SUBVERTING THE ART OF DIPLOMACY

Author: Selman Özdan

Bullshit and lies can undermine the art of diplomacy, putting in peril the relationships between states and the role of diplomats in honestly and frankly conveying information to their governments.

As the philosopher Frankfurt (2005: 63) states, bullshit is ‘unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic’. Further, the bullshitter has no interest in whether what s/he claims is true or not . Facts do not concern her/him, and is not ‘germane to the enterprise of describing reality’.

Modern communication channels such as Twitter have accelerated such bullshit statements because State officials are poorly informed by social media and would not be able to make deliberative statements.

There is a significantly nuanced difference between bullshit and diplomacy. While the essence of the former is ‘phony’ (Frankfurt 2005: 47), the soul of latter is tact and sensibility, reason and persuasion. It is possible that the former emerges in default of the latter. While bullshit is ‘so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean’ , it can be defined as a deceptive method which aims at manipulating the opinions and attitudes of those with whom the bullshitter speaks. The bullshitter’s focus is ‘panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. As we have so often, and alarmingly seen, the bullshitter ‘is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well’. The liar, by contrast, is ‘inescapably concerned with truth-values’ , and must show some concern for the truth; the bullshitter, by contrast, does not share the same lack of constraint as does the liar. Unlike the liar, the creativity with which the bullshitter constructs his reality is ‘less analytical and less deliberative’ than that which is used in lying.

Both the liar and the bullshitter misrepresent the truth. What the liar hides, however, is that ‘he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false’. What the bullshitter seeks to hide 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. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

The bullshitter is a person who is ‘neither on the side of the true nor the side of the false’. Rather, 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’ . The bullshitter does not ‘care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purposes’. Accomplishing an outcome and following protocol rules are important features, inter alia, of diplomacy, and would no longer be defined as an art while it is used by a bullshitter. The bullshitter puts forward neither false nor true statements, and s/he more likely speaks or makes statements without worrying about the outcome or what is true. The essence of bullshit is not ‘that it is false but that it is phony’ . Further, excessive indulgence in bullshitting involves ‘making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say’ so that the ‘normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost’ . The bullshitter, unlike the liar, pays no heed to the authority of truth. Consequently, Frankfurt suggests, ‘the bullshitter is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are’ . Of further interest, and which may explain why so many continue to believe Trump, is that the proliferation of bullshit has its deeper sources in scepticism which ‘deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality’ and who, therefore, reject the possibility of ‘knowing how things truly are’ .

A bullshitter ‘may not deceive us … either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about his enterprise’ (Frankfurt 2005: 54).

Frankfurt (2006: 5) claimed that bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false.