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Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, a moment's reflection suggests this is not new.

The dawn of the "modern era" in the west is attributed to the rise of Jesus, and, forgive me but what are the various stories of Jesus other than total ridiculous bullshit- reincarnation, "immaculate conception", all the other nonsense- intended to build and maintain the social and financial control structures that existed at the time?

I have not studied concrete instances of bullshit in the middle ages but the post-Enlightenment (a bullshit term if ever there was one) was riddled with bullshit. And then the late 1800s in the US featured "snake oil salesman" and "wildcat banking"- these sales pitches are literally indistinguishable from those described in the article.

Technology changes the diffusion rate and potentially the effectiveness of the art of the bullshitter (debatable) but the art itself is ancient.

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I think the key is that everybody expected that technology would decrease the effectiveness of bullshitting. Local bullshitting relies on there being nobody in the room to say "BS" -- or at least, a small enough number that wishful thinking could dominate. And the bullshitter knew that their time was limited before somebody called them out.

The truth-tellers were expected to have an advantage: once the truth was seen, most people would recognize and accept it. The bullshitter's advantage was the slow speed of information diffusion.

Turns out that is wrong. People are regularly given definitive rejections of bullshit, and they deny them. It's not that they haven't seen it, but that they choose to accept the bullshitter's reality. We always expected to be able to fool some of the people all of the time... but we assumed that "some" was a number in the single-digit percentages, not a majority or near majority of the (connected, first) world.

I still don't know what to make of it. I'm pretty glum, to be honest. And I believe that's a lot of the point. I think that a lot of people choose to accept bullshit precisely because they think it hurts people they don't like. They may even grasp that it's false, but simply don't care. The negative consequences to them are sufficiently far off as to be dismissed, but the upside of having people angry at them is immediate.

I think that you are severely overestimating the number of people who believe the political bullshit. A much simpler explanation is that the vast majority are simply lying about believing it. How would American right-wing voters behave if they actually believed that the election was stolen? They would boycott voting and they would do it loudly. But they don't actually believe it.

There is a word for this type of lie: vranyo.

Lying about believing that Trump will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it distracts you from addressing their actual motivations which they know are cruel and unjust.

> I think that you are severely overestimating the number of people who believe the political bullshit.

I come from a very, very red part of America, and I can assure you that many of them do believe it, or at least did in early 2021. A couple years later, we've seen the investigations turn up none of the evidence that was described, but people still believe it. Close relatives of mine were raving about the 2000 mules documentary earlier in the year, which was completely debunked.

I think a lot of those same people are getting tired of being told that the next big shoe to drop is just around the corner, but if we're being honest, it's not all that different from how the left treated the Mueller investigation. Everyone was so convinced that they were going to rattle Trump's presidency and Mueller totally punted on Trump in his final report.

It feels like we're living in a non-stop JJ Abrams movie where we're constantly being triggered to follow one anxiety-inducing story after another.

Christianity challenged the powers that be, something like the first 20 leaders of the Christian Church were lynched for being Christians.

There is "lying" which is apparently "betrayal", there is "bullshitting" for the nuance of cheap and vile, and then there is talking of things you do not know properly.

But this is an example of the already noted risk to have "overly quick" "bullshit identifiers" around, which may add further noise instead of progression.

> what are the various stories of Jesus other than total ridiculous bullshit...?

Stories of deep psychological truth that transcend physical space and time. Just like all great religious stories.

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