the consequences of it, and we can say "ha hah, only bullshit!" but it's much, much more pernicious than that.

Someone who is enthusiastically fluent in bullshit can be trusted to be just as enthusiastic about destroying ecosystems, livelihoods, cultures, and peers, because instead of feeling existential dread at meaninglessness, they find security in it. It's difficult for most hackers to imagine that the dim agreeable affect of a middling project manager or adjunct eating lunch at their desk as barely concealing an abyss of rage and shame - one that is only relieved by tiny acts of passive sadism, but that's literally people everywhere.

The term for them was "Little Eichmanns," because the whole point of Eichmann was that nobody would ever have thought him capable of being the architect of mass atrocities, but he is the prototypical example of the "stupid and dilligent," who can be relied upon at scale to substitute compliance and bullshit jargon for meaning.

Source: banks, government, unicorns, and other institutions.