Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2010 - 9:06 p.m.
Pants on Fire
*************
�It is impossible
for someone to lie
unless he thinks
he knows the truth.
Producing bullshit
requires no such conviction.
A person who lies
is thereby responding
to the truth,
and he is to that extent
respectful of it.
When an honest man speaks,
he says only what he believes
to be true;
and for the liar,
it is correspondingly
indispensable that he
considers his statements
to be false.
For the bullshitter, however,
all these bets are off:
he is neither
on the side of the true
nor on the side of the false.
His eye is not
on the facts at all,
as the eyes
of the honest man
and of the liar are,
except insofar
as they may be pertinent
to his interest
in getting away with what he says.
He does not care
whether the things
he says describe
reality correctly.
He just picks them out,
or makes them up,
to suit his purpose.�
� Professor Harry G. Frankfurt,
�On Bullshit�, pp. 55-56.
